Judith Butler Has Questions

"And how is it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and consolidates the normative conditions of its own emergence?" (Bodies That Matter 10)

"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?" (Bodies That Matter 10)

"How would we account for the motivation and direction of construction without such a subject?" (Bodies That Matter 7)

"How can there be an activity, a constructing, without presupposing an agent who precedes and performs that activity?" (Bodies That Matter 7)

"If gender is a construction, must there be an 'I' or a 'we' who enacts or performs that construction?" (Bodies That Matter 7)

"In the second and third cases, the seductions of grammar appear to hold sway; the critic asks, Must there not be a human agent, a subject, if you will, who guides the course of construction?" (Bodies That Matter 6-7)

"Would such a rethinking of such conventional oppositions entail a rethinking of 'constructivism' in its usual sense?" (Bodies That Matter 6)

"And if 'sex' is a fantasy, is it perhaps a phantasmatic field that constitutes the very terrain of cultural intelligibility?" (Bodies That Matter 6)

"Or do these very oppositions need to be rethought such that if 'sex' is a fiction, it is one within whose necessities we live, without which life itself would be unthinkable?" (Bodies That Matter 6)

"But is it right to claim that 'sex' vanishes altogether, that it is a fiction over and against what is true, that it is a fantasy over and against what is reality?" (Bodies That Matter 6)

...—then what, if anything, is left of 'sex' once it has assumed its social character as gender?" (Bodies That Matter 5)

"Insofar as it relies on this construal, the sex/gender distinction founders along parallel lines; if gender is the social significance that sex assumes within a given culture—and for the sake of argument we will let 'social' and 'cultural' stand in an uneasy interchangeability..

"Is sex to gender as feminine is to masculine?" (Bodies That Matter 4)

"And how does the category of 'sex' figure within such a relationship?" (Bodies That Matter 1)

"Is there a way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender?" (Bodies That Matter 1)

"Which bodies come to matter—and why?" (Bodies That Matter xii)

"What are the constraints by which bodies are materialized as 'sexed,' and how are we to understand the 'matter' of sex, and of bodies more generally, as the repeated and violent circumscription of cultural intelligibility?" (Bodies That Matter xi-xii)

...but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies?" (Bodies That Matter xi)

"Given this understanding of construction as constitutive constraint, is it still possible to raise the critical question of how such constraints not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies...

"Are certain constructions of the body constitutive in this sense: that we could not operate without them, that without them there would be no 'I,' no 'we'?" (Bodies That Matter xi)