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Toril Moi on Butlerian Rabbit Holes

Butler's Performativity

A work in progress

  • We can perform in relation to one of two poles: On the one end we can promulgate the hegemonic materialization process
  • Profound performativity seems to be the process of accessing the excluded space in order to destabilize the hegemonic materialization process, challenge as it were the normative descriptors (Ex: woman)
  • Materiality is bound up with signification from the start
  • "language and materiality are fully embedded in each other"
  • Butler articulates a position on how Bodies materialize in order to substantiate this claim

Butler's Semiotics

A work in progress

materiality of the signifier

  • Moi thinks Butler conflates the 'materiality' of language with the 'materiality' of bodies.
  • Moi thinks Butler turns the body into a linguistic effect
  • "Butler loses sight of the body that her work tries to account for: the concrete, historical body that loves, suffers, and dies."

Moi raises several criticisms against Judith Butler and Poststructuralism generally

  • 1960's sex/gender distinction
  • Too theoretical not enough about the bodies
  • Avoidance of using the word Woman(en)
  • Semiotic rabbit holes in pursuit of an understanding of bodies and subjectivity

Moi on Butler

Overview

Moi on Butler's Semiotics

The way out of the rabbit hole

  • Butler in her general theory which links sex with gender does so without losing the body. Though Butler does this in a non-phenomenological way.
  • Butler is articulating a general theory of how bodies become demarcated and is setting up a structure that contextualizes and historicizes bodies.
  • Butler, instead of starting from discrete micro phenomena as Moi would have, seems to start from a meso/macro phenomenal level

The way out of the rabbit hole

  • Moi's criticism against Butler at times seems unwarranted, or rather, missing Butler's points.
  • Oddly the two have a similar project but I think they approach it from two different perspectives.
  • I assure you that Butler did not lose sight of Bodies as her account of the relation of language to material revolves around performance, which is what individual lived bodies do.
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