What makes a life "grievable"? Who gets to be seen, heard, counted as a subject—as a person? These are not abstract questions for Judith Butler. They are the stakes of her decades-long interrogation into gender, power, and what she calls cultural intelligibility.
Butler, best known for Gender Trouble and the idea that gender is performative, isn't just interested in identity. She wants to know how identity becomes possible. What are the conditions under which a body comes to matter? And just as crucially, under which it doesn't? Cultural intelligibility is her name for the frameworks that determine whether a life is socially recognizable, and therefore livable.
The Social Script and Its Censors
Cultural intelligibility functions like a social script—a set of norms and expectations that govern who fits and who doesn't. These aren't simply descriptive categories (man, woman, citizen, parent), but prescriptive ones: they tell us how to be. They also draw boundaries around what counts as coherence.
A genderqueer person, for example, may live a life that disrupts binary scripts. But if society lacks a way to read that life—if there are no pronouns, no bathrooms, no kinship language, no legal boxes to check—then that life becomes unintelligible. Not just misunderstood, but unthinkable.
Butler doesn't say we must all conform to these frameworks. Quite the opposite. Her work is about how these frames can and must be contested. But first, they must be seen for what they are: contingent, constructed, policed.
Recognition and Its Discontents
The idea of cultural intelligibility has wide implications. It explains why some deaths make headlines while others go unnoticed. Why some families are granted legitimacy and others are called "broken." Why some forms of protest are celebrated and others criminalized.
In Frames of War, Butler examines how media and state apparatuses condition our responses to violence. A life becomes grievable only if it fits within the dominant frame of humanity. Refugees, racialized bodies, queer subjects in the global South—these are often lives lived on the edge of recognizability, and thus on the edge of care.
Butler is not merely diagnosing exclusion; she is theorizing the politics of recognition. Who names? Who frames? Who decides what counts as a viable life?
Troubling the Frame: Toward Ethical Recognition
To make a life intelligible, in Butler’s terms, is not to normalize it. It is to open the frame, to expand the conditions under which lives are recognized as lives. This means troubling the categories themselves. Not adding more identities to the list, but questioning why the list exists in the first place.
Butler's call is ethical, not just analytical. She asks us to apprehend lives even when they do not "make sense" according to prevailing norms. To extend recognition not as tolerance, but as shared vulnerability.
Because in the end, cultural intelligibility is not just about who we see. It's about who we can become.
