Writing Projects

Judith Butler and Virtue: the starting point

March 16, 2010

Currently I am working on an essay in which I reflect on the ethical significance of J Butler’s cultivation and promotion of troublemaking. The first half of the essay, which I prepared for the FEAST conference last fall, focuses on the ethical gesture towards troublemaking that Butler makes in Gender Trouble. The second half of the essay focuses on linking that ethical gesture to virtue ethics and on developing my own claim that staying in trouble is an important virtue.

I haven’t fully developed the second half of the essay, partly because I haven’t had the time and partly because I haven’t had the inspiration. Sure I want to argue that troublemaking is a virtue, but how? And why virtue? While vague and unfocused answers to these questions have been swimming around in my brain for a few years now, the specific way to articulate my argument in relation to Butler and virtue ethics has eluded me.  But a few weeks ago, I began to envision an approach. Butler’s work over the past decade is filled with vague references to virtue ethics–she often refers to flourishing and the good life and links them with her ideas of persisting and the livable life (which are central to many of her recent works, including Undoing Gender, Precarious Life, Frames of War). She focuses some attention on Aristotle, particularly in her edited collection with Laclau and Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony and Universality. And she even devotes an entire essay to Foucault, virtue and critique (“What is Critique?” An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue“). I realized that one way to frame my discussion of Butler, troublemaking and virtue is to ask: why does she refer to virtue and draw upon virtue language frequently?

After pondering these questions for a few weeks I decided that I needed to carefully reread “What is Critique?” and think about how Foucault and, by extension, Butler are thinking about virtue. So, I reread it tonight. Cool. Very, very helpful. Since I plan to give the whole essay a lot more attention in the next few days (especially during my writing date with KCF!), I won’t write much now. Let me simply offer a teaser. Towards the end of the essay, after discussing how Foucault understands virtue as: a. a critical relation to norms, b. a way of re-describing resistance (outside of the autonomous self), and c. a self-making through the refusal to obey (that sounds familiar–didn’t I write about that idea here?), Butler offers this very brief aside:

I do not mean to rehabilitate Aristotle in the form of Foucault (although, I confess, that such a move intrigues me, and I mention it here to offer it as a possibility without committing myself to it at once) (319).

What do we make of this aside? Is she suggesting that troublemaking (in the form of critique–because she never uses the word trouble in this essay) is a virtue? Is she also suggesting that we might want to think some more about the usefulness of Aristotle’s work, particularly in terms of virtue/virtue ethics? Excellent. What would it mean to re-think Aristotle through Foucault and to imagine virtue in terms of trouble and critique? Does reading Aristotle through Foucault suggest a resignifying of virtue (that is, an inhabiting of virtues and virtue language differently)? Am I a nerd because I find this discovery of Butler’s aside to be truly exciting (or because I made a reference to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure)?

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Linking care with troublemaking, part 1.5

March 15, 2010

Note: As I was reviewing part 1 of this series on linking care with troublemaking, I was struck by Tronto’s definition of care. Instead of adding in my reflections about the definition to part 1 (which is already too long), I thought I would post a part 1.5.

In Moral Boundaries (and earlier with B Fisher in “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring” from Circle of Care), Tronto offers the following definition of care:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (103).

Maintain. Continue. Repair. Those ideas don’t seem to resonate at all with making and staying in trouble. Or, do they? Is it possible to imagine making trouble–disrupting the status quo, challenging ideas that are assumed to be givens and emphasizing the brokenness of ideas/images/visions–as actually contributing to the sustaining and repairing of the world? What does it mean, from a feminist (ethics) perspective, to repair things or people? What are the differences or similarities between repairing and creating, fixing old ideas and constructing new ones? Perhaps I should check out (literally and figuratively) Elizabeth Spelman’s Repair at Wilson Library?

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Linking care with troublemaking, part 1: Defining Care

March 15, 2010

It is spring break and I am taking a few days to think through some ideas that keep coming up in my reading, researching and teaching. One idea that I have been experimenting with for some time now is that of troublemaking as a form of care. I can’t quite remember where or when I first started to think that care and troublemaking could (or should) be connected, but this idea seems to be bothering/inspiring/haunting/provoking me lately.

I think one reason that I like connecting care and troublemaking is because much attention (some positive, a lot negative) has been given to the concept of care within feminist ethics. In the context of feminism and feminist ethics, care is popularly understood as being closely tied to nurturing and the re-valuing of women’s work/women’s roles/women’s ways of knowing/women’s practices as mothers and care-givers. This focus produces a narrow framing of the issue: Care = Nurturing = Comfort = Maternal = Women. While this framing does not accurately represent how many feminist ethicists reflect on and use care in their own projects, it can be hard to think of care as a feminist practices outside of the frame of the nurturing mother. I think that linking troublemaking with care could enable us to rethink how we understand care and feminist ethics and how we frame their relationship. At the very least, just thinking about troublemaking (which emphasizes discomfort and uncertainty) as a form of care makes some serious trouble for care and feminist ethics!

Note: Why, you may ask, am I using the language of frames/framing here? Last week in my grad class on troublemaking, we read the introduction to J Butler’s latest book (May 2009), Frames of War. So the idea of framing is fresh in my mind. I really like Butler’s use of framing as a way to focus (to frame?)  her own discussion of grief, war and the livable life. She not only uses the concept of framing as a way to think about how we represent/structure/understand an idea, issue or norm (the frame), but she also argues that we need to spend some time troubling that framing instead of quickly moving to create new frames. At one point in the essay (pages 8-12, to be exact), she traces the meaning of “to be framed” and encourages us to engage in a troubling/calling into question of our frames in order to expose how they always produce an excess/outside that doesn’t fit (drawing upon Trinh T. Minh-ha, she calls this a “framing the frame”). She understands this excess/outside in two different ways: a. (negatively) as a necessary part of the process of framing that functions at the limits and helps to define what one is (A), by what one isn’t (not A) and b. (positively) as the uncontrollable part of the process of framing that always exceeds (breaks with) that framing and enables it to take on new meanings/new contexts. Hmm…does this fit with my discussion of the framing of feminist ethics and care. Yes! But, how? Well, I can’t quite articulate that right now. I will leave it to fester–in my brain and on this blog–for a while…

This discussion and reflection on care, troublemaking and feminist ethics is a big project (a book, perhaps?). Right now I want to focus in on some definitions of care offered by those engaged in feminist ethics. Bypassing the definitions offered by Nell Noddings or Carol Gilligan, I want to begin with Joan Tronto’s four part definition of care as it is articulated in chapter 4 of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (but also coming out of her work with Berenice Fisher who wrote a fabulous book, No Angel in the Classroom, that I use whenever I teach Feminist Pedagogies).

Tronto begins her essay by revisiting the definition of care that she created with Berenice Fisher:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (103).

In offering this definition, Tronto wants to highlight several features. Caring:

  • implies a reaching out beyond the self (relational)
  • requires action
  • is not limited to human interaction
  • is not exclusively dyadic (relationship between 2 people)–not just about mother/child relationship
  • is largely defined culturally
  • is an ongoing process, not a single act or type of activity
  • is a practice and a disposition
  • are those practices that have maintaining, continuing, repairing the world as their end

Tronto offers four phases of care that are analytically separate but interconnected in the ongoing process of care:

Phase One: Caring About
Phase one involves the recognition that caring is necessary. It is about paying attention to issues/individuals/communities/nations/regions and identifying their needs.

I am particularly interested in the phase of caring because it resonates with my own linking of care with curiosity and paying attention. I think of caring-as-curiosity as more than just paying attention and recognizing that there are needs to be met through practicing care. Is this phase always (and only) phase one in a larger process of practices? Why is it important to distinguish it analytically from other forms of care? What are the limits or dangers of doing so?

Phase Two: Taking Care of
Phase two involves assuming responsibility for those needs and developing ways to respond to them. This second phase goes beyond identifying a need to the recognition that action is needed and can be taken.

When I think of taking care of something, I often think of solving (or getting rid of) a problem. Tronto doesn’t address the (sometimes) negative tone of this phrase or the potential conflicts between solving a problem (taking care of it) and the need for ongoing care. She does, however, discuss how it is often connected with men and the power/privilege they have in being able to address and solve problems (121).

Phase Three: Care-giving
Phase three involves the actual physical labor that is necessary for taking responsibility and meeting the needs of others. Tronto offers the following as examples: nurse administering medication, repair person fixing a given thing, mother (or father?) talking with her child about the day’s events, a neighbor helping a friend to set her hair (107).

I am struck by her examples here. These activities seem to be overwhelmingly feminine–can a father engage in these caring activities? Or, when a father cares is he engaged in mothering? Tronto does suggest that these are the examples that most quickly spring to our minds–is this true? Is this how we envision care?

Phase Four: Care-receiving
Phase four involves the responses of the person/community/object who receives care.  Tronto believes this phase is necessary because focusing on how the object of care responds to that care enables the care giver to assess whether their actions were effective and productive.

Is this another form of paying attention? So, it is not just that we pay attention to the need for care but that we pay attention to our practices of care and the limits and possibilities of that care. Hmm…so maybe paying attention (and caring about how we care) is important for multiple phases of giving care.

After providing her definition and phases of care, Tronto devotes the rest of the essay to exploring how care (as a practice and disposition) is marginalized; is gendered, raced, and classed; and contained as work and as weakness. In terms of containment (and the connections between race/class/gender and containing care), Tronto writes:

…caring about, and taking care of, are duties of the powerful. Care-giving and care-receiving are left to the less powerful (114).

Tronto also discusses the importance of thinking about care as a disposition and a practice. She suggests that envisioning care only as a disposition reduces care/caring work to emotions and the private individual’s emotional investments and intentions. This suggestions troubles me a little as I think about my own interest in promoting troublemaking as a virtue/attitude/approach. It also troubles me as I think about the role of emotions in terms of Sara Ahmed and her discussion of collective feelings. Ahmed is not interested in drawing such a strict division between emotions/feelings and actions. In “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others,” she argues that “emotions do things” and that “rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationships between the psychic and the social, between the individual and the collective” (27). Hmm….

It is helpful for me to work through Tronto’s definition here. In part 2 of this linking care with troublemaking, I want to read chapter 5 of Moral Boundaries–”An Ethic of Care” and think about what this might mean for my exploration of care and for Michel Foucault’s use of care in “The Masked Philosopher” (which I discuss here) and in The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume 3.

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Is grief our only resource for how to stay in trouble?

October 26, 2009

I believe that staying in trouble is an important ethical practice. But, what do I mean by this? What sort of resources do we have for understanding how staying in trouble should be practiced? In this entry, I want to reflect on an important way in which my own thinking is different from Judith Butler’s: While Butler argues that grief is a valuable resource for staying in trouble, it is not the only resource. As someone who has spent the last 4 years grieving for a mother who was dying (and who died on September 30th of this year) of a particularly horrific form of cancer (pancreatic), I am not interested in mining the ethical/transformative possibilities of grief. I don’t want to keep grieving; I want to stop grieving and I want to think about what other resources we have for staying in trouble. What about humor and comedy? Are there ways to think about the state of being in trouble that are not connected to violence, grief and vulnerability (as something that is only negative and that always signals loss–of control, of autonomy, of stability)?

In many of her recent works, such as Undoing Gender, Precarious Life and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Butler focuses on the importance of grief. In Precarious Life, Butler asks:

Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its vulnerability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?

And concludes:

To foreclose the vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearing and find our way (30).

Refusing to leave our grief, where we are beside ourselves with sadness and pain, can be very productive for us; it reminds us how we are connected to others and it can make us more compassionate as we are compelled to recognize our own vulnerability. Grief—the loss of a loved one—undoes us. We can no longer believe in the illusion that we have control and that we are autonomous individuals who act freely and without constraint. When we grieve it is not that we suddenly become vulnerable. Instead, the belief that we are not vulnerable and the illusions that we construct to shore up that belief no longer work. Grief reminds us (or perhaps enlightens us) that we have always already been vulnerable. I agree that there is something extremely valuable about being compelled to face our own vulnerability; it can open us up to thinking about, respectfully listening to, and valuing the lived experiences of others.

We can understand Butler’s promotion of grief to be functioning in three different ways in her texts. First, Butler is particularly interested in valuing grief because public displays of grief and the right to grieve for those you love have been denied lots of folks within gay/lesbian/queer/trans communities (here, she is thinking about the AIDS crises and how so many folks were not able to publicly grieve for those that they lost to the illness). So, when she promotes grief, she is thinking about these communities and their important need—what she might even call their human right—to have their love and grief publicly acknowledged and respected. Second, she wants to value grief in post 9/11 America because it was so quickly foreclosed in order to violently respond to the attacks on September 11th. Instead of reflecting on what happened and allowing our grief to open us up to the world, the Bush regime swiftly turned to violent retribution. This lack of a space for grief made it very difficult for us to critically reflect on our grief. And the specific way in which we responded to the attack, through a politics of terror, anti-intellectualism, the production of the Arab-as-terrorist-abject, and the development of a policy of Us vs. Them, encouraged us to dehumanize (and not grieve) for any of those victims who we deemed to be not like us. In both of these instances, the specific ways in which grief has been foreclosed has been very violent. I find Butler’s desire to alleviate that violence through valuing grief to be very compelling.

These first two ways are in response to specific historical, cultural, social conditions. In these situations grief is the thing needed because grief has been so unjustly denied. But, there is a third way to understand what Butler is doing with grief. If we trace her work back through Gender Trouble, Psychic Life of Power and even Precarious Life, we see that she is promoting grief as a valuable state to be in as a subject. Her emphasis on not foreclosing grief is the idea that being in a state of grief, where we are undone and are forced to recognize that undone-ness, is “one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearing and find our way” (30). So, grief is fundamental to our experiences (and our effectiveness) as subjects.

Debbie_DownerNow, is Butler really suggesting that we should all try to stay in a state of grief all of the time? I don’t think so. But, what are to make of her claim that it is one of our most valuable resources, especially when she offers no other resources? I agree with Butler that being undone, that recognizing our vulnerability, is essential. But, I have become increasingly tired of talking about grief. Staying in a state of vulnerability-as-grief (like I have with my mom) for such a long time is too much for anyone. It is an important resource (my own experiences in grief have opened me up to more ways of being/doing), but it should never be the only resource. And, it should not be the model for how to recognize our fundamental connection and accountability to others and how to stay in trouble. Where is the laughter (and the fun) that Butler argued for in Gender Trouble? It seems to me that Butler’s overemphasis on grief has turned her into a Debbie Downer. (Yes, I am referring to the character on Saturday Night Live who is played by Rachel Dratch. I must write more about her and the laughter that accompanies her depressing rants. How do humor and grief work simultaneously in these sketches?)

So, what about playfulness, laughter, and joy? What sort of resource does humor serve as? How might laughter and humor enable us to connect with others and open ourselves up to those others? Why does trouble seem to lead directly (and exclusively) to tragedy, violence and being undone? As I continue to ponder the ethical value of troublemaking and troublestaying, I want to focus on the joyful, playful and fun (sometimes, but not always, funny) resources for living a virtuous life. This focus is not meant to deny the existence of grief (indeed, it is something that, for good or bad, I live with now), but to suggest that trouble isn’t always negative and that our practices of it may yield positive (dare I say, happy?) results.

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My Presentation

October 7, 2009

Sadly, my mom died and I wasn’t able to go to the FEAST conference (the one that I wrote about here and here). Since I couldn’t present it there, I thought I might post it on this blog.

The Ethics of Making, Being and Staying in Trouble
In the 1990 preface to Gender Trouble, Judith Butler reflects on trouble and its value, concluding “that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it” (Gender Trouble, vii). With this statement, Butler introduces a central theme that continues to shape and motivate much of her work: learning how to make trouble and be in trouble are important tasks of the resisting subject. In this presentation, which comes out of a larger project on troublemaking as a virtue, I argue that Butler’s opening statement about troublemaking in Gender Trouble is not only a critical and provocative intervention into feminist politics as usual, but is an ethical gesture towards the dignity, desirability and necessity of troublemaking. This gesture, which is taken up more explicitly by Butler in Undoing Gender, points to two separate but related ethical projects involving troublemaking. The first project is concerned with making trouble and being in trouble in ways that extend and rework norms so that they make more lives possible and livable. The second project is concerned with exploring what is demanded of us as moral selves as we strive to stay in trouble.  I will conclude my presentation by tentatively linking the second of those projects with my own work on troublemaking as a feminist virtue.

At first glance, Butler’s suggestion that “trouble is inevitable, the task how best to make it, what best way to be in it” seems to be the declaration of a disobedient child or a disheartened academic-activist. However, it is not just a rebellious claim, by a bad girl, thumbing her nose at the feminist establishment. Nor is it a pessimistic statement of resignation by an armchair academic about the futility of feminist politics. Instead, with this reflection on trouble, Butler is calling for an intervention into feminist politics ‘as usual’ and she is making a tentative ethical gesture towards the value—that is, the dignity, desirability and necessity—of making, being and staying in trouble.

Through her intervention into feminist politics as usual, Butler aims to trouble the heterosexist norms that explicitly and implicitly frame feminist politics and its construction of “woman” as political subject. She engages in a critical genealogy of key feminist thinkers and feminist concepts. And, she works to disrupt hegemonic understandings of who the subject of feminism is and how that subject should engage in politics. Through her ethical gesture, Butler aims to grant dignity to the practice of troublemaking—specifically gender troublemaking—and to point to its value both for her own theoretical activism and for those individuals and communities who fail to be fully intelligible in dominant discourses on gender.

Since Gender Trouble much attention has been given to Butler’s troublemaking as intervention. Her challenge to feminist identity politics and her reflections on drag as a subversive performance have been taken up by a wide range of thinkers and activists, some embracing her work as revolutionary and others rejecting it as apolitical and dangerously anti-humanist. She has been heralded as the saint of postmodern resistance and condemned as the ultimate sinner against feminist emancipatory politics. However, while much has been made of Butler’s ideas about gender trouble as subversive intervention, not enough attention has been given to the ethical possibilities of troublemaking that Butler gestures towards in Gender Trouble.

There are several reasons why the ethical possibilities of troublemaking have not been considered. First, the ethical moment in Gender Trouble is largely overshadowed by Butler’s troublesome critiques of some “treasured feminist values” and her difficult language and writing style. Second, the ethical moment is forgotten in the wake of the powerful theoretical shift in feminist and gay and lesbian politics that Butler helped initiate with this relatively small text that she imagined “maybe one or two hundred people might read” (UG, 207). Third and finally, the ethical moment has remained largely hidden because of Butler’s early resistance to ethics and ethical language and her seemingly singular focus on subversion and disruption as (gender) troublemaking. Largely for these reasons, Butler’s early ethical gesture, and the ethical possibilities within all of her writings, were mostly ignored throughout the 1990s.

In the time since 9/11, Butler’s work has become more explicitly ethical. Her promotion of accountability and precariousness and her emphasis on the livable life suggest that Butler is interested in taking up her early ethical gesture towards troublemaking in order to explore troublemaking’s ethical value. In her 2004 collection, Undoing Gender, her earlier resistance to ethics—as a turn away from politics—and to norms—as normalizing and oppressive—is replaced with an urgent (and passionate) plea for ethical reflection on how we are done and undone by gender norms and how we might rework and expand norms in order to extend the livable life to those who have previously been denied it. With a focus on the livable life and the achievement of that life by reworking gender norms, Butler places ethics at the forefront of her critical reflections on gender, sexuality and political transformation. Central to this critical reflection is the idea that finding the best ways to make trouble and be in trouble are not only political projects but ethical ones.

This taking up of the ethical gesture in Gender Trouble is not, as some theorists have argued about Butler’s recent work, a turn to ethics. For me, a turn to ethics implies two things. First, it implies a turn away from something else, in this case, a turn away from politics. But, in Undoing Gender, even as she places ethical questions of life, livability and norms at the center of her essays, Butler doesn’t eschew politics. She believes that troublemaking is fundamentally connected to radical democracy and ongoing participation in political life. Second, a turn to ethics suggests that prior to this turn, Butler’s work was not ethical. In focusing on Butler’s opening statement about troublemaking in Gender Trouble as an ethical gesture instead of a critical and political intervention, I am arguing that ethics has always motivated Butler’s critical projects. Undoing Gender, which expands upon Butler’s earliest articulations of this ethical gesture, provides us with an opportunity to rethink the significance of Butler’s notion of troublemaking not through its function as disruptive intervention, but through its role as an ethical practice and approach to one’s political life.

So, what is Butler suggesting when she claims that “…trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it?” Butler believes that making trouble and being in trouble are essential practices for the thinking and resisting subject. For Butler, the best way to make trouble is to refuse to accept that any categories—even the most fundamental categories of our social existence like “woman” or “human”—are unquestioned givens. And it is to subject those categories to critical scrutiny in order (1) to explore the limits of their ability to be inclusive and to be translated into a wide range of contexts globally and (2) to determine how they must be “expanded, destroyed or reworked in order to encompass and open up what it is to be human and gendered” (Undoing Gender, 38). This second aspect—the focus on expanding, destroying or reworking categories—frequently involves opening up and inhabiting categories in unexpected and unauthorized ways (e.g. international gay and lesbian groups claiming their rights are human rights).

If the best way to make trouble is to critically question categories like “human” or “woman” and to open them up to potentially new understandings, the best way to be in trouble is through a persistent examination of the difficult and frequently contradictory moments when we cannot easily read what is going on and when common sense, language and knowledge seem to fail us. Those moments that “make us wonder” and that “remain not fully explained and not fully explicable” (The Judith Butler Reader, 417) can generate some valuable and productive questions and debates about the limits and possibilities of fundamental categories like “human.”

Butler’s emphasis on these moments of unknowingness is evident in her work. As she demonstrates in her analysis of drag, of Antigone, of intersexuality and of gender and its relation to sex and sexual difference, she is drawn to those moments of degrounding and how they push at our “most sure ways of knowing.”

Because she gives so much attention to these moments of uncertainty and unknowingness, some feminists dismiss her troublemaking as lacking any political or ethical value or label her a hip defeatist. But, Butler argues that the making of and being in trouble is motivated by more than a desire to provoke for the sake of provoking. Individuals and/or collectives make trouble because they are already in trouble. For those who are unintelligible—that is, those who improperly inhabit their gender roles, whose desires do not follow proper patterns of sex and gender, whose bodies fall outside of the norm—for them, trouble is inevitable because the categories that are supposed to describe them do not or will not. They make trouble because they want to claim their own humanity in a system of norms that does not authorize those claims, that does not consider their life worthy and that banishes them to the realm of unspeakablity or to social death. And, they are in trouble because when they assert those unauthorized claims, they demonstrate the fragility and fallibility of those taken-for-granted norms about what and who is “human.”

This claim about the inevitability of trouble and the need to make and be in it so as to expand and rework previously unquestioned categories is crucial to understanding what kind of ethical gesture Butler first makes in Gender Trouble. In defending it against the charges that it is apolitical and unethical hip defeatism, Butler argues that troublemaking has ethical value. Making trouble by challenging categories and opening them up to think about them differently is not only about disrupting or rebelling or challenging. Making trouble is about “extending the norms that sustain viable life to previously disenfranchised communities” (UG, 225). It is about working to open up the category of human to be more inclusive. And, it is about ethics and asking, “from a position of power, …what makes, or ought to make, the lives of others bearable” and possible and livable (UG, 17)?

While Butler explicitly uses ethical language and concepts in Undoing Gender, the idea of extending and reworking norms so that they make more lives possible and livable as an important ethical project was already present in and a central motivating factor for Gender Trouble. In the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble Butler reflects on her personal investment in troubling gender and how troublemaking might enable her to not only grant recognition but dignity to her family members by making their lives possible and livable. She writes that her troublemaking in Gender Trouble

was not done simply out of desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of ‘real’ politics, as some critics have conjectured. It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. What would the world have to be like for my uncle to live in the company of family, friends, or extended kinship of some other kind? How must we rethink the ideal morphological constraints upon the human such that those who fail to approximate the norm are not condemned to a death without life (xxi)?

This desire to live, to make life possible, to create a world that grants dignity to others who have been denied it and extends to them the possibility of having their own livable lives, is an ethical gesture, by Butler, towards the value of troublemaking. Making and being in trouble has the potential to open up and rework categories like the “human” in more inclusive and life-affirming ways and to contribute to an ethical vision that contains the normative aspiration of giving people room “to breathe, to desire, to love, and to live” (Undoing Gender, 8).

The ethical gesture here is towards a project that is both political and ethical in scope and that is concerned with developing and assessing a wide range of practices in a wide range of contexts to determine troublemaking’s effectiveness for producing more expansive and less violent understandings of who/what is intelligible. To be sure, there is much ethical value in thinking about troublemaking as contributing to a larger ethical project in this way. This is a project that must remain central to any feminist ethics. However, there is another way in which to read what Butler is doing (or what we can do) with her early statement about troublemaking; there is another ethical project being called for (albeit tentatively).

Butler’s ethical gesture towards the value of troublemaking is not just about making and being in trouble, it is about staying in it. When Butler concludes that trouble is inevitable and that we must find the best ways to make and be in it, she is not just promoting making trouble, she is arguing that trouble always already exists (it is inevitable) and that our task is to find out how to stay in it in productive and potentially transformative ways. Indeed, the central task for Butler in Gender Trouble is not to make trouble for categories like gender by disrupting or calling into question their stability and “realness”. The central task is to ensure that those categories continue to make trouble for us (and that we continue to make trouble for them) so that the regulatory practices of sex/gender/desire that produce them are not concealed and presented to us as unquestioned truth.

This idea of staying in trouble becomes a central project for ethics because staying in trouble—remaining in that space of our unknowingness and uncertainty where we push at the limits of our most sure ways of knowing—enables us to “think critically and ethically about the consequential ways that the human is being produced, reproduced and deproduced” (Undoing Gender, 36). When we rush to get ourselves out of trouble we foreclose the possibility of thinking about how we have constructed our knowledge of the “human” or what counts as life and how we might think about those constructions differently. And when we rush to get ourselves out of trouble and the trouble that is caused by thinking differently (and with openness) about the “human” we do violence to those who have not only been denied a livable life but have been written out of life by the constructions and assertions of the “human” that are predicated on their very unintelligibility.

The ethical gesture here is towards a project that is focused on an exploration of what is demanded of us as moral selves as we strive to stay in trouble. This project is not concerned with developing the best possible practices of troublemaking, even as that is a very important project, Instead, it is about reflecting on how we might resist the urge to shore up our unknowingness and assert our “truths” in violent ways and how we might learn to “know unknowingness at the core of what we know, and what we need…” (Undoing Gender, 227).

The question of how to stay in trouble is a primary preoccupation of Butler’s in the post 9/11 world. In Precarious Life, staying in trouble is described in terms of grief, vulnerability and precariousness. And, in Undoing Gender, staying in trouble is described as being done and undone by gender norms. In both of these reconfigurations, the ethical value of staying in trouble, first gestured towards in Gender Trouble, is central to Butler’s own thinking about how moral selves should function ethically in the world.

But, although Butler takes up her ethical gesture from Gender Trouble and makes it more explicitly ethical in recent works like Undoing Gender and Precarious Life, she still only points to the ethical possibilities of troublemaking. Much more work needs to be done in order to flesh out the idea of making, being, and staying in trouble as ethical practices and projects.

In concluding this presentation on Butler and the ethical value of troublemaking, I want to make my own ethical gesture towards troublemaking as staying in trouble. Thinking about troublemaking as staying in trouble can shift our ethical attention away from developing the practices or rules that should always guide our troublemaking and towards cultivating qualities of character that encourage us to approach a wide range of activities with a troublemaking (that is, critical, thoughtful and questioning) spirit/ethos. One potentially fruitful way to think about this troublemaking spirit is as a feminist virtue, that is, as an ethical way of being, a mode of relating to the world, a quality of character, a disposition, or an attitude that influences our ethical/political understandings and shapes our ethical and political development. Thinking about troublemaking as a virtue encourages us to ask after how we should live as troublemakers and what kind of (moral and political) selves we need to be in order to stay in trouble. And, it enables us to value troublemaking as an important quality of the moral self.

So, that’s it. The ending is a little abrupt; I was planning to have some informal remarks in which I talked more about what staying in trouble might mean for feminist ethics.

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How can it already be September 18th?

September 18, 2009

It seems like I am always asking questions like this: How can the summer be over? How can it be the end of the second week of classes? And, most important for this post, how can it already be just one week before I present at the FEAST conference? Earlier in the summer, I wrote an entry about this presentation; I “promised” that it would be the first in a series of entries in preparation for the conference. I wrote that entry on July 23rd. Now, on September 18th, a week before the conference, I am finally offering the second entry. I have been thinking about my paper (no, really, I have), but prepping for classes–putting together the syllabi, setting up the blogs, etc–took up a lot of my time in August and early September. Oh well, better late than never.

If you recall (and if you don’t, that’s okay, just look here to “remember”), my presentation is about the ethical possibilities in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, particularly in her project of trouble (which I describe as making, being in and staying in trouble–hmm…isn’t that the name of this blog?). In my first entry, I wrote about why I think it is important to consider the ethical import of Gender Trouble. In this entry, I want to focus on my conclusion and engage in a ‘lil bit of musing about what my project is–that is, what I want to do with the idea of troublemaking/troublestaying as a virtue.

In the manuscript I submitted last February, here is how I conclude my presentation:

In concluding this presentation on Butler and the ethical value of troublemaking, I want to make my own ethical gesture towards troublemaking as staying in trouble. Thinking about troublemaking as staying in trouble shifts our ethical attention away from developing the practices or rules that should always guide our troublemaking and towards cultivating qualities of character that encourage us to approach a wide range of activities with a troublemaking (that is, critical, thoughtful and questioning) spirit/ethos. One potentially fruitful way to think about this troublemaking spirit is as a feminist virtue, that is, as an ethical way of being, a mode of relating to the world, a quality of character, a disposition, or an attitude that influences our ethical/political understandings and shapes our ethical and political development. Thinking about troublemaking as a virtue encourages us to ask after how we should live as troublemakers and what kind of (moral and political) selves we need to be in order to stay in trouble. And, it enables us to value troublemaking as an important quality of the moral self.

Having run out of time in my presentation, I want to end with two final questions: What would a feminist ethical project that emphasizes the virtue of troublemaking look like and how does this project differ from one that emphasizes the virtue of care? How might troublemaking as a feminist virtue shift our understanding of feminist ethics and feminist virtue ethics?

One big reason that this conclusion is so brief is because my presentation is limited to a certain number of minutes–I have 40 minutes total, but that includes discussion and I am very interested in what people will have to say about my project. But even though my conclusion needs to be brief, I want to develop it a little more in the following ways:

Why virtue? A key part of my argument is that we should look at troublemaking as a virtue. But, why? What does thinking about it as virtue offer us that thinking about it in other ways doesn’t? I like thinking about troublemaking as a virtue because of the emphasis, within virtue ethics and virtue-talk, on quality of character/attitude/ways of being. For me, troublemaking is not easily defined by a practice (or set of practices). It is a approach–a critical/attentive/curious approach–to life (to ideas, to beliefs, and to practices, etc). In this way, we can’t simply say that the ethical value of troublemaking is found in this or that practice. Instead, we can talk about how our way of engaging in a practice (are we aware of the limits of that practice, are we attentive to the effects of that practice on others, are we open to other ways of practicing) enables us to be more or less virtuous. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of what counts as troublemaking (it is not reduced to any practice or practices) and provides for the opportunity to think through how a wide range of practices might be or might not be troublemaking in an ethical/virtuous sense.

My vision of troublemaking as an ethical attitude is partly inspired by Michel Foucault and his discussion of the limit attitude in “What is Enlightenment?.” He describes this attitude, which he also calls the “critical ontology of ourselves” as “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (319).

It is also inspired by Audre Lorde and her linking of the erotic with excellence and eros in “The Erotic as Power.” She writes: “For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (54). And, “in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea” (57). Focusing on character and excellence enables us to think about ethical practices differently; it centers our discussion on self-making and the cultivation of a self who can learn to practice ethical (and politically transformative) troublemaking everyday–in a wide range of practices.

And my vision of troublemaking as an ethical attitude is inspired by Maria Lugones and her discussion of the playful attitude in “Playfulness, ‘World-Traveling’ and Loving Perception.” In describing a game she is playing with a friend–they are throwing stones in the water–she writes: “The playfulness of our activity does not presuppose that there is something like ‘crashing stones’ that is a particular form of play with its own rules. Instead, the attitude that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play” (95). So the determination that something is playful is not based on the type of activity it is. Instead it is based on the selves-at-that-moment who do it and the spirit/ethos of their individual and/or collective doing. In this way, suggesting that troublemaking is virtuous is based not on what the activity is (protesting, violent rebellion, talking back in class), but on how it is being done. But, wait. I want to offer another clarification here. The “how” it is being done is not just about intention (what one’s purpose is for engaging in the troublemaking), it is also about attention or, more specifically, attentiveness (how one is aware of the effects of that activity, how one notices and thinks through the implications of their actions in doing the activity, how one takes care of and is responsive to the others engaged in or affected by the activity). [note: this idea of attentiveness is inspired by conversations with Naomi Scheman and Rebecca Moskow].

Now, in thinking about troublemaking as an attitude or approach to one’s actions, I am not suggesting that becoming someone who engages in virtuous making of/being in/staying in trouble is as easy as “changing your attitude” (which is a critique that Kelly Oliver levels at Lugones’ playful attitude in her book, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition). When we link the idea of attitude with character and excellence and virtue, we can see that troublemaking as a virtue is not something that we easily and immediately are able to do. Instead it requires tremendous effort: training, repeated practice (habit) and the striving for a balance between being deficient and excessive in one’s troublemaking practices.

In “Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White Character,” Alison Bailey discusses the value of cultivating a virtuous character (in this essay, the virtue she is thinking about is traitorousness or being-a-traitor). Here is a helpful example she gives for understanding how developing this process works (and particularly how it involves more than just doing practices with a certain attitude):

The activity of virtue resembles the workout example. Just as a person does not become fit by doing a series of sit-ups and then declaring, “There, I am fit!” so a person does not become virtuous by doing a series of good deeds and then declaring, “Finally, I am virtuous!” Virtue and fitness arise in the process of continually working out or doing good deeds. We become virtuous when we have the practical wisdom [developed through this habitual practice], to act courageously to the right degree, for the right reasons, and under the right circumstances (38).

I think there is a tremendous amount of value to be found in thinking through how a person or persons could be trained to practice troublemaking in political and ethically responsible ways. Virtue ethics, with its emphasis on character, training, practice, habit, gives us the language and framework for thinking through how to do this.

Uh oh. I have enjoyed writing this entry, but it is over 1550 words long. That is about 1350 words longer than I need for wrapping up my presentation. Maybe I should approach this differently…later. For now, I’m done.

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in honor of my 50th post!

July 23, 2009

Yes, this is my 50th post. 36,301 words, give or take a few. Not that I am counting or anything. In honor of this very “important” occasion I want to do a series of entries on my theory of the ethics of making, being in and staying in trouble. Rather fitting since making/being in/staying in trouble is the theme of this blog, don’t you think? Okay, there is another reason why I am posting these entries now. I am presenting on this subject at the Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) conference in September and I need to start polishing my remarks. I thought working through them on the blog might be helpful.

Initially I was planning to post the entire presentation on here–in chunks of course. But, now I am thinking it would be better to pull out some troublesome bits (as in parts that I want to flesh out/clarify)and reflect on them. But in this entry, I think I will just introduce my project. Here is the abstract for the FEAST presentation:

ABSTRACT: In the 1990 preface to Gender Trouble, Judith Butler reflects on trouble and its value, concluding “that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it” (Gender Trouble, vii). With this statement, Butler introduces a central theme that continues to shape and motivate much of her work: learning how to make trouble and be in trouble are important tasks of the resisting subject. In this presentation, which comes out of a larger project on troublemaking as a virtue, I argue that Butler’s opening statement about troublemaking in Gender Trouble is not only a critical and provocative intervention into feminist politics as usual, but is an ethical gesture towards the dignity, desirability and necessity of troublemaking. This gesture, which is taken up more explicitly by Butler in Undoing Gender, points to two separate but related ethical projects involving troublemaking. The first project is concerned with making trouble and being in trouble in ways that extend and rework norms so that they make more lives possible and livable. The second project is concerned with exploring what is demanded of us as moral selves as we strive to stay in trouble.  I will conclude my presentation by tentatively linking the second of those projects with my own work on troublemaking as a feminist virtue.

9780415389556I am exploring the ethical possibilities of Butler’s work on troublemaking. It is exciting to see the recent interest, both by Butler and those writing about her, in connecting her work with ethics. For too long, the popular (among academics, that is) understanding of Gender Trouble is that is was not only counter but harmful to ethics/ethical projects. I remember this happening a lot in grad school. Ah, grad school…On the first day of every semester you had to go around the room and give your little spiel about what your academic interests were. Although I tried to mix it up, I usually ended up saying something about the ethical possibilities in the work of Judith Butler. One time, after giving my spiel, the professor sarcastically uttered, “good luck with that.” Oh bother. Anyway, the tide has changed and more scholars are writing and thinking about Butler and ethics. Moya Loyd writes about it. So do Samuel Chambers and Terrell Carver and Gill Jagger. Butler writes about it here, here, here, and with Catherine Mills and Fiona Jenkins here.

But, even as scholars have begun to think about ethics and Butler, their attention has frequently been on Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. What about Gender Trouble? Does it have anything to offer to ethics, feminist, queer or otherwise? Or is it part of a different stage in Butler’s thinking? On one hand, I can appreciate the need to turn to other texts. It is true, as Samuel Chambers and Terrell Carver suggest in their introduction to Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, that an overemphasis on Gender Trouble (which is often the only book that some people think Butler wrote) can obscure our understandings of Butler’s contributions to political [and ethical] thought beyond gender and gender performativity (5). However, failing to consider the ethical import of Gender Trouble could be sending the worrisome (well, at least to me) message that troublemaking/troublestaying, which is first and most directly articulated in Gender Trouble, has no ethical value. And often implied in that message is the idea that engaging in the troubling of gender is something that Butler used to promote–that is before she grew up and turned to more serious matters, like ethics and morality.

This idea that Gender Trouble and troublemaking is immature and therefore unethical raises several questions for me: 1. As Butler (and her work) has grown older, has she matured beyond Gender Trouble and troublemaking? Has she replaced her “childishness” and lack of seriousness (playfulness?) with more weighty matters–like being undone, normative violence, grief?; 2. Does one have to be “serious” and mature (that is, not young and immature) in order to engage in ethics? Can we imagine ethical visions that are not predicated on this equation of  maturity + seriousness = responsible/accountable and ethical?; and 3. Is troublemaking too playful, too immature, and therefore not ethical?

In my own work, I offer a very strong “No!” to this last question. Indeed, I am devoting a huge chunk of this blog to the idea that troublemaking, as a practice and an approach to life, has much to offer to feminist and queer ethical visions/projects. And in my presentation at FEAST I argue that Butler plants the seed for her future work on troublemaking as ethical in Gender Trouble. It is my contention that Butler’s recent work on ethics is not so much a turn to ethics (and a turn away from all that playful/immature performativity of her past) but a return to or maybe an extension of the ethical gesture towards troublemaking/troublestaying that she first makes in the 1990 preface to Gender Trouble.

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