http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler
[edit] Critical response While Butler’s work, especially the notion of “gender performativity” is far from universally accepted as being an accurate or complete explanation of gender identity, it has been extremely influential in the field of gender studies, not to mention in cultural studies, philosophy, and literary criticism. The extent of Butler’s influence may be approximated by referring to the website for the University of California, Irvine’s Critical Theory Institute, which hosts a list of references to Butler’s work that includes hundreds of titles. Of course, the list is not even comprehensive, as new analyses of Butler’s work are still being written. [17]
Some theorists have built off Butler’s work and the idea of gender performativity in new directions. For example, Susan A. Speer and Jonathan Potter claim that it gives new insight in several areas, especially in the concept of heterosexism. However, although Speer and Potter find Butler’s work useful in this respect, they find her work too abstracted to be usefully applied to “real-life situations.” For this reason, they pair a reading of Butler with Discursive Psychology in order to extend Butler’s ideas to real-world scenarios.[18]
Negative critical response to Butler’s work has generally fallen into two categories: criticisms of her writing style, and criticisms of the ideas she puts forth.
Martha Nussbaum wrote an article in The New Republic titled "The Professor of Parody" criticizing Butler's writing for obscurantism and for its merely "verbal and symbolic politics"; in contrast, Nussbaum mentions thinkers such as Catharine MacKinnon, Nancy Chodorow, and Andrea Dworkin as examples of effective feminist scholarship. According to Nussbaum, without a universally applicable notion of social justice or normative principles, Butler's projects constitute mere moral passivity. The thrust of Nussbaum's criticism lamented the retreat from legal and institutional concerns that contribute to material and practical gains for women, versus the isolated gestural movements that encourage defeatism and thus "collaborate with evil."[19]
Also in 1998, Philosophy and Literature admonished Butler with first prize in its Fourth Bad Writing Contest, for a sentence in the scholarly journal diacritics.[20] Following controversy, and perceptions of mean-spiritedness, over the "Bad Writing" award that Denis Dutton gave out under the auspices of his academic journal, Dutton discontinued the award in 1999.[21] Butler commented on the event in an interview,[22] and published a response entitled "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back" in the pages of the New York Times.[23]
The criticism that Butler’s writing style is too dense or obfuscatory has itself been criticized. In Judith Butler: Live Theory, Vicki Kirby’s exploration of Butler’s contributions to gender theory, Kirby suggests that Butler’s critics are practicing anti-intellectualism, writing, “Not surprisingly, the reception of Butler’s prolific contribution to theoretical and political life depends on the importance attributed to such concerns."[24]
Butler herself has also responded to criticism of her writing’s accessibility, writing in 2004:
"It’s not that I’m in favor of difficulty for difficulty’s sake; it’s that I think there is a lot in ordinary language and in received grammar that constrains our thinking - indeed, about what a person is, what a subject is, what sexuality is, what politics can be - and that I’m not sure we’re going to be able to struggle effectively against those constrains or work within them in a productive way unless we see the ways in which grammar is both producing and constraining our sense of what the world is."[25]
Butler further argues that attacks on her writing style from those in the humanities are symptomatic of these critics’ doubts of their own importance or of the importance of the humanities in general to the academic world, writing:
"Those intellectuals who speak in a rarefied way are being scapegoated, are being purged, are being denounced precisely because they represent a certain anxiety about everyone’s effect - that is, what effect are any of us having, and what effect can we have?" [26]
Some critics, including Susan Bordo, have criticized Butler for reducing gender to language. Bordo, for example, argues that the body is a major part of gender, thus implicitly opposing Butler’s conception of gender as performed. [27]
Others, like Peter Digeser, have argued that Butler’s idea of performativity is too pure to account for identity. Like others before him, Digeser doubts that pure performativity is possible, and argues that in viewing the gendered individual as purely performed, Butler ignores the gendered body, which Bordo has argued is extremely important. Digeser argues that neither an essentialist nor a performative notion of gender should be used in the political sphere, as both simplify gender too much.[28]
One major critic of Butler’s work has been Nancy Fraser. The two writers, along with Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, participated in a discourse about each others’s work in 1995. Fraser has argued that Butler’s focus on performativity has distanced her from “everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves … Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?”[29] Fraser argues that Butler needs to fully commit to her positions by way of justifying them and thus validating them, as this is the only way to achieve a political impact. Like Speer and Potter, Fraser also argues that Butler’s focus on language removes her from real-world issues and makes her work difficult to be applied to real-life situations. Fraser has also argued that homophobia is a result of cultural influences rather than economic, a position which Butler has argued directly against in an essay titled “Merely Cultural.”
Although Butler clearly disagrees with Fraser, the two are old friends who have entered into direct discourse several times in the past[30], and Butler has stated that she views the difference of opinion between the two as “productive disagreement
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