Judith Butler

The Marxist Paradigm Definition Marxism sees humans as communal, creative producers, who are conscious, autonomous, and have free will (Mullaly, 2007). Marxists value all individuals on the simple basis of being human, not on how ‘superior’ they appear to be (Mullaly, 2007). They consider production to be the nature of all societies, and the mode of the production alters the society it is in (Mullaly, 2007). They have the same view of the nation-state as the social democratic view, which is…

Many individuals have been both emotionally or physically harmed because they are not like everybody else. Judith Butler shares a story of a boy who walked and talked differently, and was often described as feminine. He committed suicide after hearing snide remarks and withstanding physical harm due to his “abnormal” actions. Females and males have conformed to act…

Gender has played a distinct role in my life since before I can remember. A gendered upbringing opened my eyes to normative social influence, structural inequality and alternative sexuality. As a boy, I was taught to erase any signs of “femininity” in my demeanour and expected to conceal almost all “effeminate” proclivities. However, after years of introspection and coming to terms with my own sexuality, I discovered A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and The Awakening by Kate Chopin, books…

Did You Find Your Bitch in Me? “We’re not animals, am I right?” (Schebetta, 2007) This statement has run across almost everybody’s mind at some point or another. Within Dennis Schebetta’s short play Dog Park or Sexual Perversity in Magnuson we follow three dogs who are trying to get the attention of the “bitches” in the park. There are many scenes that are a questionable reflection of our society and how some minority groups are degraded and abused. Looking through the scope of feminist theory…

“Freedom as Marronage.” University of Chicago Press, 1 Feb. 2015 Judith Butler, Ernesto laulau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 2000; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2002; Yves Benot, Les lumière, l’esclavage, la colonisation , 2005; Laurent Dubois, “An enslaved enlightenment…

Feminism is still going on in today's society. Women are still fighting to gain equality. During Anne Bradstreet's time, women had to live up to the Puritan rules in their everyday life. They had to do the duties of woman and nothing else (Blackstock). Anne Bradstreet's father, Thomas Dudley, wanted his daughter to be well-educated and her works proved it (Blackstock). They published her works under her brother-in-law name because in the Puritan society, it was offensive to write poetry because…

The second “wolf” in this story is drastically subtler than the outwardly terrifying worm creature, this wolf is less physical and more conceptual. This ferocious and terrifying “wolf” is the universally known terrible feeling that we call grief. Grief is defined as “keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow; painful regret.” This definition fits perfectly with the story presented in Emily Carroll’s “Through the Woods” in the short story “The Nesting Place”. Our…

However, her language bears traces of an internalization of the oppressive social structure and an anxiety of authorship1 that prevents her from successfully establishing herself as autonomous. In this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate how Margaret Cavendish, through her poetry and prose, endeavors to achieve self-sovereignty through singularity but fails due to fear of social alienation from not just the patriarchal hegemony but also from the women of her era that perpetuated it. In The…

In the award-winning book Trumpet, a story about a jazz musician who lived his life as a man despite being born a girl, Jackie Kay drives both her characters and the reader into questioning some widely-accepted norms, including the correlation between biological sex and culturally-determined gender roles. The defiance of this conception is explicitly demonstrated via the novel’s elaboration on the process in which Joss Moody manages not only to deconstruct but also to reconstruct his gender…

Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts is a memoir that focuses on her relationship with her partner Harry,the changes both of them go through as Harry begins taking testosterone and Nelson becomes pregnant, and ends with her giving birth to their son. The Argonauts can be described as a book that has hit its cultural moment, a book that has come just in time. During her pregnancy, Nelson really begins to question some of the most controversial topics discussed throughout the world today. She…