Judith Butler

Sexual politics, torture, and secular time

If one wants to begin with most common of beginnings, namely, with the claim that one would like to be able to consider sexual politics during this time, a certain problem arises. Since, it seems clear that one cannot reference ‘this time’ without knowing which time, where that time takes hold, and for whom a certain consensus emerges on the issue of what time this is. So if it is not just a matter of differences of interpretation about what time it is, then it would seem that we have already more than one time at work in this time, and that the problem of time will afflict any effort I might make to try and consider some of these major issues now. It might seem odd to begin with a reflection on time when one is trying to speak about sexual politics and cultural politics more broadly. But my suggestion here is that the way in which debates within sexual politics are framed are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time. That there is no one time, that the question of what time this is, already divides us, has to do with which histories have turned out to be formative, how they intersect – or fail to intersect with other histories – and so with a question of the how temporality is organized along spatial lines. I’m not suggesting here that we return to a version of cultural difference that depends on cultural wholism. In fact, I oppose any such return. The problem is not that there are different cultures at war with one another, or that there are different modalities of time, each conceived as self-sufficient, that are articulated in different and differentiated cultural locations or that come into confused or brutal contact with one another. Of course, at some level, that could be a valid description, but it would miss an important point, namely, that hegemonic conceptions of progress define themselves over and against a premodern temporality that they produce for the purposes of their own selflegitimation. Politically, the questions, what time are we in? are all of us in the same time? and specifically, who has arrived in modernity and who has not? are all raised in the midst of very serious political contestations. The questions cannot be answered through recourse to a simple culturalism.

Melancholy gender—refused identification

Freuds discussion of melancholy in “Mourning and Melancholia”; includes an account of identification as the incorporation of the lost object. This essay first seeks to establish a relation between that incorporative identification and the formation of “the bodily ego.”; It then seeks to situate this melancholic condition of the bodily ego in terms of the “loss”; of the same‐sexed object under prevalent conditions of compulsory heterosexuality. This “loss”; might be better understood on the model of foreclosure, suggesting that it is a loss resolved into a melancholic identification and hence central to the formation of same‐sex gender identification. This account of the melancholic consequences of a disavowed homosexual attachment is then situated in terms of contemporary conditions of grief over the loss by AIDS of so many gay men. The suggestion here is that the cultural “unreality”; of that “loss”; may be attributable to the foreclosed status of homosexual love as that which “never was”; and “never wa...

Violence, Mourning, Politics

This essay argues that mourning can provide resources for the rethinking of community and of international relations and that the military preemption and derealization of loss undermines fundamental human ties. The author suggests that nonviolence can and should emerge from the practice of mourning. The essay links a relational conception of the self to an ethics of nonviolence and a politics of a more radical redistribution of humanizing effects. In this way, the author connects a psychoanalytically informed concept of subject formation to a politics that offers a critique of the derealizing effects of U.S. military violence. Because lives, under current political conditions, are differentially grieved, egalitarian mourning offers the possibility of expanding the very conception of the human.

Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality

I would like to take my point of departure from a question of power, the power of regulation, a power that determines, more or less, what we are, what we can be. I am not speaking of power only in a juridical or positive sense, but I am referring to the workings of a certain regulatory regime, one that informs the law, and one that also exceeds the law. When we ask what the conditions of intelligibility are by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized, by which some subject becomes the subject of human love, we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all. So I propose to broach the relationship between variable orders of intelligibility and the genesis and knowability of the human. And it is not just that there are laws that govern our intelligibility, but ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly define intelligibility. This is what Foucault describes as the politics of truth, a politics that pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, that order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and that we come to accept as the given field of knowledge. We can understand the salience of this point when we begin to ask: What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? Subjectively, we ask: Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? What happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place in the given regime of truth? This is what Foucault describes as “the desubjugation of the subject in the play of . . . the politics of truth.”1 Another way of putting this is the following: What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be? And this way of putting the question, which is Foucault’s,

Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović

With reference to the ongoing economic “crisis,” several European and American scholars discuss the concept and politics of precarity. As their conversation shows, precarity is inextricable from our ever-shifting understandings of bodies, labor, politics, the public sphere, space, life, the human, and what it means to live with others.

O parentesco é sempre tido como heterossexual

A partir do debate ocorrido na Franca a respeito da legalizacao das unioes entre homossexuais, a autora conclui que tomar posicao a favor ou contra nessa questao e aceitar os termos nos quais o debate esta posto e considera os riscos politicos e teoricos de circunscrever uma realidade bem mais complexa.

Photography, War, Outrage

uation in which journalists agree to report only from the perspec tive established by military and governmental authorities. They traveled only on certain trucks, looked only at certain scenes, and relayed home only images and narratives of certain kinds of action. Embedded reporting implies that this mandated perspective would not itself become the topic of reporters who were offered access to the war on the condition that their gaze remained restricted to the established parameters of designated action. I want to suggest that embedded reporting has taken place in less explicit ways as well: one example is the agreement of the media not to show pictures of the war dead, our own or their own, on the grounds that that would be anti-American. Journalists and newspapers were denounced for showing coffins of the American war dead shrouded in flags. Such images should not be seen because they might arouse certain kinds of sentiments; the mandating of what could be seen?a concern with regulating content?was supplemented by control over the perspec tive from which the action and destruction of war could be seen. Another implicit occurrence of embedded reporting is in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The camera angle, the frame, the posed sub jects all suggest that those who took the photographs were actively involved in the perspective of the war, elaborating that perspective and even giving it further validity. In her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag remarks that this practice of embedded reporting begins earlier, with the coverage of the British campaign in the Falklands in 1982, where only two photojournalists were permitted to enter the region and no television broadcasts were allowed (65). Since that time, journalists have increasingly agreed to comply with the exigen cies of embedded reporting to secure access to the action. But what is the action to which access is then secured? In the two Iraq wars, the visual perspective that the Department of Defense permitted to the

Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity

Academic freedom has become a contested category in the United States. On the one hand, conservative scholars have sought to use the term to criticise what they perceive as political correctness in the academy, whereas progressive scholars have sought to bolster academic freedom as a principle that safeguards academic self-determination over and against corporate and government intrusion. Robert Post, for example, has argued that the way to preserve academic self-governance is to allow tenured faculty to make judgements about curriculum and appointments because they have undergone the relevant professional training in a given discipline and so are uniquely prepared to make these sorts of judgements. Protecting academic freedom, according to this view, depends upon our ability to protect the singular professional capacities that tenured faculty have assumed by virtue of professional training and practices of peer review.

Tráfico sexual: entrevista

Gayle Rubin e uma antropologa que escreveu grande numero de artigos muito influentes, entre os quais “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, “Thinking Sex”, “The Leather Menace” e “Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong: An Analysis of Anti-Pornography Politics”. Em breve a University of California Press vai publicar uma coletânea de ensaios seus. Atualmente ela esta escrevendo um livro baseado numa pesquisa etnografica e historica sobre uma comunidade de homens gays leather 1 de San Francisco. Rubin e militante do movimento feminista desde o final da decada de 1960, e teve intensa atuacao na politica gay e lesbica por mais de duas decadas. Ela foi uma critica apaixonada do movimento contra a pornografia e da agressao as minorias sexuais. Seu trabalho apresentou uma serie de sugestoes metodologicas para os estudos do feminismo e do homosssexualismo masculino que estabeleceram algumas balizas no processo de desenvolvimento de ambos os campos de estudo.

PERFORMATIVIDAD, PRECARIEDAD Y POLÍTICAS SEXUALES

Gender performativity is one of the core concepts in Judith Butler’s work. In this paper Butler re-examines this term and completes it with the idea of precarity, by making a reference to those who are exposed to injury, violence and displacement, those who are in risk of not being qualified as a subject of recognition, There are issues that constantly arise in the nationstates, such as claiming a right when there is not a right to claim, or being forced to follow certain norms in order to change these norms. This is particularly relevant in the sexual policies that are shaped within the nation-states.