GENDER AND BIOPOLITICS IN JUDITH BUTLER: PERFORMATIVITY, RECOGNITION, AND NEW FORMS OF NORMATIVITY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18623/rvd.v23.7375Keywords:
Judith Butler, biopolitics, gender, performativity, recognition, normativity, SubjectivationAbstract
This article rereads Judith Butler's theory of gender in dialogue with Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics. Foucault shows that modern power does not merely repress bodies; it regulates life, governs populations, and constitutes subjects within specific regimes of truth and normativity. Butler extends this problematic to sex, identity, recognition, and performativity. For Butler, sex is not the expression of a natural and fixed essence, but a mode of subject formation constituted through repeated norms, discourses, and bodily practices. The article argues that Butler should not be read as a thinker who moves beyond biopolitics, but as one who makes visible the changing forms of biopolitics within contemporary debates on gender. The destabilization of norms does not necessarily entail the disappearance of power. On the contrary, emancipatory possibilities such as recognition, visibility, and the declaration of identity may also generate new normative arrangements and forms of exclusion. The article therefore proposes that contemporary gender debates be examined not only through the language of emancipation and plurality, but also in terms of new biopolitical modes of regulation.
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