Introduction: Participation and Precarious Alliances, Now and Then

Butler, Martin; Hausmann, Albrecht; Kirchhofer, Anton

doi:10.14361/9783839423189-001

Cited by 3 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…76 Again, the defining feature of Warman's life was her military service, which made her a "heroine", and an "icon for national self-recognition". 77 Overall, there is a remarkable consistency in the framing and sentiment of the many obituaries and interviews. By presenting their loved ones as "good soldiers", the loved ones simultaneously legitimate the state the female soldiers died ostensibly defending.…”

Section: Good Soldiersmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…This is in keeping with Butler's observation of the strong hetero-normative imperative "in the genre of obituary, where lives are quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, and monogamous". 97 The distinction, then, lies in the commensurability of the essentialized gendered subjectivities inherent to the "good personhood" constructed in the various obituaries with the assumptions of the gendered system of war. The temporal representation of men as always-already in the military, whereas women are generally portrayed as "passing through" speaks to the subtle designation of their primary identity.…”

Section: Good Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Death does not become her: An examination of the public construction of female American soldiers as liminal figures

Millar¹

2015

Rev. Int. Stud.

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Abstract:Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, over 150 female American military personnel have been killed, over 70 following hostile fire. Given Western society's long-standing practice of reserving the conduct of collective violence to men, these very public deaths are difficult to encompass within the normative and ideological structures of the contemporary American political system. This study examines the ways in which the public duty to commemorate the heroism of soldiers -and the private desire to accurately remember daughters and wives -poses a significant challenge to coherent discursive representation. In doing so, the study employs hermeneutical interpretation to analyse public representations of female soldiers and their relation to death in US popular culture. These representations are examined via Judith Butler's concept of grievabilitythe possibility of receiving recognition as a worthy life within the existing social imaginary. It is argued that female soldiers are grievable as both "good soldiers" and "good women", but not as "good female soldiers". The unified subject position of "good female soldier" is liminal, and thus rendered socially and politically unintelligible. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications of this liminality for collective mourning and the possibility of closure after trauma.Katharine M Millar is a DPhil Candidate at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Her doctoral dissertation examines popular discursive constructions of the military in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the way they both challenge and inform processes of collective subjectformation.

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Section: Good Soldiersmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Good Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Death does not become her: An examination of the public construction of female American soldiers as liminal figures

Millar¹

2015

Rev. Int. Stud.

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“…They are not law in the customary meaning of the word. 59 According to Butler, the practice of the US government after 11 September 2001, especially the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo prison, exposed a peculiar process: the emergence of sovereignty within the space of governmentality. Such emergence of sovereignty does not simply consist in the state, understood as a specific entity, using governmentality as a method (in which case legitimization could be considered); it is hardly possible to identify the state in the era of governmentality.…”

Section: Arendt and Legendre -Necessity In The Realm Of Freedommentioning

confidence: 99%

Departure from the rule of law as the consolidation of biopower. Example of Polish legislation justified by fighting the Covid-19 pandemic

Barut

2021

AFPiFS

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Throughout this article the author interprets the crisis of the rule law in Poland in 2020 caused by the phenomenon described as Covid-19 pandemic as the solidification and consolidation of biopower – the contribution of ideas and practices justified by the findings of natural sciences to the disestablishment of paradigms hitherto recognized as fundamental to the creation and application of law, that is the due process of law or its formal justice. I proceed from the assumption that the creation and application of law must be grounded in phronesis — the Aristotelian prudence, that is the intellectual process of assessment of not only the means but also the goals. Thanks to the discernment of both the goals and the means in the same cognitive act, one gains the opportunity to distinguish individual cases and insight into specific situations. I assume the phronetics of law to justify and at once enable its acquisition of the property referred to as justice in its formal sense — predictability, non-retroactivity, generality of regulation, and so on. If, on the other hand, the law becomes subordinated to paradigms justified with the use of natural sciences, it ceases to fulfil its function. Biopower invades the legal sphere as a discourse of necessity, such a necessity is in itself the very opposite of the fine art of balancing the various competing interests, appreciating the importance of form and ritual, distinguishing the various individual cases. The purpose of this article is to analyse the impact of the crisis referred to as the Covid-19 pandemic on law and in no way to pronounce on the medical aspects of its proliferation or express a moral or political judgement of the actions justified by the need to contain it.

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“…As regards grievability, the normative production of ontology is visible, for Butler, in the way that certain dead persons, particularly non-Western others (her listings include 'Palestinians', 'Afghan peoples', 'Arab peoples', 'practitioners of Islam', 58 and 'Iraqis'), 59 do not qualify for obituaries and or other forms of public recognition by the media. This is because their lives are not apprehended as lives in any meaningful sense.…”

Section: Ordering Grievabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…85 In this sense, they extend, rather than subject to critique, existing indices of grievability and humanizing norms, with the effect that subaltern populations are simply incorporated within and assimilated to the existing order of grievability when the powerful deign they might be. 88 A critical politics of the human, in other words, will be one that puts into question the sphere of appearance of the human; that is, our sense of 'reality' and the 'normal'. It will seek to rupture the normative ontology, in other words, that disallows the ungrievable ontological status as human.…”

Section: Naming the Unnamedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Naming the dead and the politics of the ‘human’

Lloyd

2016

Rev. Int. Stud.

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1 Naming the dead and the politics of the 'human' Moya Lloyd Abstract:The summer of 2014 saw several campaigns to name the dead of Gaza. This paper aims to explore these initiatives through the idea of the 'human'; understood both in terms of grievability, as a life that matters, and as a 'litigious name' employed by subaltern groups to make political demands. My argument in this paper is that politically not all attempts at nomination are equivalent and that a distinction needs to be drawn between those carried out on behalf of the 'ungrievable' and those engaged in by them. Only the latter enables a critical

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Introduction: Participation and Precarious Alliances, Now and Then

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Death does not become her: An examination of the public construction of female American soldiers as liminal figures

Death does not become her: An examination of the public construction of female American soldiers as liminal figures

Departure from the rule of law as the consolidation of biopower. Example of Polish legislation justified by fighting the Covid-19 pandemic

Naming the dead and the politics of the ‘human’

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