[rec] Theory is more fun than Literature (at least some of the time)

[kwritten]

This is an American Cultural Studies // Literary Theory rec-post. This is not - by any means - an all-inclusive list of the subject. In fact, it's pretty narrow in scope as my research in Uni focused primarily on the 19thC (why I'm writing a thesis on contemporary fandom is a question I still ask myself on a daily fucking basis because I do NOT

Comments

[belecrivain]

" To claim that sexual difference is more fundamental than racial difference is effectively to assume that sexual difference is white sexual difference, and that whiteness is not a form of racial difference." You are going to have to break that one down for me, as my reading finds it pretty repulsive.

[kwritten]

She's talking about how the color line and the gender line are related, basically. She's saying that anyone who says that sex is a more fundamental difference than racial difference is basically saying that there is no difference between a Black woman and a White woman because they are both women first and racial difference is subservient to any other form of difference.

Or - she is also saying that a Black Gay Male's experience will be different than a White Gay Male's experience and claiming that there is no racial difference is wrong.

This particular passage is in her chapter on Nella Larson's text Passing which is about a black female who "passes" as white. In her discussion of the main female character's sexual identity, Butler is careful NOT to assume that sexual identity trumps racial identity

[belecrivain]

The "identity" part was what was missing; I read sexual difference as *biological* difference, so either she was arguing that there was no biological differences between the sexes, which is folly (not that three isn't a spectrum of differences, and the binary categorization has its limits, but), or that there *was* biological differences between *races* to equal those of distinctive genitalia, which, no.

[kwritten]

Actually one of her arguments is that we infer more "biological" difference than there actually is.

Her theory of Performativity is that bodies do not perform gender and are constantly contesting it. Which is a highly fascinating theory and I've written many an essay that takes it into account. ((Basically that there's no such thing as "women are shaped like an hourglass" which I think Sungjong has made fully clear.))

No really though - psychoanalysis theory is not generally going to talk about biology. Except for when it does. IGNORE THAT STATEMENT! ((Because the way we define things changes how we think about things, etc etc. Semiotics theory really fucks with the universe.))

[kwritten]

Also okay I found more quotes from that chapter discussing the characters and their relationships to Whiteness and sexuality that might help clear up the meaning of that particular quote::

Irene herself is in a double bind: caught between the prospect of becoming free from an ideology of “race” uncritical in its own masculinism and classism, on the one hand, and the violations of white racism that attend the deprivation of black women’s sexuality, on the other.

Both Irene and Clare are interpellated by a set of symbolic norms governing black female sexuality, then the symbolic is not merely organized by “phallic power,” but by a “phallicism” that is centrally sustained by racial anxiety and sexualized rituals of racial purification.______________________________________________________

[belecrivain]

...that Butler is nearly unintelligible if you haven't spent hours training your brain to think it over.

You are hitting on -- what's the opposite of a kink? -- a problem I have had for YEARS, namely ever since spring of 1996 when I had a really awful English 10 class. (The English 10 series of classes being designed to be your first first-year English class at Swarthmore.) It was great, in that it introduced me to reader-response and new historicism, but it also introduced me to Bad Academic Writing. And BAW was the main reason I did not become an English major -- it drives me nuts when writing gets so tangled up in itself that it becomes another barrier to entry. I will take your word for it that Butler is worth the work, as I trust your judgment, but on the whole I think that there has been this trend of taking dense writing and allowing it to turn into BAW, to the point that clear writing gets devalued, and I get lost in a sea of ARRRGH.

[kwritten]

Okay so my hackles are raised?

I have a *very* emotional connection to Judith Butler especially with regards to the idea that her theories are lost behind bad writing.

When I was first introduced to Butler I was in my first semester of Grad School in a classroom of about 12-14 students. There were TWO Straight White Males, one gay guy, and the rest of us were socially awkward Female English majors.

Straighties liked to take over the class and prove their manliness - finding it especially worthy of lol to be disrespectful to our teeny Asian Female professor.

On the day of Butler, one Straightie had the gall to YELL at the professor that Butler's argument was "stupid" and that she's a bad writer

[kwritten]

(I am grinning maniacally because I'm 90% convinced that if you read certain papers of mine, they would go into that category of "Bad Academic Writing")

[belecrivain]

My Eng 10 prof did come off as a jerk and I once had to throw a book to get his attention and he disliked everyting I wrote. but that is a separate point