Response Paper #4: Judith Butler

“In the theatre, one can say, 'this is just an act,' and de-realize the act, make acting into something quite distinct from what is real.” (Butler, 527)

If performances are received by audiences as distinct from one another and form what is real, could we argue about the influence of transgression of gender roles on the stage to define what is proper outside of a performance space?

Roles on stage - Roles in everyday life

M. Butterfly is a play by David Hwang – inspired by Madame Butterfly. The play based on true events, is about the relationship between Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat assigned to Beijing in the 1960s, and Song, a Chinese opera performer.

Song manipulates Rene into disclosing secret diplomatic information and spies him for the Chinese government. Gallimard is unaware or willfully ignorant of the fact that in traditional Chinese opera, all roles are performed by men, so their affair lasts for many years. Since, Gallimard betrays his country; he is tried for treason, which led him to learn the truth about that Song is actually a man employed to pose as a woman in order to extract state secrets from him. At the end, Gallimard dresses like a woman and commits suicide by stabbing his heart with a dagger. This kind of a suicide performance is generally associated with woman, so we could say that the European, white masculinity's fantasy of the Oriental woman intervenes a homosexual desire. M Butterfly constitutes a distance between the gender and the body; the play deconstructs the binary oppositions, which structure the meaning. Hence we could say that the play challenges the perceptions about social, political, cultural and especially gendered identities of the Western audience.

Does crossgender performance keep the existence of the dominant masculinist hegemony, just by defining the genders as different and unequal? Or does the use the transgressive energy on theatrical presence destabilize accepted categories? Hwang's play as a transformation from Madame Butterfly into M Butterfly could be read as a play of repressed homoeroticism that elaborates the construction of a marginalized sexuality. And, in my opinion this deconstructivist example is crucial to understand the work of Butler, who states that appearance contradicts the reality of the gender.

Hwang’s play is a contemporary example of transgression of gender roles on theatre; however the situation is as much as complicated in the works of Shakespeare and also in the Ancient Greek Theatre. Boys were the central female figures in Shakespeare's day; their high voices and smooth skins without hair differentiated them from the mature male actors and gave them the advantage on the stage. Additionally, in Ancient Greek the hypocrites were always men. Female roles were played by males before puberty and before their voices changed. Since the hypocrites were all male, the mask was necessary to let them to play female roles (the mask hides the identity or puts the ambiguity of M.) it was necessary to make them look female for female roles.

We are all M. Butterflies – (are we?)

In the previous part I try exemplify Butler’s ideas on performance and gender construction on the stage, to prove the impossibility of strict definitions or failure of guesses about the gender categories, gender preferences and sexuality. Butler states that gender is not a fixed category but one continually constructed in social interactions. Actually RuPaul was right, “We are born naked. Everything else is drag.” or the rest is performativily defined from a Butlerian perspective. In this part I am going to ask my questions without referring any artistic performance.

Butler claims that there is no essential category for gender. Gender is not something that is internally built but something that is achieved and is always reproduced by the body. The body creates an illusion of these true social scripts and identities through repetition. Her attempt to refigure the body moves from the periphery to the center of analysis, so that it can be understood as the very point of subjectivity. Also, Butler argues that, this illusion is the dichotomic relationship between fe/male, and it is constructed through a performative fulfillment by social sanction and taboo; and there is social punishment for not conforming. But what about those people with non-conforming gender identities, practices? If there is punishment and there is nothing internal provocating his/her gender identity how would someone be socialized into the wrong gender or decide to express the wrong gender?

On the other hand, in my opinion there is something lack about those who challenges these gender roles, in her article. Would I have to be a part of a sexual or racial or any kind of minority community, to criticize the corrupted mentality of heteronormativity? What about those who are heterosexual, are not they able to challenge their given gender identities?

The body is constantly doing new acts, and gender is in a constant flux. So, Butler’s idea of performativity has then constituted the idea that gender is always moving and shifting. Based on her theory, gender is not a stable and an innate fact. And I am definitely agreed on the importance of Butler’s theory and concepts since they deconstruct discussions of body’s and gender’s essential sameness or difference. Overtime, we believe that gender is something that we rely on, and must have a concrete definition; however Butler’s ideas on body and gender, open a room to shift and move freely; additionally her framework explains gender beyond heterosexual ideals. But I still have questions about those who are aware of the vitality of body as a political site for representation and socially-culturally construction of gendered categories through reiteration in everyday practices, but those who reject to be M. and instead prefer their gendered bodies, their Madame or Monsieur.

Read more...

Response Paper #3: Umberto Eco

During the late '60s the rigid categories of works of art has started to change; and beyond the fixity of works, we have faced with newly emerged hybrid forms that emphasized the openness, the contingency and the continuity. New paradigm has mainly focused on the “open work of art”, the dynamic processes rather than the completed works or the static objects. Umberto Eco is an important actor for us to highlight the notion of open work. Eco examines the idea of open work, which reflects the relativity and discontinuity of the modern world, to explain the obvious difference between modern and traditional art.


According to Eco, most extreme form of the idea of the open work is formed by “works in motion”. What such works have in common is the participant or interpreter is required to complete the work of art, to cooperate with the author in making the composition, that means author leaves some of the components to the interpreter or to chance, thus giving them a multiplicity of possible orders. Indeed, the construction process of an open art work could similarly be read to the construction process of Self, and I am going to explain this analogy through Bakhtin dialogism as a starter, then I am going to emphasize Cortazar's novel Seksek to analyse the open work in terms of hypertextuality and literature.

Dialogical Work, Dialogical Self

Traditional monological and dichotomic form of subject was challenged by Bakhtin’s According to Bakhtin, individuals complete their Selfhood by interaction & communication, when they are in a relationship with other, who has a surplus of seeing and is able to see what we cannot see. We have the same surplus of seeing too with the other, a kind of intersubjective cooperation for social totality. So the construction of every Self is dialogical, there is a mutual necessity in the relation of “I & the Other” to complete a view about the Self. Similarly, by referring Eco's texts, we could talk about the mutual necessity between the author and the interpretor to gain a complete perspective about the work of art; and therefore we could suggest the analogy between “Self and Work of art” in terms of reciprocity.

On the other hand, Bakhtin considered language and its system as hybrid as society to explain heteroglossia that means language is something multiple, include various kinds of voices, words from different people with different social and cultural backgrounds. And additionally individuals use different words in different contexts, so individuals are not the passive, obedient actors under the text, or social structures. Maybe the terms of heteroglossia lead us thoroughly to think about the active role of interpretor.

Although subjects -or interpretors- are ideologically marked by particular cultural and discursive formations that are determined within asymmetrical power relations, as Bakhtin mentioned that, subordinate social groups-or interpretors- can diagolize and rewrite monological discourses with new meanings. To sum up, open work as a kind of dialogue, is not simply an exchange; indeed, it stresses the continual interaction, interconnectedness, and an intersubjective communication. Hence, the construction process of the open work provides us with the most important medium that is dialogue, through which selfhood is expressed and realized. So, Umberto Eco's open work could be seen an example of dialogism.

Cortazar's Seksek, an example of Hypertexuality

The idea of openness of the work of art can be seen in the multiplicity of interpretations and the continually interactive play between reader and text or author in literary theory. However, while the literary text itself remains the same, different readers have different highlighters to the text as a matter of form rather than its content. This is somehow distinctive then to say that different readers will interpret the text in various ways. What happens is that readers' ideas about the form of text are different beyond its content. And in my opinion Eco's definition of open work could be challenged by the relations between content, form and the reader or interpretor.

This becomes apparent in works of hypertexts or Cortazar’s Seksek. Cortazar's work is a game with multiple endings and with this game the reader reaches an interesting spatial metaphor; hypertextual structure offers a single drawing with a multitude of combinations. Seksek is divided into three parts and 155 chapters as two different but interrelated stories. The work can be read either in direct sequence or by jumping through the chapters. The later alternative reading offers an alternative narrative within the text. The work does not end with the word “the end”, instead there are three stars at the end of the first book. Seksek has a hypertextual, experimental structure where the reader can access the information in different contexts. Reader's involvement is important in this hypertextual work because the reader makes the link between two different moments of two different stories.

In Seksek, same textual elements of information are used to reestablish different stories through hypertextuality; and what makes this work unique is the meaning that is produced by the interplays of the inner texts which reactivate readers of the work to experience the text in different ways and construct different forms between inner texts. Hence, it is the form -not the content- , the new strategy of the open work that make the meanings reachable and interpretable.

Questioning the text, questioning the world

Text is a social construct and hypertext is a paradigm for the social construction of meaning. Hypertext is a structural strategy with its new field of possibilities, where the reader or interpretor finds a space for freedom. And as a multicentered medium, hypertext or postmodern textuality destabilize the traditional textual practices and cultural discourses that we experience through the texts; and thereby it liberates text - and us- from the limitations of strictly defined linearity and hierarchy.

Within the blurred boundaries of postmodern textuality, we become able to subvert our habit of reading and thinking as a result of interaction and multiplicity in a decentred work without any given interpretative privilege. This challenge of postmodern textuality allows us as reader of texts but also informs our readings of the world from a multi perspective and anti hierarchical function, and I think, this is the point where Bakhtin and Cortazar meet beyond the work of Eco.

In conclusion, the idea of openness suggests a wide range of information that admits for numbers of possible readings, and it is the very condition of every work of art, specifically in literary works. Texts encourage the readers, interpretors to provide what is not there, so that the whole communicative process of reading itself becomes interplay between the clear and the ambigious, the expressed and the unexpressed. The readers can be successfully engaged with the experience of the interaction and in turn produce and create themselves as well as the production of meaning.

Read more...

pazar gunumu guzellestiren f.'ye tesekkuru borc bilirim

Lauri Faggioni ve mutluluk

Read more...

Ben bugun bunu sevdim, severdim yine sevdim, daha da...

Read more...

Response paper #2: Claude Levi Strauss

Levi Strauss adapted Saussure's linguistic model into the social sciences through anthropology and studied cultures as texts to determine the universal and deep grammars of cultural mythologies. His structuralism is able to construct a model for the underlying structure of all the possible structures which not be directly analyzed by empirical observation. His version of structuralism seeks to define the common structural principles that include the logical and universal characteristics of the human mind. This idea of structure is unobservable, which means human beings are participants of this structure but they are unaware or unconscious of its influences.

In the structural study of myth he argues that if we could determine the underlying structure of the narrative, its constituent elements and the way that they are organized, then we are able to see that these myths are not meaningless sequences of events. Through his structural analysis we could see that myths are concerned with deep problems and they are logical in their underlying structures. They are sophisticated attempts to resolve the logical problems. Myths are highly and complexly structured, they confront contradictions and draw out patterns of relationships. The myths are various, but the basic structures are similar as a result of the universal characteristics of human mind that preserve the basic intellectual unity.

His structural theory is quite logical for the sake of a universalistic deep element, however I am going to question his theory by emphasizing the importance of social and geographical environment -as the constituent elements of culture- that the myth is created, and the role of the storyteller in an unconscious process of mind.

Reductionism(?)

Myths can only be defined and understood as part of a myth system. Thus, Levi Strauss analyses the myth system by searching for the underlying structure of relationships between the elements of the stories rather than looking at their contextuality to demonstrate the similarities between basic kinship structures in different cultures.

His interest with the mental structure which lies behind the myths he studied does not lead him to engage in empirical research. Myths' variety and complexity studied through the mental structure of the human mind so, could we interpret his structuralism of being reductionist? Does he reduce culture merely to a mental structure and negate the complexity and historical and social specificity? Then, what about the geographical and also historical determinants of culture, is it possible to draw such a rigid boundary between them?

He offers a detailed analysis of oedipal myth by examining those relationships from a structural point of view. His sample case works successfully, but this achievement works through the opposites, through binary oppositions. Therefore we could ask even if it is possible for us to reconstruct the myth by referring different and unsuitable features of the stories, without negating the contradictory elements or ideas of a universal mental structure. His analyze aims to make visible the hidden and unconscious mental structure that lead to occur myths observable to us. Although it impossible to understand the structures of myth beyond their social and historical contexts, Levi Strauss structuralism is somehow blind to the uncontrollable elements of the culture due to disregarding the importance of geography and history for the analysis of culture.

Role of the storyteller in an unconscious structure. Is this something possible(?)

Levi Strauss looks for a pattern which is present in all myths, regardless of who created them under which circumstances. Myths are the products of unconscious operators of the mind, ones of the teller is not aware. The individual teller does not create the basic pattern for producing the telling of the particular myth. we can only understand this basic pattern properly by seeing the way it is marked out across the whole range of myths.

The author of the myths are unaware operators of the structure of thought underlying the individual myths, but this might be problematic. The individual actors tell the myths as they do because of the nature of that structure, and then the meaning of the myth is something created by the system, where the teller's behaviors are shaped. The author of the myth is not someone who provides the principle of unity amongst them; and also s/he is not a center, so the meaning is originates from the system not from the individual.

In Levi Strauss view of structuralism the major element of cultural myth is the logical structure of the human mind. On the one hand this main determinant implements it power regardless of any social or historical context. On the other hand human agency is ignored easily as a result of the implemention of power regardless of the impacts of human agency to practice their meanings on the social world, and to desire to change the social world in different ways.

Both phonemic and kinship systems are the products of the structures of human mind. They are the products of the unconscious structure of the mind and operate on the basis of general laws. The mental structure imposes its power to the subjects who are unaware of what is happening, but who can still use them correctly. If the mental structure remains unconscious human agency is in fact left unaware of it, and thereby it will not be meaningful for her/him to talk about myths in empirical sense. But as Levi Strauss states that if we are able to analyze and then demonstrate the structural existence of relationships between cultural myths, then how can something observable be unconscious?

Read more...