Banned Bodies, Spurned Speech: Butler, Kristeva and the location of a 'maternal language'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cet article propose de revenir sur la critique que fait Butler de Kristeva, notamment sur la thiorie du langage poitique.Butler misinterpr2te la thiorie de Kristeva et, ce faisant, mine son propre argument selon lequel le genre est perjormatiJ: En (re)venant ir Butler et en me penchant sur Kristeva, j'abom'e ensuite le discours fiministe qui se demande comment traduire la thiorie en pratique: comment le langage poitique de Kristeva peut-il fonctionner dans le sens d'un#minisme d'avenir?Relue du point de vue de Kristeva, la thiorie de la perjormativiti du genre de Butlerpeut-elle &ire re'habilite'e?Comment un lien entre le langage poitique de Kristeva et la perjormance de butler part-il dicentrer de faqon productive la structure du pouvoir partriarcal hitirosexualise'?Judith Butler has suggested that gender is a "cultural configuration" (Gender Trouble 190).She posits that gender categories are predicated on the grounds of exclusion, and what is at stake is the power of identity.I refer, here, to Butler's preceding remarks wherein she states that "the foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken" (181).She maintains, throughout her text, that in the present socio-cultural "configuration" a subject must be read as such-be culturally identifiable-in order to begin to enact political change.The thrust of Butler's argument is, in short, that gender is culturally prescribed to a subject (in order to render that subject identifiable), however, Butler takes great pains to demonstrate that gender is an arbitrary construction and that, as there are only two "culturally identifiable" genders, this process is inherently exclusionary.She maintains, moreover, that systematically categorizing gender works to undermine the subversive potential of individualistic identity.I will speak to this last point throughout the course of the paper.If power-moreover heterosexualized patriarchal power-is structured to exclude a majority of the population, then it follows that at the very least there should exist, within the excluded majority, a desire to subvert that power.It is curious, then, that Butler's critique of Julia Kristeva's "body politics" hinge on what Butler sees as an impossible and inadequate politics of subversion (102).Kristeva, in her work on subject-formation, relies on the multiple meanings available in language (what she calls poetic language) as a means by which to subvert the patriarchal law of power.Poetic language, for Kristeva, offers a way to reconnect with the 'maternal body'-a 'body' that psychoanalysis maintains every subject must turn from in order to enter into the socio-symbolic order.One could make the argument that 'figure' or 'specter' could work interchangeably
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".