No Relation to Rhett
by Bethany Stotts
Chicago, Ill.—At a panel on “Revision as Writing, Writing as Revision,” Modern Language Association (MLA) panelists offered tips to increase the clarity and quality of academic writing. The panelists proposed several solutions, many of which emphasized reducing the length of dissertations and cutting out unnecessary or jargon-filled material. The presenters also challenged writers to think outside the formulaic dictums of literary theory. “I think that gender-based sex and sexuality are playing themselves out in formulaic ways that are knee-jerk, predictable in too many dissertations and they seem…boring,” said Professor Susan Gubar of Indiana University at Bloomington. She suggested that undergraduate writers “try to break out of certain formulaic ways of thinking.”
In a colorful speech, panelist Cathy Birkenstein-Graff of the University of Illinois at Chicago exhorted academics to adopt an “embrace your shame approach” in which authors visualize antagonistic, cruel voices which tell them that their theses are meaningless. Writers should “make themselves vulnerable to that little voice that comes and visits them, sometimes in the middle of the night, and says ‘You idiot. Nobody in their right mind is possibly going to believe your central argument that ____, whatever,’” she said. Writers should also visualize a voice mocking “Everyone is so convinced that, on the contrary ____, they’re surely going to call you totally naive. Indeed, look at from the vantage point of—blah, blah, blah— they may even laugh at you. They may even drive you out of the profession. If, that is, they even deem your argument important enough to bother listening to,” she continued.
Birkenstein-Graff argued that the best academic writers “embrace rather than push away these painful countervoices, [these] painful counterperspectives that inevitably arise in the revision process, using them to structure and motivate what they themselves want to say.”
In direct contrast to the other panelists’ emphasis on cogency and understandable writing, Birkenstein-Graff suggested that academic writers look to “Bad Writing Award” winner Judith Butler for inspiration. According to the UI Chicago lecturer, Butler is a “masterful, masterful writer” who “directly engages what her harshest critics say about her work.” She held up Butler’s Bodies That Matter as a shining example.
One topical sentence from Butler’s 2004 Bodies That Matter reads “The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of ‘sex,’ and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge.” In other words, someone seeking to define one’s own sexuality must abjectly repudiate his or her real sexuality in favor of the social sexual construct. Or, put even more simply, one cannot define sexuality without operating within social norms. Butler later argues that the adoption of such norms produces “consequences that [the sexed subject] cannot control.” The book includes chapters on “The Lesbian Phallus and Morphological Imaginary,” “Critically Queer,” and “Arguing With the Real.”
On the subject of lesbianism, Butler later writes that “Insofar as the phallus is an idealization of morphology, it produces a necessary effect of inadequation, one which, in the cultural context of lesbian relations, can be quickly assimilated to the sense of an inadequate derivation from the supposedly real thing, and, hence, a source of shame.” Professor Butler currently teaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California at Berkeley.
Professor Birkenstein-Graff openly admitted that Butler’s writings have been repeatedly criticized by public figures as obtuse, if not “bad writing.” In 1999, Butler received the “Bad Writing Award” from Philosophy and Literature. The journal’s editor, Denis Dutton, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the desperate incantations” of the journals’ contest winners “hope to persuade their readers not by argument but by obscurity that they too are the great minds of the age.” “[Butler’s winning] sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it,” wrote Dutton.
Birkenstein-Graff implied, however, that the attacks on Butler’s writing came not from the construction of her sentences but because her opponents disagreed with Butler’s theses. “But what makes Judith Butler stand out above the crowd is that in arguing her case, she makes life very difficult for herself by…engaging head-on the views of those who not only do not believe that gender is constructed, but believe that anyone who does is a bit foolish,” she said.
She concluded that many professors’ “writing suffers from an excess of blandness, and may well in fact qualify, if not for a bad writing award, but at least for a boring writing award, if such were ever to come into existence.” In contrast, Butler’s sentences offer a new way to add spice to academic papers. “If, however, we could follow the lead of somebody like Butler, and look squarely at those who want to critique us and shame us, our writing would be infused with precisely the kinds of exciting, challenging tension it needs,” Birkenstein-Graff said.
If all academic writing became infused with the “excitement” of Butler’s work, many outside the field would probably fail to recognize the change.
Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.
