A Study On Reading Politics Of Judith Butler

The most influential politics of reading was proposed by feminist criticism in the1980 s,with gender identity as the starting point and grounding point for its reading interpretations.In the 1990 s,Western feminist theory met with postmodernist thinking.Feminist criticism in this period was internally and externally difficult: firstly,feminist criticism was still in a contest with patriarchy for the right to speak,which required a stable,unified female subject;postmodern feminist criticism,on the other hand,began to turn towards the recognition of gender identity and the plurality of subjects,triggering an identity crisis of the critical subject.The dilemma facing feminist criticism is clearly tied to the disintegration of identity politics,and it is against this background that Judith Butler emerges to challenge existing feminist criticism in a wholly subversive way,proposing a new vision of the subject’s identity: perhaps there is no such thing as a pre-crisis female identity,which in a way directly dismantles the struggle and crisis that exists within feminism.She then uses genealogy to deconstruct the reader’s subjective identity based on gender differences and attempts to reinterpret it in a postmodern context.The article is divided into five parts,namely an introduction and four chapters in the body.The introduction outlines the origin and significance of the topic,the current state of research on Judith Butler’s reading politics at home and abroad,as well as the specific research ideas and methods.The first chapter explores Butler’s genealogical approach to reading.While Judith Butler’s contribution to feminist criticism is usually evaluated on the basis of her gender discourse,this paper argues that Butler’s gender discourse can not be discussed in isolation from its context,and that this theory,which is somewhat behavioural in nature,can only operate in an orderly manner if it is based on a genealogical approach to its examination.Using the deconstruction of gender identity as a starting point for dismantling the identity crisis facing postmodern feminist criticism,Butler applies her transformed genealogical approach to critically examine feminist-related concepts of sex/gender,the body,and gender identity,dismantling their natural and material representations.The second chapter focuses on Butler’s genealogical examination of gender as a product of the heteronormative matrix,and the feminist emphasis on the identity subject‘woman’ as a foundationalist fiction that supports the concept of the subject and is a product of power discourses.It is on this basis that Butler presents her theory of gender narrative-that women are constructed in narrative.Gender is no longer the positive binary model previously envisaged by feminist theory and patriarchal discourses,but is transformed into a constructed category of historicity.On the basis of this view,Butler treats gender as a fluid and derivative identity.The third chapter emphasises that Butler is still writing in an internal critical tradition,so her deconstruction does not seek to deny or abandon the category of‘woman’,but rather to question it,to suspend all foundationalist views on the category that were implicit,to minimise its foundationalist weight,and to reconstruct it as A fluid,permanently open and contestable postmodern category.Guided by this idea,and taking advantage of the theoretical opportunities presented by post-structuralist linguistics,Butler proposes a series of strategies for discursive subversion.The fourth chapter summarises and reflects on Butler’s politics of reading in terms of the expansion and deepening of previous paradigms of reading and feminist identity politics in the field of reading politics,as well as the fierce criticism that Butler’s postmodernist stance has attracted.