Butler and bad writing

William S. Lear rael at zopyra.com
Wed Jan 27 11:14:56 PST 1999


On Wed, January 27, 1999 at 02:44:00 (-0800) Dennis R Redmond writes:
>On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, William S. Lear wrote:
>
>> So, through reiteration of norms we as individuals and a society come
>> to recognize a certain form of female body as desirable, or "normal",
>> thus pressuring women to conform to it by shaping their bodies to fit
>> (or, despairing, plunging into the potato chips and achieving
>> precisely the "opposite"?). How is this different from 19th century
>> feminists griping about corsets?
>
>It's the extension of the principle, from the mere physical restraints of
>the Steam Age to the complex biotechnical/surgical interventions of the
>Silicon Age, which is scary. Progress turns into regress.

Ok, she extends corsets to silicon implants, big deal (I don't mean to be bilious). Why does this need to be said with 8 syllable words?


>It's about imagining a social role, I think -- other people are watching
>you, see, and you're locked into this dialectic with them. Even if
>you ignore them, they're watching you and can potentially get in
>your face at any moment. Butler's point has to do with the invisibility of
>lesbian women, they're fitted into this heterosexual role, and end up
>acting that way (i.e. being afraid to kiss their partner in public,
>internalizing homophobia, etc.). So the performative isn't just any old
>street scene, it's the point at which subjects start messing with the
>script and create theater of their own.

In other words, precisely the thing that Lawrence Goodwyn wrote about in *The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America* (Oxford University Press, 1978). I don't have the book at hand to quote from directly at the moment, but if I remember correctly, he wrote about the importance of the people *recognizing* that they were acting contrary to the way they were supposed to: they recognized that they were acting together rather than as atomized parts, and they recognized that this was important.


>Butler's hope is that by thinking through all this agency stuff, we'll
>understand our limitations better, and then move past them, somehow, via
>that performativity thing. That's where *I* have problems with Butler,
>myself -- I find her solutions to be too limited, she doesn't stress the
>aesthetics or materialities of rebellion quite enough. But her basic
>theoretical exposition is pretty sharp.

I find her "theoretical exposition" sharp only in that it looks formidable. I find it pretty much empty of anything new, though. I'm still waiting for answers to two questions: 1) What is new here?; 2) What is new here that must be expressed in the way she expresses it?

Bill



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