Map -- Week 4

EHB

Comments

  1. Taylor DawsonSeptember 10, 2018 at 10:19 PM


    Butler:
    “but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project.“

    “gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences.”

    “My suggestion is that the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time.”

    Butler advises caution around gender theorizing as it is necessary to understand that language is a prison house that restricts and constructs the ways we can talk about gender. Just as language creates and constructs gender, language also restricts the ways we can deconstruct it.

    I am reminded of the language gap that existentialists often address when referring to the elusive nature of language (Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche).


    “How to do things with words” association:

    A cool book I read a long time ago is called “Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy.” Basically the author talks about the occult and magic and the ways language and words can be magic. The way a magus(writer) can make things happen that are much like magic. Creating something from thin air.
    (Still reading J.L Austin and struggling)

    ReplyDelete
  2. lauradanioSeptember 11, 2018 at 12:10 PM

    1. Austin's thoughts on the philosophy of language grounds the readings in a way that left me wondering what other ways could we challenge language?
    2. We start off with his account of how language is situated in society and the ways in which we use language to make statements.
    3. I was immediately reminded of the good utterances, but also the destructive utterances that can sometimes perform an action--maybe even a future action like prophesy-- I will revisit this idea later.
    4. Austin moves into with the reading is essentially about how we make things happen by using words... not necessarily only looking at the words themselves. After breaking down what a performative utterance is (mostly located in the first lecture), his argument rests in the fact that to say something is do something.
    5. "There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances" (p. 26)
    6. I am drawn to this quote because it resurfaces #2 in that what is the effect of destructive words. In my masters program, I chose this article to extend a project. Granted, I did not understand the depth of Austin's argument and granted I still struggle with my ideas and how to extend his theory, BUT I posed the question in my project, "if saying something is doing something then can we use this same theory to understand the effects of saying "nigga"?" For all the non-black folks out there... please use "n-word" to avoid any mishaps. It is possible that I was overreaching or maybe my teacher did understand what I was trying to say, but does something happen with the n-word is used by, let's say a white male and is projected onto a black male. I think a different type of performance happens. I think the word is a performative utterance. Again, this could be a reach or I need more research. We do things when we say things, right Austin?
    7. "Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be under-
    stood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments
    of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self," (Butler, 1988, p. 519)'
    8. I think this quotes generally gets at the center of Butler's thesis and how we understand gender to be a thing that we perform, and are not necessarily born with a knowledge. I summarize this quote to my students whenever we overlap on the topic of how society influences our identity and perception. Later on p. 520, she defines gender as an idea of "taboo". She argues that actions create ideas of being and in this case-- how we understand gender and identity.
    9. If gender is created by the act of performance, then there is room to construct another gendered identity through the act of doing. In some cases, maybe even destruct the idea of gender... is that completely possible? I have a mentor who identifies as non-gendered, but at times they still perform very gendered behaviors and alludes the masculinity of it all... maybe I need to do more reading to understand this or maybe I am so engulfed in society that it is hard for me to unlearn.
    10. I guess my last point goes into what Butler gets at in the latter parts of her essay about the "binary restriction of gender" (p. 530) and that we should process phenomenological aspect of understanding what it means to perform gender in society.

    ReplyDelete
  3. josiahSeptember 12, 2018 at 10:26 AM

    Ethan,

    I'm intrigued by your mention of commedia and biomechanics at the bottom of the page. Why are they there? Commedia suggests playing roles, but I suspect something different is going on with biomechanics (which I don't know that well). I hope you'll bring this up next week.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ethan BrownSeptember 22, 2018 at 1:07 PM

      Hi, Josiah! Sorry, I just saw this. I noted Commedia dell'arte and biomechanics when I was reading where Butler discusses the theatrical sense of a gendered act. In her claim, "the act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again," (526) I saw a connection between the habitual performative acts and the accumulation of gender norms that impose gender on bodies. The habituating and rehearsal of performative acts in preparation to present/perform gender reminded me of the etudes in biomechanics, base movements ritualized to help actors access a wider range of performances on stage. The notion of an accumulation of stock gender norms waiting to be activated, interpreted, and performed reminded me of Commediate dell'art and the stock characters waiting to be activated by actors and brought together to improvise a performance.

      For your amusement, me teaching biomechanics: www.facebook.com/TheatreAUG/videos/1719867434718015/
      www.facebook.com/TheatreAUG/videos/1719900124714746/

      Delete
  4. Ethan BrownSeptember 22, 2018 at 12:58 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where is the performance in Joseph Roach's "Culture and Performance"?

I’d like to ask for some help, both in sorting out an essay, and in answering the question, “What is performance theory for?” I’ve been struggling with Joseph Roach’s essay in Performativity and Performance . At first reading, it seemed to be a clear tracing of three funeral performances as examples of social memory. Stepping back from it, though, I feel like it wanders over lots of territory, and I’m having difficulty finding the main point he is arguing. I believe one of his main theses is that literature and orature are interrelated, “that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time” (45). Another thesis is that performance allows culture to change. I don’t see how these arguments are supported with the analysis of different funeral performances, though. The literature he refers to is the libretto of an opera (an obvious aesthetic performance form) or a newspaper. How is performance related to what has traditionally been considered literatu...
Read more