How do we define “human?” This is a question that has become more difficult and bewildering to answer as time passes day by day. Judith butler tries to answer this age-old question of how we define “human”. In Butler’s essay, “Beside Oneself” it demonstrates the predominance of sexual orientations and how the role of society has influenced human’s lives. In turn, the essay asks many questions that challenges the readers to think critically and look within outside the norm and interpret for themselves what one believe the answer for Butler’s ideology. However, Butler failed to define clearly the most important question, how do we define “human?” Although, Butler made the claim that to be defined as human is to be part of the society and be accepted into the social norms, humans should not be based on standards of being accepted by the society. Instead humans should be defined by humanity (caring for those in need), and the freedom to critically think for ourselves. It is very common to confuse the word “human” and “person”. One way to address the definition of human is to know the difference between the word human and a person. The difference between human, and person is that human is referred to of, or consisting of people of, relating to the social aspect of people (dictionary.com). A person is a human being in the form of adult or child, and distinguished differently from an animal or a thing (dictionary.com). Butler uses the terminology “human” rather than a “person”
First off, we must explore Butler’s Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy to grasp a better idea of what she intended her essay to install in its readers. Throughout the essay, Butler stresses the importance of pushing the limits of social norms. Butler says, “nevertheless, those who live outside the conjugal frame or maintain modes of social organization for sexuality that are neither monogamous nor quasi-martial are more and more considered unreal, and their loves and losses less than “true” loves and “true” losses” (245). Here, Butler is talking about categories, in terms of sexuality. She is
Throughout the novel Kindred, Butler compared and contrasted modern African Americans with African Americans that were slaves in the novel. Some of the many ways she compares them are through education, work ethic, and their personal feelings about and/or how they handle their own slavery.
Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, grandparents, pimps, prostitutes, straight people, gay people, lesbian people, Europeans, Asians, Indians, and Africans all have once thing in common: they are products of sexuality. Sexuality is the most common activity in the world, yet is considered taboo and “out of the norm” in modern society. Throughout history, people have been harassed, discriminated against, and shunned for their “sexuality”. One person who knows this all too well is activist and author, Angela Davis. From her experiences, Davis has analyzed the weakness of global society in order to propose intellectual theories on how to change the perspective of sexuality. This research paper will explore the discussions of
In Octavia Butler’s Dawn the idea of gender is deconstructed and reformed from the typical human’s definition. Often people do not consider the role of gender in society today. Usually the first thing one notices when meeting someone new is their gender or their presumed gender. However, there becomes a problem when the person whose gender we perceived identifies as a different gender. Butler forces the reader to examine how they judge and perceive gender. While the ooloi are actually “its” their personalities seem to imply a certain gender. The transgender community often brings up this issue because these assumptions of gender based on our judgments of what defines a male and what defines a female can skew how a transgender person is treated and addressed. In Chapter One of Gender Through the Prism of Difference by Anne Fausto-Sterling, the idea of expanding the number of genders based on one’s biological differences is examined through the five sexes theory. By now the concept of gender being defined solely by one’s biology has mostly been left in the past but the question remains of how do we truly define gender? How does being outside of the social norms that Michael Warner talks about cause us to feel shame when discussing our gender and our perceptions of gender? In this essay, I will argue that preconceived notions of gender create shame when a person’s own perception of their gender does not fit the social norms. This stigma around the limited and strict definitions
The US is appealing in the eyes of other countries, and even ourselves, because of the “free” and “equal” characteristics we claim ourselves to have, such as: freedom of religion, freedom to own private property, and freedom of equal justice. However, in the eyes of an African America, Atlantic Monthly Journalist, we see that all of these freedoms find a loophole when it comes to the black community. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me, he writes from a political, yet deeply personal standpoint to analyze today’s version of racism. Coates strays away from his usual journalist works to a more deeper and personal view. His book is devoted to his fifteen-year-old son, Samori, and provides him with guidance through the struggle of racism; all while letting Samori fend for himself. Coates’ lets his son know all this through history, and heritage; of his own and of America’s.
First published in 1979, Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred is a unique novel, which can be categorized both as a modern-day slave narrative, and as a science fiction time-travel tale. In the novel, Butler uses time-travel as a way to convey W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double-consciousness. Dubois’ theory is based on the idea that people of color have two identities, both struggling to reconcile in one being. His theory about the complex nature of the African-American experience directly relates to Butler’s use of Kindred’s protagonist, Dana, and her experience time travelling as a modern-day African-American woman, and her experience of a pre-abolition, nineteenth-century slave.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivered her speech “The Solitude of Self” in 1892, which presented a definition of being a human being as well as being a woman in the time when males were dominating the society. By analyzing the historical and rhetorical context that the speech was delivered at, I argue that Stanton managed to address her purpose to the targeted audiences.
“Butler’s characters value community over individual success. Or better, individual success is defined in terms of community. Her questions are: what do we do to survive? How must we change if we are not to be wiped out by others, by ourselves? (Hairston 297)“
By making use of the cliché vampire tales and transforming them into a unique fictional novel, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling takes the reader into a different world in which pleasure, hatred and persistence are combined to solve the mysterious life-threatening puzzle of a genetically modified vampire. Fledgling is a novel that exposes the ignorance hatred can create and the strength survival can generate. Nonetheless, Fledgling, like many other books, has its downfalls and confusions. Butler’s last novel expresses everything she believed and stood for, and opens the eyes to those who cannot see our universal issues by placing them in a totally different world.
Should Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” be classified as a slave story? The author claims that “Bloodchild” is not a tale of slavery, but rather a love story and a coming-of-age tale. Does “Bloochild” conform to the conventions of the slave stories, love stories, or coming-of-age tales with which you are familiar? What other classifications—in terms of literary genre, form, or mode—apply to “Bloodchild”?
Throughout history, female artists have not been strangers to harsh criticism regarding their artistic works. Some female artists are fortunate to even receive such criticism; many have not achieved success in sharing their works with the world. In Virgina Woolf’s third chapter of her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf addresses the plight of the woman writer, specifically during the Elizabethan time period of England. Woolf helps the reader appreciate her view on how stifling and difficult this time period was for women and how what little creativity emerged would have been distorted in some way. Through a number of claims, examples and other literary techniques, Woolf is able to
Both Foucault and Butler claim that sexuality is not what makes us who we are, that it is simply a social construct. In addition, they both believe that by submitting to the mechanisms of power and categorizing ourselves sexually, we are giving impetus to our own subjugation. While they hold similar beliefs in many ways, and much of Judith Butler's work is building upon work done by Michael Foucault, Judith Butler does diverge from Foucault's ideas. The reason Butler revises Foucault is that his concept of biopower leaves no room for resistance to power. For Foucault, a shift in the 17th century from a top-down monarchial model of power which focused on the individual gave way to a political technology for controlling entire populations.
The main idea of this essay was to choose a topic that would centre on something that has posed as a challenge or change in/to individuals as well as the society at large in recent years. In my opinion, I think that one of the most prominent of these issues in recent times has become people’s general attitude towards gender and sexuality. The new notion of “open- mindedness” towards groups that have traditionally been marginalised or misrepresented in mainstream society on the basis of sexual attraction and gender identity has definitely been catching on and I think that it is a major thing that has evolved especially in recent years and it has definitely brought about challenges as well as changes
In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes “As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which a ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘pre-discursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts (11).” After reading the statement, I agree with Butler’s claim that sex is not a natural trait, but one that is culturally assumed by nature of gender. Gender is a cultural phenomenon that traps us all. Perceptions and constructs created by the people of society reach high and wide and affect every individual of modern Western culture.
In her essay “In Search of a Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf used Shakespeare’s sister as a metaphor to explain the position of women in Elizabethan era. Since author finds it difficult to find any trace of women in the Elizabethan era, she creates a fictional character through imagination, and to feel situations that the women in Elizabethan society would have had to go through. Woolf compares fiction to a “spider’s web” (520) that permeates life “at all four corners” (520). Through this metaphor, she personifies narratives of women suffering as a spider’s web that cling to our material reality. For Woolf, our lived stories are a part of this web which can be changed, destroyed or, re-spin with our imagination. In my paper, I argue that Wolfe uses the metaphor of a spider’s web as a heuristic device to make a case for literacy analysis and fiction as tools for exercising narrative agency and challenging stories that deny us representation in this world. To illustrate this, she creates an imaginative character, named Judith Shakespeare, to surface the gender inequality in the Elizabethan era. For this purpose, she not only writes a new chapter of Elizabethan history that centers the perspective of the women, but she also gives voice to women of that era who, like Judith her main character, were silenced and delegitimized by the spider’s web of their time.