Cultural intelligibility: refers to the production of a normative framework that conditions who can be recognized as a legitimate subject. Butler uses it in her earlier writings as a way of think about how normative ideas of sex and gender circumscribe who can be conceived of as subject. She also draws on it in her later texts (particularly Undoing Gender and Precarious Life), to demonstrate how the human is normatively produced within particular racial and cultural frames. On both occasions, Butler ties the idea of cultural intelligibility to the possibility of a liveable life (that is, a life that is recognized as having value and legitimacy). Before any individual can live a ‘liveable’ life, she argues, they have first to be recognized as a viable subject. If they cannot be recognized in this way (because they deviate somehow from the norms determining viable subjectivity), then their lives will be ‘”impossible”, illegible, unreal, and illegitimate’ (GT: viii). They simply will not matter. Any regime of cultural intelligibility thus hinges on what she calls in the 1999 preface ‘normative violence’ (GT:xx): that is, the violence that is done by certain norms in the generation of liveable lives and in the constitution of subjectivity. It is this interest in how normative violence relates to cultural intelligibility and how both relate to liveable lives that drives her politics (33).
Heterosexual matrix: generates a series of ideal relations between sex, gender and desire such that gender is said to follow naturally from sex and where desire (or sexuality) is said to follow naturally from gender. ‘Sex’ in this sense can be thought of as a natural substance that is given expression in both femininity and masculinity, AND in specific ‘modalities of desire and pleasure’ (‘GB’:259). Consistent with the grid, maleness entails masculinity, and masculinity is expressed in sexual desire for a woman, whereas femaleness entails femininity and is expressed in sexual desire for a man. Gender and desire are thus seen as aspects of sex. As such, “intelligible” genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire’ (GT:23). These relations of coherence and continuity are not natural; they are the effect of the constitutive and violent work of certain gender norms. A coherent —and culturally intelligible— subject, therefore, is one in whom sex, gender and desire flow in the way just described. Where however, sex, gender and desire line up in a different way … the individual in question is regarded as culturally unintelligible and, as such, as not a viable subject. In terms of the matrix, he might be thought of, that is, as ‘unnatural’ or as not a ‘proper’ man. If therefore, according to the terms of heteronormativity, to be human is to be heterosexual, then consequently anyone who is not heterosexual (be they gay, lesbian or bisexual, for instance) is not (fully) human. As non-human or less-than-human, they lack social, legal and political validity. Exposing the regulatory and fictive nature of compulsory heterosexuality is thus central to a gender politics, such as Butler’s, that seeks legitimation for non-normative sexual minorities (34-35).