Fashionable Subjects: On Judith Butler and the Causal Idioms of Postmodern Feminist Theory

Abstract

What conception of causality is presupposed when the discursive con stitution of identity is affirmed? Is the subject of late modernity "Pro duced?" "Generated?" "Inscribed?" "Constructed?" "Defined?" "Formed?" Indiscriminately employed in much recent feminist theory, these terms evoke quite different understandings of causal efficacy, and hence quite different accounts of how specifically gendered identities are fashioned. To indicate what is at stake here, I explore arguments advanced by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and, more recently, in Bodies That Matter. In the former, Butler's unrecognized reliance on a mechanistic idiom of causal ity vitiates her genealogical critique of the humanist subject. In the latter, more elliptically than conclusively, Butler proposes a critical reappropria tion of the Aristotelian idiom of form and matter. Building on this sugges tion, I argue that an organic idiom of causality, although not without problems, is better equipped than is its Cartesian counterpart to make sense of the body's immanent implication in the processes by which it becomes a gendered subject. In closing, I ask about the implications of these two idioms of causality for our understanding of political agency