JUDITH BUTLER

It is an individual’s social field and the conscious habitus which forms his body. The cultural, economic and social interaction makes this body sustain and survive within this sphere. Leib and Korper are words in German which represents the living body and dead body respectively. When coming to Phenomenologist’s, particularly Edmund Husserl, Leib denotes not only the living body but also the lived body. The basic character of this body is that it is extensive. Whether it is a living body or dead body, it is always extensive. Husserl’s idea of Lived Body problematizes this idea of body.  It is through the interactions of the body and the perceptions of the body, the world is perceived by an individual. In this perspective, world is not a collective of actual facts but the actualization of perceptions and it is the body which perceives/actualizes the world.

When coming to Merleau- Ponty, body is the complex relation between the subject/object, inside/outside and it has its own complexity and uncertainty. The lived body is not a natural essence or the product of the cultural transactions but a place where nature and culture are complexly tied up. The being of the body is not materialistic for Ponty. Before every intellectual act body comes in terms with the surroundings and this compromise makes the basic character of the body. In a sense, phenomenologist’s says that the body thinks in its own way.

It is this perception of body by Phenomenologist philosophy, which is questioned and problematized by Judith Butler and she tries to explain the ways in which social agents constitute social reality and body through language, gesture and all manner of symbolic social sign. Butler adds that there is more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agents as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts. Apart from the perception of body Butler comes at the distinctions between Gender and Sex. Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed, rather, for Butler it is an identity constituted in time- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.

Gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. If the gender identity is stylized repetition of acts through time, then the possibilities of gender transformation are found in arbitrary relation with these repetitive acts. These repetitions are found either in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style of acts.

Phenomenology has also tried to explain the various physiological and biological acts that structure the bodily existence and the meanings that embodied existence assumed in a lived experience. Merleau- Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception claims that the body is “an historical idea than a natural species”. Simon de Beauvoir in The Second Sex claims that woman in any extension, any gender, is an historical situation rather than a natural fact. In Merleau- Ponty and Beauvoir, the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain and cultural and historical possibilities. Merleau- Ponty also realises that body apart from the historical idea, it is also a set of possibilities continually realized. Merleau- Ponty means that, body gains its meaning through a concrete and historically mediated expression in the world.

Body as a set of possibilities, signifies two things at first:

I.                    Its appearance in the world is not predetermined by some manner of interior essence.

II.                  Its concrete expression in the world must be understood as taking up and rendering specific of a set of historical possibilities.

These possibilities are necessarily always constrained by the available historical conventions and body as a materiality that bears meaning and the manner of this bearing is fundamentally dramatic. By dramatic, Butler means that the body is not merely matter but continual and incessant materializing of possibilities. The I that is the body is a mode of embodying and what it embodies is its possibilities. Gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, as a strategy of survival; gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. As gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender and without these acts there would be no gender at all.

The body is invariably transformed into his/her body through gendered appearances. Butler says that “As Foucault and others have pointed out; the association of natural sex with a descrete gender and with an ostensibly natural attraction to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural conjunction of cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interests”. The only way in which the system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with natural appearances and natural heterosexual dispositions. In this context, gender is an act which has rehearsed and requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again. Gender appears to the popular imagination as a substantial core which might be well understood as the spiritual or psychological correlate of biological sex. Gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex, a true or abiding masculinity or feminity, are also constituted as part of the strategy by which the performative aspect of gender is concealed.