The title given to the interview is “Feminism should not resign in the Face of such Instrumentalization.” I found it pretty interesting to read, and would like to suggest that you check it out!
Source/credit: iablis.de, Renate Solbach
I was very excited when I stumbled across this interview. In it, Butler talks in detail about a few different topics, including her refusal of the Civil Courage Prize in Berlin. I thought this was great, because most of the coverage I have read about this was other people’s opinions and statements about her refusal of the prize, & I previously hadn’t been able to come across a statement that she had made herself. I had no idea that initially, when she arrived, she had intended to accept the prize. In my opinion, it’s pretty fucking great that that had happened organically & this pretty much squashes the rumors of Butler’s refusal of the prize as a “publicity stunt”.
Also, I really appreciated here how Butler talks about the intersectionality of oppression. Overall, I must say that she is truly a badass and you should read this interview. For serious.
Source/credit: AVIVA-Berlin website, Undine Zimmer, Marie Heidingsfelder, and Sharon Adler
If you want to read this interview right now, please make sure that you have the time to do so. At thirty-one pages, it’s pretty lengthy, but as I tend to say about Judith Butler’s interviews, it really is worth reading.
Maybe it’s just me, but I haven’t really noticed a lot of people in the public eye discussing the topic of non-violence in an “in-depth” way enough. I really respect Butler for speaking about it in interviews as openly and as often as she has.
* Also, for anyone interested in reading a book by Butler on similar/same subjects, I recommend that you read her book “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?”
Source/credit: Identities - Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. II, No. 1, Summer 2003
This is another interview that I had come across before I started this blog. I re-read it a few minutes ago, & wanted to post it, so here ya go.
Here’s a kick-ass quote from the interview- “…it is important that people ask the question ‘what is possible’ and believe in possibility. Because without the motion of possibility there is no motion forward.”
Source - LOLApress
For some reason, I especially enjoy reading interviews. Here’s an interesting one from February 2010, that Udi Aloni did with Judith Butler.
Source: Haaretz News site
Okay, so I have to admit that the title was what originally caught my attention, before I read this interview. (I mean, I tend to not expect the words “carefully crafted” and “fuck you” put together.) However, once I started to read it, I was glad that I did. Butler and the interviewer spoke on a variety of topics, such as grieving, different presidential administrations, social privelege, while the topic for most of the interview is war.
Butler makes many interesting points in this interview. Below are a few that I found to be especially compelling-
“Guernica: In the book’s introduction, you set out a principled vision for how we might go about defining life—
Judith Butler: I am not at all sure that I define life, since I think that life tends to exceed the definitions of it we may offer.”
“Judith Butler: …I think that we have seen quite cynical uses of feminism for the waging of war. The vast majority of feminists oppose these contemporary wars, and object to the false construction of Muslim women “in need of being saved” as a cynical use of feminist concerns with equality. There are some very strong and interesting Muslim feminist movements, and casting Islam as anti-feminist not only disregards those movements, but displaces many of the persisting inequalities in the first world onto an imaginary elsewhere.”
In the second quote, above, I really appreciated the way Butler spoke about the inequalities present in the first world, and of the “imaginary elsewhere.” It made me think about how a lot of the time, when people who live in the first world speak about inequality and injustice going on somewhere other than where they live, they often form their thoughts and ideas through a lense of the social privelege that they have, without even realizing it. I think it’s a challenging situation, not being able to see past the privelege that one has, and not being able to see that one is treating people as “other”, when that is not the intention.
The failure to recognize a possession of social privelege is something that effects me, personally. As a woman of color, and as a member of the LGBT community, it would probably seem easy to assume that I don’t have social privelege, but I do (regardless of whether or not I’m always conscious of it). As a person who gets to eat three meals a day, and make glib remarks about being “addicted” to Dunkin Donuts, & as someone who lives in a “first world” nation (a term that I’m honestly not too fond of), yeah, I’m priveleged.
*Here are a couple of other points Butler made that I appreciated-
“Judith Butler: Let us remember that Marx thought of thinking as a kind of practice. Thinking can take place in and as embodied action. It is not necessarily a quiet or passive activity. Civil disobedience can be an act of thinking, of mindfully opposing police force, for instance. I continue to believe in demonstrations, but I think they have to be sustained. We see the continuing power of this in Iran right now. The real question is why people thought with the election of Obama that there was no reason to still be on the street? It is true that many people on the left will never have the animus against Obama that they have against Bush. But maybe we need to protest policies instead of individuals. After all, it takes many people and institutions to sustain a war.”
“Judith Butler: Perhaps the issue is to become less ferocious in our commitments, to question certain forms of blind enthusiasm, and to find forms of steadfastness that include reflective thought. Nonviolence is not so much about the suppression of feeling, but its transformation into forceful intelligence.”
Alright, so I know that I put quite a few quotes in this post, but I highly suggest that you click the link at the top of this post and read the whole interview because it’s totally worth it.
Source- Guernica Magazine
http://tinyurl.com/jbutlerintrvw2001
Disclaimer: This is going to be a slightly longer post than usual.
So, above is a link to an interview with Judith Butler from a few years back, which was in an international journal. I was reading it earlier this morning, before I went to work, and I found it to be very interesting.
Firstly, I liked the fact that there were multiple people who got to ask Butler questions. They covered a variety of topics with her, such as biology, certain issues related to the legal system, the formation of coalitions on local levels, et al.
What I also noticed was Butler’s references to other people’s works; such as Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg. Some other people she made reference to like Cindy Sherman, Anna Mendietta, and Michael Berube I was not as familiar with, but I took note to look them up later. I appreciated that she credited people from whom she had learned ideas from & whose terms she had used/referenced, although I wouldn’t expect less.
My favorite part of this interview was the fact that it acknowledged and addressed common criticisms of her work, namely the criticism that Butler does not use language that is accessible to a large readership. This was of particular interest to me, because although I have enjoyed most of the work by her that I have read so far, I do agree to a certain extent that she uses somewhat inaccessible language, when more accesible language is available. I also think that it’s pretty notable that other well-known women have had this criticism of her as well, such as Martha Nussbaum1 and Gloria Steinem2. Butler does face this issue pretty directly, though, which I respect.
Cited- 1 http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/Cober/mathesis/nussbaum.html
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem
Source- Scribd.com, International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, Volume 6
