This interview clarifies Butler’s account of materialisation by confronting persistent misunderstandings around performativity, construction and the body. Butler rejects the claim that discourse freely invents material reality; instead, regulatory norms establish the conditions under which bodies become intelligible, recognised and socially viable. Performativity is reiterated citation, not theatrical choice, and its repetition is never perfectly secure. The interview format is methodologically significant because conceptual pressure emerges through questions concerning sex, abjection, law and political strategy. Butler’s responses reveal a theory attentive to both structural constraint and the possibility of resignification. The wider bridge is toward institutional practice: bodies come to matter through medical, legal, linguistic and social frameworks that distribute legitimacy unevenly. The text’s contribution is to show that ontology is politically administered. Materiality cannot be separated from the regimes that name, classify and sustain it, yet those regimes remain vulnerable because their authority depends upon continued repetition.
