BUTLER PROVIDES A BASIS FOR FEMINIST POLITICS

BUTLER PROVIDES A BASIS FOR FEMINIST POLITICS

1. BUTLER’S PRESCRIPTIONS DESTABLIZE HEGEMONIC SEXUAL CATEGORIES

Susan Hekman, Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, HYPATIA, Fall 1995, p. 151.

Butler defines her own political position in the context of a discussion of the growing literature on "radical democracy." She rejects what she declares to be the impossible ideal of this position radical inclusivity. In a densely argued critique of Slavoj Zizek's politics, Butler rejects his claim that politics should be grounded in the "real" that lies outside the symbolic. Butler makes it clear that for feminist politics this means that instead of invoking "woman" as the real beyond the symbolic, we should instead "mobilize the necessary error of identity". She argues that we can and should invoke the category "woman," but our aim in doing so must be to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. Butler's prescriptions for a feminist politics, then, come to something like this: feminists can deploy the categories of abjection which, although constituted by the hegemonic law of sex, can be used to destabilize that law. Although categories such as "queer" are not inherently destabilizing, they can and should be used as a site of resignification and refiguration of the symbolic that produce them. In other words, it is not enough to be "queer," one must be "critically queer."

Lisa Duggan, Professor of History, New York University, JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY. Spring, 1998, p. 9.

But Sokal and his supporters, including Rosen, Epstein, and Pollitt, aim their attacks at a very amorphous target called "postmodernism," "deconstruction," or "cultural studies"--all very different intellectual practices, and not all guilty as charged--or just designated as Theory, or personified as Judith Butler--whom many see as having an almost magical power to destroy progressive activism. From another point of view, Butler's work has enabled forms of activism. Perhaps it is this queer activism ("harmless cross-dressing") and not Theory alone that is the underlying target of some of the attacks. Polarizing "theory" and "politics" (the "academic" and the "activist" as Rosen, Epstein, and Pollitt do) requires some major oversights and distortions. Many of the arguments assigned to "academic/ theory" can be found in "political/ activist" discourses too. During the 1980s, interventions into leftist and feminist politics on the grounds of race and sexuality appeared in grassroots organizing and organizational conflicts as well as in scholarship and theory. Many leftist feminists have only belatedly and begrudgingly accommodated these interventions. Historians and others located in the university have some reason to assign them to a younger generation of "pomo"-influenced scholars. Sometimes, the impulse to attack Theory and its pretensions can function as a displacement of generational tensions and political conflict.
3. FEMINIST POLITICS MUST CONTEST THE MEANING OF THE TERM “WOMEN.”

Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, American Political Science Review, December 1995, p. 1003.

Butler then turns to the political necessity within feminism to "speak as and for women." This necessity, she writes, needs to be reconciled with the complementary necessity of continually contesting the meaning of that word. Feminists should assume that "'women' designates an undesignatable field of differences," so that "the very term becomes a site of permanent openness and resignifiability." She urges, on these grounds, that "the rifts among women over the content of the term ought to be safeguarded and prized, indeed, that this constant rifting ought to be affirmed as the ungrounded ground of feminist theory".

BUTLER’S FEMINISM DESTROYS ANY CHANCES FOR REAL CHANGE

1. BUTLER OFFERS NO POSSIBILITIES FOR REAL CHANGE

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37.

Up to this point, Butler's contentions, though relatively familiar, are plausible and even interesting, though one is already unsettled by her narrow vision of the possibilities for change. Yet Butler adds to these plausible claims about gender two other claims that are stronger and more contentious. The first is that there is no agent behind or prior to the social forces that produce the self. If this means only that babies are born into a gendered world that begins to replicate males and females almost immediately, the claim is plausible, but not surprising: experiments have for some time demonstrated that the way babies are held and talked to, the way their emotions are described, are profoundly shaped by the sex the adults in question believe the child to have. (The same baby will be bounced if the adults think it is a boy, cuddled if they think it is a girl; its crying will be labeled as fear if the adults think it is a girl, as anger if they think it is a boy.) Butler shows no interest in these empirical facts, but they do support her contention. If she means, however, that babies enter the world completely inert, with no tendencies and no abilities that are in some sense prior to their experience in a gendered society, this is far less plausible, and difficult to support empirically. Butler offers no such support, preferring to remain on the high plane of metaphysical abstraction. (Indeed, her recent Freudian work may even repudiate this idea: it suggests, with Freud, that there are at least some presocial impulses and tendencies, although, typically, this line is not clearly developed.) Moreover, such an exaggerated denial of pre-cultural agency takes away some of the resources that Chodorow and others use when they try to account for cultural change in the direction of the better.

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37.

And yet it is much too simple to say that power is all that the body is. We might have had the bodies of birds or dinosaurs or lions, but we do not; and this reality shapes our choices. Culture can shape and reshape some aspects of our bodily existence, but it does not shape all the aspects of it. "In the man burdened by hunger and thirst," as Sextus Empiricus observed long ago, "it is impossible to produce by argument the conviction that he is not so burdened." This is an important fact also for feminism, since women's nutritional needs (and their special needs when pregnant or lactating) are an important feminist topic. Even where sex difference is concerned, it is surely too simple to write it all off as culture; nor should feminists be eager to make such a sweeping gesture. Women who run or play basketball, for example, were right to welcome the demolition of myths about women's athletic performance that were the product of male-dominated assumptions; but they were also right to demand the specialized research on women's bodies that has fostered a better understanding of women's training needs and women's injuries. In short: what feminism needs, and sometimes gets, is a subtle study of the interplay of bodily difference and cultural construction. And Butler's abstract pronouncements, floating high above all matter, give us none of what we need.
3. BUTLER’S CRITIQUE IS FATALISTIC

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37

In its small way, of course, this is a hopeful politics. It instructs people that they can, right now, without compromising their security, do something bold. But the boldness is entirely gestural, and insofar as Butler's ideal suggests that these symbolic gestures really are political change, it offers only a false hope. Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it. Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler's hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.