I love the way Judith Butler uses dense theory to
support her arguments, providing insight without the theory becoming daunting,
but I love the tone of her pieces more, raising thoughtful, sensitive questions
that pull gender arguments out from under the scope of academia and into a very
personal and, at the same time, human realm. Butler raises an excellent point,
from Imitation and Gender Insubordination,
when she writes, “for it is always unclear what is meant by invoking the
lesbian-signifier, since its signification is always to some degree out of
one’s control, but also because its specificity
can only be demarcated by exclusions that return to disrupt its claim to
coherence” (125). I understand coherence
best in terms of physics. Two waves are superimposed, added together (or as the
case may be, subtracted from each other) to create a wave of either greater or
lesser amplitude. However, the specificity of any signification inherently
limits its potential to either evolve or devolve. It becomes static. Butler’s
metaphor of “coming out” of one closet, only to be “closeted” in “coming out,”
illustrates the risk of becoming trapped by signification (125).
Moreover, Bodies
that Matter suggests that the construction of gender performance, occurring
as a “temporal process,” can shift as regularly as moon phases. Butler writes, “Construction
is neither a single act nor a casual process initiated by a subject and
culminating in a set of fixed ideas” (239). In flux and “not initiated” by
subject, something without rather than within influences the performance’s meaning
and direction. Butler points exploration towards the “reiterative” and “citational”
practices by which discourse produces effects. The repetitive transfer of
images, text, and video through the internet makes this Butler statement
particularly noteworthy as an author of highly “citational” work. At what
point, I wonder, does the discourse itself become trapped, or fixed, by the
discursive process that repeats and cites itself? This lament is over the
process by which discourse circulates in our technology. Keyword searches,
search engines that narrow rather than broaden the field, while making it
easier for us to fixate on “our” side, version, avenue of interest, effectively
blindfolding us to topic-related info buzzing around cyber-space, categorized
under a different set of keywords. Are discursive expositions that destabilize
and deconstruct, be they texts, videos, or images, subject to the same potential
of fixation as the “repetitive labor of the norm?”
The predicaments of classifications can be daunting. On the one hand, we need classifications to make sense of the world around us...to make connections. On the other hand, they box our identities into categories that we may or may not agree with. Butler's category-opposed theory seems a bit different from the theories of the nineties. I recall that Gloria Anzaldua proposed a new category for Hispanic lesbians...the "new mestiza" she called it (and again, the word mestiza has different meanings for different groups). Unlike Anzaldua, who wanted to belong to a group (because she was rejected by whites, by Mexicans, and by straight males and females), Butler dislikes being categorized and boxed into a permanent definition of gender.
ReplyDeleteNora
The idea of discourse itself being trapped is a great one. One of the things I really like about Butler is that she is stepping out against an existing discourse - she is creating new words and uses for existing terms. And look how challenging it is for readers to grasp her meaning. Trying to escape or subvert a given discourse is a herculian task. And I think if you take up a Foucaldian idea of discourse as power then discourse can absolutely be trapped by itself. Power often becomes it's own victim, I think.
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