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BURKE’S PROJECT MAKES HARMFUL ASSUMPTIONS
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- Judith Butler
BURKE’S PROJECT MAKES HARMFUL ASSUMPTIONS1. BURKE’S DEFINITION OF MAN IS ESSENTIALIST OF WOMEN Celeste Michelle Condit, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at University of Georgia, QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, August 1992, p.np. Burke defines Man as “the symbol using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection. This strikes me as a fairly perceptive summary of the average Euro-American heterosexual XY. But essentialist feminism has taught us that it is not a good summation of the majority of experiences of the other genders. For example, for most Euro-American heterosexual XX’s of the past, it is the positivity of particular experiences (e.g. maternal love) that has formed the dominant influence on languaging. Consequently, for such women the fact that “the negative” is a unique creaton of language does not mean that it forms the essense of language. Similarly, as radical feminist critics of science and technology, especially critics of the new birth technologies, have pointed out, it is men who have created the instruments that separate women from their natural conditions and it is largely for this reason that the separation has been so oppressive. 2. BURKE’S DRAMATISM IS ETHNOCENTRIC Celeste Michelle Condit, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at University of Georgia, QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, August 1992, p.np I suspect that at some time, in more or less perfected form, persons in all cultures engage in victimage rituals. What I am suggesting is that victimage may not be the dominant motive structure of all cultures. What Burke’s ethnocentric version of Dramatism threatens to blind us to is the multiplicity of different motive structures available in language. To move post-Burke is not, then, to deny that victimage is a should look for other universally available potentials in language and add them to the Dramatistic dictionary. Additionally, it is to hint that while victimage might show up in many cultures, the nature of victimage might very substantially. The Burkean definition of "victimage” may need casuistric streching.
Celeste Michelle Condit, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at University of Georgia, QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, August 1992, p.np. The need for revision is made urgent by the fact that another great depression is reasonably likely in the near future. We are approaching the point in the business cycle where so much wealth is held by so few persons that consumption becomes inadequate to support industrial production. That we have reached such a point so soon after experiencing the Great Depression is frustrating, but a great deal of business money has been spent helping Americans to forget that unbridled capitalism tends towards temporary collapses. However, it is not merely that the public is gullible. Even academics never learned the lessons that those such as Burke taught the last time around. Burke would have us transcend this tragedy by adopting a comic frame. Burke accepted Marx’s analysis of the class situation, but he rejected Marx’s solution. At several points Burke suggests a preference for socialism, but he also indicates that a specific economic form is not the fundamental problem. In other words, he locates the problem of wealth and poverty outside of capitalism, at a deeper level, in language itself, where the urge to hierarchy tends to be generated (or, I would argue, at least exacerbated). Burke’s analysis has been shown to be largely correct; we have learned that even in non-capitalist systems, dominated by discourses of equality, hierarchies reappear; and those “on top” systematically allocate to themselves more of the goods of social life than they allow to their “equals.”
Imagine the spectacle of a gay pride parade: flamboyant cross-dressing, same-sex displays of affection, signs and posters advertising the legitimacy of outside the mainstream conceptions of sexuality, lesbians dressed as "butch" or "femme," transsexuals, male transvestite "drag queens," even gay men and lesbians who look like they could have come right out of the corporate business world -- all in some way defy societal expectations of the correct performance of gender through their appearance in the parade. Some people welcome the idea, others believe it to be a disgusting abomination, and the majority finds it slightly distressing or somewhat unsettling. Why does gay pride make some people feel "unsettled"? Judith Butler would argue that what is being "unsettled" are the norms and taken for granted assumptions about gender that are common in our culture and society. Martha Nussbaum, a professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, writes, “Butler's main idea, first introduced in Gender Trouble in 1989 and repeated throughout her books, is that gender is a social artifice. Our ideas of what women and men are reflect nothing that exists eternally in nature. Instead they derive from customs that embed social relations of power.”15 Judith Butler is a professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler's ideas of gender as something we "do" not something we "are" recasts contemporary debates over feminism, women's political issues, and gay/lesbian studies. WHAT IS GENDER? Simone de Beauvior, an early feminist, said that "one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman." This observation, that women are not biologically determined creatures, but rather, through an accumulation of social norms, practices, and expectations, they fulfill their assigned roles in order to become women, provides a starting point for Judith Butler. For Butler gender is not a "stable identity." Rather, gender is constituted and instituted "through a stylized repetition of acts." Butler derives influence from "the phenomenological theory of acts" put forth by such philosophers as Huserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Mead. She explains that phenomenology grounds theory in lived experience. It "seeks to explain the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign." Butler is influenced by "post-modern" or "post-structural" philosophy that challenges the idea that behind the signs, symbols, and words we use to describe our realities, there is an objective and perfect truth. These philosophers argue that social reality is brought about by the ways we describe it and act it out. These actions are so daily, ordinary, and commonplace, that we rarely question them. For example, the woman who applies lipstick everyday without question constitutes her social reality in which women are supposed to have colorful lips. However, there is no objective reality behind this woman's conception of femininity as including makeup. No laws or rules are written somewhere that state that women have red lips. Further, there is no independent "choosing and constituting agent prior to language (who poses as the sole source of its constituting acts)." Hence, there is no "woman" behind the act of application of makeup who is an independent, free, unchanging, choosing agent. Butler challenges classical philosophical idea of the stable subject, as opposed to the objects that subject acts upon. The woman, would be traditionally considered the subject, as opposed to the object, the makeup she chooses. Butler argues, however, that the woman is also an object. She is an object of the "constitutive acts" that create what it means to be feminine. Butler challenges the divide between the subject and object.16 Butler adopts a division that many feminists make between "sex" and "gender." Feminists argue that "sex" is the biological fact of being a man or a woman, depending on the body one has when born. Gender, in contrast, is the social and historical meaning assigned to bearers of those body parts. Butler argues that this doesn't deny "the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body," meaning, Butler doesn't want to say that there are no such things as breasts, penises, ovaries, etc. Her argument is rather that the way we understand the fact of these material and natural body parts is determined by our history, society, and culture. The words we use to describe body parts themselves would have no resonance with us if it was not for the historical norms that gives them meaning. Without the repetition of these norms, there would be no gender at all. Butler seeks to analyze how the material and natural dimensions of the body come to acquire meaning as gender. Butler conceives of our understanding of the body as a set of "possibilities." A possibility is not something concrete and certain in the objective world. It is not an "interior essence" or fixed and stable identity. Possibility conveys the sense that a body could potentially undergo a process that would create meaning for it. She writes "the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation, as Beauvoir has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation." Our historical conventions place limits on the possibilities we have for understanding our embodiment, but we reproduce those historical conventions when we adopt them in order to understand our bodies as "male" or "female." Enacting gender is a way of "taking up" or "rendering" historical possibilities. Butler's phenomenological understanding of acts leads her to conceive of gender as a "performance” or a "drama" using the metaphor of the theatre. Daily performances both constitute what gender means and enact it. Butler writes, "By dramatic, I mean only that the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities." A person is not her or his body. A person "does" her or his body. The body is an enactment, a drama, a playing out of scripts that are determined by history, culture, and society. Butler, however, laments the fact that the conventions of language force her to construct sentences with an active subject, the "I" who plays out gender on an object, "my body." She argues, "the possibilities that are embodied are not fundamentally exterior or antecedent to the process of embodying itself." The possibilities that are played out are also "active subjects" in the sense that they prescribe limits on the meaning that can be expressed, and the "I" is their object. 17 It is also important to note that this drama is repeated on a continual basis. Butler writes "the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time."18 She explains, "As anthropologist Victor Turner suggests in his studies of ritual social drama, social action requires a performance which is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation."19 The drama must repeat itself continually to inscribe itself onto our collective subconscious. It becomes a ritual. Every time it is repeated, it increases its legitimacy and status as normal and natural. Gender is not only a performance, it is a historical strategy. Gender is "a strategy of survival" for a culture that depends on two genders, masculinity and femininity, to maintain its hegemony and transmit its norms. Butler writes, "Discrete genders are part of what 'humanizes' individuals within contemporary culture." Your humanity is dependent on whether you are properly a "man" or a "woman." Those who fail to meet the definition of one or the other, for example, hermaphrodites, those born with both male and female sexual equipment, are considered monstrous and inhuman, creatures that need to be surgically "fixed" to meet the definition of either "man" or "woman" for acceptance as human. Punishment is the result of choosing not to conform to gender rules. Women considered too masculine and men considered too feminine are regularly ridiculed and ostracized. They are not "real women" or "real men." The young boy who wants to go to ballet class with his sister is laughed at on the playground and encouraged by his father to play hockey instead. Examples abound. Butler writes that this ostracism is a cultural strategy: "those who fail to perform their gender right are regularly punished." They are punished for failing to strive for a certain ideal of femininity or masculinity. However, this ideal is not a "natural fact." Butler writes that gender is "a construction that regularly conceals its genesis." It hides the way it came into being with the illusion of an origin in science, biology, or natural fact. Gender purports to be natural and essential, when it is only constituted by "tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders." These actions increase the credibility of the gender system: "The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one's belief in its necessity and naturalness." Gender is a drama and also a fiction.20 Nusbaum provides a clear articulation of Butler's conception of gender as a performance: "when we act and speak in a gendered way, we are not simply reporting on something that is already fixed in the world, we are actively constituting it, replicating it, and reinforcing it. By behaving as if there were male and female "natures," we co-create the social fiction that these natures exist. They are never there apart from our deeds; we are always making them be there."21 Butler describes the hegemonic order of gender as a set of scripts that have already been rehearsed and are given to each individual. The act has been going on since before the actors "arrived on the scene" and the scripts will survive the individuals who act them out. However, for their perpetuation, these dramas must be continually "reproduced as reality."22 Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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