Butler's Work Research Articles

Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens

In this paper we combine the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1987) with Judith Butler's (1990, 1993, 2004, 2009) work to follow the rhizomatic becomings of young people's affective relations in a range of on- and off-line school spaces. In particular we explore how events that may be designated as sexual cyberbullying are constituted and how they are mediated by technology (such as texting or in/through social networking sites). Drawing on findings from two different studies looking at teens’ uses of and experiences with social networking sites, Arto in Denmark, and Bebo in the UK, we use this approach to think about how affects flow, are distributed, and become fixed in assemblages. We map how affects are manoeuvred and potentially disrupted by young people, suggesting that in the incidences discussed affects travel as well as stick in points of fixation. We argue that we need to grasp both affective flow and fixity in order to gain knowledge of how subjectification of the gendered/classed/racialised/sexualised body emerges. A Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian frame helps us to map some of these affective complexities that shape sexualized cyberbully events; and to recognize technologically mediated lines of flight when subjectifications are at least temporarily disrupted and new terms of recognition and intelligibility staked out.

The absent piece of skin: Gendered, racialized and territorial inscriptions of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war

AbstractThis paper addresses how the wombs of women and the absent skin on the circumcised penises of men become the predominant sites on which racialized and gendered discourses operating during the Bangladesh War are inscribed. This is explored by examining instances of sexual violence by Pakistani soldiers and their local Bengali collaborators. The prevalence of these discourses in colonial documents about the Bengali Muslims underscores the role of history, the politics of identity and in the process, establishes its link with the rapes of Bangladeshi women and men. Through this, the relationship between sexual violence and historical contexts is highlighted. I locate the accounts of male violations by the West Pakistani army within the historical and colonial discourses relating to the construction of the Bengali Muslim and its intertextual, contemporary citational references in photographs and interviews.I draw on Judith Butler's and Marilyn Strathern's work on gendering and performativity to address the citational role of various practices of discourses of gender and race within colonial documents and its application in a newer context of colonization and sexual violence of women and men during wars. The role of photographs and image-making is intrinsic to these practices. The open semiotic of the photographs allows an exploration of the territorial identities within these images and leads to traces of the silence relating to male violations. Through an examination of the silence surrounding male sexual violencevis-à-visthe emphasis on the rape of women in independent Bangladesh, it is argued that these racialized and gendered discourses are intricately associated to the link between sexuality and the state in relation to masculinity.

Passing for Human in Science Fiction: Comparing the TV Series Battlestar Galactica and V

This article discusses passing for human and constructions of humanity in the original and re-imagined versions of science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica and V. On the one hand, humanity is negotiated in the series through inhabiting “the right kind” of body; on the other hand, it is constructed by taking part in certain performances. The article examines the role that gender, sexuality, and race play in the process of passing for human, and how they intersect in constructing the signifying practices that mark what is human and non-human. These intersections are connected to cultural and political dynamics current at the time of the series' creation. By drawing on Judith Butler's work on gender performativity and Sara Ahmed's work on sensations, emotions, and encounters, the text establishes how humanity is constructed in the series through encounters with others, and how signs of humanness and inhumanness stick and slide between humans and “the others” in these encounters.

Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain (review)

Reviewed by: Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain Elena Capraroiu Herrmann, Gina . Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2010. Pp. 246. ISBN 978-252-03469-5. Written in Red is a study of Communist autobiographical writing in Spain. What distinguishes Gina Herrmann's work from the existing scholarship on the subject is its broad, international perspective and a way of examining key issues such as Communism, the self, and literature, that brings to the fore tensions and "relations of contingency," not of "substitution" (7). Herrmann takes six Spanish writers—Dolores Ibárruri, Jorge Semprún, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Tomás Pàmies, and Teresa Pàmies—and studies their autobiographical work within the frame of larger practices of self-representation, especially the ones emerging in the Soviet Union during Stalin's time. One underlying assumption of the book, used as a guiding principle in the organization of the study, is that Communist subjects do not become who they are by keeping the public and private spheres of their lives apart, or simply by opposing political power. In line with Foucault [End Page 760] and Judith Butler's work on power and subjection, Herrmann argues that subjects constitute themselves through a process of internalization of power. In the case of Communist cultures, Herrmann points out, voluntary and mandated self-reflection lay at the core of the process of identity formation. To the extent that people were living in a new society, the state endorsed introspection. But as the act of looking into oneself turned into an object of state scrutiny, autobiography often became confession. Herrmann uses state-generated life narratives as a point of reference and claims that these institutionalized stories function as a "template," a "blueprint" for other Communist literary autobiographies. The introduction actually reproduces a questionnaire given to party members in the Soviet Union and Western Europe. The document reveals the paradigm of class and religious oppositions and the story of conversion, which, Herrmann argues, transfers to the structure of the Spanish Communist memoirs. What Herrmann finds surprising is that certain traits of the institutionalized autobiography surface in the Spanish Communist memoirs written in the post-Stalinist years and, in some cases, from a dissident perspective, thus indicating that memoirists drew a line between party affiliation and the belief in Communism as a social model. The persistence of the Communist ideal even in the life stories of dissidents, such as Semprún and Teresa Pàmies, leads Herrmann, following François Furet's work, to underscore the importance of "ideology as sentiment" (6). The idea generates new interpretations, Herrmann notes, and rightfully so, because it guides Communist studies toward matters of subjectivity and language expression. In this sense, the inclusion of life stories of Soviet and western Communists next to the questionnaires would have opened a productive dialogue, a crossfire between personal and collective forms of verbal expression. In fact, Herrmann's approach to Written in Red is intersectional. The five chapters are organized according to how writers "work through, resist, or comply with party-initiated practices of self-representation" (x). The first chapter concerns the "organic Communist memoir." Herrmann identifies a complete overlapping of Dolores Ibárruri's autobiography with the aesthetic of Socialist Realism. Although published in Moscow in 1962, after Khrushchev's secret report, the memoir leaves out all polemical aspects of Stalinism and controversies inside the Spanish Communist Party. An important argument in this chapter is that Ibárruri strategically employs public manifestations of maternal sacrifice and widowhood to shape her political identity. The second chapter considers how each writer constructs a story of conversion vis-à-vis traditional conversion tales and Stalinist self-writing. Chapter 3 follows chronologically to the moment of the Spanish Civil War. Besides the fact that the war sets aside Spanish memoirs from other Communist autobiographies, Herrmann focuses on the "codification of wartime gender roles" (87) and the importance of "public happiness," a concept taken from Hannah Arendt, to emphasize the emotional value of war experience in women's self-narratives. The fourth chapter studies "memoirs of disavowal." Central to the analysis here is the split position of...

‘Circumcision: everyone's talking about it’: legislation, social pressure and the body

This article reads Megan Lindholm's short story ‘Cut’ alongside Judith Butler's work on legal structures as an intervention into debates about the relationship between the body and the state. Focusing on issues relating to female genital cutting, I argue that Lindholm's narrative draws attention to the ways in which pre-political conceptions of gender undermine attempts to establish women's rights over their bodies through legislation. By challenging the distinction between female genital cutting and cosmetic surgery, ‘Cut’ compels us to reconsider the ways and the purposes for which we make use of the law. The second half of the article will consider the ways in which ‘Cut’, much like Butler, frames its response to these tensions in primarily individual terms. I argue that the valuing of individual over collective action risks making effective activism appear impossible and leaves both writers unable to explore crucial means of collective response to the issues to which they rightly and astutely draw attention. Finally I consider some of the possibilities for collective action arising from ‘Cut’ that resonate with successful activism in the real world, that are not fully explored in the text.

“The Walking Wounded”: Youth, Public Education, and the Turn to Precarious Pedagogy

In his reflections on the realities of being young in postwar America, Paul Goodman warned in 1956 that living and learning under capitalist societies would stay “desperately hard” for youth so lon...

Performativity between Logos and Nomos: Law, Temporality and the Non-Economic Analysis of Power

Judith Butler's signature theorizing of performativity requires attention to full ethico-political range of meanings of law, from self-discipline to convention to juridical logic of sovereignty. That is, performativity spans continuum across political rule and ethical rules, and play of processes of subjectivization, subjecthood and subjection. Problematizing sovereign subject, Butler unpacks a priori, intending legal subject by reading law at once as text, thus cracking open self-referential and universalist moves of sealed juridical logic, and also as context, as norms that are always on move. Considering law's performativity challenges authorial and authoritative transparency of law--its sovereignty--by demanding a temporally robust approach to very idea of context. A theorizing of iteration and citationality, performativity poses context as more than just historical and empirical framework for law, contemplating it instead as historicity of law itself, of law understood as ever-shifting convention, or always already situated norms that become sites for citation. My work on installation of rule of law in colonial India, particularly colonial law's staging of society as market, and its temporal politics, that is, its production of modern, contracting economic subjects as opposed to anachronistic subjects of custom, brings me back to these thematics of convention, context and historicity in Butler's work. In British India, a mission to systematize law confronted array of customs and conventions among local populations. Butler innovatively engages such tensions across different forms of law. A deconstmction of speech act, idea of performativity reveals itself as a temporal play that cuts across two broad concepts of law: logos and nomos. Logos, traditionally translated as reason or speech, also evokes a divine performative, word or sovereign command, as well as notion of law as a sealed logic or system. Law as nomos, on other hand, refers to law as convention, what is done and what is accepted. The idea of nomos evokes ways of being, settled norms and values, while at same time exposing a problem of agency: who is agent of convention? In legal scholarship, both explicitly and implicitly, concept of law as nomos has informed robust readings of legal regimes as lived worlds, as normative universes that are made, maintained and remade. (1) Butler's performativity complicates and finesses such critical approaches. To show how, I draw attention to temporal and spatial situatedness of convention and pose nomos as a marker of context, its consistent remaking, and so its (im)possibility. I would like then to emphasize Butler's wide-angle approach to law, which renders her a unique legal theorist whose legal philosophy stems from a relentless focus on slippages across, and temporalities of, law as nomos and as logos. After discussing Excitable Speech to highlight these moves, I will consider ways in which they cite and speak to another influential mapping of ethico-political continuum of law: Foucault's analysis of discourses of governing/government, particularly in his late College de France lectures, and what he calls non-economic analysis of power, which informs his genealogy of governmentality. (2) In a much-cited early lecture, Foucault asks if it is possible to imagine relations of power differently from classical models of social contract that structure liberal democratic legal systems today, models which conceptualize power as an economy or exchange of rights. (3) Butler's theorizing of performativity challenges liberal templates of law and legal procedure in just this way. To further pursue this connection between Butler and Foucault on relationship of law and governmentality, and to bring early Butler of Excitable Speech (4) to Butler of Precarious Life, (5) I will pose questions that are opened by story of rule of law in British India, especially legal institutionalization of that ubiquitous modern social imaginary, the economy. …

Law in Drag: Trials and Legal Performativity

To import Judith Butler's work into a conversation about law to unfurl a provocative new map of a familiar landscape and to revel in the pleasure of traveling it, off-road, looking anew at landmarks so many have passed by for so long. She has a way of talking about law that pins down its complicity in a stubbornly enduring social order even as she breathes life into it as a domain for exploration and critique. The force of her thinking--for me, particularly her thinking about performativity --shatters conventional ideas about what law by enabling us to ask how it enunciated, what it produces, how it done. Can one think of law as a kind of formation in itself, one that authorizes itself via what Butler has called a sovereign conceit but that in fact called into being in the very act of calling others to account? Taking up performativity this way might seem slightly off-color. After all, as Butler has framed it, the interpellative process has a political edge to it. Its purpose, as she proposes in Excitable Speech, is to indicate and establish a in subjection. (1) One could hardly argue that law a subject in subjection. And yet, in what follows, I will try to elaborate on the ways in which at least one kind of legal operation, the trial, implicated in an interpellative process (2) that destabilizes its own relation to state power, though neither fully nor innocently. Moreover, I will argue that the trial a legal space ripe for critical analyses of identity formation, a place in which the norms that bring certain kinds of moral or moralized subjects into being are contested rather than assumed. In trials, alterity (that is, difference or otherness) within norms can be at least partially exposed because of the ways in which trials stage their own performative relation to law. Though I think one could make this claim as it relates to trials generally, I'd like to focus on one particularly self-reflexive trial--self-reflexive because of the way it self-consciously stages a fracturing of the meaning of law--by way of illustrating the incisiveness of the concept of performativity in complicating notions of the juridical. While the arguments that follow should not be understood as a celebration of trials as radically transformative legal spaces, either for the law or for the social subjects that come before it, thinking about their performative enunciations of law does, in my view, open up a way to analyze moments of disruption and foreclosure in the ongoing citational processes that constitute social identity. (3) Trials always begin with a story, but even in its barest outlines this one perhaps more remarkable than most. In 1901, a sixteen-year-old woman named Evelyn Nesbit first met the great New York architect and aesthete Stanford White. (4) A striking beauty, she had pulled her family out of poverty by moving from Pittsburgh to New York to find success as a photographic model and budding stage performer. (5) White, in his late forties, had a penchant for young beauties and he drew Nesbit into an extravagant world of glittering champagne parties and private modeling sessions before either seducing or raping her (depending on the account) in the mirrored bedroom of his private penthouse suite in the first Madison Square Garden (a spectacular building of his design). (6) Though clearly traumatized by the event, Nesbit became White's mistress even as she was being courted by other wealthy playboys, including her future husband Harry Thaw. She relied on White for money, of course, but they also appear to have been deeply entranced by one another, and though their affections eventually waned, Nesbit would never--even during her testimony in Thaw's trials--fully renounce him. (7) Born to a wealthy Pittsburgh family, Harry Thaw lived an eccentric and profligate life, as debauched in its own way as was White's. Having seen Nesbit onstage at around the same moment White came into her life, Thaw's attraction to her quickly turned into an obsession, and once she began to separate herself from White, Thaw leaped in as her protector and financial supporter. …

Spatial Performativity/Spatial Performance

This paper considers Judith Butler's exploration of the symbolic and iterative relations of gender and the extension of her ideas into architectural discourse. The paper is set out in two main parts. The first introduces Butler's notion of performativity, in particular looking at how space operates in her text. The second part of the paper looks critically at how her work has been explored by architectural scholars; highlighted in this section is the translation of Butler's work into architecture through the lens of performance. This paper concludes by arguing that a synthesis between performance and performativity opens up a more nuanced theorisation of a subject who acts in space and time.

A Slow and Painful Crawl

Research Article| November 01 2010 A Slow and Painful Crawl: The Videos of Kent Anderson Butler Thomas McGovern Thomas McGovern THOMAS MCGOVERN is the author of Hard Boys + Bad Girls (2010) and Amazing Grace (2010) and a professor of art at California State University, San Bernardino. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2010) 38 (3): 8–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2010.38.3.8 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Thomas McGovern; A Slow and Painful Crawl: The Videos of Kent Anderson Butler. Afterimage 1 November 2010; 38 (3): 8–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2010.38.3.8 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2010 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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. …

The author, agency and suicide

In the essay, ‘What is an Author?’, Michel Foucault contends that ‘the author does not precede the works’. If this is the case, then what happens when the notion of the author as never outside discourse is grafted to suicide? What happens when suicide – most commonly defined as a deliberate taking of one's life – is read through the idea that the one who is doing the taking does not precede it? Does this not obliterate agency in suicide: the key ingredient necessary to marking the individual as the sole author of their death? This article responds to these questions by first considering what Foucault's contention might offer to understanding the constitution of agency in the act of suicide. The author then draws on elements of Judith Butler's work to consider a way of thinking of suicide which furthers Foucault's contribution. The article argues that positioning suicide as already part of discourse does not undermine the individual as the author of death, or makes the act of taking one's life any less deliberate. Conclusions are then drawn with a comment on Foucault's position on death being power's limit, and what this might mean for understanding suicide.

The Transversality of New Materialism

This article centres around three ways in which ‘new materialism’ or ‘neomaterialism’—terms coined by DeLanda and Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s—can be called ‘transversal’. New materialism is a cultural theory that does not privilege culture, but focuses on what Haraway would call ‘naturecultures’. It explores a monist perspective of the human being, disposed of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities until today, by giving special attention to matter, as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought. New materialism, a cultural theory inspired by the thoughts of Deleuze, that spurs a renewed interest in philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, shows how cultured humans are always already in nature, and how nature is necessarily cultured, how the mind is always already material, and how matter is necessarily something of the mind. New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions that are haunting a cultural theory that is standing on the brink of both the modern and the post-postmodern era. The transcendental and humanist traditions, which are manifold yet consistently predicated on dualist structures, continue to stir debates that have a stifling effect on the field (think of the feminist polemic concerning the failed materialism in the work of Butler, and of the Saussurian/Lacanian linguistic heritage in media and cultural studies). New materialism allows for the conceptualisation of the travelling of the fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture, and opens up active theory formation. The three transversalities concern disciplinarity, paradigms and the spatiotemporality of theory.

Preparing for politics: Judith Butler's ethical dispositions

The question of Judith Butler's ‘politics’ and their normative justification has been raised by critics and supporters alike for some time. The number of recent texts dedicated to this topic suggests that it remains an unresolved and still pressing question. I argue that in order to identify and evaluate the political implications of Butler's work, we must first recognize the relationship and distinction between four vectors of her thinking: her diagnosis of the human condition, her expression of specific normative aspirations, her defense of a distinct ethical comportment and finally her theory of political engagement. I conclude that Butler implicitly counsels the cultivation of certain ethical dispositions, including generosity, humility, patience and restraint, as part of a practice of preparing to engage in a kind of politics that breaks radically with the mastery- and sovereignty-seeking variety all too familiar to us in contemporary times.

“The Male Preserve of Martyrdom”

Suicide bombing occupies an uneasy place in relation to suicide in newsprint media. It is often described simultaneously as suicide, murder, and terrorist attack. It almost always involves the death of more than one person in a very public manner. When placed alongside cultural questions of gender in suicide, the uneasiness of suicide bombing intensifies, dominated by deeply biased and contradictory interpretations of gender. Guided by Debord's notion of spectacle and Butler's work on naming, I will argue that what is represented about Palestinian female suicide bombers as examples of suicide-related deaths is part of materializing suicide as masculine and masculinist, hailed by gendered understandings of suicidal violence and agency. Such a production, I will also argue, is rendered by race as another condition of understanding how gender comes to reside in suicide. I will begin by examining the articulations of Palestinian suicide bombers in selected Australian newspapers. I will then interrogate the meanings and assumptions made available in what is represented, and the ways by which spectacle and language gender suicide.

Seasoned Equity Offerings: Stock Market Liquidity and Duration of the Completion Cycle

Short-term cash needs play a critical role in equity issuance decisions. Consequently, the ease with which an offering is completed can have a direct effect of the cost of raising equity. Extending the work of Butler, Gullon, and Weston (2005), we examine the relation between equity market liquidity and the ease with which an offering is completed, as proxied by the duration of the completion cycle. Using a sample of 3,844 seasoned equity offerings over the period 1984-2008, we find that firms with greater pre-SEO liquidity are more likely to complete an offering sooner. Our results hold across different liquidity measures and alternative regression specifications.

Coming to know oneself through experiential education

This article draws on the work of Foucault to explore why students on a residential program talk about learning about themselves as if it were an epiphany and one of the most empowering aspects of the program. Foucault's schema of turning to the self suggests that the pleasure students experience at ‘discovering’ themselves is a logical response to what he terms as one of the most powerful technologies of the self. Butler's work on giving an account of oneself is used to investigate the terms through which learning about the self occurs. She extends and inverts Foucault's schema, suggesting that one is only required to give an account of the self in the face of another. To become self-knowing requires recognition by another and recognition of others. While contemporary experiential education has been shaped by the maxim that nothing is more relevant to us than ourselves, I argue that perhaps this maxim should read; ‘Nothing is more relevant to us than those around us’.

Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature Ranen Omer-Sherman Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African American and Jewish-American Literature, by Catherine Rottenberg. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2008. 180 pp. $50.00. Performing Americanness is the kind of unprecedented, richly comparative study that significantly changes the nature of the conversation by cogently presenting how African-American and Jewish-American writers of the early twentieth century narrated the critical categories of identity that enlivened their era. Rottenberg begins with the important premise that both minority literary traditions experienced vital transformations at roughly the same moment; aware of their inherent liminality, writers from both backgrounds strategically created a place for themselves within American letters analogous to the struggle of each group to accommodate itself in American society as a whole. The seminal novels addressed in Rottenberg's six lean and lively chapters include classics of the Harlem Renaissance such as James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen's [End Page 210] novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), alongside representative texts of the early Jewish-American literary canon: Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements (1923), Arrogant Beggar (1927), and others. In my courses on the dynamic of "Passing" in twentieth-century American literature I was long ago struck by the glaring fact that both Johnson's and Cahan's troubled protagonists conclude their narrative journeys by expressing regret for having somehow failed to keep faith with their own better natures. Rottenberg is the first writer I have come across to successfully delineate the implications of that shared narrative dynamic, and she does so in ways that greatly complicate the notion of the individual's "authenticity" or "essence" while also raising important questions about each group's collective identity. And of course such an analysis is fully warranted; after all, during the period that Rottenberg examines, Jewishness was still mediated within a racial discourse of identity, not only by others but by Jews themselves. Thus, she argues that the conclusions of both Autobiography and Rise of David Levinsky alert readers to "the coercive aspect of race identification, and the punishments meted out to subjects who attempt to identify differently" (p. 118). Rottenberg seeks to transcend the well-worn paradigm of reading early Jewish American works as struggles with assimilation by aligning them with the performative/reiterative nature of passing narratives. In this context she adroitly draws on Judith Butler's groundbreaking work on social identity and performativity: "performativity, as the most efficacious form of positive power, tends to reinforce the hegemonic order and upholds existing hierarchal power relations. Reiteration produces the illusion of an identifiable and stable referent for regulatory ideals" (p. 28). Butler's theoretical paradigm exposes the inevitable dissonance between normative roles and actual social behavior or lived experience. Hence, Rottenberg is excited by the premise that the novels she discusses each "dramatize a certain moral imperative—the necessity of ensuring that, at any given historical moment, there are always many possible, socially sanctioned, and thus normative ways of performing Americanness" (p. 15). Precisely because hegemonic order requires the reiteration of racial codes for its survival, avenues for potentially subversive variation open up with exactly the same frequency. Deeply engaged with the critical stakes over whether Larsen's Passing, a milestone in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, should be read as an argument for passing as a subversive cultural strategy or one that merely serves the individual's separate survival, Rottenberg posits that its two female protagonists each dramatize the "regulatory ideals that circulate and operate in the service of particular relations of power" (p. 35) and, even more significantly, reveal how in the dominant culture, "though whiteness is privileged [End Page 211] over and against blackness . . . the very repetition and circulation of different, and, at times contradictory, racial norms create the possibility of subversion" (p. 50). Similarly, Yezierska's fiction, while exposing the rigidity of American class structures of the 1920s (which bear roughly similar regulatory ideals to the racial norms critiqued in the racial novel of passing), present...

Performing Gender in Augustan Criticism and Pope's To a Lady

AbstractThis piece explores the performance of gender in literary criticism of the period 1660‐1740 and in Pope's To A Lady. Arguing that the use of gendered terms in literary criticism is part of the performance of gender, the essay draws on Judith Butler's work. The essay traces the use of explicitly and implicitly gendered terms in literary criticism in order to suggest the gender value assigned to particular technical aspects of verse. The essay closes with a reading of To a Lady which argues that the poem explores the relationship between the ideas of female inconstancy and male artistic virtue.

Queer Politics in Schools: A Rancièrean reading

The perceptibility and intelligibility of queer students and teachers have been a central theme in queer politics in education. Can queer teachers be ‘out’ to their colleagues and students? Can queer relationships be seen at the school prom? Can queerness be seen and heard? At the same time, perceptibility and intelligibility are by no means uncontested political goals. This paper analyzes different school initiatives by and/or for queer students and asks how political these initiatives are from the perspective of Jacques Rancière's conception of politics. In particular, it employs Rancière's work on the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible) to analyze conditions of visibility and sayability and the political risks and benefits that gaining visibility and sayability carries for queer students and teachers. The paper brings Rancière's distinction between identification and subjectification into conversation with Judith Butler's work on the governing of intelligibility by social norms, and the promise of ‘insurrectionary speech’. Finally, Rancière's work on the role of allies in political interventions that shift the distribution of the sensible provides a fresh reading of Gay‐Straight Alliances in schools and the work of queer allies more generally.