I’m still getting a handle on the intricacies of setting up my very own wordpress website. Tim has been a fantastic help, giving me various tips that I’ll try to put in to practice in the next few days. I must say, though, that I am somewhat annoyed by little niggly things that don’t work out how I think they should - for instance, though I have a “tag cloud” set up on my page (check it out - it’s over to the right of this post, and currently has the oh-so-clever name of “Signifiers“), it doesn’t look like the tags with which I have been tagging my entries (I use the plural form of this word, even though I’ve only written one other entry, because I am highly pretentious) aren’t showing up as part of the actual “tags” section at the bottom of these aforemention entries.
Speaking of convoluted sentences which run on forever, imagine my horror when I learned that my beloved Judith Butler was named winner of the “Bad Writing Contest” in 1998. Granted, the sentence is a bit on the long side:
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
But should a theorist so fantastic and so controversial be subjected to the expectations of clear and comprehensible writing that the rest of us mere plebes must adhere to? I think not! After all, convoluted and dense writing means that readers must try harder to understand what she’s writing about! Butler is so amazing that not only does her theory force us to rethink conventions of gender representation, but the way she writes about her theory forces us to confront and reevaluate dominant ideologies about the construction of a sentence! Lead on, Judy, lead on!
And before anyone jumps on me and says “OMG YOU FOOL DON’T CALL JUDITH BUTLER JUDY SHE HATES THAT” I will preemptively respond with: I KNOW. I WAS BEING IRONIC. IT WAS HILARIOUS. I totally get that “It’s Judy in the living room, Judith in public.” Not that I know Judith in the living room .. If I did I probably wouldn’t call her Judy, though. I’d call her “J”. Or something. And while I myself never got a chance to read the fanzine Judy! (Which, incidentally, the big B herself was not a fan of), I totally wish it was still in publication. Check out what Richard Burt had to say about Judy! in his article “Getting off the Subject; Iconoclasm, Queer Sexuality, and the Celebrity Intellectual“:
“It is perhaps clear why Butler dislikes both being called Judy and the fanzine Judy!. For the fanzine is a form of imitation and gender insubordination that mimes and critically exposes Butler’s reliance on “the phallic regulatory norms of institutionalized criticism”: Judy! is a “speculative excess” that exposes the way Butler legitimates her performance of performativity through her own body, or more precisely, through the promise of access to it. Butler’s body matters, it’s “the body you want,” because it will make your body matter. Butler is the critic who will take you inside academia and out, “beyond the confines of the ivory tower” as the introduction to the Artforum interview puts it, if you purchase and mime Butler’s books in the appropriate way, if you submit, that is, to the authority of her lesbian phallus. This is precisely the serious point made comically in Judy!. On a page with the words lesbian phallus written in large Gothic script across it, we read this appreciation of Butler: “Judy is the number one dominator, and the only thing you or I can do is submit gladly. Take it with pride. Think of it like this: Kaja Silverman might be the Phallus masquerading as lack, and Teresa de Lauretis might be lack masquerading as the Phallus, but Judy is the Phallus masquerading as the Phallus.” Judy! isn’t simply a frivolous parody of Butler’s “serious” work, but seriously reveals the excessive, unwittingly self-parodying elements of that work. It puts “seriousness” in quotation marks, deconstructing the opposition between serious original and subversive parody.”
And now, for a little bit of color (of the gray scale sort), I give you a picture of Judy Garland, because one Judy alludes to all Judy’s.
Recent Comments