Judith Butler Beside Oneself Summary

Butler says “We have an interesting political predicament, since most of the time when we hear about “rights,” we understand them as pertaining to individuals, or when we argue for protection against discrimination, we argue as a group or a class.” (Page 241). I agree with this statement. This statement reflects the reasoning why societies that we find ourselves in are the way they are. I believe this statement means more than what is read. I believe this is why individuals who are not accepted by society are the ones who are misunderstood by society. People who are gay, lesbian, or transgendered do not have the same rights and same pre-judgment that is formed from someone who is accepted in society than a heterosexual person. However gays, lesbian, and transgender express political views and ideas just as a heterosexual person who is accepted by society expresses their political views. Sexual orientation is the only reason gays, lesbians, and transgender are not accepted by society. Butler says “We ask that the state, for instance, keep its laws off our bodies, and we call for principles of bodily self-defense and bodily integrity to be accepted as political goods. Yet, it is through the body that gender and sexuality are exposed to others, implicated in

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 second person perspective of “Until Gwen” offers in-depth detail and description of flashbacks and thoughts, as well as providing the story, thoughts, and actions which engages the reader. This causes the story to seem more personal and captivating through a connection to both the characters and their storyline, making it more personal. The use of second person allows for further character development and connections to characters that the reader can piece together, and relate with.

Gender, by definition, is the state of being male or female typically used with reference to social and cultural differences. Sex, by definition, is either male or female into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions. However, society fails to separate the two. Judith Butler describes in “Phylosophe” that a young man who was murdered because he was dramatically feminine than he was “supposed” to be masculine. In the “Prelude: The Barbershop,” Ashanti Young details of his hardship of being denied from subcultural groups that he wants to identify with. Audre Lorde expresses her tyranny as a black, lesbian woman fighting through criticism and judgement and silence in “The Transformation

“The Flowers” by Alice Walker is a short story written in the 1970’s. The story focuses on Myop, a ten year old African American girl who loves to explore the land in which she lives. Carefree and naïve, Myop decides to travel further away from her ‘Sharecropper cabin’ and travels deep inside the woods to unfamiliar land where she discovers the decomposed body of an African American man. It is then Myop quickly grows up and suddenly becomes aware of the world in which she lives. The story relies on setting and symbolism to convey the theme of departing innocence.

Octavia Butler is one of only a few African-American science fiction writers, and the only African-American woman to earn popular and critical acclaim predominantly in the genre of science fiction. Her writing has earned science fictions top literary honors, including the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award. Octavia Butler was born on June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, California. Her young adulthood was an amalgam of misery and motivation; she supported her family by working as a domestic. Often accompanying her mother to work, Butler witnessed the racial and economic indignities common to the African-American working poor, particularly women. Class, gender and racial inequalities would play a central role in her writing. Butler 's most popular short story to date is "Bloodchild". The frightening futuristic dilemma in "Bloodchild" involves humans who have had to escape to another planet for survival. Butler skillfully reverses the troupe of animal captivity and breeding to make humans the other. By placing the animal like creatures in control but also making them dependent on the earthlings, Butler uses symbolism to emphasize on the main themes of Gender roles, Interrelation and the lack of Freedom in society.

Octavia Butler’s Dawn explores a world of the unknown after humans nearly destroy their kind along with Earth, causing an extraterrestrial species to intervene. The protagonist, Lilith, finds herself in a predicament as she is captured and locked in solidarity for a long. The extraterrestrial species that intervenes, Oankali, strip her of her clothes, mysteriously cut her and then tell her it is her role to mother a group of humans and prepare them for a return to Earth. In the novel Lilith is conflicted, she knows she has no control of her body and that humans have been “enslaved” by the Oankali but begins to trust and connect with them, especially Nikanj. Through the relationship of Lilith and Nikanj side by side with Humans and the Oankali, Octavia Butler explores the monstrous aspects of people and acts within the cultures.

The poem “The Mother” written by Gwendolyn Brooks in 1945, is a poem that focuses on the immeasurable losses a woman experiences after having an abortion. The poems free verse style has a mournful tone that captures the vast emotions a mother goes through trying to cope with the choices she has made. The author writes each stanza of the poem using a different style, and point of view, with subtle metaphors to express the speaker’s deep struggle as she copes with her abortions. The poem begins with, “Abortions will not let you forget” (Brooks 1), the first line of the poem uses personification to capture your attention. The title of the poem has the reader’s mindset centered around motherhood, but the author’s expertise with the opening line, immediately shifts your view to the actual theme of the poem. In this first line the speaker is telling you directly, you will never forget having an abortion. Brooks utilizes the speaker of the poem, to convey that this mother is pleading for forgiveness from the children she chose not to have.

This weeks readings really made me think about myself as a person and the actions that I make everyday. What really made me think of this was when I was reading Judith Butlers article, and how she goes on to explain how we create our gender based off the actions we make everyday. The concept of a constantly evolving gender really amazes me and makes me think back to concept of how the person we are today is a combination events spread across our life spans culminating into my living breathing entity. The idea of how a girl could be more of a man than an actual man takes me back to a time in my life when i was a young child. My sister and I were jumping off of our local jungle gym and of course I was a young and hesitated. Before I jumped my

Throughout history, definitions of sexuality within a culture are created and then changed time after time. During these changes, we have seen the impact and power one individual or group can have over others. In the Late Nineteenth Century into the Early Twentieth Century, we see multiple groups of people and or authorities taking control over the idea of sex and how they believe society is being impacted by sex. At this point in time, society had groups of people who believed they had the power to control how society as whole viewed and acted upon sex. Those particular groups and ideas changed many lives and the overall definition of sexuality within that culture.

This book features a collection of Judith Butler’s essays and her primary intention with this collection is to “focus on the question of what it might mean to undo restrictive normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life” (12). These essays look at the construction of gender and the way certain conceptions of it are normalized and reproduced in potentially harmful and limiting ways. Butler uses a feminist poststructural framework to critique the normalizing/marginalizing views of gender that exist because the “terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, out-side oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically

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.

behavior and a cry for the recognition of women's rights ( ). Instead its theme

Gender is defined in Undoing Gender in an act of improvising within a scene of constraint, where one that is always within a social context, and never outside of the ideology. Butler expresses that Undoing Gender expresses an understanding of how “restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life” might be undone. She stresses throughout the reading that this process of undoing is not something that is negative or

Giving an Account of Oneself, a compelling piece of work written by Judith Butler, digs deep into what it means to give an account of oneself and how it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to do such an activity without becoming “a social theorist” (Butler 8). Butler states “the story of my origin I tell is not one for which I am accountable, and it cannot establish my accountability,” (Butler 37) since the story is always changing. We are not able to give our accounts as the accounts we give will always be told in different lights and we, as beings, are always changing as the norms around us change. The sense of being ties into us not being the same person we were when we came into being, and nor are we the same being as when we begin to tell the story of our origin of being. However, other notable influences, such as Levinas, believe that fully exposing our origin of being would act as a sort of “surplus” (Levinas 79) meaning those we expose our origin of being to will be so overwhelmed with the situation that we would never be able to give an account of ourselves overall. Levinas’ views coincides with Butlers’ on the topic of norms and how we will never be able to act outside of norms when he states, “the moment I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone… I am, as it were, disposed by the language that I offer” (Levinas 26).