Bodies that Matter (was Re: Mistress Judith)

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Before Butler, the psychologist Nancy Chodorow gave a detailed and
compelling account of how gender differences replicate themselves across
the generations: she argued that the ubiquity of these mechanisms of
replication enables us to understand how what is artificial can nonetheless
be nearly ubiquitous. Before Butler, the biologist Anne Fausto Sterling,
through her painstaking criticism of experimental work allegedly supporting
the naturalness of conventional gender distinctions, showed how deeply
social power-relations had compromised the objectivity of scientists: Myths
of Gender (1985) was an apt title for what she found in the biology of the
time. (Other biologists and primatologists also contributed to this
enterprise.) Before Butler, the political theorist Susan Moller Okin
explored the role of law and political thought in constructing a gendered
destiny for women in the family; and this project, too, was pursued further
by a number of feminists in law and political philosophy. Before Butler,
Gayle Rubin's important anthropological account of subordination, The
Traffic in Women (1975), provided a valuable analysis of the relationship
between the social organization of gender and the asymmetries of power
______________

Wonderful work indeed (consumed me in my undergraduate education).  But
these authors do not provide a detailed examination of those structures
which Nussbaum accuses Butler of reifying when the former writes:  "She
[Butler] suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the
marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society... will never be
changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them,
and to find pockets of personal freedom within them." Which works serve as
deeper, more profound critiques of these structures (including of course a
dilineation of what they are?) If not Foucault and Butler, then who?

Yours, Rakesh