Bodies that Matter (was Re: Mistress Judith)

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.princeton.edu
Mon Nov 22 08:01:06 PST 1999


Before Butler, the psychologist Nancy Chodorow gave a detailed and compelling account of how gender differences replicate themselves across the generations: she argued that the ubiquity of these mechanisms of replication enables us to understand how what is artificial can nonetheless be nearly ubiquitous. Before Butler, the biologist Anne Fausto Sterling, through her painstaking criticism of experimental work allegedly supporting the naturalness of conventional gender distinctions, showed how deeply social power-relations had compromised the objectivity of scientists: Myths of Gender (1985) was an apt title for what she found in the biology of the time. (Other biologists and primatologists also contributed to this enterprise.) Before Butler, the political theorist Susan Moller Okin explored the role of law and political thought in constructing a gendered destiny for women in the family; and this project, too, was pursued further by a number of feminists in law and political philosophy. Before Butler, Gayle Rubin's important anthropological account of subordination, The Traffic in Women (1975), provided a valuable analysis of the relationship between the social organization of gender and the asymmetries of power ______________

Wonderful work indeed (consumed me in my undergraduate education). But these authors do not provide a detailed examination of those structures which Nussbaum accuses Butler of reifying when the former writes: "She [Butler] suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society... will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them." Which works serve as deeper, more profound critiques of these structures (including of course a dilineation of what they are?) If not Foucault and Butler, then who?

Yours, Rakesh



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