From steven@sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp Mon Jan 31 21:14:05 2000
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From: "Steven J. Willett" <steven@sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 14:23:29 -0600
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Subject: The professor of parody
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<color><param>0100,0100,0100</param>Martha Nussbaum has an excellent critique of Judith Butler's style, core 
ideas and willful political impotence--to subvert a performative 
genderism--in the current issue of The New Republic: "The Professor of 
Parody."  The gravamen of her charge is that we should view Butler 
more as a sophist than a serious philosopher.  


The string of critical letters that followed publication of the article is, 
perhaps, more revealing than the article.  The most idiotic and 
simultaneously most chilling came from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:


<paraindent><param>left</param>"This flag-waving championship of needy women leads Nussbaum 
finally to assert that "women who are hungry, illiterate, 
disenfranchised, beaten, raped ... prefer food, schools, votes, and 
the integrity of their bodies." Sounds good, from a powerful tenured 
academic in a liberal university. But <italic>how</italic> does she know? This may 
be her idea of what they should want. In that conviction she may 
want to train them to want this. That is called a "civilizing mission." 
But if she ever engages in unmediated grassroots activism in the 
global South, rather than championing activist theorists, she will find 
that the gender practice of the rural poor is quite often in the 
performative mode, carving out power within a more general scene 
of pleasure in subjection. If she wants to deny this generality of 
gender culture and make the women over in her own image, she will 
have to enter their protocol, and learn much greater patience and 
understanding than is shown by this vicious review." </paraindent>

<paraindent><param>right</param>    </paraindent>



<nofill>
==========================================
Steven J. Willett
University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus
2-3 Nunohashi 3-chome
Hamamatsu City, Japan 432-8012
Voice: (53) 457-4514; Fax: (53) 457-4514
Japan email: steven@sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp
US email: sjwillett@earthlink.net
.