Indeed, it is part of Butler’s political project to seek out the limits of discursive intelligibility in Bodies, so that, as in Gender Trouble, she can draw attention to those identities and bodies that currently ‘matter’ and those that don’t. Again, as in Gender Trouble, Butler will assert that sexed identities are taken on through the violent rejection and exclusion (or ‘foreclosure’) of identities that are deemed not to matter, i.e. not to count within a heterosexual matrix which has a vested interest in preserving its own stability and coherence at the expense of ‘other’ identities (Salih 2002:76).
