O feminismo em outros termos: da crítica ao sujeito fundacional feminista à ética da precariedade em Judith Butler.

Abstract

The philosophical, epistemological and political tradition that we today call “feminist” was built upon the ever-changing basis of conflict and dispute, through divergent voices in constant clash and defiance of one another. With each attempt to enclose the definition of its subject and its demands, hegemonic feminism is interpellated by those who it invariably excludes; it is called to notice the limitations as well as the localized nature of its universalizing claims. We find in Judith Butler, the philosopher who, in the end of the 1980s, begins her analysis of feminism’s gender troubles, a critique which is both a thread and a framing device to understand the following problem: what is left for feminism if the foundations upon which feminism stands – if the subject it intends to speak on behalf of and from which it draws its moral demands – is established as a place of dispute and is, consequently, under constant revision? How does one keep it alive, relevant and representative? How to establish and move forward with a theoretical and political action that protects the interests of women and simultaneously remain deeply aware of the exclusions, contradictions and alliances that we do or do not make to enable said action? The hypothesis of this research branches in two ways: the first being that the deconstruction of feminism’s foundational subject does not represent the end of feminism, but in fact constitutes an essential step towards keeping feminism relevant. Viewing its subject as an open field for dispute and debate represents the solution to feminism’s representation problem, not its undoing. However, in renouncing a strong identitarian basis – the ontology of which is, from the beginning, illusory –, we are left with a void: what element, if not the identitarian one, allows both a feminist description of the world and its normative claims? Our second hypothesis is that the answer to this question is in an ontology founded not on identity, but on a “new ontology of the body”, whose constitutive vulnerability is shared by all. From this inescapable precarious condition, Judith Butler derives an ethics of precarity which, we believe, would allow feminist thinking to deal with the contradictions of countless identities which constitute subjects; identities that not only reach beyond gender, but also inform how gender is experienced – race, class, nationality, etc. – and, in doing so, build a way of thought and action that is permeated by the many and unpredictable intersections that arise from the meeting of diverse bodies in search of a livable life.