Excerpt from the intro to my Senior Thesis,
Herculine’s Prophesy: Angels, Carnal Ethics and Post-Genital Desire
by Julian Letton
My line of inquiry is in the signifying chains that link materiality to body to sex to gender. Specifically, it is of a genitally focused nature. Butlers theory of sexuality, influenced heavily by Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Simone de Beauvoir, Freud and Lacan, resists, without explicitly acknowledging, a material limit in their thought. Butler uses the terms body, materiality, and sex in such a way that they imply, even in their invocation, something beyond the specificity of certain bodies.
By placing sexual dimorphism—the differentiation of genitalia along lines of ‘male’ or ‘female’—in explicit conversation with Butler’s understanding of materiality, sex and bodies, I hope to show the difficulty for certain genitalia to be understood discursively. By tracing the ‘birth’ of sexual difference through Genesis, I hope to reveal the logic at work in sexual difference, especially insofar as it serves to naturalize, through repetition and displacement, certain textual moments that resists a binary reading. The category of ‘woman’ and feminism’s subsequent claims, has presumed in relation to sex that it is always a question of men vs women and that, insofar as its not, it is some variation of homosexual, bisexual or an idealized (and surgically materialized/transitioned) transsexual who ultimately share the same sexually differentiated genitalia.
Genitalia conditions and instantiates a claim to a participatory right in the realm of what can be said to exist as ‘bodies’ and, as a question of causality (even if mutually constitutive in relation to genitalia) subjects who can then speak from said bodies as an ‘I’. If, as Butler suggests, sex is already gender insofar as both are conditioned and practiced as and through regulative ideals in relation to each other, perhaps this is conditioned by something prior, even material. By turning to the intersections between Irigaray and Butler in relation to what ‘woman’ is, I seek to reveal the physical nature, and the unification of women’s bodies as legible through repetition. On this point, I do not disagree with Butler.
ACADEMIC WERQ
