Published May 1, 2014 by Admin Judith Butler is a preeminent gender theorist and has played an extraordinarily influential role in shaping modern feminism. This means you are free to share/repost/republish/remix for non-commercial purposes on condition that you acknowledge CLT and link to the source page. Among her books are Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Excitable Speech, all published by Routledge. To this she adds, in her appropriation of Austin, that such subject formation takes place within a milieu of ‘ongoing political contestation and reformulation of the subject as well’ (Butler 1997a: 160). One might easily say that it opposes hegemonic powers because gay marriage makes marriages gay. 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. In an interview with Guardian journalist Owen Jones, Butler spends an … Moreover, Kristeva is seen to privilege the maternal body and the act of birth even as these must remain without the symbolic outlet due of the Law of the Father. Learn how your comment data is processed. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Zizek, Slavoj (1999), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London and New York: Verso. 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). An example is when a bride/groom and groom/bride say “I do” at a wedding, they may then actually become married. Often, Butler gives the impression that for her, the social-political sphere determines the nature of psychic space. body and gender by means of Foucault’s ideas as well as Judith Butler’s concept of per-formativity in order to discuss difficulties in society. Revealing and calling attention to that discursive operation through performances can assist in reimaging how bodies relate to one another. Butler’s question is: how can one get an ontological purchase on the semiotic when access to it is only possible via the Symbolic itself? However syntactically, it also evokes another title – When Attitudes Become Form. Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught since 1993. As connected with legal studies, she writes “Law is not literally internalized, but incorporated, with the consequences that bodies are produced which signify that law on and through the body.”11Gender Trouble, 134-5. The latter is seen to be formed according ‘to certain requirements of the liberal state’ and its juridical apparatus (Butler 1997b: 100). 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. Judith Butler (b.1956) received a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1984, with a thesis on Hegelian influences in France. Those performatives, those most “injurious interpellations” may then become sites of radical reoccupation and resignification because those ‘signs/scripts/forms’ are discursively constructed. Hegel, in his theory of Lordship and Bondage, a key reference for Butler in the Psychic Life of Power (1997b), shows a disavowal of the body similar to that in the relation between man and woman in patriarchal society. 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. Judith Butler is one of the most famous and prolific humanities scholars in the academy today. For him, there might as well not be any pre-discursive reality. See, Judith Butler & Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013); Notes Towards a Performative Theory. For Austin, it is possible to ‘do’ things with words (see Austin 1980). 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. (Butler 1999: 173). And she adds, in a key passage: That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. 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). As opposed to a naturalist view, which says gender relations are imposed by nature and therefore cannot be changed in any fundamental way, the performative principle precisely enables the subversion of fixed Austin, How to Do Things with Words 1-11 (1962). Every utterance is a locution, the noise of an utterance when “saying something.”3Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Contest, in Limited Inc. 3-12 (1988). 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. 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. York and London: Routledge. Shop amongst our popular books, including 151, Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter and more from judith butler. When an utterance meets the social conventions it is has felicitous uptake making it into a performative that transforms. John Austin was an “ordinary language” philosopher who is credited with initiating the study into performatives. Home › Feminism › Key Theories of Judith Butler, By Nasrullah Mambrol on March 11, 2018 • ( 4 ). The iterability of the performance is generated from the citationality of the sign that allows one to ‘make trouble’ by citing or reciting the performative in ways that are contrary to or revealing of the instability of heteronormative hegemony.14See, e.g., Derrida’s Limited Inc., 7-12. One could too hastily object that the infant is sexed and is therefore a girl. Can such absolute contingency be sustained? Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. 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). Sie ist Professorin und Lehrstuhlinhaberin für Rhetorik und Komparatistik an der University of California, Berkeley. They are still “saturated” in power relations. Judith Butler’s The Force of Non-Violence argues that this ambivalence should not undermine ‘the task of critical thought in order to expose the instrumental use of that distinction that is both false and harmful’ (7). J.L. 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. All utterances are performed, but not all utterances are performatives. And she points out that identity, being a fundamental attachment for the subject, cannot simply be thrown off at will. Although an adept of literary theory and philosophy, it is as feminist theorist and inaugurator of queer theory that Butler has become well known. : Blackwell. Thus Butler counters Lacan’s claim that female homosexuality is a disappointed heterosexuality by claiming that female heterosexuality might be a disappointed homosexuality (Butler 1999: 63). In the book, Butler critically engages with the key presuppositions of feminist theory and practice as regards gender and sexuality, arguing that these are irreducible to naturalised heterosexual categories. 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. Critique of Kristeva – Critique of Essentialism. Unless otherwise indicated, written content on this site is published under. “bride(s)/groom(s)”, that allow them to say “I do” for those utterance to enact “marriage.” Saying “I do” at a rehearsal dinner will not enact marriage. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Performatives are then “inserted in a citational chain, and that means that the temporal conditions for making the speech act precede and exceed the momentary occasion of its enunciation.”7Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 176 (2015). Judith Butler (* 24. Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Buy judith butler Books at Indigo.ca. Wer ist Judith Butler und was macht sie? Cultural Econ. However, the disciplinary apparatus that produce discourses of subjection bring about the very conditions for subverting that same apparatus. She sets the scene for this by invoking the idea of performative as the key to gender and sexuality as constructed. Following Foucault, who argued that subjects are constructed through the juridical notions of power to produce the subjects they come to represent, Butler seeks to uncover how it is that “woman” comes to be a subject and how subject status allows one to stand before the law.8Gender Trouble, 2. Judith Butler is an American gender theorist and professor of comparative literature and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. This means you are free to share/repost/republish/remix for non-commercial purposes on condition that you acknowledge CLT and link to the source page. 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. Thus for Austin, language is not only a medium of communication, or a tool for describing the world. Kirby, Vicki (2005), Judith Butler: Live Theory, London and New York: Continuum. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 176 (2015). 62-3 (2007). . 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). (1990 and 1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New Instead, it could be “heterosexual law” which is a bundling of juridical and disciplinary forms of power into a discursive performance as a way of being. The ability to continually challenge is more clearly illustrated in Butler’s later works. Ihre einflussreichen sozialwissenschaftlich-philosophischen Arbeiten stehen in der Tradition der Kritischen Theorie, des Poststrukturalismus und der Queer-Theorie. 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. For Butler, there are no natural bodies or bodies that pre-exist societal or cultural inscription. 1956 1978 1978/79 1982 1984 seit 1994 Geboren in Cleveland, Ohio B.A. Austin analyzed performative utterances in three parts: locution, illocution and perlocution.2J.L. Judith Butler (b.1956) received a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1984, with a thesis on Hegelian influences in France. 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. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. That objection elides the doctor/nurse’s performative utterance that collapses sex/gender into social identity formation. It is not simply a mechanism of repression, or prohibition, for example. Politically, Butler claims, ‘all manner of things ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘Oriental’’ are summarily subordinated to the principle of the maternal body’, which raises both the issue of Orientalism and multiplicity as a ‘univocal signifier’ (Butler 1999: 114). Performative contradictions can be tactically performed to publicly destabilized pretenses of universality by highlighting it’s spatial and temporal dimensions. It is salient to Butler’s account that before being girl-ed or boy-ed the “infant-body” or “it” is also excluded from social identification by the re-iterability of the norm. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. She served as Founding Director of the Critical Theory Program as well as the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at UC Berkeley, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Butler, then, favours Foucault over Lacan and rejects the Lacanian Symbolic as the sphere which sets the coordinates of our existence in advance. Before it can become truly subversive, the semiotic must be repressed by the Symbolic, so that the only way that the semiotic can find expression is ‘prior’ to meaning, as in the infant’s holophrastic utterances, or ‘after’ meaning, as in psychosis, where words are no longer used to signify. Instead of saying “it’s a girl” the doctor/nurse could have uttered “it’s a lesbian!” For Butler, “the queer appropriation of the performative mimes and exposes both the binding power of the heterosexualizing law and its expropriability.”15Bodies that Matter, 232. The enormous bulk of scholarship on her work, the breadth of her Thus – almost despite itself, because of the critical edge – it gave feminist studies, and subsequently, queer theory, a massive shot in the arm. These kinds of performative utterances, Austin calls ‘illocutionary acts’. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the ‘integrity’ of the subject. I also add that Butler’s account is useful for understanding how struggles for subject status interpellate individuals who seek to interpolate which may produce the unintended effect of further marginalizing those who are already precarious. In addition, ‘perlocutionary acts’ may be defined as using words to get (persuade, seduce, cajole) someone to do something. References Unless otherwise indicated, written content on this site is published under Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Quite rightly, in Butler’s view, Foucault does not attempt to project anything beyond discourse. For instance, one might query whether gay marriage promotes or opposes heteronormative hegemony? 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. Inspired by Foucault, Butler employs the notion of performative to emphasise that the gendered body is enacted. Butler not only notes this discrepancy, but also reflects upon the possibilities such a position might, or might not, open up. For instance, in terms of legal censorship, the regulation that “states what it does not want stated thwarts its own desire…that throws into question that regulation’s capacity to mean and do what it says[. For Butler, performativity is not solely an extension of discourse theory as her later works suggest bodies “speak” without necessarily uttering. In the later work, Butler discusses Foucault on the subject of power, as this is effected within a ‘re´gime of truth’ (Butler 2005: 22). (2000a) Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press. I am working on performativity among Sindhi women .kindly guide me more on this topic, will wait for your next article on performativity. 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. When the body is identified as “girl,” the utterance imposes “girl-ness” upon the body, therein interpellating the “infant”/”it” into “girl.” The act of the doctor/nurse is not mere performance. Although each sentence may be said to be true or false, sentences do more than provide true or false pictures of the world. 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? How a judge reads a verdict that has (or fails to have) performative power to transform relations is a potential object of further inquiry. Judith Butler has 175 books on Goodreads with 126152 ratings. 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. She is known for her work on gender, sexuality, power, vulnerability and identity. Lecturer in English PSC Solved Question Paper, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Postmodernism and Feminism – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, Queer Culture – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, Gay/Lesbian Studies – Literary Theory and Criticism, Transgender Studies – Literary Theory and Criticism, University of Calicut Literary Criticism and Theory Paper Scholarly Materials. It is the use of “ordinary language” in “non-ordinary” ways, or what Derrida would call “reinscription” that a term can break with discourse to engender insurrectionary potential.13Excitable Speech, 144-5. In other words, Butler invokes her earlier use of performative as ‘subject formation’. Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Contest, in Limited Inc. 3-12 (1988). Generally, Butler has been concerned with the issue of resistance to power and the place in society of gay rights and queer politics. (1997a) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, Cal. 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. 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. Consider the terms cited in the following sentence: “the infant had female-body parts that allowed the doctor to exclaim it is a girl.” The “infant-body,” which is also called “it” before it is “girl-ed” or “boy-ed,” has no social identity. 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. 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. Importantly, she combines speech act theory with a phenomenological theory of “acts,” Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as a heavy dose of Foucault’s notions of subject formation to explain how social agents constitute and reconstitute reality through their performance of language, gesture and sign.6Butler, 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). © 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. 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. Besonders anregend ist ein zweiteiliges Interview mit Judith Butler, in dem sie auf ein breites Spektrum von Fragen eingeht, die auch wichtige Themen ihrer aktuelleren Werke betreffen.
The collected volume Butler Matters testifies to Judith Butler’s extraordinary importance for feminist and queer studies and for gender research. Your email address will not be published. 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. She’s also absolutely not here for TERFs, as a new … Early Butler focused on the production of women as subjects of feminism. Images and other media may be under different licences. Feminist writer Judith Butler has given her theory on why JK Rowling has deemed it necessary to speak out on trans lives. Butler’s collection of essays, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, written in 1989, first published in 1990, and published with a new preface in 1999 sold over 100,000 copies world-wide and has been translated into a number of languages.
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