Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 16:53:34 -0500 From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com> Subject: M-TH: movement As part of my continuing corruption by postmodernism, I just came across this in a short commentary by Adam Phillips that Judith Butler included in her book The Psychic Life of Power: "Starting with two sexes, as we must - described as opposites or alternatives or complements - locks us into a logic, a binary system that often seems remote from lived and spoken experience.... We should be speaking of paradoxes and spectrums, not contradictions and mutual exclusion. Every child rightly wants to know whether there is a position beyond exclusion or difference or separateness - a world in which leaving and being left out disappears, an idea taken up at a different level in utopian socialism, which aims at a society without margins and therefore without humiliation.... The language of boundaries that psychoanalysis is so intent on...promotes a specific set of assumptions about what a person is and can be. It is a picture of a person informed by the languages of purity and property, what Mary Douglas more exactly called purity and danger. It may be more useful to talk about gradations and blurring rather than contours and outlines when we plot our stories about gender. Butler's language of performance keeps definition on the move, which is where it is anyway...." I imagine a lot of Marxists would find this heretical. I'd love to hear some comments. Doug --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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