A Study Of Judith Butler’s View Of Discourse In Gender Theory

Judith Butler,as one of the famous contemporary postmodernism thinkers,occupies a very important position in feminist theory,queer theory,gender studies and other fields.Butler’s theory of gender performativity has had a strong impact on traditional gender research and has attracted great attention from the academic circles.At present,the academic circles has achieved abundant research results on Butler’s gender theory,covering different disciplines such as history of thought research,interdisciplinary research,and literary criticism.However,in Butler’s theory of gender performativity,discourse,as a crucial thread that runs throughout,is scattered throughout the discourse of each of her works.The current research mostly selects the relevant discourse from the works "Gender Trouble" and "Body That Matters" for sorting and analysis,while ignoring the content of Butler’s other works such as "Excitable Speech".Based on this point,this paper attempts to analyze and summarize Butler’s discourse by focusing on "Excitable Speech",combining "Gender Troubles","Body That Matters","Antigone’s Claim" and "Undoing Gender",and tries to establish a comprehensive overall framework of the discourse view in Butler’s gender theory.Specifically,the main body of this article is divided into five parts.The first chapter will restate the discourse and Butler’s interpretation and sublation of the four major thinkers,Austin,Derrida,Althusser and Foucault,quoted by Butler in the course of his theoretical exposition.The second chapter mainly discusses Butler’s construction and transcendence of naming and questioning discourse on the subject of power and its discourse subjectivity in "Excitable Speech",and explores the political performativity of discourse in the context of sovereign states.The third chapter discusses Butler’s specific discourse on introducing gender speech and gender subjects into his discourse theory,attempting to clarify the production,construction,and discipline of gender discourse on gender subjects.Chapter 4 is to place the gender subject within the discourse of national state’s law and discusses how Butler establishes a relationship with discourse subjectivity and gender subjects regarding law as a prohibited discourse.The content of the fifth chapter attempts to reveal Butler’s gender deconstruction scheme of regaining subjectivity by actively occupying discourse through returning to discourse performativity-based,as well as the citation,misappropriation,resignification,and recontextualization of injurious speech and legal discourse,through Butler’s analysis of Antigone’s discourse misappropriation.