Overview

Handout: Overview for Feminist Theory

 

 

Section One: Antigone: Becoming States and States of Becoming

 

Terms:

 

Ontology and Epistemology (states of becoming; states of becoming)

 

Incest: laws and states; political economies of sex

 

Performativity and Performance

 

Reproduction and recognition

 

Loci:

 

“Liberal Humanism”

 

“Psychoanalytic Criticism”

 

Feminist responses:

 

Judith Butler:

 

Judith Butler: “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?”

“…I do not mean to resolve this dilemma in favor of one or the other but to develop a critical practice that is mindful of both. I want to maintain that legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will and will not count as an intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship” (117)

 

Gayle Rubin

 

Artifact:

 

Hedwig and the Angry Inch:  How does Hedwig bring into play the “state/States” of gender/sex?; Founding myths and performance; “….there was a wall erected between in the city of Berlin….Hedwig is like that wall….”

 

 

 

Section Two: Huckleberry Finn: Automation and Animation: Re-thinking the intersections of race/sex/gender

 

Automation: Taylorism, Fordism

 

Animation: gesture; “surfaces”; embodied defiance

 

Irony: Reading between possibility and limitation (finitude); James Cone: tragedy and transformation encountered through difficult and complex surfaces: skin; symbols; stereotypes

 

The “obscene cut” in Twain; Jim at the cut between automation and animation

 

Reading and race

 

Minstrel

 

Fred Moten: “Black Mo’nin’ In the Sound of the Photograph”: Performative writing; “a poetic that makes possible a semantics of the anguished cry…”

“Blackness is an ongoing performance of encounter: rupture, collision, and passionate response.”

 

“…the nature of photography and our experience of photography… that mode of semiotic objectification and inquiry which privileges the analytic-interpretative reduction of phonic materiality and/or meaning over something like mimetic improvisation of and with that materiality that moves in excess of meaning.”

 

“The cut”: rupture and collision

 

Loci:

 

“Post-structuralism and Deconstruction”

“Feminist Criticism”

 

Artifact:

 

 Art/performances of Kara Walker : How might we think about Moten’s “cut” in relation to her work?   Where do the “surfaces” of race/sex/gender come together in her work?  The significance of irony.

 

 

Section three: Passing: in/on/through/with

 

Passing

 

Modern/postmodern Blackness (sex/gender)

 

Performance and performativity (once again)

 

Whose history?

 

Raced/gendered/sexed “looks”

 

Authority and states: “socio-political machinery”; “subjective territory”; “transversal acts”

 

bell hooks: The postmodern critique of “identity,” though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of “identity” as one example.

 

Reynolds: “subjunctive spaces” – “what if”/ “as if” – between subjective territory and transversal territory

 

Artifact:

 

Paris is Burning:  Authorship? What conceptual machinery is reproduced?  What kinds of transversal spaces are made possible?  Postmodern blackness?