Butlerian Thought

Butlerian thought refers to the work of poststructur-alist and queer theorist Judith Butler (1956). In curriculum studies, her theorizing is used to deconstruct binary concepts of gender, reconceptualize identity as nonunitary, and posit an ethics based on the limits of self-knowledge. Her most influential book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, critiqued the work of feminists who asserted woman as constituting a category with common interests and traits that reified an essentialist notion of gender. In de-essentializing gender, Butler conceptualizes identity as free-floating, as not connected to an essence, but instead to performance. In some of her later works, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjugation, Excitable Speech, and most recently Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, published in 2000, Butler examines the implications of a nonessentialized notion of identity for theorizing subjectivity, power, and ethics.

For Butler, subjectivity is constructed through historical and anthropological positions that understand gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts. Gender is a not a fixed category, but is fluid and shifting, changing in different contexts and times. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Butler argues that gender is flexible and not caused by stable factors. There is not a gender identity behind expressions of gender. Gender, in other words, is a performance; it is what one does, rather than what one is. Subjectivity is not the result of an authentic inner core self, but is the dramatic effect of performance.

The issue of power and agency is central to Butler's work. A central goal of feminism has been social change to improve the specific life circumstances of women. However, when woman as a category no longer exists, what becomes of political resistance? When subjectivity is no longer unitary [Page 93]and fixed, what becomes of agency? How is power reinterpreted and understood without a subject? In her examination of censorship of hate speech in Excitable Speech, Butler disrupts the myth of the independent subject who holds power. Instead, she posits a notion of power as embedded in language and discourse. The discourse of censorship in this case functions ironically to construct power as constitutive of the state that subsequently subverts the positioning of the “I” that draws on agency in opposition to the state. Butler thus questions the very possibility of any genuine oppositional discourse. For Butler, subjects no longer have power but are produced in the very relations of power that they seek to oppose. Gender is consequently an effect of power that functions as a truth.

In Giving an Account of Oneself, published in 2005, Butler develops an ethics based on the rejection of a Western notion of the unitary self that no longer has a referential “I.” Drawing on Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler examines what becomes of ethics when the subject is understood as being in a continual state of flux and constituted in relation to the social. Given that our self knowledge is limited, the concept of responsibility is one of acknowledging that we can never know ourselves except in relation to the social world. Consequently, social critique is at the core of ethical practice.

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