Judith Butler
Seminar - UHON 401

Instructor(s): William Barnes

Course Description

Zoom Link for Preview Night (10/28/24 from 6:30pm-8:30pm)

Link: https://unm.zoom.us/j/97489480344 

Along with Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek, American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler is one of the most recognizable public intellectuals working today. Their work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory all over the world.
Butler began challenging conventional heteronormative notions of gender and developing their seminal theory of gender performativity and has since then expanded their analysis of how identity relates to hatred, anger, and violence targeting specific groups, and has theorized many ways we can contest identitarian hatred, anger, and violence and work towards creating a world where there is a greater chance for more people to flourish.
This course will focus on this central aspiration and examine Judith Butler's work from their earliest essays (predating Gender Trouble) through to thepresent. Dedicated to understanding Butler's philosophical inheritance, we will read those primary sources that they consult alongside their own texts (e.g., Simone De Beauvoir's feminist theory, Freud's account of melancholia, and Foucault's descriptions of power). Topics under consideration will be the Foucauldian inheritances that inform the performative account of gender, Butler's theorization of dispossession and vulnerability, and their philosophies of violence and non-violence, working through performativity, materialization, the fusion of Psychoanalysis and structuralism, and their more recent ethical and political work, finishing with a look at their activism and public speaking. We closely read Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Precarious Life, and The Force of Nonviolence alongside texts that greatly influenced Butler including works by Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault. We will also analyze Butler’s work alongside films and literature including The Embrace of the Serpent, The Incredibles 2, Paris is Burning, and others.

Texts

Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Precarious Life, 2004 and The Force of Nonviolence (all by Butler) alongside texts that greatly influenced Butler including works by Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault. We will also analyze Butler’s work alongside films and literature including The Embrace of the Serpent, The Incredibles 2, Paris is Burning, and others.

Requirements

30 pages reading per week and ...
Students will always be given multiple multi-modal assignment options (the prompts lay out the basic tasks - students are always free to take these tasks in different directions as long as they get my permission) including project-based learning, podcasting, film-making, web design, graphic art, songs, comedy bits, poetry, literature, public speaking, presentations, seminar papers, research papers.

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About the Instructor(s): William Barnes

Will is a comparative philosopher from Leeds in the UK who has studied in York London Kathmandu and the Land of Enchantment. He has taught philosophy, political theory, religious studies, and composition at The University of New Mexico since 2010. Will has taught 22 different courses and has had thousands of students, all of whom he loves. Will was recently nominated for the Affiliated Teacher of the Year award and loves his students and teaching in the Honors College at UNM. Education: Will has an MA (with Distinction), 2011, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UNM, in 2018, He has a graduate certificate in Sanskrit and Advanced Buddhist Hermeneutic from the Ranjung Yeshe Institute, University of Kathmandu, 2008, an M.A. in Religious Studies (with Merit) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2007 and a B.A. (with Honors) in Philosophy from York University, 2004. Research: Will specializes in Ethical, Social, and Political Philosophy and his area of concentration is Non-Western Philosophy, particularly Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Ethics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. His research focuses on the intersection between the social and the psychic as they relate to violence, and ultimately, contesting it. This work includes A Critique of Liberal Cynicism, (Lexington 2022) and Politics, Polarity, and Peace published as part of Brill Rodopi’s Philosophy of Peace (2023). Other recent work publications include “Is Anger Ever Required? Ārya Śāntideva on Anger and its Antidotes” published in The Ethics of Anger (Lexington 2021) and “The Virtue of the Chickadee: Chief Plenty Coups’ Anti-Genocidal Ethics” – a chapter in Peaceful Approaches for a More Peaceful World (2022). His manuscript “Virtues of Unknowing” forms the basis of one of the three courses he currently teaches at UNM Honors.