Location: Home > Sports, Hobbies & Games > Philosophy > Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

Author: Judith P. Butler
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book

List Price: ~~Ł16.99~~
Buy New: Ł11.25
You Save: Ł5.74 (34%)

New (35) Used (10) from Ł11.25

Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

2 reviews
Sales Rank: 167248

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.5

ISBN: 0415903661
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.3
EAN: 9780415903660
ASIN: 0415903661

Publication Date: December 16, 1993
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. Shipped from UK Mainland. Delivery is usually 4 - 5 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail.

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex": On the Discursive Limits of Sex

Similar Items:

•	Gender Trouble (Routledge Classics)
•	Undoing Gender
•	The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge v. 1
•	The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure: The Use of Pleasure v. 2 (Penguin History)
•	Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation & Difference)

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

Thought-provoking March 16, 1999
26 out of 28 found this review helpful

This book clarifies much of Foucault was saying in History of Sexuality. Butler is careful, however, to not borrow the models Foucault uses, thereby, avoids some of the mistakes and gaps that occur in his thinking, namely the silence on women. Butler, more than Foucault, is not willing to settle the debate on sexuality merely as the obtaining and disseminating of pleasures and how those bodies perform them. Rather, she takes bodies as always already gender indeterminate and destablilizes their performatives further to show how bodies are marked by gender as well as race, class, sexulaity, etc. and how these categories are also destabilized within the perfomative. I highly recommend this book to feminist and queer theorists and well as anyone who is concerned about creating any sort of opposition to the reactionary right-wing forces that are attempting to further entrench their dominance over the rest of us.

5 out of 5 stars

Performativity is not about choice! December 2, 1998
13 out of 18 found this review helpful

When Judith Butler describes gender as performative, contrary to much of what is mistakenly thought out there, it is not about choice! It is not about choosing to put on a gender--as if it was a performance in the traditional or obvious way. The performativity of gender is meant to suggest--invoke--that gender is constituted by performative acts which repeated come to form, take shape, a "coherent" gender identity. Thus, Butler uses the performative to suggest that this coherency is false and that because of acts that disrupt the strict reads of gender--acts that occur naturally, perhaps daily, perhaps unacknowledged, gender comes to be seen/viewed as that which is only as stable as this performative function's stability is. Or put more simply, gender-as-stable is undermined by Butler by reading it through the performative--becuase it is never "performed" the same exactly. So, it is not that people can choose to perform a certain enumeration of gender, rather it is that noone precisely (actually) fulfills these gender identities that we have!