Michel Foucault And Judith Butler: Comparative Analysis

Introduction

The following essay will introduce both Michel Foucault and Judith Butler and their research and findings in the theoretical framework of queer theory. Philosopher, Judith Butler believes that “we all put on gender performances and that gender, like sexuality, isn’t a vital truth that has come from the body’s materiality but rather a regulatory fiction” (Morgenroth & Ryan, 2018). Butler’s work stems from Foucault’s work and findings providing a 21st century edge to queer theory. The two will be discussed in comparison, including the cross-pollination of their research. Both in which look at the ‘man’ or persons concepts of self both internal and external contributors. This will in turn be concluded with a brief ideology of the current effects of organisational culture management in relation to queer theory and the introduction of queer theory into the workplace.

Michel Foucault

Paul-Michel Foucault was born October 15, 1926, France and passed June 25, 1984. The French philosopher and historian has been daubed the foremost influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War II period. His subjects of study included prison, sexuality and society (Faubion, 2019). His theories are largely concerned with the concepts of power and also the relationship among power, knowledge and discourse, and his influence is evident during post-structuralism, post-modernist, feminist, post-Marxist and post-colonial theorising (Mills 2003). All though Foucault died in 1984, his ideas have and still cause much debate. His ideas to the present day have yet to be accommodated by theorists round the world. This can be thanks to the ‘iconoclastic and challenging nature of Foucault’s theoretical work’ (Mills 2003). Foucault’s work on the analysis of sexuality has helped in challenging the preconceived ideas of sexual characteristics.

In 1970, he was awarded a chair within the history of systems of thought at the school de France, France’s most esteemed post-secondary institution. The appointment gave Foucault the possibility to conduct concentrated research (Faubion, 2019). Between 1971 and 1984 Foucault wrote several works, including three volumes of a history of Western sexuality. The fourth volume of his history of sexuality remains incomplete due to his declining health and death. Foucault’s Ideas focused around what sorts of masses of human there are, what is their essence, what is the essence of human history and of humankind. Foucault sought to not answer these traditional and seemingly straightforward questions but to critically scrutinise them and also the responses that they had inspired. His critique targeting the basic point of reference that had grounded and guided inquiry within the human sciences which was the concept of “man.” The person of this inquiry was a creature purported, like many preceding conceptions, to possess a relentless essence or as actually, a double essence. On one hand, man (persons) was an object, obedient to the indiscriminate dictates of physical laws. On the opposite hand, man was a theme, an agent uniquely capable of comprehending and altering his worldly condition so as to become more fully, more essentially, himself. Foucault reviewed the evidence that such a creature actually had ever existed, but to no avail. In an attempt, he found only a plurality of subjects whose features varied dramatically with shifts of place and time. Foucault suggested that, to the contrary, a creature somehow fully determined and fully free was little of little wanting, a contradiction in many terms. Not only had it never existed of course, it couldn’t exist, even in theory. Foucault’s increasing concern with ethics led him to a far-reaching revision of The History of Sexuality.

Foucault has been widely read and discussed in his claim. He has galvanised a military of detractors, the less attentive of whom have misread his critique of “man” as radically anti-humanist, his critique of power-knowledge as radically relativist, and his ethics as radically aestheticist. However, this did not prevent him from inspiring increasingly important alternatives to established practices of cultural and intellectual history. His critique of the human sciences provoked much soul-searching within anthropology and its allied fields, whilst it helped a replacement generation of students to embark upon a cross-cultural dialogue on the themes and variations of domination and subjectivation. The primary volume of The History of Sexuality has become canonical for both gay and lesbian studies and “queer” theory, a multidisciplinary study aimed toward critical examinations of traditional conceptions of sexual and personal identity. The terms discourse, genealogy, and power-knowledge became deeply entrenched within the vocabulary of virtually all contemporary social and cultural research. Foucault has attracted several biographers, a number of whom are happy to flout his opposition to the practice of seeking the key to psychology or personality of its author. Yet, in their favour, it must be admitted that Foucault’s personal life may be a worthy subject of attention. He regularly made note of the problems that troubled him personally, emotional suffering, exclusion, and sexuality the topics of his research. His critiques were often both theoretical and practical. Although he despised the label “homosexual,” he himself was an openly gay man.

Judith Butler

Judith Pamela Butler born February 24 is an American academic whose “theories of the performative nature of gender and sex were influential within Francocentric philosophy, cultural theory, queer theory, and a few schools of philosophical feminism from the late 20th century” (Duignan, 2020). Butler’s first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), a Book of her doctoral dissertation, was a discussion of the concept of desire because it figures in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its subsequent interpretations by various 20th-century French philosophers (Duignan, 2020). Gender is that the repeated stylisation of the body, a collection of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to supply the look of substance, of a natural kind of being (Butler 1990, p. 33). Butler stated that There is any individuality behind the expressions of gender. “Identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results” (Butler 1990, p.25). In her best-known work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and its sequel, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), Butler built upon the familiar cultural-theoretic assumption that gender is socially constructed (the results of socialisation, broadly conceived) instead of innate which conventional notions of gender and sexuality serve to perpetuate the standard domination of ladies by men and to justify the oppression of homosexuals and transgender persons.

One of her innovations was to suggest that gender is constituted by action and speech. By behaviour within which gendered traits and dispositions are exhibited or acted out. Specifically, gender isn’t an underlying essence or nature of which gendered behaviour is that the product; it’s a series of acts whose constant repetition creates the illusion that an underlying nature exists. Gender, “is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” She stressed, however, that individuals don’t exist before or independently of the genders they “perform”: gender is often a doing, though not a doing by a theme who may well be said to preexist the deed. Indeed, “the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and thru the deed.” Individual identity (the subject) is itself performatively constituted. It follows that individuals don’t “choose” their genders and can’t assume or discard or radically alter them at will just by behaving (or not behaving) in certain ways. At the identical time, small deviations from established patterns of gendered behaviour are possible and indeed inevitable, and it’s through such occasional variations that the socially constructed character of gender is revealed.

Butler contended, somewhat paradoxically, that not only gender but sex itself. The notiion of being biologically male or female is “to some degree” a performative social construct. Sex is performatively constructed within the sense that it represents an essentially arbitrary distinction between individuals that’s drawn at or before birth and later reinforced through speech acts like “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” In heterosexist cultures, the repeated performance of this repetitive exercise serves (among other things) to impose a norm of desire supported by a synthetic association between biological sex and gender (the “law of heterosexual coherence”), thereby sustaining a system of “compulsory and naturalised heterosexuality” known as the “heterosexual matrix”.

In Gender Trouble, Butler questioned the validity of much feminist political theorising by suggesting that the topic whose oppression those theories attempted to explain “women” is an exclusionary construct that “achieves stability and coherence only within the context of the heterosexual matrix.” REFERENCE Her suspicion of the category led her to doubt the wisdom of conventional political activism geared toward protecting women’s rights and interests. She emphasised instead the subversive destabilisation of “women” and other sub categories through consciously deviant gendered behaviour that might expose the artificiality of conventional gender roles and also the arbitrariness of traditional correspondences between gender, sex, and sexuality. The most-overt samples of such “gender parody” involve cross-dressing, especially drag. Butler’s Gender Trouble was one in almost every of the founding texts of queer theory, and her work continued to excite much debate within cultural theory, especially within the United States in the early 21st century. It also attracted significant criticism, however, for both its substance and its style. Even sympathetic readers of Butler’s work, as an example, worried that her view of the topic as performatively constituted left her without a coherent account of individual agency. Others complained that her conception of politics as parody was impoverished and self-indulgent, amounting to a sort of ethical quietism.

Comparison

Inspired by Foucault, Butlers approach is to destroy the links between that series so desire and gender are allowed to be flexible and not made to be steady factors.

In other words, gender may be a performance; it’s what you are doing at particular times, instead of a universal who you’re.

This approach of gender is extremely kind of like that of sexuality. Butler, Foucault and Queer theory all believe that your identity isn’t fixed but constructed at certain times or in certain situations. Foucault argued that sexuality was produced which overlaps on what Butler says about gender being performed/produced.

This idea of identity as free floating and not connected to a true meaning but rather a performance, is one in every of the key ideas within the creation of queer theory.

Noteworthy within the discussion of queer theory is that the exclusion of bisexuality. Scholars writing on the subject of bisexual identity frequently lament the shortage of bisexual representation in works of queer theorists. However, though the matter has been noted, it’s yet to be addressed within the most body of queer theory (Callis, 2009).

In her paper “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, Judith Butler reads Foucault’s “What is Critique?” in step with Foucault, critique may be a practice of De-subjugation of the topic, which might provide it with a particular quite autonomy. But what quite autonomy is basically possible for the topic, when Foucault rejects the notion of the sovereign subject? Butler’s reading

wishes to solve that difficulty in Foucault’s position by examining the notions of virtue and of speech acts. But Foucault tends more to consider the courage of the truth (parresia) as a critical mode of philosophical intervention in politics, and he thinks of it as a virtue or as an ethos. Butler’s conception of the subject rejects the whole notion of an originary freedom and she prefers to think in terms of an agency which would take place in the context of the subjectivation itself, where being produced as a subject is originally being subjected to different modes of interpellation by the norms. In reading Althusser’s conception of ideology with Foucault’s desubjugation, she considers the critique as the critique of norms of recognition and the subject as vulnerable. “The fact that the action has moved on makes it more, not less, important to critically interrogate and go beyond queer theory and politics, to ask what kinds of theory and praxis we need to liberate individuals from institutional constraints, work settings and organizational processes.” (Pullen et al., 2015).

Conclusion

In this essay i’ve got checked out the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, both within which have influenced the work of gender and sexuality in distinctive ways. Foucault’s work on the repression within the historic period and his work on homosexuality.

I then went on to check Judith Butler’s work which was influenced by Foucault on gender performances. I discussed how Butler believed that we all bear gender performances but that it isn’t who we are, rather a time to time experience.

Both these theorists have checked out themes in sexuality, gender and society, with a number of their ideas intersecting, with both Foucault and Butler watching sexuality and gender as constructed and performed by individuals. Foucault also checked out the development of the homosexual figure.

References

1. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble (1st ed.). Routledge.
2. Callis, A. (2009). Playing with Butler and Foucault: Bisexuality and Queer Theory. Journal Of Bisexuality, 9(3-4), 213-233. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299710903316513
3. Clegg, S., & Cunha, M. (2019). Management, Organizations and Contemporary Social Theory (1st ed.). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429279591
4. Duignan, B. (2020). Encyclopaedia Britannica, Biography Judith Butler. Retrieved 10 April 2020 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Judith-Butler
5. Faubion, J. (2019). Encylcopedia Britanica. Biography Michael Foucault. Retrieved 10 April 2020 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Foucault
6. Mills, S. (2003). Michel foucault. In Michel Foucault. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
7. Morgenroth, T., & Ryan, M. (2018). Gender Trouble in Social Psychology: How Can Butler’s Work Inform Experimental Social Psychologists’ Conceptualization of Gender?. Frontiers In Psychology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2018.01320
8. Pullen, A., Thanem, T., Tyler, M., & Wallenberg, L. (2015). Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization. Gender, Work & Organization, 23(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12123
9. Jake Gordon 13781962 A1 – Advanced Organisation and Management Theorising