A Genealogia crítica dos corpos: o tema da materialidade em Judith Butler

Abstract

Judith Butler's critique of the feminist notion of the subject, developed in the 1980s, resulted in the publication of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993). These works demonstrate an effort to problematize the very notions of the constitution of the subject and its bodily materiality, as these investigations sought to problematize gender. In this sense, the main objective of this work was to understand the genealogical method applied by Butler to analyze the conception of bodily materiality. The philosopher's critique is concerned with analyzing the mechanisms that operate in the materialization of gendered bodies, since when it comes to materiality, sexual difference is invariably invoked. Butler's reflections in these early works seek to conceive other possibilities for thinking about feminism without resorting to the category of "woman". The philosopher questions the restrictive identificatory bases of gender studies, and in this task, she uses and appropriates the genealogical method—of Nietzschean origin reformulated by Michel Foucault—to analyze gender ontologies and bodily materiality. Therefore, this research analyzes Butler's critical genealogy to expose the gendered materiality produced by the matrix of intelligibility, the result of a power that constitutes while simultaneously maintaining an excluded domain.