readings post: Bordo v. Butler

Is Judith Butler a Bay Area solipsist?  Bordo maps Butler on to a model of the Great White Male Monied Philosopher who is divorced from context and material realities, who can afford to swim in pure discourse at the expense of having to negotiate embodied "experience" day to day (281).  Butler's idea of the parodic enactment of gender as subversive act, according to Bordo, sounds good *in theory.*  Bordo refers to Butler's "linguistic foundationalism," which Bordo implicitly contrasts with her own more "materialist" approach, signaled in tropes such as her phrase, "the grip of culture on the body"; Butler, on the other hand--Bordo implies--would dissolve the materiality of the body into a diaphanous "text."  

Bordo rightly, I think, calls attention to the fact that the body-as-text (Butler's notion) doesn't exist in a vacuum, that such texts require readers, and that readers vary from context to context; that such texts also have authors, and that the authors are not necessarily themselves edified by the "enlightening" texts they display (292-93).  Bordo casts Butler as an academic who, impotently encased in the ivory tower, flatters her ego by fantasizing that her mere "textualism" is equipped to produce material changes "out there."

Certainly, watching a filmic text such as "Orlando" is unlikely to convert the queer-hater (who is unlikely to see the film to begin with) to reconsider their politics.  And given that Butler does, demonstrably, "talk the talk" (what Bordo terms the "power-language" of academic-ese, in which the pretension of an avant-garde "elitism" is fused with the glamour of a fiery politically oppositional stance), Bordo's portrait of Butler is not without justification.

On the side of Butler, however, I offer the following:  Bruzzi notes that "passing" must fail if it is to do any political work; the seams must show.  This was Butler's idea of parody, and it makes logical sense.  I would only venture to add that the political work that Butler envisions may come at a high cost.  I am thinking here of Matthew Shepard, or, more in line with Butler's focus on drag, of the scenario fictionalized in the film "Boys Don't Cry" (1999).  The trauma of a slaying in one's own community has an impact that the experience of watching "Orlando" necessarily lacks.  According to a radio report I heard, masculinist homophobes in the state of Wyoming were galvanized in support of the cause of gay rights by the close-to-home brutality of Shepard's death, which worked on them as a kind of consciousness-raising.  Brutality inscribes the conscience of a community.  Not parody alone, but trauma and martyrdom, may be required to effect political change, which may arise retrospectively in the wake of their devastation.  And even then, the forces of reaction and forgetting are legion.