Butler has been criticised for focusing on the ‘performance’ of each individual without fully acknowledging that each performance is interpreted by others in a variety of ways, therefore according to Benhabib (1995b) it is overly-deterministic. I would argue, however, that this view over-emphasises the theatricality of performativity, disregarding its linguistic aspects. Butler has also been criticised for over-privileging gender in her analysis and thus inadequately addressing ‘race’ (Xhonneux, 2013). In my view, this is an unfair criticism as she not only acknowledges ‘race’ but highlights its socially constructed nature and its parallel binary divisions (i.e. black/white) (Bell, 1999; Ratna, 2013). Butler herself began to focus more on ‘race’ in her later works, first discussing racist hate-speech in Excitable Speech and later exploring how bodies and lives are recognised or understood by the construction of discourses around them in Precarious Lives (2004b). Although ‘race’ is not specifically addressed in her earlier works, Butler’s deconstructive approach can be applied to any aspect of identity such as gender, ‘race’ and sexuality. I find Butler’s focus on the intersection of gender and sexuality, often neglected by Black feminists, to be a particular strength of her work, thus her inclusion in this study.
Critics of Gender Trouble denigrated what they saw as a failure to acknowledge the ways in which male and female bodies are literally different in the very nature of their morphology and reproductive roles. Butler does not, however, neglect the body; rather she sees it as having a pre-determined social existence that defines its materiality and creates the social context it occupies. As Lee states “bodies are already and always inscribed within a social, cultural,
historical and political milieu” (2005: p288). The body is, therefore, “an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities” (Butler, 1988: p520). Thus, Butler asserts that one is not just of a body but one does one’s body according to different social situations. Hence, Butler’s usefulness for a study of domestic abuse is located to a particular arena. Butler does not seek to deny the materiality of the body but rather to deconstruct and scrutinise its materiality within a cultural context. However, in doing so, she removes the body from its real-world context.
Nussbaum (1999) criticises Butler’s neglect of the physicality of the body for ignoring the realities of women’s lives in which they are physically and sexually brutalised. I have some sympathy for this criticism which is why I did not singularly employ Butler but linked her to ethnography and the participants’ real world settings. Butler, however, later acknowledged that “the critique of gender norms must be situated within the context of lives as they are lived” (2004a). My view is that Butler is a theorist whose work must be applied to real world settings by researchers themselves. Butler focused specifically on the body in Bodies That Matter
(1993) and particularly Undoing Gender (2004a) in which she acknowledged the body as a site of great vulnerability: “to be a body is to be given over to others even as a body is one’s own” (2004a: p20). According to Chambers, for Butler:
“A body is both dependent upon others and subject to violation by another, by others. Through our bodies we always remain exposed to others and our very vulnerabilities tie us to others. In this sense ... we find something primary about the body, something fundamental, undeniable” (2007a: p49).
Bodily vulnerabilities tie women to their abusers, making Butler’s understanding of embodiment particularly relevant to drawing insights into abusive relationships. There can be no more poignant yet fitting example of the fragility and vulnerability of the body than the experiences of survivors of domestic abuse as demonstrated in the following chapter,
highlighting that “violence is surely a touch of the worst order, a way in which the human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in the most terrifying way” (Butler, 2004a: p22). Violence destroys bodies, literally and in a social sense as “the infliction of physical pain unmakes and deconstructs the body, while simultaneously making and constructing the world of the perpetrator” (Bakare-Yusuf, 1999: p311).
In acknowledging the destructive power of violence, Butler does not deny the materiality of the body but instead sees it as being inevitably and powerfully predefined by cultural constructs of gender. Cultural constructs are a particularly useful concept when examining women in a specific location who, it transpired, had similar stories and challenges based on their location. Thus, Butler’s focus on the socially constructed nature of gender and sex moves discussion away from the biological characteristics of ‘men’ and ‘women,’ subsequently locating responsibility for the vulnerability of women in domestic abuse relationships within a cultural and societal context. Consequently notions of self-blame, frequently characteristic in discussions around gendered violence, are rejected. Critics have disagreed on this aspect of Butler’s work. Nussbaum sees the victimless status of Butler’s feminist writings as undermining the need for feminist activism. Conversely, Disch asserts: “one of Butler’s most practical contributions to feminism is her resolute opposition to the construction of women as victims” (1999: p546) My position, supported by Mills (1997) is that Butler’s performative and linguistic analyses provide a framework in which to understand subjects’ compliance in their own oppression without blaming or victimising them. In spite of participants experiencing extreme victimisation within intimate relationships, I have no desire to portray them as victims. The very fact that each participant had extricated herself from her abuser is evidence of her own rejection of ‘victim’ status. Butler states, and I coalesce here, that gender does not cause certain behaviours but rather the behaviours one performs create gender. The extent to which cultural factors determine the performance of gender roles is a key point of this study.