English 67

Butler persuasively describes the lack of a non-”inscribed” body, that is, one that is free from being always already interpreted. The problem is that we cannot imagine a body in the absence of interpretation, because to do so would be to imagine one independent of a culture, and language, which themselves already interpret and reinscribe that body.

Looking through the index of Gender Trouble, I cannot find any sustained analysis of the biology of reproduction, or evolutionary biology. Is that because the “discourse of science” is also implicated in creating and reinforcing all the hetero-normative codes that get internalized as “feeling?” I’m not pointing to this as a flaw in Butler’s work, but I would definitely be interested in her take on gender and evolutionary biology.

She is definitely on to something though when she talks about the processes of exclusion that create the heteronormative codes. Look at Leviticus 18. On the one hand it’s painfully obvious, on the other, it begs to be re-thought and re-theorized in light of both Freudian theories of incest prohibition as key to psychosexual development, and and of Butler’s notions about bodies being the site of identity, both individual and collective.

After a long list of sexual prohibitions (incest of degrees, male-male, bestiality)

Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:
25: And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.
26: Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:
27: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;)
28: That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.
29: For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people.

The language of “ejection and abjection” is clear here: if you “defile” yourselves by improper sexual contact, you defile (the promised) land, and it will spit you out, just as your body ejects that which is “unclean.” (The notion of clean/unclean also evokes biology and evolution in ways that Butler doesn’t fully address either . . . )

While I feel pretty clear on the notion of gender as citational performance, I am still somewhat less clear on how the normative codes which structure and instill the performance get internalized in the first place.