JLO63O, Butler

“Juridical power inevitably ‘produces’ what it claims merely to represent; hence, politics must be concerned with this dual function of power: the juridical and the productive” (192).

Judith Butler addresses the issues with the political representation of women. She starts first, by readdressing this statement by saying that both representation and politics are the controversial terms to be dealt with. Representation, she says, constitutes an exclusive binary framework where the terms woman, female, etc. are identified only as comparisons to the patriarchal society. Politics, conversely, work in accordance with representation. Together, ‘they produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent.’

“A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation” (Foucault).

We can relate the feminist theories of Butler to Foucault’s concept of power and subjection. Last class, someone used the example of tying baby elephants up to a post. When they are younger, they are not strong enough to break away from that post. When they grow up, however, it is already inculcated that they cannot break away from the post, so they assume the role of staying near – never testing that they have the strength to break away. Similar to the relation of power constructs and political representations, you grow up hearing about repressive state apparatuses and it is instilled in you that someone is always watching and you should never break the law. You are a ‘subject before the law.’ Likewise, young women grow up encultured by ideological representations of the female. “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” – Simone de Beauvoir. Butler argues that binary representations are politically universal while culturally acclaimed.

It is the “power relations that both constitute ‘identity’ and make the singular notion of identity a misnomer” (194).

Webster’s dictionary defines identity as “oneself or itself, and not the other.” It is thus paradoxical to state that an identity is a function of something else. Butler says that women, like the term ‘woman,’ are objectified as subjects (defined as “an object, scene, incident, etc., chosen by an artist for representation, or as represented in art). Their assumed identities are constructed out of an already existing other, specifically of the patriarchal male. It would be post feminist, however, to be liberated of “the necessity of having to construct a single or abiding ground which is invariably contested by those identity positions or anti-identity positions that it invariably excludes” (194). We need to remove representational politics because in representational politics, we find people subjecting themselves in relation.