Oh, it's about concision.
The sentence that won her the bad writing award was:
> The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to
> structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of
> hegemony
> in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and
> rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking
> of structure,
> and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes
> structural
> totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into
> the contingent
> possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony
> as bound
> up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power
I had no idea what that meant until Martha Nussbaum translated it far more concisely as:
> Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force
> structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as
> everywhere uniform. By
> contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations
> of that force as
> variegated and as shifting over time
In the quotation you like so much, as far as I can tell the idea is that we should uphold universal rights and principles as long as we regard their meaning as contingent and constructed, subject to change and political contestation. Seems eminently reasonable. But can you explain how that's any different from John Stuart Mill?
For that matter, here's Mill on epistemology:
> Of nature, or anything whatever external to ourselves, we know . . .
> nothing, except the facts which present themselves to our senses, and
> such other facts as may, by analogy, be inferred from these...[This
> means that the] nature and laws of Things in themselves, or of the
> hidden causes of the phenomena which are the objects of experience
> [are] radically inaccessible to the human faculties.
Let's go on! This is from the Martha Nussbaum essay:
> 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.
> This notion, of course, is nothing new. The denaturalizing of gender
> was present
> already in Plato, and it received a great boost from John Stuart Mill,
> who claimed in The
> Subjection of Women that "what is now called the nature of women is an
> eminently artificial
> thing." Mill saw that claims about "women's nature" derive from, and
> shore up, hierarchies of
> power: womanliness is made to be whatever would serve the cause of
> keeping women in
> subjection, or, as he put it, "enslav[ing] their minds." With the
> family as with feudalism, the
> rhetoric of nature itself serves the cause of slavery. "The subjection
> of women to men being a
> universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears
> unnatural.... But was there
> ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who
> possessed it?"
> Mill was hardly the first social-constructionist. Similar ideas about
> anger, greed, envy, and
> other prominent features of our lives had been commonplace in the
> history of philosophy
> since ancient Greece. And Mill's application of familiar notions of
> social-construction to
> gender needed, and still needs, much fuller development; his
> suggestive remarks did not yet
> amount to a theory of gender. Long before Butler came on the scene,
> many feminists
> contributed to the articulation of such an account.
> In work published in the 1970s and 1980s, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea
> Dworkin argued that the conventional understanding of gender roles is
> a way of ensuring
> continued male domination in sexual relations, as well as in the
> public sphere. They took the
> core of Mill's insight into a sphere of life concerning which the
> Victorian philosopher had said
> little. (Not nothing, though: in 1869 Mill already understood that the
> failure to criminalize
> rape within marriage defined woman as a tool for male use and negated
> her human dignity.)
> Before Butler, MacKinnon and Dworkin addressed the feminist fantasy of
> an idyllic natural
> sexuality of women that only needed to be "liberated"; and argued that
> social forces go so
> deep that we should not suppose we have access to such a notion of
> "nature." Before Butler,
> they stressed the ways in which male-dominated power structures
> marginalize and
> subordinate not only women, but also people who would like to choose a
> same-sex
> relationship. They understood that discrimination against gays and
> lesbians is a way of
> enforcing the familiar hierarchically ordered gender roles; and so
> they saw discrimination
> against gays and lesbians as a form of sex discrimination.
> Before Butler, the psychologist Nancy Chodorow gave a detailed and
> compelling account of
> how gender differences replicate themselves across the
> generations...[etc.]
Here's something often attributed to our 19th Century social constructivist, though it's not clear if he actually said it:
> That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often
> becomes the height of wisdom in the next.
No doubt Butler has offered original analyses of things like Althusserian interpellation or whatnot, but I'm sure that's not the reason you're into her. I'm trying to understand the appeal....
Seth