ch. 1-7

Brittain

The first seven chapters of Butler and Athanasiou’s book recalled much of last week’s class discussion to mind.  The central theme that stood out most to me throughout the reading was their notion of understanding the roots of normativity.  In class we touched on the importance of recognizing the inevitably polarized nature of neutrality.  In itself, neutrality is indivisible from social norms and relative cultures.  Neutrality remains fundamentally based on the very power struggles it purports to eschew.  Butler and Athanasiou’s conversation that comprises their book centers on the inseparability of the self and the social, which smacked distinctly of neutrality’s inability to separate itself from cultural norms.   Even within the rejection of certain norms, there exists an implication that the norm itself exists.  This may appear as a fruitless observation, however just as neutrality pretends to not contain elements of bias, one’s self-conception cannot also pretend to exclude aspects of their society.*  The authors assert that “we cannot understand what happens to an individual’s land if we do not understand both the social form of property and the social form of individuality” (Dispossession, 8).  One must recognize the indivisible nature of self from society in the forms of property, legalities and social freedoms in order to understand the nature of rebellion or acceptance of cultural norms and laws.  The realm of citizenship is inherently tied to property, private interests and social acceptance.

Butler and Athanasiou’s assertion has important implications for future construction of societal changes.  An attempt to reject certain societal norms would be fruitless when reconfiguring laws and society just as attempting to reconstruct the self remains necessarily tied to the environment by which one was reared.

*gender neutral language