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Where Does Matter Come From? Where Does Vitality Go?—The Substance and the Polyphony of "Things"

Ivan Yi-fan Hu · 2024.12.24–29

Abstract The Substance has largely been treated as a "feminist film," while its conspicuous experiments with the posthuman and body horror have received insufficient formal attention, serving merely as supplementary material within gender debates. This overlooks what distinguishes the film from existing films about gender and wastes an opportunity for productive dialogue among established gender theories. Focusing on the "thing" that names the film and forms its core, this essay closely reads the film through questions of matter, sex and gender, the body, discourse, and performativity. By tracing the multiple theoretical positions of the "thing," it reassesses the film's experimental significance and considers possibilities for feminist new materialisms.

Keywords thing; matter; sex and gender; body; discourse; performativity; feminist new materialisms

A theory enthusiast's experience of The Substance1 may resemble an ordinary viewer's, with a few differences. When the protagonist takes a drug called "substance" to regain youthful vitality, Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter readily comes to mind. The painful, slow writhing of one body splitting to deliver another, the shifting perspectives of the two bodies, and the accelerating collapse caused by repeated violations of "You are one" may touch theoretical nerves labelled posthuman, cyborg, or companion species. More obviously, the film has prompted renewed discussion of bodily politics, the male gaze, and other familiar feminist questions. Yet, mediated by theory or not, the blood, tumours, and even a tiny wrinkle of skin strike the viewer directly, stirring throat and eyes in waves of nausea and pleasure. Once the screening ended and I could recover, I ruminated again. Along with stomach acid resembling the film's yellow-green liquid, my theoretical appetite, after voyeurism had exploded, cooled, and turned inward, made me notice the material character of blood, flesh, and skin. They certainly offer something to discuss and, still more, something to feel. Our violent response to their exquisitely naked material representation resembles Bennett's excitement and unease before an unrotted dead rat in a rubbish heap: "Not Flower Power, Black Power, or Girl Power, but 'Thing-Power': the uncanny capacity of inanimate things to animate, act, and produce dramatic yet subtle effects"2. Perhaps this partly explains the film's success. Every viewer is compelled to receive a sensory satisfaction, while academics find prompts for subsequent commentary.

This reading seems almost to exhaust the possibilities too easily. Yet even the approaches just mentioned produce "dramatic yet subtle effects" among themselves. To bring these subtleties into focus, let us try a thought experiment in labelling. It can reveal the expectations through which the film is viewed and recover, through comparison, what labels necessarily scrape away or fail to see.

Begin with the most heated and immediately visible question: is The Substance a "feminist film"? Online responses frequently compare it with Barbie (2023), already commonly admitted to a feminist film canon, placing them at opposite ends: one a sunny, playful false fairy tale, the other a genuinely dark, enlightening cult film. As one comment puts it, "Greta enlightens humanity, Coralie ends it".3 The breasts, buttocks, and thighs repeatedly framed from the perspective of powerful middle-aged men certainly suggest the gaze. Recreating a younger body and recklessly extracting resources from an old, ugly, wrinkled one to preserve the new body's sex appeal further suggests competition between women. Critics object that the director's safe, ambiguous critical stance behind the camera never reaches structural problems. It selectively "critically watches" exposed bodies, following those very men's gaze. Put bluntly, the critique of the male gaze becomes an incomplete visual sleight of hand and a collective trial of the ageing protagonist, without preventing voyeuristic pleasure in her beautiful new body before its collapse. Viewers can also laugh while declaring their disgust at a tangled muscular creature spitting a breast from its mouth. Letting one's eyes crawl over beauty becomes gentlemanly appreciation, facing an ugly creature becomes courage, and glaringly denouncing the heroine becomes justice: another performance of "righteous bravery with a well-read air".4 The camera's criticism amounts to "You actually made such a thing!" Beauty versus ugliness, success versus failure. It condemns her attempt to defy "natural laws" for youth and beauty until she loses human form, rather than asking how beauty itself becomes a command of "second nature" governing everyone inside and outside the film. It mocks her servitude to beauty even as a monster who still wears jewellery, rather than joining film and audience in reflecting on beauty labour itself. As another sharp comment notes, "From 'doing beauty labour' to 'do it, but not too much'; from 'freedom to lower oneself' to 'downwards, but only so far'."5

This follows the film's most conspicuous feminist discussion.6 The label, or interpretive form, is internally coherent. But while exposing ambiguity and covert satire behind the camera, should we not also guard against drawing the target before shooting, or assigning a charge before finding evidence? The problem is not only the inwardly closing, formulaic, self-addressed murmur of critique. Clues to escaping its circle may lie precisely in what it impatiently discards as worthless debris; every stern refusal then confirms itself and tightens the trap. The labelling experiment is unfinished, however. Its second and final question is less socially heated, not because it is necessarily milder, but because fewer people have noticed it. Apparently concerning the future rather than the present, it asks: is The Substance a "posthuman film"? As noted, sensory shock strikes first, with or without theory, but once the first peak subsides we return through different theoretical mediations. Moving between them, I wonder: which is content and which is form—social critique or body horror7? We could simply say that writer-director Coralie Fargeat uses eyeball-assaulting bodily horror to convey a bloody rebellion against the patriarchal aesthetic gaze. Controversies about whether she succeeds can then be absorbed into this possibly intentionalist reading. But suppose, instead, that social critique is a cover for a radical biotechnological experiment approaching the claim that humans are things. Such a claim would be unacceptable when gene editing already marks an ethical taboo—or, more sensationally, perhaps Fargeat discovers while filming that she has opened biotechnology's Pandora's box. The hypothesis sounds absurdly tangential. Yet making the readings collide creates unexpected combinations of their theoretical resources. If feminism fundamentally critiques the essentialist idea that gender inequality derives from innate physiological difference, treating identities, including gender, as fluid, socially constructed, and discursive, then technologies powerful enough to alter genes, rewrite memories, or change sex would mark a leap for anti-essentialist feminism. This is not an essence fixed once for all by nature, but a post-essentialism in which essence itself flows. Far from a novel theoretical frontier, it is a highly simplified retelling of Donna Haraway's influential cyborg feminism.

The seemingly arbitrary hypothesis may thus bring out what is genuinely experimental and exceeds familiar readings. Imagine that the protagonist's drug produces a young, attractive male body. The plot might then follow the embodied reversals of oppression arising from shifting sex: the male body enters powerful men's circles, discovers their everyday obscene sexual solidarity, and montage connects it to the overt or covert humiliations suffered as a woman. Perhaps such a film would face fewer complaints that "social significance outweighs art" or that "it openly stages the male gaze", and better realize Fargeat's wish to "address these questions on a larger scale".8 Of course, this presumptuous rewriting still puts the theme first. The finished film also contains resources for dialogue among readings. My aim is not, however, to illustrate it with ready-made concepts, as so many existing discussions do. The limitations of that procedure, and its waste of an opportunity, are already apparent. Bourdieu observes:

What circulates between philosophers, contemporary or otherwise, is not only canonical texts but an entire philosophical doxa: school labels functioning as slogans in celebration or polemic, decontextualized quotations, academic commonplaces, and—perhaps especially—guides to the schools. These may constitute an intellectual generation's "common sense" more powerfully than anything else. ... When a new literary or artistic group emerges in cultural production, the whole problematic shifts: its appearance changes the literary field's state and displaces the range of possible choices.9

It is welcome that feminist discourse, once a marginal voice of resistance, increasingly occupies the upper hand in many discursive fields, including discussion of this film. Calling it a common sense of our time is no exaggeration. But does victory end the matter? If new contents are continually pressed into existing monolingual forms through confident appeals to a dominant voice, theoretical closure and involution become unavoidable. Like bubbles—or, more locally, the heroine's repeated extraction and advance spending of bodily essence—the discourse exhausts itself. Its self-destructive murmurs even participate in extracting and reproducing its own surplus, just as the heroine's pursuit of youth ultimately serves her entertainment company's ratings and profit. I do not mean "Enough, stop being a feminist buzzkill." Rather, the familiar model shows its weakness when reading The Substance. It may suffice for the protagonist before she takes the drug, but falls behind the version once another body crawls out. If the first half offers a feminism of the human, the second offers a feminism of the manufactured human.

I. Where Does Matter Come From? "Old Materialism Is Only Half a Materialism"

The crucial question is why the protagonist takes the drug. It drives the plot, and competing answers reveal the overt and covert assumptions of its quarrelling audiences. A simple answer says that she wants youth and beauty, defies "natural laws" because her desires know no bounds, and deserves her collapse. Another asks us to read the film as feminist allegory, judging neither praise nor blame at the surface level of conduct. Taking the drug would then metaphorize an impulse to transform structure; the collapsing muscular creature would be the tragic revolutionary who speaks out even at the price of self-destruction. Giving birth through a miraculous drug would mock the men atop the entertainment company as a miniature patriarchal society, while the New Year bloodbath would directly figure a revolutionary riot bringing down the order.

Compared with the first view—said to dominate male audiences and help explain their unrestrained laughter—the second shows more reflection. Yet what stands out is less the strength of an awakened woman than the drug called substance. If blame or ridicule punishes defiance of natural laws, praise merely celebrates those laws bestowing grace on her: her exploding body warns the patriarchal representatives at the gala. Does this warning necessarily concern gender, mortal flesh, or even human society? The question remains. Her calls are always answered by a deep, unquestionable, mysterious male voice. Apart from the male recruiter, himself another experimental subject, no real face appears. Each call, collection, and dose resembles a task on a preset track, a trial whose administrator disregards her wishes from the outset. It is as though he plants a bomb in her body for her to detonate; its explosion raises a cloud called feminism to certain viewers' applause. How different would this be from her obeying the divine command, appearing in radiant beauty to universal cheers at the gala, then offering neoliberal "be yourself" and "girl power" remarks, like the television interview in the film? The old body fails the male entertainment boss's test; the young body also fails the mysterious male drug god's. Neither matters: she is only a subject in a grand plan called "natural laws." One side solemnly accuses her of violating them, forgetting that their nature is built by entertainment and pharmaceutical firms posing as creators. The other prays for supernatural pharmaceutical power and elevates the stage into a sacred altar of women's revolution. This recalls Marx and Engels on Feuerbach: "When Feuerbach is a materialist, history lies outside his view; when he considers history, he is no materialist. For him, materialism and history fall completely apart."10

The body, a primary battlefield of gender ideology, is placed under natural laws and treated as a once-given essence. The first body signifies old, ugly, wrinkled; the second young, beautiful, smooth, and firm. The plot need only move between these poles until they collide. Yet physical attributes alone do not generate their dramatic relation: discourse links them beneath the surface. Suppose the new body were another middle-aged person, an older person, or a child. The heroine might not take the risk at all. She and the audience anticipate a finished product, a sexy body; this foreknowledge makes them watch the transformation with uneasy expectation. Age is a continuous, unremarkable number sequence. The two bodies differ by only about twenty years, yet they become sharply opposed, as though symmetrically placed on either side of a peak. The range they delimit is, in the boss's phrase, a "youth job." One body exits with old age, another enters with youth; as the saying goes, "if you do not take the job, someone else will".

Classical materialist feminism is powerless here. The heroine is already drawn into the patriarchal machine: have both bodies not become organs of its great body? When she can desire life and death only as an organ, another body merely lets her become a fresher organ. From this feminist perspective, moreover, is a body not noteworthy only as a component embedded in patriarchal reproduction? Apart from declaring her a defector to patriarchy—one who curries favour with men—and condemning her bodily debauchery, the familiar approach seems to have little to say. If structural violence causes her age-related dismissal, it can likewise explain her decision to take the drug and the creature's eventual bloody explosion. But explanation is all it offers. What is not structural violence? Does the mysterious male drug god directly giving her a new body count too?

II. Where Does Vitality Go? The Weight of Bodies and the Lightness of Discourse

What if, like radical feminism, we distinguish sex from gender? Biological sex certainly does not directly equal social gender. Yet the body still appears a naturally given entity, either deliberately avoided or denied, or deployed as a resource of resistance. The first option attends less to bodies than to the meanings society imposes on them, compensating after hitting a wall it knows cannot be breached. The body remains an invisible, impenetrable wall. The second essentializes it further, treating it as something to requisition rather than a firm ontological starting point of its own. The heroine's refusal to age and her use of the drug correspond to the first; the beautiful flesh supposedly mocking patriarchy corresponds to the second. Ultimately she collapses into a puddle of blood, having disrupted only one gala. A new face will quickly replace hers on the billboard, and the energetic camera of Pump It Up will focus on another pair of breasts and buttocks.

"Every appeal to the body is always already discursive ... Therefore, the division of sex and gender makes the body the boundary between materiality and representation, while that division and its effects are not themselves put into question."11 Escaping essentialism does not mean pushing constructivism to an either/or extreme; that only restores the circle. What we imagine as essence and construction is already inscribed by norms through language. Repeated attempts to break essential limits and attain free construction fall back into constraint because they are "conventionalized, restricted repetitions of norms". "Repetition is not performed by a subject; repetition enables the subject and constitutes its temporality. This reiteration implies that 'performance' is not a single 'act' or event but a ritualized production. This ritual is repeated within and through constraint, prohibition, and taboo."12 Postmodern feminists influenced by poststructuralism, exemplified by Judith Butler, problematize sex/gender and recover the complexity of bodily-discursive relations beneath the apparent alternatives of essence and construction. The passage states the basis of gender performativity: gender is the performative repetition and self-citation of its norms.13 Against the classical liberal-feminist question of "how a female becomes a woman", Butler shows that this question still presupposes a hidden interior essence. Its resistance therefore remains half-hearted and finally futile. Rather than ask "how a female becomes a woman", she deconstructs the naturalized categories of sex and gender themselves:

Against these accounts of construction, I propose a return to matter, understood not as a site or surface but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter. … The question is no longer how gender is constructed as and through an interpretation of sex—a question that leaves sex's materiality untheorized—but through what regulatory norms sex is materialized. How does treating the materiality of sex as given presuppose and consolidate the normative conditions of its emergence?14

In brief, what the sex/gender binary treats as a given material existence is precisely the materialization of sex that Butler questions. Performativity brings the formerly walled-off body under social-discursive norms. In the separation of sex and gender it is not a passive backdrop but an active participant interacting with discourse. Its materiality is continually redefined and participates in the performative self-repetition of norms.15 Butler sees the inability to change things under the binary as a melancholic condition. She locates transformative possibility in the fissures of materialization at the metalevel: "This reiteration also opens gaps and fissures, unstable elements in construction that escape or exceed the norm and cannot be wholly delimited or fixed by its repetition. This instability is the deconstituting possibility of the process of repetition itself, a force undoing the stabilized effects of 'sex' and placing the consolidation of the norms of 'sex' in a potentially productive crisis."16

Butler thus reads the first of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach— "The chief defect of all previous materialism, including Feuerbach's, is that the object, reality, and sensuousness are apprehended only in the form of the object or of contemplation, rather than as sensuous human activity, as practice, or from the subjective side"17—as follows:

If materialism takes practice as constitutive of its objects, understanding practice as socially transformative activity, that activity constitutes materiality itself. As a specific activity, however, practice presupposes a transformation in an object's state, usually from nature to society, but also from an alienated to a non-alienated social condition. In either case, in Marx's new materialism the object is not merely transformed: to a considerable degree it is the transformative activity itself. Its materiality is established through a temporal movement from an earlier to a later state. The object is a site of temporal transformation and is therefore material. Its materiality is neither static, spatial, nor given; constituted through transformative activity, it is itself such an activity.18

This makes clear the close link between Butler's distinction of matter and materiality and her understanding of practice. Materiality's dynamic generation is materialization: the body becomes matter and therefore matters. "To speak of bodies that matter is no incidental pun: being material means materializing, and materialization is precisely where the body 'matters,' where it becomes intelligible. To ask something's meaning is to ask how and why it matters; 'to matter' here means both 'to materialize' and 'to mean'."19 Replacing an essential body with a discursive body makes the body wholly dynamic within discursive practice. It has always already inhabited a normative structure. Only by entering into how it repeatedly participates in reproducing norms—practice—can we disrupt the stable order.20 Otherwise, as with old materialism or radical liberalism above, we circle back to the beginning.

The insights of materialization must be acknowledged: they break essentialism's circle and enter the material production of the discursive body. "Matter cannot be the highest principle of being, not only because the labouring subject mediates natural materials, but because production concerns not matter 'itself' but its concrete forms of existence, determined quantitatively and qualitatively."21 Yet showing how discursive materialization repeats a representational order only elaborates "how things relate to people in a human way". How to "relate to things in a human way in practice"22 remains caught in an endless circle of discursive construction. This deepens the divide between the physically existing body of flesh and the discursive body. Because flesh relates to us through its materiality, its matter seems dispensable; within performative representation it becomes an inaccessible thing-in-itself. Critics thus argue of Butler that "despite apparently critiquing the sex/gender division, her work in many respects intensifies the matter/representation dualism."23 If change can begin only by opening cracks in performative representation at a poststructural discursive level, the approach evokes the injunction to "fight selfish thoughts in their slightest flash and make revolution deep within the soul". Remember that the mysterious male drug god repeatedly tells the heroine, "You can stop at any time". Language causes Gender Trouble, but the trouble's solution is not an apparently reversible linguistic problem. The weak points of the performative order may not be confined to materialization. Might the dissolving force of what "escapes or exceeds norms" and "cannot be wholly delimited or fixed" be sought in matter? Perhaps we should attend instead to his other warning: "You are one."

III. The Polyphony of Things: Towards Feminist New Materialisms

What is this oneness? In the landmark collection Material Feminisms, Susan Hekman observes that many postmodernists "move from the priority of reality to that of discourse". Yet "matter is more than a social construction or a passive object of linguistic invention". To "construct the ballast," she reads Foucault's account of biopower as "shifting attention from the body to the interaction of discourse and body". Postmodernists, she argues, depart from his attention to their complex relations. Together discourse and matter construct "bodily existence". "Discourses about bodies cannot be separated from the bodies we inhabit: we are our bodies, and discourse and matter become one within embodied existence."24 A deeper question follows. If we do not encounter matter "itself," and can "relate to things in a human way in practice" only when it "relates to people in a human way," does that imply that things can relate only to humans and that such relations exhaust their existence? Can our inability to reach the thing-in-itself justify denying its existence? "Can things not exist independently, especially apart from the subject? ... Might there be a philosophy of absolute things resolutely detached from human reference?"25 The target is less a return to essentialism than the dissolution of the cogito's spell.

Reading Beauvoir's formulation of "becoming a woman", Butler points out that it "implies an agent, a cogito-like subject". Becoming always takes place under the compulsion of specific norms, but "clearly, this compulsion does not come from 'sex'": the female is not given in advance, and "nothing guarantees that the one becoming a woman is female". The proposition already repeats gender norms.26 As we earlier imagined, why could the drug not produce a man, or more radically a sex-changing being? Accepting that a woman gives birth to a woman and then concentrating on the struggle between the bodies repeats norms at the metalevel. Their clear opposition follows from the assumption that "the body is treated merely as an instrument or medium, to which an entire set of cultural meanings is only externally related"27. Butler therefore argues, with evident anguish, that "individual bodies cannot be said to possess a signifiable existence before gender marking". She retreats from the material body because "discourse attempts to set limits on analysis or to secure certain humanist tenets as prerequisites of all gender analysis". Better, then, to leap fully into discourse. Yet she still asks: "To what extent are bodies formed in and through gender markings? How can we reconceive the body so that it is no longer a passive medium or instrument awaiting the animating force of an entirely immaterial will?"28 "To what extent" suggests a bodily force escaping marks. On entering our cogito, a body is already marked, but its possibilities are not exhausted by that cogito. "Female biology—the intense and diffuse physiological heat and sensuous pleasure arising from the clitoris, breasts, womb, and vagina, menstrual cycles in women's bodies, the gestation and completion of life—will receive explanations far fuller than our present understanding."29 The interviewers who say, "This time every organ is in the right place," can only lose language before the final many-faced body. That may rewrite their entrenched male-gazing minds more deeply than verbal struggle. Likewise, when the heroine extracts resources from her old body without hesitation, she does not expect a turkey leg to produce, as if by quantum interference, a swelling in her buttock. Such a nightmare, more than a voice saying "You can stop at any time", forces her to sit and confront the madness and absurdity.

The second body's name, SUE, abbreviates "Substance." It is a material body made from the material of the old flesh. To the male boss, viewers, and lovers, however, she or it is a cute thing to use, gaze upon, and flirt with. Discourse reaches at most the skin around blood and flesh. Partial covering provokes the desire to see nudity, but the gaze stops at that outer skin. When SUE is intimate with a man and the zip on her back opens to expose a rush of viscera, few beyond an expert such as Bataille could enjoy it. Yet SUE emerged from the first fleshly body—whose name, Elizabeth, I have not mentioned until now. Their bodily substance communicates through a U-shaped tube; their external covering differs. Here form outweighs content; form is content. When we discuss "the body," we discuss skin rather than what skin encloses. Instead of saying discourse materializes and masters the body, we might say it can only draw a boundary of skin. Materialization is the discursive delimitation that gives matter form, making it human-shaped and therefore humanly related to people. As Barad writes:

Discursive practices are specific material (re)configurings of the world through which boundaries, properties, and meanings become differentially determinate. They are ongoing agential intra-actions of the world, establishing particular determinacies and complementary indeterminacies within phenomena as they become. Crucially, they are causal intra-actions: they enact causal structures in which some components, "effects," are marked by others, "causes," through their differential articulation. Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but the world's ongoing performance in the differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility. In causal intra-activity, new intelligibilities emerge between parts of the world; boundaries and properties become determinate, and active materiality, possibilities, and impossibilities are reconfigured. Discursive practices are boundary-drawing activities in the world's continuing agential intra-actions, without end.30

Feminist new materialisms31 extend performativity from discursive to material-discursive practice. This emphasizes the dynamic, complex entanglement of matter and discourse: ongoing agential intra-actions. It advocates "women's specificity through a new, situated and therefore relational way of thinking, accepting non-complementarity and multiplicity while seeking reconnection and positively emphasizing the importance of embodiment and lived experience".32 Yet the Anthropocene is only a brief instant since the universe's beginning. Entrusting change to new configurations of order speeds up the world's differential dance; whether we can follow its rhythm, whether it accelerates evolution or hastens extinction, cannot be known. It may more readily turn into technological worship.

Consider the final creature, often called an "indescribable thing." Indescribable means it has not formalized as a thing that discourse can catch and assign a place. It is knots of muscle, heaps of organs, content without form, material without human shape: pure matter. The audience initially responds with cold silence and anger that its gala has not proceeded as usual. When the mask falls and conatus, the force of self-preservation, escapes, bursting the tulle and spraying blood, flesh, and organs over the hall, screams erupt. But is this not a body? Even reduced to a face crawling on the ground, it insists on reaching its Walk of Fame star before dissolving into blood. Earlier it could apply a mask, ornaments, and a dress, which means it still inhabits a network of meaning, perceiving and acting along boundaries drawn by discourse. "Acquiring a body is thus a progressive undertaking that simultaneously produces a sensory medium and a sensitive world."33 Here, however, the medium is preprogrammed and its world restricted to a delimited range. We can equally say that it is a body, but people have not adjusted to its new performativity; the heroine's thinking has not kept pace with her bodily evolution, as when typing outruns thought and the system freezes. Where is the solution? Perhaps the drug god's technology will mature until switching bodies every seven days is unnecessary. There may be customization, home delivery, fair distribution, Fair Play, until no one knows beauty as beauty and all is well. Or technology need not improve: accelerate person-to-person transmission of Substance until everyone becomes a mountain of flesh and then a pool of blood, and people may realize bodies are not passive objects. By then Pump It Up will probably be off the air. But at last no one will dare sell beauty again—will they?

Notes

  1. At the time of writing, the film had not been officially released in mainland China. Chinese titles besides '某种物质' include '完美物质', '惧裂', '实体', and '物质'. Written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (b. 1976), her second feature competed at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in 2024 and won Best Screenplay.
  2. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 6.
  3. Douban user '嘟嘟熊之父', short review, 20 May 2024, https://movie.douban.com/subject/35882838/comments: 'A dream-making film, the queen arrives, the endpoint of Barbie. Greta enlightens humanity; Coralie ends it. You want to kill yourself, and yourself happens to agree.' Author's note: Greta is American director Greta Gerwig (b. 1983), writer-director of Barbie.
  4. The phrase comes from another much-discussed 'feminist film', Her Story, written and directed by Shao Yihui (b. 1991).
  5. Douban user 'SPHINX', short review, 7 July 2024, https://movie.douban.com/subject/35882838/comments.
  6. The discussion observed here is mainly on the mainland Chinese internet, particularly Douban: https://movie.douban.com/subject/35882838/.
  7. Body horror is a horror subgenre focused on bodily distortion, transformation, damage, and representations violating natural laws or ordinary physiological expectations, producing fear, unease, and disgust. It commonly involves abnormal changes to flesh, bones, organs, and other body parts. Examples include David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) and Stuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986), adapted from H. P. Lovecraft. Cronenberg (b. 1943) is often called the father of body horror; Gordon lived 1947–2020 and Lovecraft 1890–1937.
  8. Catherine Wheatley, "'Behind the Perfect Smile, There is A World Inside That is Violent'," Sight & Sound, October 2024, 47.
  9. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed," in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (Columbia University Press, 1993), 32.
  10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (Beijing: People's Publishing House, 2012), 158.
  11. Claire Colebrook, "From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens," Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): 77–8.
  12. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex', trans. Li Junpeng (Shanghai: Shanghai Joint Publishing, 2011), 81.
  13. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, trans. Song Sufeng (Changsha: Yuelu Press, 2024), 83–84.
  14. Ibid., introduction, 10. Author's note: that Chinese edition renders sex as 性别 and gender as 性属. In quotations I replace these with 性 and 性别 respectively throughout. Unless otherwise stated, emphasis in quotations follows the source.
  15. Irene Costera Meijer and Baukje Prins, 'How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith Butler', Signs 23, no. 2 (1998): 275–286; Fan Xuan, 'Materiality and Materialization: The Theory of the Body in Bodies That Matter', Chinese Journal of Sociology, no. 3 (2012): 229–237; He Lei, Desire, Identity, Life: Judith Butler's Journey of the Subject (Zhengzhou: Henan University Press, 2018), 107–116.
  16. Butler, Bodies That Matter, introduction, 11, Chinese edition cited above.
  17. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, 133.
  18. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 8, Chinese edition cited above.
  19. Ibid., 9.
  20. Anna Petronella Foultier, "Language and the Gendered Body: Butler's Early Reading of Merleau-Ponty," Hypatia 28, no. 4 (2013): 772–5; Jason Glynos, "Body, Discourse, and the Turn to Matter," in Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions, eds. Sanja Bahun and Dušan Radunović (Ashgate, 2012), 173–5.
  21. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (NLB, 1971), 34. Author's note: the Chinese quotation is taken from Yu Wujin, 'Thing, Value, Time and Freedom: An Inquiry into the Core Concepts of Marx's Philosophical System', Philosophical Research, no. 11 (2004), 4.
  22. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42, trans. Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (Beijing: People's Publishing House, 2016), 124.
  23. "From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens," 78.
  24. Susan Hekman, "Constructing the Ballast: An Ontology for Feminism," in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Indiana University Press, 2008), 100–1.
  25. Wang Min'an, 'The Turn to Things', in Affect, Matter, and Contemporaneity (Jinan: Shandong People's Publishing House, 2022), 119.
  26. Butler, Gender Trouble, 52–53, Chinese edition cited above.
  27. Ibid., 54.
  28. Ibid., 54. Author's note: emphasis here is mine.
  29. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, trans. Mao Lu and Mao Yuyuan (Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House, 2008), 33.
  30. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 148–9.
  31. Alternative Chinese renderings of the term include 女性主义新唯物主义, 新唯物主义女性主义, and 女性新物质主义.
  32. Yang Qianwen and Dai Xuehong, 'The Material Body in Feminist New Materialisms', Journal of Fujian Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), no. 5 (2024), 167.
  33. Bruno Latour, "How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies," Body & Society 10, No. 2/3 (2004): 207.

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