ʼ quotation as an encapsulation of a principle of gender (acquisition), during which ʻwomanʼ is taken to be equivalent to ʻgenderʼ. Under ʻsexʼ, however, he notes the turn to using ʻgenderʼ in the 1960s and quotes (p. Granted, Butler does not truly use the ʻoʼ word, but to what else is ʻmaterializationʼ meant to refer? Once we understand the which means of Beauvoir’s remark, the very form used reveals a contradiction, and it becomes obvious that this is a strategic use of Beauvoir. Human trafficking is the modern type of slavery, with unlawful smuggling and buying and selling of people, for pressured labour or sexual exploitation. Moira Gatens, ʻA Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinctionʼ (in Judith Allen and Paul Patton, eds, ʻBeyond Marxism? Interventions After Marxʼ, Intervention, no. 17, 1983), is perhaps the perfect-identified problem. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, p. Gatensʼs essay (reprinted in her Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Routledge, London and New York, 1996) makes a strong case for the dependence of the sex/gender distinction on a discredited (and implicitly rationalistic) body/thoughts dualism in which the physique is mistakenly conceived as neutral and passive. Ibid. See additionally Butlerʼs Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London and New York, 1990, p.
If the reason for the unhappy idealist implications of Butlerʼs Gender Trouble (the collapse of ontology into performativity) relies on the unwarranted presumption of the essentially essentialist nature of any notion of ontology – and its affiliation, due to this fact, with the ʻmetaphysics of substanceʼ – this metonymic slippage is acknowledged and addressed in Bodies That Matter with what is meant to be the resolutely nonor anti-idealist notion of ʻmaterializationʼ. As this exhibits, Butlerʼs revised position owes more to Aristotle or to Greek ontology extra usually than to de Beauvoir. Then again, Butler clearly is ready to suppose through the standing of ʻsexʼ in a more radical approach than de Beauvoir, who does, within the last instance, are inclined to assume binary sex distinction as beyond dispute. But not all being is thus substantialized and there isn’t any necessity to grasp ʻbeingʼ in this way. Indeed, this may even be the one coherent means of studying Gender Trouble. Reading retrospectively, something like this belated acknowledgement of the opportunity of radicalized ontology may even be glimpsed in Gender Trouble.
Her own words, nevertheless, suggest that the shift will not be one from ontology to pre-ontology, however from important to (something like) existential ontology – exactly from ʻWhat is/has being? ʼ query is determinately related to important ontology and nothing else – that is, if we aren’t allowed to ask the ʻWhat is? If Butler appears increasingly unwilling to acknowledge de Beauvoir as a philosophical precursor to this project of radicalized ontology, this can be due to Butlerʼs allergy to the tainted phrase ʻontologyʼ (an allergy which we’d like not share), but also as a result of her reading of a intercourse/gender distinction into The Second Sex positions ʻsexʼ as the (important) ontological ground of gender, existentially (or, we would now add, performatively) understood, foreclosing the opportunity of ontology as existential, or otherwise. ʻThat the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological standing aside from the varied acts which represent its realityʼ:63 this declare could now be re-learn as an assertion of the non-essentialist ontological status of the physique as performative, as a social(ized), historic ontology of the physique – that’s, one which does not take its ʻbeingʼ as fixed or foundational however ʻin processʼ, an idea acknowledged, maybe, in Butlerʼs earlier reference to ʻcontingent ontologiesʼ.
Gender Trouble is the acknowledgement of the necessity for the theorization of the ontological status of the physique and/or intercourse, or the tacit acknowledgement of the necessity for a radicalized notion of ontology in general. The (ostensibly un-Butlerian) foundation for Butlerʼs move past de Beauvoir here rests on a radicalized social and historical ontology. 4. In fact Butler was already signalling the transfer away from her earlier place on de Beauvoir in Gender Trouble, the place she says (p. Butler and de Beauvoir on the Foundations of Sexual Differenceʼ (Hypatia, vol. Paris, 1976, Vol. II, p. In an unpublished paper, learn at the Cinquantenaire du Deuxième sexe conference in Paris, January 1999 (ʻEmbodied Identity: Towards a Reinterpretation of Beauvoirʼs Anti-essentialismʼ), Annemie Halsema additionally denies that there is a intercourse/gender distinction in de Beauvoirʼs work, but argues this through an analysis of the concept of the physique as state of affairs (slightly than, as here, by the notion of ʻwomanʼ). Take pity on my unprotected state of affairs. I stated I’ve bought to take a shower … The proverbial notion that a cold shower dampens a man’s sex drive is a delusion. Speaking once more of the shift away from the earlier notion of ʻconstructionʼ, Butler says that she proposes, in its place, ʻa return to the notion of matter, not as site or surface, however as a strategy of materialization that stabilizes over time to supply the effect of boundary, fixity, and floor we call matterʼ.