Bodies That Matter 1993 pages 15-16
As a result of this reformulation of performativity:
- gender performativity cannot be theorized apart from the forcible and reiterative practice of regulatory sexual regimes,
- the account of agency conditioned by those very regimes of discourse/power cannot be conflated with the voluntarism or individualism, much less with consumerism, and in no way presupposes a choosing subject;
- the regime of heterosexuality operates to circumscribe and contour the “materiality” of sex, and that “materiality” is formed and sustained through and as a materialization of regulatory norms that are in part those of heterosexual hegemony;
- the materialization of norms requires those identificatory processes by which norms are assumed or appropriated, and these identifications precede and enable the formation of a subject, but are not, strictly speaking, performed by a subject; and
- the limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where abjected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as “bodies.” If the materiality of sex is demarcated in discourse, then this demarcation will produce a domain of excluded and delegitimated “sex.” Hence, it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as is it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary “outside,” if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter.
How, then, can one think through the matter of bodies as a kind of materialization governed by regulatory norms in order to ascertain the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the formation of what qualifies as a viable body?
How does that materialization of the norm in bodily formation produce a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation which, in failing to qualify as the fully human, fortifies those regulatory norms?
What challenge does the excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as “life,” lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?