For decades, American women have turned to plastic surgery to make their breasts larger, their stomachs flatter, and their thighs smoother. Recently, more and more of them also want their vaginal openings tighter and their labia smaller. Although no official data are available on how many of these procedures are performed annually, industry experts estimate that plastic surgery of the female genitals is the fastest-growing area of plastic surgery in the United States. How should cultural critics interpret this phenomenon? One useful approach to examining this trend is to consider it as evidence of Judith Butler’s theory that gender actually produces sexed bodies. From this perspective, how might genital plastic surgery serve to transform the bodies of women into “properly sexed” female subjects that are better suited to meet the criteria of the label “woman” under the heterosexual imperative?
In Gender Trouble, first published in 1990, Butler radically challenges the long-held idea that gender is a social construct that imprints itself upon stable, “natural,” sexed bodies. Conventional thinking presumes that gender, particularly the myriad of ways in which people “perform” their role as a man or a woman, is an effect of having one of two kinds of sexed bodies. Butler’s work inverts this assumption, demonstrating how sex is actually a gendered category. As such, gender is therefore a cause rather than an effect, and the mark of gender brings the sexed body “into being” . Butler emphasizes how sexed bodies are created toward a particular end: normative heterosexuality. In Bodies That Matter, published three years after Gender Trouble, Butler continues her investigation of this topic:
The regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. Recognizing Butler’s understanding of the body as a discursive construct, one can begin to consider how even those born with the sexual organs of a female might determine that, nonetheless, they do not “measure up.” Simply having a vagina, it seems, may not be sufficient qualification for membership in the category “woman.”
In Gender Trouble, first published in 1990, Butler radically challenges the long-held idea that gender is a social construct that imprints itself upon stable, “natural,” sexed bodies. Conventional thinking presumes that gender, particularly the myriad of ways in which people “perform” their role as a man or a woman, is an effect of having one of two kinds of sexed bodies. Butler’s work inverts this assumption, demonstrating how sex is actually a gendered category. As such, gender is therefore a cause rather than an effect, and the mark of gender brings the sexed body “into being” . Butler emphasizes how sexed bodies are created toward a particular end: normative heterosexuality. In Bodies That Matter, published three years after Gender Trouble, Butler continues her investigation of this topic:
The regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. Recognizing Butler’s understanding of the body as a discursive construct, one can begin to consider how even those born with the sexual organs of a female might determine that, nonetheless, they do not “measure up.” Simply having a vagina, it seems, may not be sufficient qualification for membership in the category “woman.”
