What do we learn from Butler?

More than fifteen years after the publication of Gender Trouble, Professor Judith Butler finally landed in Japan. While the Japanese audience was interested to find out how Professor Butler, as the author of the book, was going to talk about the world today and about her latest field of interests, it was our task as the audience to figure out what we, living in our time and place, could learn from her.

The seminar at ICU on the 12th of January started with a short speech and went on to a question/answer session where she answered various questions from both the guest commentators and the floor. In the speech, which served somewhat as 'an introduction to Judith Butler' by the professor herself, she raised the question as to how it is possible for us to be constructed and constrained by the other and to also have agency. This question of human dependence on the other for its own existence is what Professor Butler has been consistently exploring since Gender Trouble. While it appeared in her early works as the critique of 'the matrix of cultural intelligibility" which sustains itself on the exclusion of bodies and sexualities that do not conform to the heteronorm, the question has increasingly come to be discussed in relation to 'recognition' in her more recent works: who is recognized as 'human', why and how is it that particular beings are not considered human, and what does the lack of recognition entail for those beings? These were among the underlying themes at the ICU seminar, and Prof. Butler repeatedly referred to the violence of recognition and to the need for expanding the possibility of recognition in relation to various topics that were discussed, ranging from the condition of the liberal right-bearing subject to the question of who/what is being eliminated from the cultural and political field of imagination and representation.

The question of recognition was discussed again at the lecture at Ochanomizu University on the following Saturday, this time drawing on psychoanalytic theories and focusing on how the lack of social recognition could threaten the existence of human beings. It was also discussed in the post-lecture question/answer session, as Prof. Butler pointed out how the images of the dead caused by the post 9.11 U.S. military operation has been erased from media representation, refusing to recognize the loss of certain lives as loss.

Expanding the possibility of recognition is, however, not the same as trying to bring what has been excluded from the existing domain of recognition back into that very domain. Indeed, when asked at the ICU seminar whether her critique of exclusion aims at inclusion, Prof. Butler answered in the negative. The point is not to pick up each excluded existence and return it to the existing domain with stable boundaries, but to question the boundaries themselves, to try to destabilize them. It implies questioning the conditions that enable us to be a woman, a member of a certain society, a right-bearing subject, or to be a human, and trying to imagine the possible domain that recognizes those whom we cannot consider women as women, those whom we cannot accept as members of our society as members, those who we believe do not deserve rights as right-bearing subjects, and those outside our understanding of humans as humans. Even if the attempt might involve risking our status as a woman, a member of a society, a right-bearing subject, or a human, and even if, when we're already excluded from the domain of recognition, the attempt might make it more difficult for us to sneak back in, we might still have to question and destabilize the boundaries of the domain, in other words, we might still have to offer a critique of the domain of recognition. Indeed, Prof. Butler also argued that a critique is most of all a critique of a field or a domain of intelligibility, and therefore engaging in a critique inevitably involves the risk of becoming unintelligible.

Although a critique in this sense is not something that can be easily achieved, we cannot give up the attempt at a critique even if we can only be partially successful. The issues of recognition can be found everywhere around us: when someone argues that 'gender-free' will create homosexuality and GID, not only should we tell them that it is simply a fallacy but we should also ask, 'Even if so, so what?'; when we are confronted with a false accusation that Japanese feminists are promoting gender-neutral locker rooms, not only should we point out that it is a factual mistake but we should also ask, 'And why do the locker rooms always have to be gender-specific?' If we are not even questioning the domain of recognition when it appears in its simplest and most obvious forms, then we have not learned anything from the books, the lecture or the seminar by Prof. Butler. If we maintain our silence at the equation of Japanese feminism with feminism by and for East-Asian people of Japanese nationality, or the equation of the feminist struggle against discrimination based on sex and gender with the feminist struggle for the equality between men and women, we have not learned anything. If we do not speak against the claim that the eviction of homeless people by the Osaka city authorities was acceptable as those people are illegal squatters from the start, then we may have had a good time listening to a world-famous feminist academic, but we certainly have not learned anything from her. Her theories can be a mere set of abstract concepts if we do not take them and use them in order to question the domain of recognition of the very culture and society that we live in. It is up to us to make them work to expand the domain of recognition in our own society, and perhaps it is only then that we will know we have learned something from her.

Chuo University Full-time Lecturer: SHIMIZU Akiko