比較文學：東方與西方(19)（簡體書）

"(I)dentity as a practice,and as a signifying practice,is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts oflinguistic life."(GT 184)
Through prioritizing the discursive over the material,Butler seems to have drifted away from a corporeal politics of gender to a foregrounding of the ontology of language/discourse in gender formulation,As Butler slides more to the poststructuralist notions of"reiteration"and"citation",this"corporeality"of gender acts gradually fades from her consideration,and eventually she falls into the trap where"all that is solid melts into language",to borrow the comment by the critic Vicki Kirby.As Kirby points out,Butler is"arguing that there can be no access to a pure materiality outside or before signification,and by extension,no access to a pure materiality of bodily life that is separate from language"(41).
Butlers reduction of the materiality of gender events to an abstracted,simplified level of discursive signification fails to address the specificity of gendered bodies and the complexity of non discursive reality in gender experience,such as oppressions and punitive regulations of non-dominant gender practices,hate to violence that is done to transgender individuals,and the moral pressures put on gender minorities.Geoff Boucher is certainly right in pinpointing gender performativity as an idealist"theory of discursive materialisation"given Butlers argument that"performative speech acts somehow transubstantiate the referent"entails the assumption"that transcendental subjectivity constitutes not just the epistemological forms,but also the substantial materiality of the object-world"(124).Indeed,despite the new epistemological mode that gender performativity provides for understanding gender issues,Butlers alliance with poststructuralist dominance of signs and discourses severely weighs down the materiality of real life experience.Gender phenomenon will be a subjectless,autonomous,self-sustained system completely isolated from not only the social,material domain of gender,but the engagement ofindividuals.