Judith Butler: disturbance, provocation and the ethics of non-violence

Abstract

To be human seems to mean being in a predicament that one cannot solve. - Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 103 Troubled thought Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) profoundly shaped critical inquiry in the decade that followed its publication across many intellectual fields, and it is undoubtedly Butler's most widely read book. When I came across it belatedly in 1995, I read it cover to cover in a day, intrigued and provoked by the ideas I encountered. Above all, however, I remember that I found myself repeatedly disturbed by the photograph on the cover, to which I would turn again and again, pausing from my reading, and puzzling over how what the image seemed to me to show might correlate with what I took the text to say. The front cover of the edition I read shows in grainy black-and-white a girl and a boy, aged about seven or eight, but the boy is in girls' clothing - a dress and ruffled pinafore matching those of the slighter taller girl next to him. At least, I took him to be a boy. It looked to me like a boy's face. Yet when I eventually turned to the back cover, I learnt that the photo is captioned 'Agnes and Inez Albright'. Are these, then, really two girls - one of whom looks like a boy - or does the boy not only wear girls' clothes but bear a girl's name? And why did it bother me that I neither knew the answer nor found it easy to square my experience of the image with what Butler seems to argue in this work? In the discussion that follows, I take the trouble this image presents as a point of departure for an initial question about how best to read Butler's work - one that turns in important ways on what we make of the idea of trouble that is at the centre of her ethical and political thought.1 I shall argue that to trouble and to be troubled, to be willing to remain in the space of trouble, are elements in Butler's valorization of and plea for the value of disturbance. Disturbance of the kind that Butler is interested in is often experienced as intolerable, indeed as a provocation or assault on the self that demands a violent reaction in return. In her most recent work, however, Butler has sought to elaborate how the experience of disturbance might be met with non-violence rather than violence, through a struggle to avoid threatening another, in reiteration of one's own experience of being threatened. We shall see that for Butler, violence belongs within reiterative patterns internal to our perceptions of what is normal or natural, and that non-violence foregrounds the ethical question of how to respond in a scene in which that question tends to vanish behind a sense of what it is 'necessary' to do. Let me begin, however, from the problem of reading and how a certain way of reading Butler would lead one to wonder about the nature of the disturbance presented by this image. Perhaps the most obvious message one draws from reading Gender Trouble is that in this work Butler is advocating some kind of radical constructivism with respect to sexual difference - radical in the sense that she suggests the questions feminism has raised about the naturalness of gender differences must come to inflect sexual difference as well, making the very idea that there are two 'natural' sexes uncertain. Gender Trouble argues that we have to go beyond the tacit or explicit acknowledgment that feminism has made of the existence of two clear biological sexes, while holding that these are distinct from and indifferent to the acculturated gender differences we might properly take as the target of political change and re-education. For 'sex' is itself, Butler argues, a gendered category: 'Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregi ven sex... gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established/ '2 If sex appears, as we might think, ordinarily, as an aspect of the natural or biological world, Butler's argument is that it is because it has been constituted as such. …