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Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
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Part 2, Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “‘Dangerous Crossings’: Willa Cather’s Masculine Names”
Butler starts the chapter by critiquing feminist readings of Willa Cather’s identification in fiction as a linear trajectory from male to female. Butler argues that such readings oversimplify the complexities of gender and sexuality within Cather’s works. Referencing Hermione Lee’s notions of cross-dressing and cross-writing, as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of cross-identification and lesbian love, Butler argues that Cather’s work poses a challenge to conventional representations of gender identifications.
Butler carries out a detailed analysis of Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia. The narrative is a complex interplay of names and identities, with Jim Burden taking on the role of first-person narrator. The novel focuses on the character of Ántonia, Jim’s friend and an immigrant from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). Butler’s analysis focuses on the symbolic importance of Ántonia’s name, which is a gender-ambiguous name.
Furthermore, the analysis centers on the intertwining of linguistic and gendered elements in Jim’s attempt to teach Ántonia English words. The characters encounter a snake shaped like the letter W, which, Butler asserts, alludes to Willa Cather. This symbol blurs the distinctions between character and author. According to Butler, the snake also represents the phallus and becomes a site for castration anxiety as Jim attempts, unsuccessfully, to kill the snake, revealing the hidden tensions between desire, identity, and resistance. Butler draws on Lacan’s and Slavoj Žižek’s works to emphasize the symbolic function of names in securing identity over time, critiquing the patronymic system—naming children after their father or male ancestor, like “Johnson”—for its embedded masculinist and heteronormative norms.
Analyzing another work by Cather, the short story “Tommy the Unsentimental,” Butler recognizes Cather’s effort to subvert traditional gender and naming conventions. The narrative revolves around Tommy Shirley, a woman who assumes her absent father’s name, challenging patriarchal expectations. The name Tommy carries historical connotations, from representing masculinity to signifying a clown, a sex worker, or a defiant girl. Tommy’s assumed identity becomes a site of resistance, appropriating and feminizing the patronym. The story explores the desire and sacrificial renunciation of love through Tommy’s relationship with Jessica, whom she eventually advises to marry Jay Ellington Harper, a man who worked at Tommy’s father’s bank. In the end, Tommy’s sacrificial act of giving up her desire for Jessica preserves both the bank, which was in trouble, and heterosexual norms.
Butler reads the story as representing a sacrifice of desire within a capitalist economy fueled by anti-LGBT bias. Tommy’s actions are those of a heterosexual male as she sacrifices her feelings for a legitimate marriage between Jay and Jessica. Tommy’s sacrifice finances the bank and heterosexuality, situating her as the expendable third element in the love triangle, embodying the sacrifice of desire for institutionalized heteronormativity. Butler argues that reading Cather’s text as a lesbian narrative complicates traditional norms of heterosexuality, challenging the notion of a fixed, historically accurate representation of lesbianism. The construction of lesbian identity occurs within discursive sites where the transfer of sexuality disrupts established norms.
Reading Cather’s story “Pau’s Case,” Butler explores the representation of bodies as divided into parts and the wavering between genders. Butler argues that the narrative exemplifies the liminal status of characters like Paul, who embody a refusal to conform to gender and sexual coherence.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge”
Chapter 6 emphasizes the need to understand the convergence of race, sexuality, and sexual difference, challenging the separation of these spheres. Butler turns to Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing to analyze the tense relationship between the two protagonists, Irene and Clare. The tension between the two women stems from the fact that Clare is a Black woman who passes for white and marries a racist white man. Clare grew up with Irene, a Black woman who can also pass, in Harlem, New York. Racial passing is the phenomenon in which individuals from one racial or ethnic group present themselves as belonging to another racial or ethnic group. This often involves individuals who are part of marginalized or stigmatized racial groups attempting to assimilate into a more socially advantaged or dominant racial group by concealing their true racial identity. Butler comments that Clare’s passing as white is a risky, erotic act that simultaneously entices and fuels moral condemnation.
The narrative culminates in Clare’s violent death after her racist husband, Jack Bellew, discovers her in the company of African Americans, leading to her fall from a window. It is not known whether Clare is pushed out by someone or whether she dies by suicide. Butler comments that the shattering of Clare’s semblance of whiteness exposes the fragility of the white project of racial purity. The narrative, Butler argues, reveals how the racial boundary is enforced through the fetishization of Black women.
Analyzing different perspectives on the novel, such as those proposed by Claudia Tate, Cheryl Wall, and Deborah McDowell, Butler argues that Clare represents both racial and sexual tensions. They note that the text dwells on the repression of homosexuality through an unspoken attraction between Irene and Clare. As Larsen’s text uses the term “queering” to represent the threat of having one’s race and sexuality made explicit, the scenes between Irene and Clare reveal the mutual erotic absorption between the two characters. Irene’s resistance to Clare appears to be due to race and class. However, Butler argues that Irene’s ambivalence toward Clare is situated within a historical context in which the desire for freedom from exclusion conflicts with the dangers of public exposure and exploitation. Butler suggests that Irene’s jealousy is a consequence of sacrificing her passion, with Brian (Irene’s husband) serving as a conduit for Irene’s repressed desires.
Butler concludes their analysis of Larsen’s text by challenging the assumption of the priority of sexual difference over racial difference in feminist scholarship informed by psychoanalysis. Butler argues for a reconsideration of the symbolic domain and social conventions, asserting that racial norms and gender norms are interconnected and cannot be fully separated.
Part 2, Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Chapters 5 and 6 deepen Butler’s conceptual analyses by putting them to work in different literary contexts. Two important threads in these chapters are idealization and sacrifice as they relate to the inscription of gender and race in society. Butler commits to an intersectional perspective, choosing narratives about characters who grapple with their nonconforming sexualities and racial identities. In Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia, Ántonia is an immigrant whose gender identity is ambiguous. In Nella Larsen’s Passing, the main characters, Irene and Clare, sacrifice their racial identity and queer attraction for secure positions in a bourgeois environment.
In their analysis, Butler draws on Freud’s essay on narcissism, which argues that love involves sacrificing a portion of one’s narcissism. Freud traces this sacrifice to the child’s idealization of the mother, when the child’s narcissism is transferred to the mother figure. Therefore, the mother symbolizes lost narcissism. Butler extends this analysis, emphasizing that the ego always takes a risk when engaging in idealization and loses. The ideal always requires the sacrifice of narcissism, leading to the ambivalence of idealization. The idealized person carries the self-love invested in them, generating both attraction and resentment.
Butler applies this psychoanalytic lens of ambivalence and idealization to their analysis of Cather’s story “Tommy the Unsentimental,” in which Tommy’s sacrificial act of giving up her desire for Jessica stems from the idealization of the heterosexual and social position that she has chosen. Tommy’s attraction to Jessica is the lost narcissism that creates the ambivalence of Tommy’s position. In Chapter 6, Butler extends their analysis to Nella Larsen’s Passing, where idealization and sacrifice play pivotal roles in the narrative. According to Butler, Clare’s risky act of passing as white exemplifies the idealization of a certain identity and role in society. Clare’s sacrifice in the narrative is literal because she loses her life—at the end of the story, Clare dies under ambiguous circumstances. The characters sacrifice narcissistic elements related to their racial and sexual identities.
Another important notion, related to Sigmund Freud’s theory of identification and sacrifice, is Jacques Lacan’s “naming.” Butler engages with this concept throughout Bodies That Matter, particularly regarding identity construction. Lacan builds on Freud’s ideas of identification and the loss of narcissism in childhood and introduces the concepts of naming and language, which are central to the formation of subjectivity. Naming is not just a linguistic act but a symbolic one that structures the subject’s understanding of reality and participates in the constitution of the subject—i.e., creating their identity. The act of naming, according to Lacanian and Freudian frameworks, involves a symbolic investment of meaning. When an individual is named or names themselves within a given gender category, they participate in a symbolic act of identification. Butler extends these discussions, using names as sites of analysis, as they symbolize not only personal identity but also the cultural norms and expectations associated with gender, race, and other social categories. For example, in her analysis of Cather’s My Ántonia, Butler explores the symbolic importance of Ántonia’s name, which is gender-ambiguous. The naming process becomes a site of struggle and negotiation, reflecting broader societal norms, linguistic structures, and the ways Performativity and Identification interplay.
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