Art in Bodies That Matter,

¶ … Art In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler makes the provocative claim that the ways in which a human body is sexed are largely contingent on discursive formations. The social construction of gender is largely based on heterosexist conditioning, and on the assumption that something called "sex" exists prior to gender. Construction is a process that is not only situated in time - it encompasses time itself, in that it serves to reiterate norms temporally. Through this process of reiteration, sex becomes both normalized and destabilized.

This produces the illusion that sex is something natural, unpredictable - rather than constructed, as it is actuality. As an alternative to such systems of construction, Butler proposes that we view the subject of the body from the standpoint of matter: What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.

That matter is always materialized has, I think, to be thought in relation to the productive and, indeed, materializing effects of regulatory power in the Foucaultian sense.

Thus, the question is no longer, how is gender constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex? (a question that leaves the "matter" of sex untheorized) but rather, through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized? And how is it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and consolidates the normative conditions of its own emergence? Tree of Life, a photographic work by the late artist Ana Mendieta, seems illustrative of many of Butler's theoretical precepts.

The photograph features the body of the artist, covered in clay, in a shaman-like pose against the trunk of a tree. It is essentially the photographic documentation of a very private performance taking place between the artist and nature. It should be noted here that the culture/nature dichotomy is just as important to Butler as it is to Mendieta.

Early on in Bodies That Matter, Butler asks the following question: "Is sex to gender as feminine is to masculine?" Nature has traditionally been associated with the feminine; thus, culture or some agency thereof will often "act" upon nature, interfering with it. Nature is thus considered as a passive surface - the feminine, the vaginal - with culture being associated with the masculine, the phallus.

Butler writes, One question that feminists have raised, then, is whether the discourse which figures the action of construction as a kind of imprinting or imposition is not tacitly masculinist, whereas the figure of the passive surface, awaiting that penetration act whereby meaning is endowed, is not tacitly or - perhaps - quite obviously feminine. In Mendieta's piece, we see a dramatization of these issues as the artist - an agent of culture - "penetrates" nature via her intervention, effectively "becoming one" with the tree.

She is thus subverting the laws of.