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Questions, Comments, or Donations
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.