Butler’s collection of essays, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, written in… Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ is most famously associated with her views on gender and is important for critical legal thinkers because performativity is deeply entangled with politics and legality. The theory the thesis follows is ... 4 Dabei sollen hauptsächlich seine Werke Überwachen und Strafe (1976) und Sexualität und Wahrheit I (1987) als Grundlage dienen. Without going into too much nuanced details of Austin’s theory, one should attend to the distinction between performance and performative. Performative contradictions, those speech acts that undermine their performative use in the act of speaking, demonstrate the failure of norms to be universalizing and totalizing. Judith Butler, in full Judith Pamela Butler, (born February 24, 1956, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.), American academic whose theories of the performative nature of gender and sex were influential within Francocentric philosophy, cultural theory, queer theory, and some schools of philosophical feminism from the late 20th century. A way out of this, I think, is the notion that whatever is the status quo that gives rise to the real, the “forms” or the “scripts” that are performed giving rise to intelligible performance, is discursively constituted. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Categories: Feminism, Gender Studies, Lesbian and Gay Criticism, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Tags: Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Austin’s Performative, Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Feminism, Foucault, Gender, Gender Performativity, Gender Trouble, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Giving an Account of Oneself, J.L. Judith Butler’s most popular book is Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice will host a study group on the work of Judith Butler at at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library, 221A. I was supposed to go with a friend, and put on my polite academic face, and listen while she is lauded by room full of people, many of them male, who cannot get over how fucking psyched they are that ‘feminism’ no longer asks them to even acknowledge, let alone challenge, male dominance. Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage The celebrity academic on the possibilities of nonviolence, the rise of the anti-“gender ideology” movement, and the militant potential of mourning. Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory (1988) 40(4) Theatre Journal 519-531; Gender Trouble (1990); The Psychic Life of Power 83 (1997). She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. What renders one intelligible also demarcates what is unintelligible. For instance, Butler discusses how undocumented people in Los Angeles took to the streets to sing the American National Anthem in Spanish in 2006.20Judith Butler & Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Unlike Arendt, who appears to believe that there are bodies that can remain private, Butler disagrees. marriage), while perlocution is the effect (upon listeners and in society) by saying something.4Austin, supra at 122-131. Perhaps partly stunned, despite her success, by the kind of criticism Martha Nussbaum mounted against her (Nussbaum 1999), Butler seems wedded lately to intervening in more public debates (on 9/11 and censorship, for example). In her work, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Butler returns to a consideration, opened up in The Psychic Life of Power, of Foucault’s theory of identity formation. “In other words, the law turns against itself and spawns version of itself with oppose and proliferate its animating purpose.”12Psychic Life, 100. Thus, in contrast to the sense of the proverb, ‘words are only words’, Austin effectively argued that words are not just words, but can be acts. © CLT (Holding) Ltd. CLT (Holding) Ltd is a company limited by shares registered in England & Wales with number 11150350 and address as listed in the Register of Companies. “Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time.” – J. M. Bernstein Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Learn how your comment data is processed. Although a body may not be in the space of appearance, or the sphere of the polis, their exclusion from that realm is a result of discursively constructed performative effects upon the body that marginalize or exclude it. If one initiates a performative without a script, one that is fully outside the bounds of intelligibility, the performance or identity will be unheeded, but it does not mean they are outside the bounds of power. In contrast to the approach which inserts the gendered body into pre-existing categories (such as heterosexual) linked to an ontology based on origins, ‘performative’ suggests that gender and subjectivity are radically contingent and subject to change. Nussbaum, Martha (1999), ‘The Professor of Parody’, The New Republic, 2 February, accessible via ‘The New Republic Online’ at The collected volume Butler Matters testifies to Judith Butler’s extraordinary importance for feminist and queer studies and for gender research. 62-3 (2007). : Stanford University Press. Performatives are utterances that engender formative force per the utterance (formative + per (utterance) = performative). The performative naming of a body upon birth, either male/female or girl/boy, engages an artificial binary that suppresses more subversive sexual disruptions of hegemonic heteronormative discourse. However, critics such as Zizek have asked whether perversion can lead to subversion of the existing order (see Zizek 1999: 248). The semiotic is proposed by Kristeva as having subversive political implications in its capacity to disrupt the social order (language, for example), even if it cannot be the basis of a new order (for it to be so would entail a flirtation with psychosis). The performance of bodies, even those that do not or cannot sing, enact “speech” through performative contradictions in spaces and times, momentary flickers, that question who owns what and who is it one thinks one is. Law dictates the form of performance but one performs the law through their expression even if it not necessarily of their choosing. This six-session study group is convened in anticipation of her academic visit and public lecture at UBC in the Winter of 2019. Alan Sheridan, London: Allen Lane. Home › Feminism › Key Theories of Judith Butler, By Nasrullah Mambrol on March 11, 2018 • ( 4 ). The issue is not perversion as unnatural practices, but of that, for example, of the order of the Law creating the criminal, the prohibition inciting the transgression, as seen in Foucault’s work on power. This is a question arising from Butler’s approach. (1987) Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, New Kristeva thus shows herself to be ultimately Lacanian, even if she disagrees with Lacan on the role and status of the drives in Freudian theory. (2000b) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Ernesto Laclau and Slovoj Zˇ izˇek), London and New York:Verso. Again, this recites how one comes to stand before the law – or how the law disallows people to stand before it. Butler, then, favours Foucault over Lacan and rejects the Lacanian Symbolic as the sphere which sets the coordinates of our existence in advance. Free shipping and pickup in store on eligible orders. Judith Butler is an American gender theorist and professor of comparative literature and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. These kinds of performative utterances, Austin calls ‘illocutionary acts’. Judith Butler (* 24. Psychic resistance to power, where issues of sexual identity might be at stake, is often reduced to the social-political articulation of power where one might want to resist the law that declares that no same sex marriages are permitted. Performatives are, even without a Butlerian slant, fecund arena for legal interrogation. For it seems to her that Kristeva privileges hetero over homosexuality and, in particular, over lesbian sexuality, so that homosexuality as judged by Kristeva, according to Butler, also risks toppling over into psychosis. However, if, as Butler says, Foucault shows that resistance to power is at the same time an effect of power (the perverse thesis), this seems to be a no win, because there is no exit, situation. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Not everyone can come before the law, but the legal construction that acts to marginalize those who cannot come before it generates the very conditions of destabilization. When so-called illegal aliens, who are “supposed” to be in the dark, appropriate a public space, especially in an “illegal public demonstration” to sing “America’s” National Anthem in Spanish, they enact multiple contradictions that interject conflicting ruptures within notions of public/private, legal/illegal, self/other, and national/non-national “ownerships.” It is the legality that makes the illegal, and the performative reclamations, possible. The point is that although an ideological, and therefore relatively transparent, relation to oneself is possible, the real material bases of identity, including, if one likes, ‘a re´gime of truth’ (Butler 2005: 22), are much more difficult to ascertain. York: Columbia University Press. Through Althusserian interpellation, where ‘the subject is constituted by being hailed’ (Butler 1997b: 95), Butler’s performative means, as we have shown, that subjectivity is established in the act, and does not exist as some a priori essential element. In The Psychic Life of Power, she focuses instead on his call to create new forms of subjectivity, forms which refuse those offered by the State and the existing power structure, and which have been imposed on people for ‘several centuries’ (Foucault, cited by Butler, 1997b: 101). For him, there might as well not be any pre-discursive reality. This always allows for rearticulation and re-inscription. Ordinary language philosophers tend to collapse the use/meaning distinction and replace it with the notion that the meaning of a word is its use.1Stanely Cavell, The Claim of Reason 206-7 (1972). Austin, How to Do Things with Words 1-11 (1962). As Butler’s critique of Kristeva shows, her key argument is that the Symbolic sets up gender identities in advance and that, in contrast to Lacan’s view, gender identities can be viewed as instituted within and by a given cultural and social matrix (another name for performative) that can be subverted. Austin, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum, Michel Foucault, Performative, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Psychic Life of Power, second wave feminism, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Although there is a subversive use, there is always the fear that (re)citing the performative either re-inscribes the heteronormative hegemony or falls outside of the intelligible. The misconception of feminine autonomy here is more restricting than the notion that woman is a symptom of man. She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Among her books are Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Excitable Speech, all published by Routledge. Along with Foucault on sexuality and Althusser on interpellating people as subjects through the uttering of words, Butler uses the notion of performative as illocutionary and perlocutionary to analyse notions, such as ‘hate speech’, ‘contagious words’ and censorship. The illocution is the effect intended in saying something (the locution determined by social conventions in particular situations, i.e. The Production of Subjectivity, Identity and Desire. Throughout the course of one’s life, one reiterates performances of gender that conform to a gender norm, which has the discursive function of re-inscribing gender performatives and rendering the individual intelligibile. For Butler, there are no natural bodies or bodies that pre-exist societal or cultural inscription. Surely, Butler implies, we are likely to end up, at best, without any clear knowledge of the semiotic, and at worst with the requirement that the drives of the semiotic be postulated as pre-Symbolic and existing prior to language but yet can become manifest only in and through language (the same Symbolic). Yesterday, Judith Butler was trending on Twitter, after she gave an email interview to the New Statesman focusing on her views on the ongoing controversy over trans rights and self-ID. See, Judith Butler & Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013); Notes Towards a Performative Theory. Judith Butler is one of the leading intellectuals of our age, an activist, philosopher and critical theorist who has spent decades writing some of the most acclaimed papers on gender in the canon. It was Butler herself who already spoke in the 1980s of “feminist phenomenology” respectively of “phenomenological feminism”, namely in her article “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description. and London: MIT Press. Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, ‘perlocutionary acts’ may be defined as using words to get (persuade, seduce, cajole) someone to do something. . And for Butler, writing in 1989, things needed to be changed; for heterosexually gendered bodies were hegemonic, while gay and lesbian bodies were designated as pathological. Her work has often been characterised as post-structuralist because of its concern to oppose all essentialist claims and to emphasise that gender relations are precisely that: relations, which implies that gender and sexuality are indeed constructed. In all, Butler gave at least $1,050 in contributions to Harris’ Senate and presidential … Such a position would avoid the problem Kristeva faces with the semiotic as a challenge to, yet dependent upon, the Symbolic. Were gender identities fail to fit within the binary form one may enact an identity that challenges intelligibility while subverting the gender binary. Early Butler focused on the production of women as subjects of feminism. Much has happened since Gender Trouble was published in 1990! In her earlier work, Butler argues that the masquerade, where heterosexuality is a play of appearances, becomes central for Lacan: a man fears becoming a woman because this reveals an unconscious desire to be loved by another man, a desire for sameness, not difference. More pointedly: the question that Butler still needs to answer is: How can performativity work as a principle of resistance (to stereotypes, etc), when a certain opacity is at the heart of every identity? 1956 1978 1978/79 1982 1984 seit 1994 Geboren in Cleveland, Ohio B.A. Judith Butler is doing the star turn. While performatives enact structures of exclusion, they are the same that give rise to conditions of radical demonstration. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Butler, Performative Agency, 3(2) J. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers From Structuralism To Post-Humanismm Second Edition  John Lechte Routledge 2008. The ability to continually challenge is more clearly illustrated in Butler’s later works. Judith Butler (b.1956) received a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1984, with a thesis on Hegelian influences in France. As such, “gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.”9Gender Trouble, 25. This notion that someone comes to stand before the law through the (re)construction of subjective agency is continually explored through her texts. The “law” Butler speaks of does not necessarily mean juridical law. Your email address will not be published. Under Butler’s account, “agency” already implies “social agency,” which is to say that someone exhibiting agency is already publicly identifiable. It is performative because the act of naming the body a “girl” also constructs “her” identity as “girl.” This is not a natural fact of the body, but a forcible “citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment’.10Bodies that Matter, 232.