Judith Butler notes that a beginning point for many feminist analyses of gender is an argument that genders are" ways of culturally interpreting the sexed body," means by which particular symbolic value is given within specific cultural circumstances to human bodies with distinct sexual characteristics (1991: 24-25, 112, 134-141) J Such approaches presume the prior reality of the body and perpetuate a dichotomy between nature (sex) and culture (gender) that is ultimately insupportable; sex, as much as gender, is culturally constructed. Butler argues that the" production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender"(Butler 1991: 7). The illusory, transparent existence of the" natural" body is itself a byproduct of discourse about bodily materiality (Butler 1993: 1-16, 101-119). In Butler's view, particular physical characteristics of the body are isolated as signifying sex through the performance of gendered activity, while this embodiment misleadingly casts an air of naturalism on the already cultural categories of sex. Instead of presuming that sex acts as a kind of grounding, a preexisting essence, for gender, Butler views sex itself as a cultural and symbolic interpretation of bodily materiality (1991). Not denying the real existence of the body, Butler instead argues that bodies are only made intelligible in terms of specific cultural readings that mutually construct sex, gender, age, race, and other embodied ways of being. It is with this understanding of the social construction of bodies, as the imposition on the flesh of certain forms of intelligibility, that I wish to begin.

I take as a model the analysis of the cultural construction of the sexed body in the European tradition. Thomas Laqueur demonstrates that the literary texts of early European philosophy and later European science, by their denotation of different aspects of material bodies, effectively naturalized the definitions of organs that Euro-American societies accept as subdivisions of the body today (1989, 1990). He illustrates the way that scientific drawings presented isolated parts of bodies according to schema of bodily divisions and identities of parts of male and female bodies, subordinating the observation of nature to culturally specific models of difference in the body, but lending these models an aura of objectivity through conventions of realism. Butler argues that, within the Euro-American tradition, representations in both visual and textual media reiterate limits on the intelligibility of the body (1993). Representations of the body, whether in words or in? mages, are themselves the media through which bodily partitions are made to appear as natural facts and alternative construals of bodily materiality are excluded as unthinkable and unintelligible. I argue that the same slippage between representation and bodily existence is discernible in pre-Columbian images from Central America. 2