Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler

336 Pages·2006·2.41 MB·English

by  Ellen Armour

BODILY CITATIONS
GENDER, THEORY, AND RELIGION
GENDER, THEORY, AND RELIGION
Amy Hollywood, Editor
The Gender, Theory, and Religion series provides a forum for interdisciplinary
scholarship at the intersection of the study of gender, sexuality, and religion.
Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making
elizabeth a. castelli
When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David
susan ackerman
Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity
jennifer wright knust
Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators
john coakley
BODILY
CITATIONS
RELIGION AND JUDITH BUTLER
Edited by
Ellen T. Armour
and
Susan M. St. Ville
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since 1893
New York, Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bodily Citations : religion and Judith Butler / edited by Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-231-13406-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-231-13407-x (pbk. : alk. paper) —
isbn 0-231-50864-6
1. Religions. 2. Butler, Judith. 3. Feminist theory. 4. Sex role—Religious aspects.
5. Gender identity. I. Armour, Ellen T., 1959– II. St. Ville, Susan M., 1963–
bl410.b63 2006
202.082--dc22
2005034516
Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed
on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Introduction xiii
Judith Butler—in Theory 1
ellen t. armour and susan m. st. ville
TEXTUAL BODIES
1. Materializations of Virtue: Buddhist Discourses on Bodies 15
susanne mrozik
2. The Garden of Eden and the Heterosexual Contract 48
ken stone
3. The Annoying Woman: Biblical Scholarship After Judith Butler 71
teresa j. hornsby
EMBODYING IDENTITIES
4. Disturbingly Catholic: Thinking the Inordinate Body 93
karen trimble alliaume
VI CONTENTS
5. Unconforming Becomings: The Significance of Whitehead’s Novelty
and Butler’s Subversion for the Repetitions of Lesbian Identity
and the Expansion of the Future 120
christina k. hutchins
6. Turning On/To Ethics 157
claudia schippert
7. Agency, Performativity, and the Feminist Subject 177
saba mahmood
THEORIZING BODIES
8. “Judith Butler” in My Hands 225
rebecca schneider
9. Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization 252
amy hollywood
Afterword 276
judith butler
Selected Bibliography 293
List of Contributors 297
Index 299
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THOUGH NOW CONSIDERABLY expanded, this volume originated
from a set of sessions sponsored by the Feminist Theory and
Religious Reflection Group at the 1997 national meeting of the
American Academy of Religion in San Francisco. The group took advantage of
the meeting’s location to invite feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler, pro-
fessor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California in
Berkeley, to respond to a set of papers by scholars of religion in various fields
using her work. Professor Butler graciously agreed, and two dynamic sessions
with a combined audience of several hundred took place. The response to
those sessions and the important place that Professor Butler’s work contin-
ues to occupy in women’s studies, queer theory, and disciplines that engage
those fields (including religion) inspired us to produce this anthology.1 While
we expect this book will find an audience among scholars in religion who
are already interested in Butler, we also hope to attract scholars of religion
who are not familiar with—or may even be skeptical about—her work. In
addition, we hope that the book will appeal to scholars of feminist and queer
theory who may be unaware of—or even skeptical about—religious studies.
A word or two, then, to entice both kinds of readers into the volume.
VIII PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE TROUBLE WITH GENDER (AND BEYOND)
Though not her first book, the publication of Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity in 1990 brought Judith Butler to prominence.2
Gender Trouble broke new ground in feminist theory and became a found-
ing text in the emerging field of queer theory with its assertion that gender
produces sex. Masculinity and femininity, Butler argued, are bodily perfor-
mances based on the demands of our heterosexual and phallocentric econ-
omy, not expressions of the body’s inner nature. In monographs that fol-
lowed, Bodies That Matter (1993), Excitable Speech (1997), and The Psychic
Life of Power (1997), Butler refined and expanded upon Gender Trouble by
developing more detailed accounts of the mechanisms through which iden-
tities are produced and resisted while attending to the political contexts in
which they function.3 In recent years Butler has turned her attention to kin-
ship structures (Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, 2000) and
international politics (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 2000, co-written
with Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau), including America’s responses to Sep-
tember 11 (in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 2004).4
Her latest book, Undoing Gender (2004), returns once again to the fraught
terrain of sexuality and gender nearly twenty-five years after Gender Trouble.5
Her investigations into all these arenas continue to explore and expose the
interplay of psychic, linguistic, and political forces.
The essays in Bodily Citations focus on Judith Butler’s performative the-
ory of gender, the aspect of her work that continues to exercise the greatest
influence on academia. We have provided in “Judith Butler—in Theory” an
account of the contours of this theory and its significance for the study of
religion; what follows here positions this volume in relation to critical ques-
tions raised about Butler’s theory. Even those who have never read a word
of Gender Trouble may be aware of the brief firestorms of controversy that
have erupted around Butler in the public press in recent years. A review of
Butler’s major works written by Martha Nussbaum for the New Republic
(February 22, 1999) is a case in point.6 Although in our judgment Nussbaum’s
review has been rightly critiqued as unnecessarily vicious and irresponsible,
it seems to us important to address.7 Doing so provides a useful entrée into
critical questions about Butler’s work that are raised and, in some cases,
addressed in Bodily Citations. Nussbaum accuses Butler (as have others
before) of substituting the doing of supposedly subversive things with words
for genuine feminist political engagement. Elevating language to center stage
distorts reality and troubles structures foundational to political activism, she
argues. Stable identities (including that of being a woman) and the ability
to act freely—both notions challenged by Butler’s work—seem to be basic
requirements for any kind of politics, feminist or otherwise. Engaging with
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX
Butler, Nussbaum claims, results inevitably in a paralyzing quietism that
eviscerates feminist politics.
The questions Nussbaum raises echo what seem to be lingering—if
uninformed—suspicions about not only Butler’s work but certain kinds of
theory on which it depends. What does theory of the type Butler engages
(psychoanalytic, deconstructive, poststructuralist) offer those who struggle
with hardscrabble political realities? Butler, like the theorists on whom she
draws, has been accused of resorting to jargon-laden prose that some deride
as camouflage for weak ideas. Are the insights to be gained from submerg-
ing oneself in what is purported to be, at least, inscrutable prose and con-
voluted ideas (or convoluted prose about inscrutable ideas) worth the intel-
lectual labor?
The introduction to Butler’s work that follows will, we trust, effectively
put to rest suspicions based on misunderstanding or misreading of this theo-
rist. Many of the essays will shed new light on those questions that need
serious consideration. Indeed, examining the uses to which religionists put
Butler’s work strikes us as an excellent location for responding to these ques-
tions and suspicions. Though itself frequently subject to oversimplification
in the popular media and the secular imagination (the religious imagination,
too, for that matter), religion is an aspect of culture that has its moments of
high theory and its hardscrabble realities. Those of us who have taken it up
as an academic pursuit are perhaps especially attuned to the complexities of
religious ideas and their materializations in religious texts and practices of
various sorts engaged in by perfectly ordinary people to ordinary and extraor-
dinary effect. Even those who go about their lives paying little or no attention
to religious matters cannot avoid their effects. For good and for ill, religious
traces persist even within the West’s putatively secular culture—overtly as a
source of conflict (as in the so-called culture wars) but also covertly (as the
unacknowledged root of certain cultural traditions). Religion, like gender and
sexuality (and often with them), is a site where language, materiality, theory,
and politics all come together in complex ways.
PUTTING BUTLER TO WORK
In addition to deepening and broadening our understanding of the
import of Butler’s work, Bodily Citations offers a distinctive approach to the
study of religion by applying a common theoretical lens to a set of issues that
emerge from diverse religious sites. The introduction to this volume describes
the essays in more detail. We take a moment here to provide readers who are
unfamiliar with the academic study of religion with a map that situates each
essay in relationship to that field.