Bodies
That Matter : On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex by
Judith
P. Butler
This book clarifies much of Foucault was saying
in History of Sexuality. Butler is careful, however, to not borrow
the models Foucault uses, thereby, avoids some of the mistakes and
gaps that occur in his thinking, namely the silence on women.
Butler, more than Foucault, is not willing to settle the debate on
sexuality merely as the obtaining and disseminating of pleasures
and how those bodies perform them. Rather, she takes bodies as
always already gender indeterminate and destabilizes their
performatives further to show how bodies are marked by gender as
well as race, class, sexuality, etc. and how these categories are
also destabilized within the perfomative. I highly recommend this
book to feminist and queer theorists and well as anyone who is
concerned about creating any sort of opposition to the reactionary
right-wing forces that are attempting to further entrench their
dominance over the rest of us. -- Anonymous Review
When Judith Butler describes gender as
performative, contrary to much of what is mistakenly thought out
there, it is not about choice! It is not about choosing to put on
a gender--as if it was a performance in the traditional or obvious
way. The performativity of gender is meant to
suggest--invoke--that gender is constituted by performative acts
which repeated come to form, take shape, a "coherent"
gender identity. Thus, Butler uses the performative to suggest
that this coherency is false and that because of acts that disrupt
the strict reads of gender--acts that occur naturally, perhaps
daily, perhaps unacknowledged, gender comes to be seen/viewed as
that which is only as stable as this performative function's
stability is. Or put more simply, gender-as-stable is undermined
by Butler by reading it through the performative -- because it is
never "performed" the same exactly. So, it is not that
people can choose to perform a certain enumeration of gender,
rather it is that no one precisely (actually) fulfills these
gender identities that we have! -- Anonymous Review
Antigone's
Claim (The Wellek Library Lectures)
by
Judith
P. Butler
The celebrated author of Gender Trouble
here redefines Antigone´s legacy, recovering her revolutionary
significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and
sexual politics. Butler´s new interpretation does nothing less
than reconceptualize the incest taboo in relation to kinship - and
open up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the
renowned insurgent from Sophocles´s Oedipus, has long been a
feminist icon of defiance. But what has remained unclear is
whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes.
Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than
has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies
also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a
form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk.
Moreover, Antigone shows how the constraints of normative kinship
unfairly decide what will and will not be a livable life. Butler
explores the meaning of Antigone, wondering what forms of kinship
might have allowed her to live. Along the way, she considers the
works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray. How, she
asks, would psychoanalysis have been different if it had taken
Antigone - the "postoedipal" subject - rather than
Oedipus as its point of departure? If the incest taboo is
reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its
solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be
acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of
Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not
honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of
normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what
sexual freedom and political agency could be.
Books by Judith P. Butler:
