Judith Butler

When I registered for the course, I was in the process of signing up for classes I had to take. I didn’t have a choice in most of them, so I didn’t do much research into what each lesson plan held. However, during our first day, I was pleasantly surprised by the goal of the class – learning about literary criticism and, more importantly, the theories that went along with it. I felt confident because I already had experience in these fields, and this class would just throw me into the deep end of…

The question of whether the relationship between Feminism and Postmodernism is or has been a productive one (especially for the former) is one that has been asked for a generation now. In its wake has emerged philosophies and theories which have profoundly challenged, if not altered, the shape and direction of Feminism, much to the ongoing dismay of many of its advocates. While the often-contentious discourse around these “two leading currents of our time” (17) did not begin with the debate that…

Expectations and standards for women in society are unrealistic and outrageous. These thoughts of what a woman should be like and how they should behave have been around for centuries. Woman are often times looked down upon when they don’t look like how society tells them to and this can cause a number of things to go wrong in their self image and life. Unfortunately these high expectations have had an extremely negative impact on females. In Margie Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll” she discusses the…

In this video, Judith Butler interviewed Sunaura Taylor, who has arthrogryposis. She described how it feel as disability, the struggles she faced daily, and how people judge her. I think this is exhibit because Taylor talked about her personal experience to shows how the disabled being treated. Taylor said, “I can pick up coffee with my mouth, but that becomes more difficult because of the normalizing standards of our movements” (Youtube). Taylor said this to shows how other people can make her…

Gender inequality is an issue that has been happening for thousands of years, affecting cultures from all around the world. Women have endured since ancient times the title as the inferior being, the “other” gender besides the man, the weaker and less valuable specimen. This gender inequality created a huge difference between men and women, placing women’s rights under men’s jurisdiction, which dictated what women were and were not allowed to do. This issue was analyzed by the French and…

Growing up in a world where there is so much pressure to be successful, numerous people are frightened of being ostracized for being themselves. As a young child, completely care free, opinions of others or how they might look at me never crossed my mind. But the older we get, conforming to the rules became the norm, a drastic change occurred as a yearning for acceptance grew. In the articles by Bordo, Appiah and Foucault, readers can see a range of views presented as they elaborate further into…

When I took the AP Language and Composition course my junior year of high school, I scored a three on the exam. As a student who always enjoyed English and did well in the subject, this was a low point, but . However, I still loved literature and knewI still wanted to become an English major at college. That is how I ended up in Dr. Clermont-Ferrand’s “Introduction to English Studies” class. Looking back at my work throughout this course, I noticed that I have a slight preference in applying…

But, Butler warns, philosophy’s transcendentalism, the false suggestive of universals, won’t deliver us there. Indeed, it is the very opposite – an “ungroundedness” – that informs our “contemporary “agency” (131) (touching upon the theme of a vulnerable universal from her first essay). Responding directly to Benhabib’s criticism, Butler notes her misreading of the “doer beyond the deed” (as opposed to the “doer behind…

1. Consult your reading from last week from Foucault and this week’s reading from Judith Butler. Using direct quotes from both Butler and Foucault, explain how Butler comes from of a Foucauldian tradition. What do they have in common? (4 marks, maximum 300 words) It is evident in Butler’s reading that she comes from a Foucauldian tradition. Foucault’s idea that discourse is “controlled, selected, organized” (Foucault, 1996) in the sense that what comes to be accepted as truth is based on a…

This article defines what Butler in her book Judith Butler introduction gender trouble chapter one: “subjects of sex/gender/desire” wants to convey to the reader. Butler presumes that there is an already accessible feminist known as "women.' Many feminists believe that developing a female identity is crucial to building awareness on women's political problems. Butler confronts this. She does not suppose that the concept of "woman" is a well-defined classification. Society constructs subjects…