The dialectics of performativity: Judith Butler and the cultural constitution

Judith Butler dismantles the traditional notion ‘sex precedes gender’ and advocates that sex and gender are constituted through the repetition of cultural acts. For Butler, ‘gender is performative,’ and she negates the pre-ontological status of the body to claim that ‘sex is already gendered.’ Butler further reinforces that, like gender, the formation of the body also evolves in a cultural space. Butler asserts that the construction of the body takes place through materialization, wherein it becomes an embodied subject that can only be known through discourses. Butler points out that power has a prominent role in the construction of the body, and it creates both intelligible and unintelligible bodies through social norms. Butler suggests that all bodies cannot represent their own identity and that their status becomes invisible to society. Butler raises the question of whose life matters here and whose life is counted as valuable. In her works, Butler talks about marginalized people and advocates that all human lives matter in society. The paper attempts to study the notion of embodiment in Butler’s Philosophy.