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The non-sovereign self, responsibility, and otherness : Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell on moral philosophy and political agency
\"In times of globalization, critiques of sovereignty have become a pervasive feature of political theory. This book investigates how forms of political association and the responsibilities we have for others could be informed by non-sovereign concepts of the self. Placing the reader in dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and Stanley Cavell, it engages with debates surrounding the key concepts of identity, becoming, agency and ethical responsibility - specifically in terms of a 'non-sovereign self'. Non-sovereignty highlights how thought, language, and ultimately one's very survival depend on social relationships. While non-sovereign accounts of human social life have become widely accepted, there is an ongoing debate about definitions and roles of key terms such as 'finitude' or 'relationality' and the consequences they have for political thought. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and Stanley Cavell, this book addresses contemporary theoretical and political debates in a broader comparative perspective and rearticulates the relationship between ethics and politics by highlighting those who are currently excluded from our notions of political community\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
White innocence in the Black Mediterranean
Themes of loss, grief, and vulnerability have come to occupy an increasingly central position in contemporary poststructuralist and feminist theory. Thinkers such as Judith Butler and Stephen White have argued that grief has the capacity to access or stage a commonality that eludes politics and on which a new cosmopolitan ethics can be built. Focusing on the role of grief in recent pro-refugee activism in Europe, this article argues that these ethical perspectives contribute to an ideological formation that disconnects connected histories and that turns questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform into matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality. The result is a veil of ignorance which, while not precisely Rawlsian, allows the European subject to re-constitute itself as ‘ethical’ and ‘good’, innocent of its imperialist histories and present complicities.
Journal Article
Judith Butler
An introductory guide to the work of Judith Butler, a major contemporary theorist, this title includes a new interview with Butler. Judith Butler: Live Theory is an invaluable introduction to the work of this key contemporary theorist, guiding the student through the most complex ideas of one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary culture. Concise, accessible and comprehensive, the book explores and illuminates Butler's important and ongoing contributions to gender theory, offers new insights into the central themes of her work, and considers the extent of her impact on how the discipline of gender studies has been shaped. In particular, the book considers Butler's intellectual work in relation to issues of sexuality and performance, identity and politics, language and power - themes central to Butler's thought and writing. Vicki Kirby locates Butler in the context of contemporary theorists and thinkers and the book includes a new interview with Butler herself, in which she discusses the key themes in her work as well as future writing plans. Offering a stimulating and clear account of the work and thought of this inspiring figure, Judith Butler: Live Theory is a key resource for anyone studying this pioneering thinker within the context of sociology, cultural studies, literary criticism, feminism and philosophy.
eBook
Reading Gender Trouble in Southeast Asia
Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble, published in 1990, enjoyed its thirtieth anniversary in 2020. To that end, the Association for Asian Studies, the United States’ largest association of academics working on Asia, invited scholars to consider the importance of her arguments and ideas for Asian studies and scholarship in Asia, including how scholars have diverged from and expanded their studies of gender and sexuality in ways not anticipated by Butler when she first published the book. In this essay, I examine the impact of Butler's book in Southeast Asia. Out of the abundance of scholarship stemming from and about the region's eleven diverse countries and their histories, I prioritize those works that explicitly engage the theoretical insights in Gender Trouble to elucidate the lives of gender-nonconforming communities in Southeast Asia. I include scholarship that allows me to explore the disjunction between categories of analysis that are foundational to Butler's theory and those at work in Southeast Asia. Far from rendering Butler's theory and methodological intervention inapposite, this mismatch has catalyzed productive rethinking of Gender Trouble and its implications for the region.
Journal Article
Normative Violence in Domestic Service: A Study of Exploitation, Status, and Grievability
This paper contributes to business ethics by focusing on consumption that is characterized by normative violence. By drawing on the work of Judith Butler this study of kajer lok—a female subaltern group of Indian domestic service providers—and their higher status clients shows how codes of status-based consumption shaped by markets, class, caste, and patriarchy create a social order that reduces kajer lok to \"ungreivable\" lives. Our study contributes to business ethics by focusing on exploitation and coercion in consumption rather than in production and of woman rather than of men. It adds to consumer research by revealing how social distinctions not only manifest in status contests in which symbolic power is at stake but also may produce violent exploitation and ungrievable lives.
Journal Article
Counter-populist performances of (in)security: Feminist resistance in the face of right-wing populism in Poland
IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.
Journal Article
Structural Apathy, Affective Injustice, and the Ecological Crisis
What I call the unfelt in society refers to different ways in which certain events or conditions fail to evoke affective responses or give rise to merely sporadic or toned-down modes of emotive concern. This is evident in public (non)responses to the ecological crisis in the Global North. I sketch an approach to the unfelt, drawing on work in phenomenology and on the situated affectivity approach. I focus on structural apathy as the condition of spatial, social, and cognitive-affective distance from the devastation and suffering caused by capitalist modes of living. Most members of affluent societies live their lives spatially and 'existentially' removed from the dehumanizing living conditions of those whose exploited labor and (stolen) land enable and sustain that affluence. The resulting apathy amounts to a constitutional inability to grasp, fathom, and sympathize with the plight of those who are forced to endure those conditions. I hold that structural apathy is an underdiscussed baseline of affective injustice. Its analysis can generate insights into the conditions that make forms of affective injustice so pervasive and seemingly 'natural' in Western modernity. While the present text broadly contributes to the debate on affective injustice, it also voices some reservations about this debate and its guiding notion.
Journal Article
Undoing Gender Performativities in Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero
Physician, psychiatrist, and Marxist activist for women's rights, Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021) published fiction and non-fiction exposing how a capitalistic, phallocratic social order keeps Egyptian women in thrall to men through violent suppression. Women are exploited by men, who see women as weak and prey on these presumed docile subordinates in a display of masculinity. Deciphering the effects of this gendered performativity through the lens of Judith Butler, El Saadawi's novel Woman at Point Zero (1977/2015a), or Ferdaous, une Voix en Enfer (El Saadawi, 1977/2007) in French, provides a narrative whose significance is amplified by Butlerian theory. The protagonist, whose voice is filtered through the agency of an amanuensis, struggles to perform and define womanhood or femininity, only to claim liberation by murdering an antagonist and assuming a stoic posture vis-a-vis her death by hanging. In other words, repeated attempts to undo gender in El Saadawi's hierarchical society fail. Nonetheless, as Firdaus rebels against the rules of feminine behavior, she dismantles the common assumption that female genital mutilation (FGM), imposed as a tool of patriarchal power, inevitably results in disability. Clitoridectomy certainly leads to a recurring sense of dislocation and haunting loss, yet Firdaus flouts victimhood and remains mutinous despite discrimination, rape, marital abuse, and physical violence. Breaking with gender norms, she refuses abjection through her own initiative by deploying her body as a weapon, enticing her prey, and performing the \"feminine evil\" projected on all women since Eve by a usurped patriarchal power.
Journal Article
Women and the Precarity of War: Reading Women Militants and Activists in Sharmila Seyyid's Ummath
Ummath, written by Sharmila Seyyid, navigates the sensitive topic of the precarious lives of three separate women amid the chaos of war-torn Sri Lanka. The stories of main characters Yoga and Theivanai demonstrate women's challenges in and out of militancy. Their struggles led them to Thawakkul, a Muslim social worker devoted to the cause of rehabilitating disabled and widowed women who once served the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam). Ummath provides a powerful social critique of the conditions that aggravated the separatist conflict, the stigmatization of women who become part of the LTTE, the inexorable violence perpetrated by all sides in a chaotic and prolonged internal conflict, and the failure of rehabilitating the militants into the community. The present article investigates the precarity faced by women in the anarchic context of civil violence and internal conflicts. The article discusses the disruption of education, militancy experience, the social stigma of being an ex-militant, and the challenges faced by reformers working to build peace in post-war society. The study employs Judith Butler's theory on precarity to investigate the social life of women militants and activists in the separatist war. Butler's concept of precarity addresses how people's vulnerability is politically induced, and hence different groups of people are exposed in different degrees to violence and death. In Butler's work, she argues that those who are not considered living in the first place, or whose lives are precarious and are not ascribed great value, are not mourned when they pass away. This article analyzes the problems that women militants and social workers face as well as the social ostracization they encounter daily through the focal points of Yoga, Theivanai, and Thawakkul's lives as narrated in Ummath. The exploration of the microcosmic experiences of the three women's lives highlights the need to study women's issues in the unstable context of a social uprising and the vulnerabilities they are exposed to in the context of human rights.
Journal Article
Insubordinate Plasticity
In this article, I explore the relationship between performativity, as it appears in Judith Butler’s work, and plasticity, as it appears in the work of Catherine Malabou. I argue that these concepts are isomorphic. Butler and Malabou both hold that resistance to contemporary forms of power, or “insubordination,” is contingent on a subject’s ability to become other than what it is; Butler articulates this ability in terms of performativity, and Malabou articulates it in terms of plasticity. I reveal the social-constructivist dimension of Malabou’s work while also making apparent the extent to which Butler’s work, contrary to her own way of conceptualizing it, and hence surprisingly and uneasily, presupposes a biologically basic capacity for change. Plasticity is this biologically basic capacity. Both thinkers affirm the idea that insubordinate forms of transformation can be impeded by the discourse that conditions what a subject can think. I suggest that this is an insight that must be heeded, even as I seek to affirm a form of plasticity beyond discourse.
Journal Article