Friday, October 10, 2008
Butler and the 'Constructionist' Position
The constructionist view of race and gender comes in varying degrees and Butler's thoughts are certainly on the more 'radical' end of the spectrum. She is claiming that not only are race and gender socially constructed ideas but even sex and identity are unreal, socialized conceptions. I think this idea has its merits for several reasons. If people were able to let go of their need for a concrete, unchanging identity that consists of social categories and labels, I believe there would be less social and cultural hierarchies. I believe this to be true because if we don't slice up our societies into categories based on our identity labels then there would be no way to 'hierarchize' ourselves based on these so-called constructions. However, Butler's ideas also pose a challenge to the pragmatical way in which I see and experience the world and many other people as well. It is simply a matter of utility that we observe the world around us and apply labels and categories to the various things that we encounter. I acknowledge that these labels are not necessarily inherent in the objects or people that I apply them to, however the utility of these labels is helpful in having knowldge about the world. Butler's ideas, while intriguing, may be too extreme to be helpful in the sense that she is making the constructionist argument too expansive. In other words, where are we supposed to draw the line when it comes to ideas and labels that are socially constructed? Should we have to reform or eliminate all knowledge because all our labels and ideas are arbitrary? How do we know that we aren't being socialized to think that we are being socialized? I agree that we need to have the ability to critically analyze and possibly reform our ideas about the world; clearly our ideas of race and gender need to be worked on in order to end racism and sexism. However, I believe that we need more to work with then just the argument that these are social constructions, because if you follow Butler's argument to the end result pretty much all knowledge is socially constructed and it is clearly not useful to deny ourselves the right to believe in our knowledge of the world. Am I reading too much into Butler's thoughts? Should we question such 'basic' notions that we even have a concrete identity of our own? Where can we draw the line between knowledge and ideas that need to be reformed and our conceptions that are useful for our experience in the world?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I totally agree with what you wrote about the utility of identity categories and the labels we use to define them. After Wednesday's class I was thinking about the question posed in discussion; "why do we need any categories (concrete or flexible)?
This might be a ridiculously simply answer, but how else would a 7-11 clerk quickly identify an armed-robber to a police dispatcher? If we did not use "white", "male" and a list of other identifying traits, then what would that clerk say? What terms might she be left with?
I certainly don't think race and gender categories are "real" per se, but they do have some pragmatic utility that has nothing to do with oppression, etc.
I don't think Butler wants to eliminate the categories we use to cut up the world. She just wants to reform them. If we look at the world in terms of our identities being effects, then a whole new possibility of agency opens up--an agency to produce one's subjectivity by performing it in such a way that may fall outside the norms produced by our society. She writes that we ought to "locate the strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them" (201). Butler wants to displace the very gender norms that enable this repetition. I don't think she'd disagree with the pragmatists about having categories as modes of organization and description--they just need to be rewritten to include many other possibilities we don't account for as a means to break down heterosexual (and other types of) hierarchies.
There are also possibilities of 'looping effects' here. So it may be that 'white' and 'male' are such effective descriptions of persons because we are already disposed to see persons as 'raced' and 'gendered'. Take a community who is not prone to seeing people as raced and as gendered -- and this opens the possibility that these labels may not be as efficacious there. This of course raises the question of whether any such communities or societies exist, and if so where, and when. But you get the general point.
In any event, great discussion, and great question.
Post a Comment