From criticism to the semiotic to the abject as a paradigm of body-genderification: Judith Butler reader of Kristeva

Abstract

Whether using semiotics to criticize psychoanalysis, whether to incorporate the abject among its problematizations, or to highlight its ambiguities, it is a fact that Judith Butler largely (re)mobilizes the notions and criticisms left by Julia Kristeva. Starting with her thesis on Hegel, she finds in this author useful tools to problematize the ways in which certain subjects are execrated in the same way that we execrate our excesses. Based on his reading of Kristeva, we will see that Butler builds a critique of semiotics and his theory of abjection, understanding this as paradigmatic for the problematization of the performativity of bodies-genders. Considering that gender acts do not necessarily obey the laws that challenge them, it is by (re)mobilizing Kristeva from a queer-feminist perspective that Butler makes us think about the potential of, in terms of power, not treating them as illegitimate, unlivable and pathologizable a priori a significant portion of forms of body-gendering. Through a queer-feminist reading of Kristevian semiotics and abjection, this article seeks to analyze one of the steps through which Judith Butler makes us think about how “flawed” the expectations of identity coherence, fixity and stability are.