ID by Methods

Question 1

Gender performativity is not a matter of choosing which gender one will be today. Performativity is a matter of reiterating or repeating the norms by which one is constituted: it is not a radical fabrication of a gendered self.

Answer 1

Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” 1993

Question 2

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Answer 2

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, German 1848, English 1888

Question 3

Whether we realize it or not, each of us brings to a text an implicit theory of literature, or even an unwitting hybrid of theories—a critical gumbo, as it were. To become aware of contemporary theory is to become aware of one’s own presuppositions, those ideological and aesthetic assumptions that we bring to a text unwittingly.

Answer 3

Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic; It’s All Greek to Me,” English 1987

Question 4

“The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken.”

Answer 4

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” German 1935

Question 5

“The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity…”

Answer 5

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabalais and His World Russian 1965

Question 6

“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.”

Answer 6

Edward Said, “Introduction” from Orientalism, English 1978

Question 7

“Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one. But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”

Answer 7

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa. Published in French in 1975, translated into English in 1976.

Question 8

“To arrive at the constitution of an ethics of sexual difference, we must at least return to what is for Descartes the first passion: wonder. This passion has no opposite or contradiction and exists always as though for the first time. Thus man and woman, woman and man are always meeting as though for the first time because they cannot be substituted one for the other. I will never be in a man’s place, never will a man be in mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other—they are irreducible one to the other.”

Answer 8

Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Published in French in 1984, translated to English in 1993.

Question 9

“Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African- American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency.”

Answer 9

bell hooks, Postmodern Blackness. Published in English in 1990.

Question 10

“Thus one could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of each other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same…”

Answer 10

Jacques Derrida— “Différance” (page 130) 1968 French

Question 11

“So, for the African, living according to the moral law means living according to his nature, composed as it is of contradictory elements but complementary life forces.Thus he gives himself to the stuff of the universe and tightens the threads of the tissue of life. Thus he transcends the contradictions of the elements and works towards making the life forces complementary to one another: in himself first of all, as Man, but also in the whole of human society.”

Answer 11

Léopold Sédar Senghor— “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century” (page 31) 1966

Question 12

“We must redefine “theory” itself from within our own black cultures, refusing to grant the racist premise that theory is something that white people do, so that we are doomed to imitiate our white colleagues, like reverse black ministrel critics done up in whiteface. We are all heirs to critical theory, but we black critics are heir to the black vernacular critical tradition as well. Our task now is to invent and employ our own critical theory, to assume our own propositions, and to stand within the academy as politically responsible and responsive parts of a social and cultural African-American whole”

Answer 12

Henry Louis Gates Jr.— “Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic: It’s All Greek to Me.” (page 44)

Question 13

“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.”

Answer 13

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish/ “Panopticism,” French 1977.

Question 14

“In the meantime, this ethical question comes into play in matters of nudity and perversity. Woman must be nude because she is not situated, does not situate herself in her place. Her clothes, her makeup, and her jewels are the things with which she tries to create her container(s), her envelope(s). She cannot make use of the envelope that she is, and must create artificial ones.”

Answer 14

Luce Irigaray, “An Ethics of Sexual Difference,” French 1984.

Question 15

“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation–and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic–and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.”

Answer 15

Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage (as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,) translated to English 1977.

Question 16

“It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers. First, we need to clarify briefly the problems arising from the use of the author’s name. What is an author’s name? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I shall only indicate some of the difficulties it presents” (380).

Answer 16

Michel Foucault- “What is an Author?” (1969) deconstruction

Question 17

“Individuals are engendered that marriage be guaranteed. Levi-Strauss comes dangerously close to saying that heterosexuality is an instituted process. If biological and hormonal imperatives were as overwhelming as popular mythology would have them, it would hardly be necessary to ensure heterosexual unions by means of economic interdependency” (180).

Answer 17

Gayle Rubin- “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex” (1975) feminism

Question 18

“The pervasiveness of this academic hegemony is an issue continually spoken about— but usually in hidden groups, lest we, who are disturbed by it, appear ignorant to the reigning academic elite. Among the folk who speak in muted tones are people of color, feminists, radical critics, creative writers, who have struggled for much longer than a decade to make their voices to make their voices, their various voices heard, and for whom literature is not an occasion for discourse among critics but is necessary nourishment for their people and one way by which they come to understand their lives better” (53).

Answer 18

Barbara Christian- “The Race for Theory” (1987) Cultural Studies

Question 19

‘“To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.”’

Answer 19

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” German 1935

Question 20

2) “Since I can count on one hand the number of people attempting to be black feminist literary critics in the world today, I consider it presumptuous of me to invent a theory of how we ought to read. Instead, I think we need to read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature. And it would help if we share our process, that is, our practice, as much as possible since, finally, our work is a collective endeavor.”

Answer 20

Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” English 1987

Question 21

“’Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.”

Answer 21

Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” section in his book entitled Discipline and Punish, French 1975

Question 22

Truth, as the lighting and concealing of beings, happens in being composed. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is as such, in eseence, poetry. The seence of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art’s poetic essence that, in the midst of beings, art breaks open and open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual. By virtue of the projected sketch set into the work of the unconcealedness of beings, which casts itself toward us, everything ordinary and hitherto existing becomes an unbeing.

Answer 22

Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of a Work of Art,” German 1935-6

Question 23

The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life, and creative power.

Answer 23

Franz Fanon, “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth, French 1961

Question 24

I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.

Answer 24

Helene Cixous “Laugh of the Medusa,” French 1975