Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0745626122
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With the publication of her highly acclaimed and much-cited book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler became one of the most influential feminist theorists of her generation. Her theory of gender performativity and her writings on corporeality, on the injurious capacity of language, on the vulnerability of human life to violence and on the impact of mourning on politics have, taken together, comprised a substantial and highly original body of work that has a wide and truly cross-disciplinary appeal.
In this lively book, Moya Lloyd provides both a clear exposition and an original critique of Butler's work. She examines Butlers core ideas, traces the development of her thought from her first book to her most recent work, and assesses Butlers engagements with the philosophies of Hegel, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray and de Beauvoir, as well as addressing the nature and impact of Butler's writing on feminist theory. Throughout Lloyd is particularly concerned to examine Butler's political theory, including her critical interventions in such contemporary political controversies as those surrounding gay marriage, hate-speech, human rights, and September 11 and its aftermath.
Judith Butler offers an accessible and original contribution to existing debates that will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.
subject. Drawing on the work of Foucault, she argues that feminism exhibits a ‘juridical’ structure: ‘juridical systems of power’, she notes, ‘produce subjects they subsequently come to represent’ (GT: 4).3 The feminist subject ‘women’ is thus produced by the very feminism that claims to represent it, both linguistically and politically. Why does this matter? It matters because if feminist politics is juridical in structure, then the definitions of women with which it works are neither objective
Wittig see Deutscher, Yielding Gender, p. 23 and Jackson, Christine Delphy, pp. 136–7. 9 See also, Deutscher, Yielding Gender, p. 31. 10 Sedgwick, ‘Queer Performativity’, p. 1. 11 See, for instance, Bordo, ‘Postmodern Subjects’, pp. 292–3 and ‘Bringing Body to Theory’; Ebert ‘Ludic Feminism’; Hawkes, ‘Dressing-Up’; Hennessey, ‘Queer Visibility’; Walters, ‘From Here to Queer’; Žižek, ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism?’, p. 132, n. 30. Interestingly, Butler claims to have been surprised by
they are always temporally distinct, and it is this temporal distinction that reveals the need for a different form of political engagement. It is not that Butler denies the existence or operation of injurious speech or that such injurious speech is constitutive in demeaning or harmful ways, as MacKinnon et al. charge. It is that hate-speech also constitutes an opportunity for defiant speech; and it is this defiant speech, not legal regulation, that has the capacity to defuse hate-speech of its
blindness and meritocracy’.58 Empirically, there is little doubt that the Supreme Court has become increasingly conservative in the last decades. Butler’s point, however, is more far-reaching. She asks, ‘What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate … [hate-] speech?’ (ES: 77). Her answer is that the state itself generates such speech. Arguments for state censorship usually characterize it as a response to offensive speech: censorship, that is, comes after the speech that it is
Cross-Dressing Pleasure with the Law’, in Feminist Consequences: Theory for a New Century, eds Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 213–53. Brown, Wendy, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Brown, Wendy, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Campbell, Jan and Harbord, Janet, ‘Playing it Again: Citation, Reiteration