Several parallels can be drawn between Judith Butler’s emphasis on materialization in Bodies That Matter and Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s emphasis on racial formation in Racial Formation in the United States. For me, the most pressing similarity is that both issues are surrounded by the two major conflicting ideas (essentialism and social construction, social structure and cultural representation). For Butler, sex cannot be purely essentialist since “[sexual difference] is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices.” (Butler 235) Because “the category of ‘sex’ is, from the start, normative,” (Butler 235) the materiality of the body cannot be divorced from “the materialization of that regulatory norm (Butler 236). She argues that our heteronormative society brings not only gender into being but also the concept of sex.
Omi and Winant point out that when approaching racial formation from the purely social structure viewpoint one is “unable to account for the origins, patterning, and transformation of racial differences.” When approaching racial formation from cultural representation one “cannot comprehend such structural phenomenon as racial stratification in the labor market or patterns of residential segregation.” (Omi and Winant 56) Omi and Winant declare on page fifty-five that “We should think of Race as an element of social structure rather than as an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion.” (Omi and Winant 55)
We could apply this thought to sex as essentialist and social constructivist respectively. The phrase would then become: We should think of Sex as an element of nature rather than an irregularity within it; we should see sex as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion. However, if we apply Butler’s conceptions of materialization to Omi and Winant’s racial formation, the idea becomes that race materializes through the concept of normativity (i.e. the white European being that which all else is measured against) and that the concept is maintained through discursive practices. Beyond that, she would argue that through performative utterance, millions of people have become racialized. Their very races have materialized through declaring “I am African American” or “I am Chinese” etc. Through these statements, they have instantly bound themselves to all other people who have declared the same and to all stereotypes which are associated with that race. Race is put upon us by society, yes, but we have also claimed it as individuals.
Visuality and visual culture are key players in the social aspects of both debates. Those who are perceived as a different race are often perceives as such via observable, physical differences. Susie Guillory Phipps, for instance, will not be treated as a separate race from Caucasians (socially) because she does not appear to be different on a visual level (Omi and Winant 54). Sex and gender are also perceived quickly through visual means by the majority of the population (who also assume that your gender “matches up” with your sex). Through these immediate perceptions, people begin to treat others the way they have been taught that they ought to treat someone of those characteristics.
The piece I chose illustrates how we are made to be labeled and sorted and identified. The boy may have given himself those titles, but he did not make up the titles. They existed before he was even born. Some of his characteristics are natural and some are from social construction. What he is is only interpretable because we have the norms and therefore the common language field with which we may refer to him. We must ask ourselves what of ours is given and what we have taken—what we have claimed and what has been imposed upon us. The boy’s cultural heritage is one of the few pieces of information which the artist has chosen to place on the boy. What does this say about identity?
Work Cited
Femenist Theory and The Body: A Reader. Eds. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. NY: Routledge, 1999.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. Second edition. NY: Routledge, 1994.
http://www.myrelchernick.com/maternalmetaphors/images/Andrea'sArticle/Bogyi-and-Mike.jpg 9/7/10
The thing I found most interesting about your post it the concept of being given labels. It reminds me of a roommate of mine that always thought she was had mostly Italian ancestry. She was always cooking pasta and was very proud of being "Italian". She had the dark hair and olive skin to back up her claims, so we all believed it. A short time later, she found out through her mother that a relative had done a family tree and that their ancestry traces back to Ireland. My friend was shocked for weeks that she had always thought she was Italian and then found out she actually is a lot more Irish. We had to remind her that regardless of where her ancestors are from, it doesn't change who she actually is as a person. It's crazy when we stop to think that much of what we think about ourselves comes from what other people tell us.
ReplyDeleteYou raise a number of interesting issues here, and I like how you interweave Butler's and Omi and Winant's language to see how their arguments regarding social construction and embodiment dovetail into each other. You do a particularly nice job of noting how both sex and race are forceably materialized through normativity, and you might think about such materialization happens through one another rather than as parallel or separate or additional processes. In other words, how is the materialization of sex inherently racialized, and how is the forced materialization of race inherently sexed and gendered? There are also a few points that are a bit unclear however, for example in the place where you are placing Butler's term (sex) into Omi and Winant's sentence structure, you write that "We should think of Sex as an element of nature rather than an irregularity within it; we should see sex as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion". I'm curious why you swapped out "nature" for "social structure" (the phrase that Omi and Winant use). Surely these are two quite different terms with significantly different implications, no? Making it a bit more clear what the relation between these are will help make your argument stronger. Nice job.
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