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The reception and development of queer theory in France has offered an opportunity to reconsider the state of queer theory more widely. French queer thinkers have shown a common concern for addressing the materiality of the body, following transgender theorists (Prosser, Namaste) in their critiques of Anglophone queer thought: for queer thinkers in France, Anglophone queer theory and figures such as Judith Butler have ‘zappé le corps’. While trans theorists hold queer theory’s grounding in poststructuralism responsible for its ‘elision’ of the material body, queer thinkers emerging from the French context such as Paul B. Preciado offer creative ways of combining the insights of poststructuralism with (new) materialist elements. This paper will interrogate these diverging approaches to how we understand the material body and its relation to language. I compare the use of skin as a metaphor to describe the relation between language and the body in Preciado’s work, as well as that of Jean-Luc Nancy, whom I take as paradigmatic of poststructuralist positions which see language and matter as entirely separate from one another. Drawing on Preciado’s work, I outline the concept of queer permeability as a way of considering the materiality of language, of addressing the difficulty poststructuralist work has had of taking material bodies into account. Finally, I argue that accounting properly for material bodies and the permeability between materiality and discourse is vital to queer thought and to queer politics.