Bodily Citations

Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville successfully bring together the nine essays in this volume in an effort to engage both scholars of religion who may or may not be familiar with feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler's work and scholars of feminist and queer theory who may be skeptical about religious studies. Significantly aiding the former category of religionists is Armour and St. Ville's remarkably clear introduction to Butler's major theoretical innovations and works, an essay anyone wishing to embark upon reading Butler should read. The nine essays in Bodily Citations focus in various ways on Butler's performative theory of gender, a theory in which not only gender, but also sex is materialized through a citational process involving the repetition of social norms. These social norms, including heterosexuality, are not natural or given but are rather founded through their repetition. Beyond the social norms that define intelligible subjectivity is the abject, those who do not adequately cite the social norms, who form the “constitutive outside” against which the subject is defined (7). However, space for subversion and for re-imagining new subjectivities opens up in Butler's theory of performativity because “to perform is to re-cite but to recite is not necessarily to repeat” and thus there is always a possibility for change (7).

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feminism · Feminist theory · Lesbian · Performative utterance · Performativity · Politics · Queer · Queer theory · Reading (process) · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Subjectivity · Subversion · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions