The material dimension of Butler's critique of gender ideology

• Grant number: 24/14729-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• End date: October 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Monique Hulshof
• Grantee: Julia Secaf Bistane
• Supervisor: Kristina Lepold
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Humboldt University, Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 22/00468-1 - Materialism and gender reification: a Butlerian interpretation of social reproduction, BP.DR

Abstract

In this text, I present the research project that I will develop during my internship abroad at Humboldt University. By highlighting the problem of the separation of spheres that permeates the debate between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser in the 1990s, I will shed light on the concepts of materialization and the materiality of ideology in Butler's work during this period. In what follows, then, I will first show how the instability of the notion of the material for Butler in this debate reflected the way she saw the materialization of sex through and as a function of historical discursive social practices. Sex is not only regulated by external norms but constitutes itself as a norm. Next, and this will be my main purpose in this future investigation under the supervision of Professor Kristina Lepold, I defend that a better way of understanding what is problematic about a static / a-historic notion of matter in Butler can be better grasped in the model of a critique of ideology. To support this, I will point to some readings on the question of interpellation and ideology in Butler and her interpretation of Althusser. In this sense, I will try to point out how the question of the materiality of ideology in Butler is related to a critique of the ideology of materiality or of the material, which leads us both to a critique of a binary sexual difference and to a critique of the separation and autonomization of social spheres, including the economy itself. My aim with this investigation is to show how adopting the perspective of a critique of ideology to read Butler's work on the materialization and delimitation of bodies illuminates her contributions not only to a better understanding of gendered social reproduction, but also to the concept of ideology for Marxist feminist theory.