Interdependence in Butler's Work

There are links between the first six chapters of “Dispossession: the performative in the political and Judith Butler’s book “Undoing Gender”. Of course, Judith Butler also partially wrote Dispossession; however, I thought that it was still interesting to see how the theme of interdependence surfaced in the two different texts.

            In the book Undoing Gender, Judith Butler uses the idea of tragedy to show that we are all vulnerable creatures. At anytime we can be subjected to great grief at the hands of someone else. As I stated in my previous blog post on Undoing Gender, Judith Butler refers to the random acts of violence against transgender women to illustrate how unexpected violence can be and how reliant we are on each other for our safety.  Moreover, in the book Dispossession the term “social death” is used to explain how some people are not viewed as human by other members of society. Social death is a way to dispossess individuals, for example transgendered people, from the idea of what it means to be human. Through being dispossessed from what is seen as human one can longer be protected by “human” rights. The book discusses individuals who are displaced from their homes and then also driven from the new lands that they migrate to. Survivor is threatened through being “outside” your land, or “outside” humanity. In some respects, ware dependent on others to determine whether we are inside, or not even though we know that we are on the inside. 

 Similarly, this idea of interdependence is explored in through the idea of dispossession. The book uses situations such as political unrest, slavery and colonialism to illustrate how at anytime we can be disposed from our homes and countries. We are reliant on governments, laws and rights to protect us and at any time these things we rely on can change. New governments get voted in and old ones get overthrown, which means we are dependent on others for stability. Also, I think the book shows that even though the idea of dispossession originally was used to in relation to losing land we can also view dispossession as being removed from ourselves, or our idea of “self”. Athena Athanasiou states “being and having are constituted as ontologically akin to each other; being is defined as having; having is constructed as an essential prerequisite of proper human being”. I think that this is a great description of the idea that we often define ourselves by what we have and when what we have is taken from us (which most things can be) then we become disposed.

I chose to speak about the theme of interdependence in both books because I think that is what draws me to Butler’s work. She exposes our humanity in a way that shows how reliant we are on each other, which I do not think is a terrible thing. In my opinion, a lot of writers focus on an unrealistic idea of autonomy that does not translate to everyday life.