Week 11 B Feminine Subjectivity I Butler Judith

Week 11 -B Feminine Subjectivity

• I. Butler, Judith. • II. Braidotti, Rosi.

• Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. ” Feminist Literary Theory. 2 nd ed. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996. 367 -73.

http: //www. theory. org. uk/ctr-butl. htm

Central Question: • Should feminist politics do without a “subject” in the category of women? (367)

Foundationalist view • An identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. (367)

Problem • • Identity → “I” → to be intelligible → subject to binary opposition → pitted against an “Other” → generated and restricted by “rules. . . of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality” • → via signification, which is a “regulated process of repetition” • → gender difference reinforced and fixed (369)

• The internal paradox of this foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the very “subjects” that it hopes to represent and liberate. (372 -73)

Butler’s Argument • There need not be a “doer behind the deed”; the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed. (367)

• As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an “act, ” as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, selfcriticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status. (371)

• The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them. (371)

• Butler argues that rather than being a fixed attribute in a person, gender should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times. • http: //www. theory. org. uk/ctr-butl. htm

• Butler argues that we all put on a gender performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of whether to do a gender performance, but what form that performance will take. • http: //www. theory. org. uk/ctr-butl. htm

• Butler suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold (i. e. they have come to seem natural. . . ) – but. . . it doesn't have to be that way. . Butler calls for subversive action in the present: 'gender trouble' -- the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders -and therefore identity. • http: //www. theory. org. uk/ctr-butl. htm

• Braidotti, Rosi. “Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. ” Feminist Literary Theory. 2 nd ed. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996. 411 -420.

• Three phases of feminist nomadism: –Difference between men and women –Differences among women –Differences within each woman

I. Difference between Men and Women Subjectivity as Woman as -Phallogocentric -Universal notion of the subject -coinciding with consciousness -self-regulating -rational agency -entitled to rationality -capable of transcendence -denying corporal origins or objectifying the body -the lack/excess/”otherthan”/subject -devalorized difference -Non consciousness -Uncontrolled -Irrational -In excess of rationality -Confined to immanence -Identified with the body— corporality that is both exploited and reduced to silence

Central Issues: • How to define woman as other than a non-man? • How to argue both for the loss of the classical paradigm of subjectivity and for the specificity of an alternative female subject? (413 -14)

II. Differences among Women = the Other -as institution and representation (See level 1) versus Real-life Women Critical hiatus between them—feminist subjectivity -experience -embodiment -situated knowledges -women-based knowledges -empowerment -multiplicity of differences (race, age, class, etc. ) or diversity -positivity of sexual difference as political project --female feminist genealogies, or countermemory -Politics of location and resistance -dissymmetry between the sexes

Central Issues: • How to create, legitimate, and represent a multiplicity of alternative forms of feminist subjectivity without falling into relativism? (415)

III. Differences within Each Woman Each Real-Life Woman or Female Feminist Subject is -a multiplicity in herself: slit, fractured -a network of Levels of experience (as outlined on levels II and I) -a living memory and embodied genealogy -Not one conscious subject, but also the subject of her unconscious: identity as identifications -in an imaginary relationship to variables like class, race, age, sexual choices

Central Issue: • How to avoid the repetition of exclusions in the process of legitimating an alternative feminist subject? • How to avoid hegemonic recodification of the female subject? • How to keep an open-ended view of subjectivity, while asserting the political and theoretical presence of another view of subjectivity? (418)

• The End