Bodies that Matter, Butler explains how the power of hegemony forms the understanding of our “bodies”. Being defined through the eyes of philosophers, psychoanalytic and fictional works. All change the way people get treated with their bodies.
A current event that ties into what Butler is mentioning is the resurfacing of the Roe vs Wade case and the decision for abortions for women.

Whether women have full freedom with their bodies or lose their right for making important decisions for their bodies. As she elaborates more on
right from wrong, she mentions that Freud argues that “the ego is first and foremost bodily
ego, “that this ego is, further, “a projection of a surface”. This perfectly defines how people perceive bodies as, whether from traditional household rules
or based on science.

Spiller opens up her essay with the names in which society such as, “Peaches” “Brown Sugar” “Aunty”, that she has been called throughout her life. When she says “I am a marked woman but not everybody knows my name”, she means that without knowing anything about her, people in society automatically categorize her because of the color of her skin and the associated history in which people of color have faced, therefore define her. The opening of Spiller’s essay compares to that of Fanon’s because immediately they are both judged by the color of their skin and looked at differently because of that. That others will always see them as these stereotypes because of the white dominated society that surrounds them. Another big aspect people of color face is the idea of being “un-gendered”. For example on page 72 Spillers writes, “Those African persons in “Middle Passage” were literally suspended in the “oceanic” if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet “American” either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all”. The fact that there was no name or even a gender named to these people was enough to create a narrative that these people were seen more as subjects rather than humans. Even though in this piece of literature there were apparently less women than men, they were still expected to endure and work just as hard as the males did. Recently, I read a book called “Black No More” where a machine was created to make a person “more white”. People of color in this book faced discrimination within their jobs, families and in present day situations, just like they do now. The issue was that even when they were “turned” white, their babies could come out black and therefore others would know whether they were actually white or not. Essentially, in the end the people who used the machine to make themselves white, were “too” white. Therefore, they were more easily identified as having used the machine and were then discriminated against. This ties into the idea that racism comes full circle from a past history and there will always be an objectification upon initial appearance due to societal implications.

Placing structure to concepts we give meaning to is a very Nietzschean idea. Through doing so, we grow the concepts and achieve a more likeness to the content. Jakobson from “Linguistics and Poetics” attempts to reduce the different facets of language using their inherent functions. He first gives meaning to the six factors of language first: addresser, context, message, contact, code, and the addressee. The addresser and the addressee are quite the opposites, where the addresser is where a message originates to give to the audience, who receives the message. The message is the content, text, or the idea that is being passed over, and it links the addresser and the addressee together. The code is where the message gains its meaning through rules, as it will be encoded by the addressor to be decoded be the addressee. The context is similar to the setting of the message and must be obviously communicated over through the message. Finally, the contact is what allows for the addresser and the addressee to maintain a connection together to further communications.

Each factor of language relate to what Jakobson calls a function. The poetic function of language is where the message places emphasis upon itself due to its more obscure message. It is meant for the addressee to delve into the syntagmatic and associative relationships between the words so that the core message is unlocked. However when the emphasis of the message is placed on the addressor or the addressee, the emotive and conative functions, respectively, are brought forth. The emotive function relies on the addressor to pass on their emotions and feelings to the message. In the case of the conative function, the message garners a response from the addressee, placing emphasis on them to maintain the communication channel. Similarly, the phatic function has the sole reason to maintain the contact, yet carries absolutely no substance. The referential function corresponds to the context; who and what the message is referring to. Finally, the metalingual function ties in with the code where they place emphasis on sentence structure and the specific words used. Jakobson created all factors and their underlying functions seek to build a structure of language that would help us further our relationships to each other.

In Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” she first talks about how the idea that the mind and the body are in fact inseparable, which is the foundation of her argument and I find incredibly interesting. I’m also not sure I entirely agree with the idea that the mind and body are inseparable because if you were able to upload your head into a computer, then you would be able to disconnect your mind from your body. It would have been intriguing if Judith explored this idea, since it questioning how important having ones own body is, and weather or not having a body is paramount to being human. That if the self within us, is put in a different body then are we the same person that we were when we had our original body. However, Judith believes that we are bound to our bodies and that the idea of gender which we have formed through these bodies has only been a social construction in which we choose to act out.  She even talks about how “Foucault writes, ‘Nothing in man-not even his body-is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other man'”. (pg. 2543) and mentions how she agrees with Foucault’s point that this idea of man and woman can’t be used as a foundation for who we are, since they are defined through history. Meaning that these ideas of gender were constructed in our past, and we have always taken them as fact simply because it had always been that way. However, Judith takes it a step even further, when talking about Kristeva and her idea of how we identify ourselves through the abjections of others, so that we can borders between what it means to be a man or a woman. Judith goes on to point out that these abjections are in the end useless, since men have feminine aspects, and women have masculine aspects to themselves. She goes on to state how we are only playing the roles of gender, since the idea of gender in of itself is a paradox. This paradox of gender is no better portrayed then towards the end of the piece when Judith talks about when “Newton writes: Drag says “my outside” appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ is masculine” At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ is feminine.” (pg.2549). It shows how we can advantage of the idea that gender is a role we play, much like Nietzsche’s point of how authors and poets use the idea of our language being completely arbitrary as the building blocks of writing, in turn breathing new life into how we view our own world.

The Moynihan report focused on the births in the black communities, and their “unfortunate” effect in helping perpetuate cycles of poverty. This story is partially true due to the fact that racist white people in that time and centuries before that consistently ruined the black family dynamic. What’s so disturbing about the report though is that they blamed the condition of the negro families and then and seemingly perpetually “in crisis’” on the gender-inverting role of black women. Spillers rejected the report and labeled it as racist and sexist. She was an African American woman writing on the cause to defend African Americans from a white-dominated culture with features like positive action, the white fight to the suburbs, low quality of education, gangs and slum life supposedly. Her other readings were very intriguing. On her essay about the Moynihan report she mainly talked about the stereotypes and the negative perceptions that were put on the black community.

Ray Nipper 

Hortense J. Spiller  “Mama’s baby Papa’s maybe” 

From the beginning Spiller goes into alot of the demeaning nicknames often tossed at African-American women. She brings up terms like “Peaches” or “Brown sugar”.  She refers to herself as being a marked woman. She writes alot about the Moynihan report and the lambasting it essentially gave to the black community.  The report according to Spiller makes the claim that the black community pretty much has no fathers at all. Moynihan makes the assertion that blacks essentially cannot fit into the vision that america has for it’s families. As if space was ever made for them to begin with. 

     She feels that the report not only dehumanizes blacks but it almost has this dissolution of gender in black families. She argues that according to this report that ethnicity is a driving force of the issues facing the black community. As if there issues were inherent. Moynihan argues that there is a sort of pathology that stifles the progress of African-Americans. 

     Spiller believes this report allows individuals like moynihan to in a way apply a sort of mythology to blacks. She goes on to mention barthes with his writings on  the signifier. She believes moynihan is essentially projecting his ideals and abstractions onto african americans. She feels that the bodies of black youth are pretty much turned into tools. They are forced into becoming political tools. The body then becomes more of a thing than a human. 

     I believe spiller makes some good points. Her essay points out the dehumanization of the moynihan report and US history at large. She argues that the bodies of blacks become “Captive” in a way. I don’t believe she is robbing them of autonomy however. I feel it’s similar to Fanon’s essay.  There does seem to be this sort of conflict of self-image vs public perception. Where one has to wrestle with how they are treated with how much they perceive their own self-worth. And when these two things aren’t consistent is can lead to a ton of internal issues. 

     She writes alot about slavery towards the end. Which gives me the idea that she’s addressing the african-american experience as a whole. She argues that blacks experience  a sort of “Collective humiliation” due to how they are often given insulting nicknames in society. Also due to the way in which their behaviors or supposed failings are instantly perceived as pathologies. 

In the beginning of Peter Brooks’s piece entitled “Freud’s Masterplot”, he comes to say that we are largely driven by pleasure. With this pleasure, we feel obligated to fulfill basic wants for food, comfort and sex as well as secondary desires for favorable respect, love, retribution, and so on. A main point made in this piece is that through storytelling and/or recalling memories, there is an impulse to recall traumatic and unpleasant past events. “The answer lies in a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things (290).” In other words according to this quotes, the fundamental aim of the story is repetition. Individuals repeat past experiences in an attempt to obtain symbolic control over their life. Repetition compulsion helps to rebuild pleasurable capacity that has been harmed by trauma. Repetition creates a bond. Humans were able to regain their enjoyment due to the binding nature of repetition. An individual’s ability for satisfaction can be restored by repeating such trauma. “The organism has no wish to change; if its conditions remained the same, it would constantly repeat the very same course of life. Modifications are the effect of external stimuli, and these modifications are in turn stored up for further repetition, so that, while the instincts may give the appearance of tending toward change, they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new” (290).A lengthy quotation illustrates how an individual’s memory is inclined to alter previous pain rather than change it to make it more palatable to the human mind. Individuals can fight extraneous influences in this way and remain focused on the original aim of existence, which is death. In some ways, we can relate the notion of memory and recalling trauma, to Freud piece entitled, “The Uncanny” which talks about how we feel anxious when a particular trigger reanimates latent childhood conflicts or primordial ideas that we previously rejected but now gain newfound validation. “The subject of the uncanny  is a province of this kind~ It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is.pot always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general” (930). The uncanny is kind of a relation to humans recalling trauma. The fact that both these pieces talk about humans recalling and tapping into dark parts of their life is extremely interesting and fascinating in which the human brian functions.

     In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler examines the phenomenon of gender and how it relates to sexuality and social significance. Butler argues that the conception of gender is established via social conventions. She supports her argument with numerous philosophical ideas and stimulating questions, and she also provides illustrations of these realities, one being drag shows.

     Butler cites Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to understand better social conventions. Which she expresses as a rewrite of Nietzsche’s ideas of internalization, in which civilization internalizes external standards and thus signifies the consistent generality of such identity. Butler goes a step further, concluding that these identifying signifiers are ‘performative,’ not innate in anyone but are utilized to offshoot one’s desired social classification.

     Butler writes,“Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (2548). 

     Drag is an excellent example of performance; it is where the subject intentionally differentiates “between inner and outer psychic space ” it gives us a clue to the way in which the relationship between primary identification – that is, the original meanings accorded to gender-and subsequent gender experience might be reframed” ( Butler 2549). An incompatible play between outer illusionary femininity and inner masculinity works simultaneously when a drag queen performs. Further, Butler states that we witness explicit distinctions of anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance within attending a drag show. Males may be heterosexual and drag queens; these categories do not overlap. But it also confirms the very social convention of “women” as the imitating elements characterize the vision of social structure. 

     Overall, Butler declares gender as a social convention that dictates identity in ways that marginalize some and certainly restrict all; these limitations create illusionary signifiers for masculine and feminine associations, which generate expectations toward sexuality and identification.

Here is a 30 minute audio lecture hitting some of the high points of the Spillers piece for today. I also recommend the Wikipedia entry on Spillers. Weirdly, it doesn’t say much about her career beyond the “Mama’s Baby” essay, but it gives a bang-up summary of the argument.

Your only assignment is to email me a brief (one-paragraph) comment or question on the reading. Here are some questions that you can answer, though you’re free to write about some other aspect if you like:

1. How does Spillers open the essay? What does it mean to be a “marked woman”? How does this opening compare with Fanon’s from earlier in the term?
2. What is the Moynihan Report? You might need to use Google or Wikipedia to get a quick sense. What are some of the ways Spillers confronts the conclusions of the Report regarding the “black family”?
3. What is distinctive about the shape of the black family that emerges from enslavement? How and why does it differ from the patriarchal structure of Western families, the structure assumed by Freud’s theory?
4. What is “monstrous” about black mothers in Spillers’ view? See p. 80. Is this a bad thing? What are some of the effects of the centrality of this maternal figure in the black family?

And for good measure, here’s the lecture on Peter Brooks’s essay from Tuesday. As with today’s class, if you haven’t already, you should email me a one-paragraph response to any of the study questions to stand as your participation grade for the day.

For Tuesday, we’ll be back in action. We’ll read an excerpt from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: I don’t have the right page numbers, since my copy is at the office, but you’ll find it in the Norton. I’m going to post the correct study questions right now as well. For those who have used their “skip,” you’ll need to submit your final blog post by Tuesday. Feel free to expand on your paragraphs on Brooks or Spillers for that assignment, if you like.