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CRITICISMS OF BUTLERMartha Nussbaum, a well known Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, takes Butler to task for what she calls a “moral quietism” on the scale of “radical libertarianism.” Nussbaum writes, “For Butler, the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics.” Nussbaum considers Butler to be too theoretical and to have too little application to practical life. Nussbaum criticizes Butler for failing to write in a way that is clear and accessible for those unfamiliar with post-modern jargon. Others criticize Butler's politics of gender subversion as being too decontextualized. Susan Bordo critiques Butler's theory of subversion, "She does not locate the text in question (the body in drag) in cultural context (are we watching the individual in a gay club or on the "Donahue" show?), does not consider the possibly different responses of various readers (male or female, young or old, gay or straight?) or the various anxieties that might complicate their readings… 29 Although Bordo agrees with Butler "in theory," she questions the likelihood that drag performances can destabilize the "binary frame" of gender identities.30 Bordo recommends that the subversiveness of gender performances be analyzed in social and historical context.31 Bordo is also critical of drag performances for perpetuating "highly dualist gender ontologies" and considers gender ambiguity a better way to destabilize the notion that there are only two impermeable and fixed genders, male and female.32 JUDITH BUTLER AND DEBATE Butler's theory that there is no truth to gender is vital in debates over feminism, women's issues, and gender. Butler's theory can provide the basis for a powerful critique of calls for legal changes that fail to question gender norms. Butler's theory can also provide reasons to reinvision status quo conventions about gender in order to open political space and freedom for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and others. A good starting place to gain an understanding of Butler's work is her book Gender Trouble. BibliographyBenhabib, Seyla, et al. FEMINIST CONTENTIONS : A PHILOSOPHICAL EXCHANGE (THINKING GENDER). New York: Routledge, 1995.
Routledge, 1993). Butler, Judith. (interview) “The Body You Want.” ARTFORUM. November 1992. Volume 31, Number 3, p. 82
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1992).
Routledge, 1990).
University Press, 1997). Butler, Judith. SUBJECTS OF DESIRE: HEGELIAN REFLECTIONS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRANCE. (New York : Columbia University Press, 1987). Cheah, Pheng and Elizabeth Grosz. “The Future Of Sexual Difference: An Interview With Judith Butler And Drucilla Cornell.” DIACRITICS: A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM, Spring 1998, Volume 28, Number 1, p. 19 Costera Meijer, Irene and Baukje Prins. “How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview With Judith Butler.” SIGNS. Winter 1998, Volume 23, Issue 2, p. 275 Duggan, Lisa. “The Theory Wars, Or, Who's Afraid Of Judith Butler?” JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY, Spring 1998 Volume 10, Number 1, p. 9 Fraser, Nancy. “Heterosexism, Misrecognition And Capitalism: A Response To Judith Butler.” NEW LEFT REVIEW, March-April 1998, Number 228, p. 140 Hood-Williams, John and Wendy Cealey Harrison. “Trouble With Gender.” THE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, February 1998, Volume 46, Number 1, p. 73. Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy. “Fashionable Subjects: On Judith Butler And The Causal Idioms Of Postmodern Feminist Theory.” POLITICAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY, September 1997, Volume 50, Number 3, p. 649. Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. PERFORMATIVITY AND PERFORMANCE. (New York: Routledge, 1995). Nussbaum, Martha. “The Professor of Parody--The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler.” THE NEW REPUBLIC. Feb 22, 1999. p. 37. Singer, Linda. EROTIC WELFARE: SEXUAL THEORY AND POLITICS IN THE AGE OF EPIDEMIC. Ed. Judith Butler and Maureen MacGrogan. (New York : Routledge, 1993). GENDER IS PERFORMANCE1. GENDER NORMS ARE CONSTITUTED IN REPETIVE ACTS. Judith Butler, Associate Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, GENDER TROUBLE, 1990, p. 148 If taken as the grounds of feminist theory or politics, these "effects" of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality are not only misdescribed as foundations, but the signifying practices that enable this metaleptic misdescription remain outside the purview of a feminist critique of gender relations. To enter into the repetitive practices of this terrain of signification is not a choice, for the "I" that might enter is always already inside: there is no possibility of agency or reality outside of the discursive practices that give those terms the intelligibility that they have. The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself. There is no ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics, for gender ontologies always operate within established political contexts as normative injunctions, determining what qualifies as intelligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality, setting the prescriptive requirements whereby sexed or gendered bodies come into cultural intelligibility. 2. GENDER IS NOT NATURAL. Judith Butler, Associate Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, GENDER TROUBLE, 1990, p. 148-149 Ontology is, thus, not a foundation, but a normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political discourse as its necessary ground. The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated. This kind of critique brings into question the foundationalist frame in which feminism as an identity politics has been articulated. The internal paradox of this foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the very "subjects" that it hopes to represent and liberate. The task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible. If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready‑made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old. Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness. What other local strategies for engaging the "unnatural" might lead to the denaturalization of gender as such?
Judith Butler, Associate Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, GENDER TROUBLE, 1990, p. 33 Woman Itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification. Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the "congealing" is itself an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social means. it is, for Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman, as if there were a telos that governs the process of acculturation and construction. Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender. To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity, a move which has been a part of cultural critique at least since Marx, is a task that now takes on the added burden of showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered, admits.of possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies.
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