| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Butler thus acknowledges the historical “locatedness” of bodily existence that Bordo fears is lost within post-structural analysis. The all-pervasive nature of culture and the inter-subjective nature of lived identity constrain individual agency in the reinvention of self. Butler continues:
Because the very terms of self-understanding are entrenched in culture, attempts to move beyond social norms are fraught with psychological peril; detached from culture, the self as one understood it ceases to exit. Nonetheless, such paradox within resistance to cultural expectations may encourage rather than preclude an active, political attempt to reshape ideology about the body. Butler reasserts the malleability of cultural categories like gender: “To understand gender as a historical category, however, is to accept that gender, understood as one way of culturally configuring a body, is open to continual remaking” (Undoing Gender 9–10). Butler continues to envision bodily identity as a product of culture and agency, with only a tangential relationship to physical form.
The disinclination of post-structural feminism to examine real bodies may, on some level, be an attempt to avoid reproducing a judgmental gaze. However, visual engagement and the act of looking at difference need not be cast entirely in terms of social control and the reinforcement of dominant ideology. It can also promote a positive line of ideological questioning and interpersonal exchange. Disability studies raise alternative frameworks for understanding the gaze by focusing on the variety of different relationships that a visual engagement with difference can