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I have just read around a quarter of this interesting book and thought I would breifly sketch out what I think is going on with this one. Please don’t take my post as an authority of course and feel free to comment on anything you think I may have misunderstood.
I seem to be really into feminism, I find it is a fascinating cultural critique.
So Butler asks about how the central subject of feminism, that being ‘woman’, came into being and whether or not it can be representitive in politics and finds there are necessary limits to identity politics. She draws on Foucault’s analysis of how a subject is formed and shaped by institutions and is then regulated by them also. So whatever we say is a subject, carries with it the criteria from the social body that controls it.
She then looks at the work of Luce Irigaray, a Beligian/French Feminist, who changes the way we percieve Simone De Beaviour’s view of one and other. Beauviour expolains there is a choice that women must make, as woman is not something you are, it is something you become – you can choose between the body and freedom. Irigraray questions this mind/body dualism and says this is not the case. She says that the language Beauviour and Sartre is all part of the masculine economy of language and so evereything is explained in categorical terms with some legal definitons mixed up in there, but she calls this phallogocentrism which means woman never becomes ‘one’ to be other. Man, masculine and male is all there is in this economy and woman is an ‘extension’ if you will, of man. She never actually ‘becomes’, she is ‘yet to be’, absent and postponed ‘deffered’ and in post-Hegealian terms – she is ‘cancelled.’
This made @”Rubsy”
think about how when people talk about The Odyssey by Homer, they seem to forget half of the story is about Penepole, or when Orpheus is ‘punished’ for looking behind him, it is Eurydice that is trapped forever and ‘cancelled’ in Hades.
(Sorry guys, but I have to put the mentions on different lines, or users on Tapatalk can’t see what is written.)
Butler asserts that feminism itself, in trying to center ‘woman’ as the subject of feminism, is nothing more than an inversion of this way of thinking and problems concerning essentialism begin to crop up, representational politics paradoxically excludes as much as it includes and women reject feminism too.
True to Nietzschean genealogical approaches, where Nietzsche says there is nothing behind the ‘doing’, she applies this way of thinking to gender – we only see what is on the outside and this in no way tells us anything about charcter, or identity. The constant changes in the social body reveal the secret that there are no fixed essences, or identities.
So I think Butler is after another way of talking about gender that doesn’t carry with it all of this phallogocentric categorisation and so she wants to start ‘gender trouble’ in order to break through the apparantly naturalised forms of gender, that we causally link to genetalia and biological sex, (biology is density) but are merely repeated acts of performance that over enough spaces of time congeal into apparently reified structures. The ‘law’ that is in ‘The Name of the Father’ seems to have gotten involved with our categorisations – a good question is whether or not these binary forms of gender have to exist in the first place.
That’s a very brief overview of course, there’s lots more in that chapter about how gender isn’t fixed and binary, when she examines Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’ and a Hermaphrodite.
In the next chapter, she looks at structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis in the form of Claude Levi Strauss and Jacques Lacan.
I only read the Levi Strauss bit. Butler tackles the question that usually arises with Feminist questions surrounding the origin of patriarchy, in order to try and find a cause that may give us knowledge and language that will help to undo the domination in some way.
Levi Strauss says you can’t have ‘raw’ without ‘cooked’ and so nature, cultures and social structures are to use a Derridean term here – ‘supplements’, they are constantly conjunct and relational.
Basically, Levi Strauss says the prohibition of incest is a cultural phantasm that forms kinship, but at the same time, it also subordinates women as ‘gifts’ to be exchanged.
This is another example of how we have to focus only on when patriarchy becomes a problem in a material sense and we can’t know absolutely when it ‘began’ and get to know the ‘before’, ‘all the way back’ to the point where men subordinated women for the first time.
Anyway, that’s as far as I got, it’s a great book so far – very captivating.
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