dmariel, Cixous and Butler

Cixous discusses the way in which we live in a world full of binary oppositions. Everything we think of is in relation to its opposite, or compared to something else. Much like
our previous theorist Macherey believed, we rely on interconnecting things in order to understand. Everything we know and understand is intertextual. Cixous presents the question of whether or not all of these binary’s relate back to the concept of man and woman, activity and passivity. “Are all concepts, codes and values-to a binary system, related to ‘the’ couple, man/woman?”
Cixous and Butler both discuss their essays in the form of gender and binary oppositions. Cixous explains how these binary oppositions create hierarchies, and Butler continues on by saying that “power produces the subjects they subsequently come to represent”. It is in this way that feminism has been defined, or not defined...”this has seemed obviously important considering the pervasive cultural condition in which women’s lives were either misrepresented or not represented at all.”
Earlier in the semester, we discussed binary opposition when learning about the theorists Roland Barthes and DeSaussure. DeSaussure states that “language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others”, therefore reiterating the fact that the words within a binary opposition define one another by comparing themselves. In addition, Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism comes into play here. We learn most about other cultures by creating them as a binary to ours. They are different and exotic, therefore the opposite of ourselves. Binary oppositions are constantly at work, and I would agree with DeSaussure that they are the foundation of our literary existence and understanding. I think that both Cixous and Butler are trying to get across the point that women are constantly being described as this ‘other’ to men, they are always the opposite of the strong binary. This is how the perception of feminism has been created from the roots of the English language.