November 10, 2011
by Alexander Brey
Comments Off on Archaeologies of Precarity
Archaeology has taken me to both sides of the Israeli-Arab conflict in the Middle East: the summer before last I was excavating a late Roman fort in Jordan south of the Dead Sea, while this past summer I was working … Continue reading
November 10, 2011
by Vanessa Christman
Comments Off on Theoretical rock star or torch-passing prophet?
As at the circus There is excitement, glee, and, Of course, performance. What a thrill to enter Goodhart Hall for the first Flexner lecture last Monday evening. I had been reading and blogging in almost total isolation for a few … Continue reading
November 10, 2011
by Jessica Lee
Comments Off on Resettled, still precarious
In her lecture, Gender Politics and the Right to Appear, Judith Butler critiques the structural systems that marginalize and precariatize populations. Thus, she expands her discursive inquiry to include minority and stateless peoples. Judith Butler’s lecture resonates with my clinical … Continue reading
November 10, 2011
by Elly Truitt
Comments Off on Being Human
Judith Butler’s inaugural lecture, “Gender Politics and the Right to Appear,” was a scorcher, covering the limitations of later capitalism, the politics of precarity, and the fundamental basis of democracy: the right to appear in public. At the heart of … Continue reading
November 10, 2011
by Mary Zaborskis
Comments Off on Are All Demands Allowed to Appear?
Judith Butler’s lecture, “Gender Politics and the Right to Appear,” this past Monday imagined the possibilities for futures that could become available when bodies gather in public and make demands, for implicit in such joining together are the demands for … Continue reading
November 10, 2011
by Sara Alcid
1 Comment
Judith Butler’s earlier work is often criticized for being too far removed from lived realities and not grounded in any sort of social activism. From the first glimpse I had of Butler’s Bodies in Alliance lecture series this Monday, I … Continue reading
November 3, 2011
by Alexander Brey
1 Comment
Yesterday I attended Professor Alice Donohue’s lecture on “The Lifelikeness of Greek Art” and I was struck by the ways in which the body in art is always a site of overlapping normative frameworks. There is of course the normative … Continue reading
November 3, 2011
by Johanna Gosse
Comments Off on Pre(Occupations)
Reviewing my fellow bloggers’ posts from last week, I saw that I wasn’t alone in noticing the coincidence between Judith Butler’s Bryn Mawr residency and the emergence (or rather, eruption) of the Occupy movement. A number of our posts included … Continue reading
November 3, 2011
by Medb McGearty
Comments Off on Perversion, Prohibition, and Abercrombie and Fitch
Recognizing the absence of something points to its very existence, or, to follow Butler’s use of the Lacanian theory of desire, to deny something is to reference it. Butler relates this theory in The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and … Continue reading
November 3, 2011
by Jessica Lee
3 Comments
I work with refugees in Philadelphia. Butler’s chapter Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification makes me reconceptualize my clients’ struggles in the resettlement process. Butler expands on Freud’s idea of melancholia into a discussion of melancholic incorporation, arguing that identity results from disavowed … Continue reading