40 RüdigerKunow
issues, such as "the importance of bodies in situating empirical actors
within a material environment of nature, other bodies, and the
socioeconomic structures that dictate where and how they find
sustenance.. ." These material dimensions, they argue, "have recently
beenmarginalizedbyfashionableconstructivistapproachesandidentity
politics" (19).^30 Similar arguments have been brought forward (without
explicit reference to gender) by neovitalist thinkers (Grosz,
Shusterman).
Given the towering role of Judith Butler's work within current
feminist theory, the recent debate about the role of the biology in the
experience and self-knowing of women can with some degree of
plausibility be read as a revisionist engagement with the Butlerian
poststructuralist orthodoxy which would dismiss appeals to a biological
substratum, however conceived and even if made from a feminist
perspective, as cases of "unspoken normative requirements" (Bodies9).
In all fairness, it must be acknowledged, however, that Butler herself is
or has become by no means as narrowly constructivist as she is
sometimes taken for.^31 In fact, as early as inBodies that Matterand
regularly in her work since then (inPrecarious Lifeand certainly in
Dispossession), Butler has insisted that while everything about a
(woman's)bodymaybeconstructed—itbecomessubjecttoconstruction
right from its conception—construction nonetheless is not everything:
"although the body depends on language to be known, the body also
exceeds every possible linguistic effort at capture" ("These Hands" 2).
This is a very interesting statement because it seems to suggest that
women's biology is in some un-described and under-theorized ways a
site of transgression or even of excess. Discussing the work of
Guatemalan performance artist José Galindo's work on resistance
againstmilitarydictatorshipshespeaksofthe"obduracyofthebody,..
. the reproduction of community or sociality itself as bodies congregate
(^30) Coole and Frost further specify their position by arguing that "society is
simultaneously materially real and socially constructed: our material lives are
alwaysculturallymediatedbuttheyarenotonlycultural"(27).
(^31) Butler, for instance, offers her theory of performativity with an explicit
acknowledgmentofnon-discursivefactors.Soshecautionsusto"thinkthrough"
the binary of what is "characterized as the linguistic idealism of
poststructuralism"anda"materialityoutsideoflanguage"(Butler,Bodies27).