 Our bodily vulnerability, and consequently our vulnerability to others, is also central to the later work of Butler. It is through the body that we become vulnerable to our material environment and to the violence which may be inflicted on us by others: “living in a world of beings who are …physically dependent on one another, physically vulnerable to one another” (2004: 22). The vulnerability to social punishments and the threats of violence attach particularly to those who fail to conform to social norms. But Butler stresses the vulnerability and precariousness of everyone’s subjectivity, formed as it is by public systems of meaning which are themselves precarious and crisscrossed by differences. We are affected by the outside, the social and familial bonds, which enable us to assume subjectivity and agency, but are also injurious to us in closing down possibilities for our ways of being. 