Obviously on the issue of the phenomenological and ostensibly natural structures of gender and sexuality Butler has all kinds of direct relevance. In particular, she demonstrates exactly the kind of critique that one would need to rigorously lay waste to ‘theology of the body’ type thinking. It would be counterproductive to set it up as an issue of Butler vs. JPII, of course, but the structure of her arguments–which tend to identify the element in an account that intends itself as critical or subversive (e.g., the constructedness of ‘gender’) and extend that element to the point of subverting what that account takes as fixed or natural (e.g., the ontological stability of ‘sex’)–would work delightfully well against that style of thinking.

Obviously, too, her implicit but direct criticism of ‘theological’ or ‘religious’ thinking deserves to be mulled over. I don’t know whether or not this is consistent in her other writings, but in Gender Trouble, these adjectives take on a fairly specific Nietzschean meaning (especially clear on pp. 76-77). Thought is designated as theological or religious when it produces and absolutizes some unattainable law, an ‘inevitable and unknowable authority before which the sexed subject is bound to fail.’ I can think of two sources for this kind of designation: one, the (Lutheran) interpretation of Paul according to which the whole purpose of the law is to prove to us our sinfulness; two, the (voluntarist) idea of God as a wholly inaccessible lawgiver. Both sources have been subjected to quite a bit of criticism by theologians themselves of late, but Butler could be read as identifying these as structural problems for theological anthropology and ethics broadly speaking rather than just as issues for Jewish-Christian dialogue and the doctrine of God.

The connection that’s been occupying me most lately, though, is a bit less direct. I think it’s possible to read Gender Trouble as a series of theoretical interventions aimed at showing that any appeal to an ‘original,’ ideal, precultural structure of existence is bound to fail. Part of it is her radical social constructionism, of course, wherein it’s simply impossible to appeal to a precultural or prelinguistic anything. But there’s something else, too: she’s just as disparaging towards theories based on future ideals as on purportedly original ones. I’m not quite clear on how this argument goes yet, because it’s not quite as close to the surface of her text. (Perhaps it would be in some of her more recent political writings.) It has to do with at least three claims:

Appeals to extra-cultural ideals–i.e., ideals completely heteronomous to ‘the law’ as we know it–inadvertently reify the existing culture itself (the clearest statement of this in Gender Trouble comes in her critique of Julia Kristeva);

Ideals, even though they’re intended as critical alternatives to some existing culture, are more often than not effects of that culture which serve to quietly support it rather than subvert it;

The very structure of the ideal ultimately restricts cultural possibilities rather than expanding them.

This critique has plenty of momentum among other recent continentals, too: it figures in Nancy, Agamben, Ranciére. And it calls into question an enormous number of theological concepts. The kingdom of God, the body of Christ, the promised land, the exodus, the garden of Eden, the fall–all of these function, to one degree or another, as paradigmatic “original” instances of something (the state of perfection, the church, God’s saving work, the prelapsarian situation, etc.).

bq. Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. … Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. (pp. 22–23)