Strange Tempest: Agency, Poststructuralism, and the Shape of Feminist Politics to Come

This essay explores Judith Butler's influence on feminist and gender studies at two levels. First, the essay examines Butler's specific theoretical contributions with special attention to the performativity of gender and the conception of agency connected with it. It highlights the contributions and limitations of Butler's account of agency and the ongoing feminist conversation that it has incited. Second, this essay explores how Butler's account of agency has unsettled feminist conceptions of established political practice and sketches how specific responses to Butler's work provide clues to key contested issues. The essay closes with a brief look at feminist scholarship that draws together Butler-informed political visions with traditional accounts of feminist political practice in a manner that foreshadows a dynamic feminist politics yet to come.     

Vulnerability, violence and (cosmopolitan) ethics: Butler's Precarious Life

This article proposes that Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence provides a valuable contribution to the sociology of cosmopolitanism on the basis of a perspective which forcefully addresses the new sovereign power of the USA which reneges on the possibilities of cosmopolitanization by means of resurgent nationalism, extra-legal modalities of militarization and incarceration ('the new war prison') and state powers now integrated into normalized practices of everyday governmentality. Butler's Foucauldian approach to power and subjectivity is contrasted with Beck's understanding of self-reflexivity in cosmopolitanized society. Butler's feminist-inspired approach to mourning and grief and her account of vulnerability and violence also encourage a response to recent acts of terrorism and subsequent wars by means of an ethics of non-violence. Drawing on the Levinasian concept of 'the face' Butler explores the obligation posed by 'the face' to refuse violent confrontation. The article suggests a sociological reading of Butler's ethical account which throws light on issues pertinent to the cosmopolitanization thesis, through an interrogation of the relations of power and powerlessness which underlie encounters with otherness.     

Ethnicity,ideology and academia

This essay examines the cultural politics of gender performance in relation to the conditions of intelligibility in Chinese society. Cultural imaginings of gender in China are influenced not only by the ideological apparatuses but also by a traditional mode of epistemology that sustains a regime of collective make-believe wherein homosexual subjects are regarded as unintelligible. Although homosexuality exists in social reality, the lack of its own truthful representation creates numerous misunderstandings that prevent the development of a positive identity in Chinese culture, and homosexual sensibilities are suppressed by the hegemony of cultural values that drive sexual deviants to self-negation and self-sacrifice. Fe/male impersonation, as an oblique mode of expression, reveals a radical difference in desire which, undefined by the existing measures of epistemology, characterizes a phantasmal situation of the obscure human passion that fails to produce full presence in Chinese cultural space.