Reflections on Judith Butler

This is such a great perception, chelseam!--your observation made me realize how problematic it is for the College to make ourselves a "destination location" (notice on NPR: the "hot" event you can't get tickets too...so everyone who listens knows something big is going on @ Bryn Mawr this month...) by hosting talks by an intellectual whose work is all about questioning the ways in which institutions "interpellate" (="hail us" into certain performances). So there's a particularly delicious irony here that, @ the end of a talk asking us to question such identity-formations, the president of the institution asked each speaker to "identify" herself. (Even more deliciously ironic: the first student questioner gave only her first name and said, "Is that adequate?")

Butler's work is all about the possibility of MISrecognition between an institution (like a school) and the subject it compels. We can HAIL you to a certain performance,  but you can also not respond as we expect/hope--there's always a range of disobedience possible here, and hailing us to perform a certain way can produce a set of consequences that exceed/confound all “disciplining intentions.” The "hailing" of the institution creates more than it means to, an excess of its intent, and it is the slippage which has always interested Butler, this ambivalence of what it means to be socially constittued: what happens if you enter social life on terms that both enable-and-violate you? How can you occupy the interpellation in order to resignify it?

Butler writes about this in many places, but perhaps most compellingly in her essay, "Is Gender Burning?" This is a reading of the film Paris Is Burning. And that film will be shown, in the company both of Butler and director Jennie Livingston, in the McPherson Auditoritum @ Goodhart from 7-9 on Tuesday, Nov. 22. Be there or be square!