Literary Theory 2019

by Dr. Ladina Bezzola / Dr. Thomas Claviez

by Dr. Ladina Bezzola / Dr. Thomas Claviez


Set of flashcards Details

Flashcards 99
Language English
Category Literature
Level University
Created / Updated 12.12.2019 / 15.11.2021
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Bhabha

Rules of recognition 

  • The colonial power comes with its own “rules of recognition” that can make its culture both ‘present’ and ‘transparent’.
  • But recognition through the colonized is disturbed by two factors:

(1) through the displacement / dislocation of culture and

(2) through the hierarchization of society in the colonial regime: The distinction into ‘them’ and ‘us’ does not allow a “stable unitary assumption of collectivity” among the colonized, but forces them into “doublethink”.

Bhabha

Subversion of colonial power

  • colonial discourse: point when, faced with the hybridity of its objects, the presence of power is revealed 
    -> If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization rather than the command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs.
  • In this way, Foucault might argue, power carries within itself the roots of its own subversion.
  • Hybridity constitutes a potential source of resistance but at the expense of the colonized culture. 
    -> between cultural identities.
  • Bhabha tries to avoid the notion of cultural erosion or deprivation of culture by arguing that all culture is basically hybrid -> Emphasizes that culture is never homogenous.

Bhabha

Mimicry

  • Lacan: ‘The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled (gesprenkelt) background, of being mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare.’” (1181/2)
  • Bhabha: mimicry is the effect of the doubling that takes place when one culture dominates another.
  • Mimicry encouraged by colonizers, but mimicry with a difference: imperfectperformance of Englishness (a bit ridiculous).
  • Mimicry as a tool of resistance
  • Outdoing the colonizers at their game: Joseph Conrad’s novels (written by a Pole)

Gayatri Spivak

  • Educated in Calcutta and the United States
  • Strongly influenced by Derrida, French theory, and Gramsci
  • Avoids any kind of final closure for her argument since it would result in the exclusion of other opinions
  • essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985/1999)

Spivak

The ‘Subaltern’

  • those of low economic status, outside the power structures of a given society, without access to social mobility, with an “ambiguous relation to power” – subordinate to it but never fully consenting to its rule” (2194)
  • subaltern women as ‘doubly’ subaltern: women without a voice

Spivak

On Marx

  • Roots in Marx’s 18th Brumaire, where he discusses class formation. Small, isolated, dispossessed peasants do not constitute a class for themselves and are therefore incapable of asserting their class interests: 

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”

  • Spivak notes the “mistranslation” from the German: not “cannot represent themselves”, butcannot get their interests acknowledged / made to count (im eigenen Namen geltend machen).
  • Spivaks question: “On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier text, can the subaltern speak?” (2199)
  • Cp. Said’s project of Orientalism, but the strata of power at work are more multiple, less binary than in Said’s case.

Spivak

4 Class Positions of Indian society

1. Dominant foreign groups, which includes colonial powers such as the English and French, international powers such as the Americans and the Russians as well as international corporations;

2. Dominant indigenous groups at the national level. This includes Indian politicians and business interests: national government and national business;

3. Dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local level

4. The people: particularly, the subaltern class

Spivak

Organic intellectual

  • Spivak argues that female intellectuals must play the role of the organic intellectual and speak for the subaltern.
  • She is aware of risk of ventriloquism (für jemand anderen reden) in this act of representation.
  • Representation is always misrepresentation (cp. Said)
  • “decipherment in an academic institution =/= not necessarily “speaking” of the subaltern. (this decipherment is linked to power, cp. Foucault)
  • For the moment: best option available

Spivak

Strategic essentialism

Political action often necessitates essentialism of one sort or another. -> Important to be aware of the issue

Spivak

On Bhaduri

  • Young woman committing suicide
  • The family considers various (unlikely) reasons, accidentally “discovering” the reason: political activism, her inability to commit the murder delegated to her)
  • To Spivak’s frustration, no-one in the closer family wanted to look into the matter, they could and would not read the gesture as an act of resistance. Spivak diagnose a “failure of communication” 
  • possible that the political motivation for suicide was hushed up because it was shameful
  • Irregularities: Spivak was no outsider, Bhaduri was solidly middle class.
  • Spivak: answers this by calling all women subaltern, but women of colour (of the subaltern class) doubly subaltern
  • Criticism: Imposition? Is it really legitimate to ‘throw’ all women – regardless of class – into the same (metaphorical) box?
  • Conclusion: Spivak takes many hermeneutic libertiesin deciphering what she calls the unacknowledged “physiological inscription of her body” (2205): such as rewriting of sati-suicide or a “hegemonic account of the fighting mother”-figure.
  • Is the political intellectual Spivak perhaps using (and abusing) Bhaduri’s story for her own ends?

Judith Butler

Main Points

  • Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
  • One of the most radical proponents of the idea that gender roles are a matter of performance rather than just culturally prescribed ideology.
  • To say that gender is performative is to say that it can be adapted in performance similar tothe way an actor interprets a theatrical role.
  • Butler develops this idea in response to what she considers to be a misguided turn to essentializing notions of identity in US-American and European feminism.

Butler

Critique of Aristotle (Essentialism)

  • Men have reason, women do not = Sexism
  • the statement is also philosophically wrong in Butler’s view: The relation between the sexes and between masters and slaves is not determined biologically
  • it is socially determined, through repeated acts of domination and subjection as well as through performances of identity by both men and women that conform to the dominant distribution of gender roles.

Butler

Critique of feminist theories (Essentialism)

  • Desire to forge bonds of solidarity -> relying upon the category of woman -> false promise of eventual political solidarity
  • risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be representative of the concrete lives of women. 
  • Spivak: feminists rely on operational essentialism, a false ontology of women as a universal in order to advance a feminist political program. She suggests it could be used for strategic purposes.
  • Butler: it is one thing to use the term and know its ontological insufficiency and quite another to articulate a normative vision for feminist theorywhich celebrates or emancipates an essence, a nature, or a shared cultural reality which cannot be found.

Butler

Constructivism

  • Butler counters strategic essentialism with a constructivist approach to gender
  • Task: to examine in what ways gender is constructed through specific corporeal acts, and what possibilities exist for the cultural transformation of gender through such acts.  
  • Strongly influenced by Derrida and Lacan, but most importantly by the late Foucault:
    cp. his History of Sexuality, where he argues that the notion of sexual identity is a very late cultural addition. Before that: sexual practices unrelated to identity (‘sodomy’, i.e., sexual practices between men, were considered as a political crime) 
  • Cp. Also Cixous and Anzaldúa 

Butler

Sex vs. Gender

  • Butler deconstructs the central assumption of feminist theory: the dichotomy between sex (as biological given) and gender (as cultural prescription),which also reflects the dichotomy between nature and culture.
  • Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender -> the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse / culture is itself a cultural construct. 
  • Butler’s main claim is that not even sexual identity is something natural since what counts as natural is also defined by culture: 
  • naturalness is “constitutedthrough discursively constrained performative actsthat produce the body through and within categories of sex.” (2489) 
  • Useful to differentiate between ‘sex’ as anatomical fact and ‘sexual identity’ / ‘sexual orientation’. 

Butler

“Imitation and Gender Insubordination”

With the quote that “being a lesbian is what I have been,” Butler argues that identity is not inherent, but performed.

The repeated performance of an identity however leads to the “sedimentation” of identity. Thus, “being” is the result of performance, of agency.

Butler

Anatomy & Performance

  • Asked in an interview about the ‘factual,’ ’material’ differences of male and female bodies – and the fact that only the female body has reproductive capabilities, she replies: 
  • “What the question (of pregnancy) does is try to make the problematic of reproduction central to the sexing of the body. But I am not sure that is, or ought to be, what is absolutely salient or primary in the sexing of the body.”
  • However, Butler also challenges the distinction between gender and anatomical sex -> sex as a reification of a series of corporeal acts
  • Butler disagrees with the concept of the naturalness of the body and the link of gender to culture.
  • She denies the feminist assumption of a fixed identity and argues that there is no sex prior to discourse. There is no natural body; the practice of “using” one’s body is culturally determined. The naturalness is “constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within categories of sex.”

Butler

Body-mind dichotomy

  • The body as main site of an essentialized naturalism vs. the spirit / mindthat should control, overcome, sublimatebodily drives.
  • The body is always the ‘sexed’ body, the body inscribed with sexual significance.
  • The sexed body as ‘signified’: “What is it?”

Butler, Foucault

Subverting “compulsory heterosexuality” 

  • Butler’s (and Foucault’s) aim to subvert “compulsory heterosexuality” and homosexuality taboo
  • Butler questions the general perception of heterosexuality as the “norm,” from which homosexuality deviates.
  • Connected to sealing off the body as an entity and sanitizing it.
  • Establishes the self as something ‘interior’ and as something that is not only distinguished from the other, but which defines the other as ‘shit’:
  • “The boundary between the ‘inner’ and the ’outer’ worlds of the subject is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity- differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit.” (2495).
  • Confrontation with the parts of ourselves that are negative (aka our feces)
  • Drag: “sex and gender denaturalized by means of performance”, gender parody