Art in Bodies That Matter, Term Paper

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It should be noted here that the culture/nature dichotomy is just as important to Butler as it is to Mendieta. Early on in Bodies That Matter, Butler asks the following question: "Is sex to gender as feminine is to masculine?" Nature has traditionally been associated with the feminine; thus, culture or some agency thereof will often "act" upon nature, interfering with it. Nature is thus considered as a passive surface - the feminine, the vaginal - with culture being associated with the masculine, the phallus. Butler writes,

One question that feminists have raised, then, is whether the discourse which figures the action of construction as a kind of imprinting or imposition is not tacitly masculinist, whereas the figure of the passive surface, awaiting that penetration act whereby meaning is endowed, is not tacitly or - perhaps - quite obviously feminine.

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In Mendieta's piece, we see a dramatization of these issues as the artist - an agent of culture - "penetrates" nature via her intervention, effectively "becoming one" with the tree. She is thus subverting the laws of gender and sex that our society has been historically based on, while ironically re-iterating the myth of the traditional association of women with nature. The artist's body seems frozen, solidified against the tree - almost as though it had been there for centuries. She thus becomes a sort of living statue - that is, a living reminder of the indissolubility of gender and sex, and a living, breathing embodiment of the performance of both in a nexus that is not quite the social, not quite the natural, but a little of both......

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