Renee Richards Documentary - NYTimes.com Search

Renee Richards Documentary - NYTimes.com Search
There was an article in the NY Times a few days ago, on April 20, 2011, in the Arts section to which I would like to call your attention, as it beautifully illustrates the problem that Judith Butler is articulating in her book, "Aganist Ethical Violence". This recent article in the NY Times, is announcing a new set of films about sports figures in the Tribeca/ESPN film festival. One of the films is about a transgendered person named Renee Richards.
In Wikipedia, Ms. Richards life is summarized, in facts figures, data from tennis tables and is a relatively straight forward account and it cites two autobiographical books in 1986, and 2007. Ms. Richards is also a person who fought for her rights to be judged as a woman when she entered won a legal decision that disputed her right, after her successful operation to play in the US Open in 1976.
Ms. Richards is facinating to many people for many reasons, and just one of these reasons is surely because after her successful sex change, she became a pro tennis star on the woman's circuit. But although "society" here represented by the "NY Times", is facinated by Ms. Richards, it has not always been kind, or even accepting, but rather has displayed a very harsh judgement of this courageous and daring person, the subject of this new sports documentary. The link at the top of my post here links to the recent article about the new sports documentary.
The manner in which the NY times has treated Ms. Richards in at least one time in the past, can be seen in a feature article from 2007, called, "The Lady Regrets" and the link to that article I have included at the bottom of this blog post. This article reflects a very harsh judgemental attitude on the part of the author, and I am also going to assert that the judgement is leveled also by society, because it was published by the NY Times. This harsh judgement is unethical and also violent and I believe this judgement comes from an assumption and demand that
Ms. Butler is challenging in her book, in the chapter called, "Giving an Account of Oneself".

Here Ms. Butler is aiming to develop a better ethics that would inform normative discourse, than the one that we currently have, and that was operative in the NY times feature of Ms. Richards in 2007, when Ms. Butler says,
"It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves. The recognition that one is, at everyturn, not quite the same as how one presents oneself in the available discourse might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that would suspend the demand that they be self-same at every moment." In that piece,
"The Lady Regrets" (NY T2007), there is not much patience on the part of the author when she says, "one ...has the uneasy sense of the impatient male surgeon trapped in her body trying to break out."

The problem that Judith Butler works to articulate, is illustrated when we look at these couple of pieces featured at different times by The NY Times. Here that that bastion of normality, and the great judger of all things under the sun, the NY Times represents what
Ms. Butler calls "available discourse" and means for this blog post anyway, the normative voice of our society that Ms. Butler is challenging in her article.

I feel and think that the feature,
"The Lady Regrets" is very acidic in it's judemental tone. In it's acidic tone resides the judgement, and therefore the violence against Ms. Richards. It is this that is unethical and according to Ms. Butler's challenge, is also inherent in normative discourse as it is and which Butler decries and calls into question.
I think the author of "the Lady Regrets" and also, society, in the sense that the NY Times published the article and cast such an aspersion toward Ms. Richards with this cutting tone is because their is too much of a demand that
"we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same", which Judith Butler postulates is not at all the best ethics. Ms. Richards clearly defied that demand by society when she first went through her sex change, but then flaunted it by becoming a pro-women's tennis star!

The main argument in "Against Ethical Violence", as I understand it, is that "normative discourse" or mainstream pundits, that is the persons who are able to speak with some position of authority and credibility in our society, such persons as, sociologists, journalists, and a plethora of others who can be considered "the speakers of officialdom", do not really "allow" a person, that is "the subject" of this normative discourse to be changeable. Furthermore, this normative discourse is inherently violent and the violence comes from an inherent presumption that one should be an unchanging person, and one should be able to give an account of oneself that adds up to a coherency that is actually unrealistic as it is inhuman. It is a "condemnation, denunciation, and excoriation." (pg 46 Butler). and further,
condemnation becomes the way in which we establish the otehr as nonrecognizable or jettison someaspect of ourselves that we lodge in the other, whom we then condemn." (same, pg 46)

If one were allowed more of one's humanity, Butler seems to say, and if one were to be a subject, in the way that Renee Richards became a subject of normative discourse when she had a successful sex change and became a successful Pro Tennis Player in the Women's Circuit, than one would be permitted, and allowed and granted a much greater set of circumstances, attitudes, presentations, actualizations, than what is approved of by society in normative discourse.
Perhaps the new documentary on Renee will suspend judgement, at very least and will...
allow us, and give us each the opportunity to know something about ourselves even if it is to admit what we do not know about this other unique person Renee, and therefore ourselves, from this better ethical standpoint that Ms. Butler is promoting when she says...
"to know oneself as limited is still to know something about oneself, even if one's knowing is afflicted by the limitation that one knows."(pg 46 same)

One might be allowed to be seen more as a light-filled collage of possibilities, wherein any one or many of those actualities might be actualized at any instance. One person, "subjected" under a different set of ethical assumptions than the ones in vogue in our present day, might allow a greater range of reality-of-humanness to be actualized then, and not killed, by a killing opinion that is inherently violent, limited, and currently normative. One such as Renee, would be welcomed and allowed the greater range of possibilites, of light-filled possibilites, than one, such as she, or you, or I can ever/could ever account for, in any discourse, and in this opening to lightto be more of a light-filled complex of presentations, incompletely projected from any body-habitus- than our discourses might be more inherently ethical.

Unfortunately, as this feature from 2007 demonstrates, these normative discursive-functioning voices, have a way of boxing their subjects in a way that is unethical, but the normative ethics typically goes un-noticed, and these judging voices are often presumptuous and violent in their positions.
It is futile enough to "give an account of oneself" as Butler rather laboriously articulates, by using the concept of opacity, in relation to oneself, on the one hand, and the nature and various genres of description which poses inherent problems which we run aground due to our humanness and also the laboriousness of epistemological discussions in general.

What can we know, let alone, what can we describe, and what kind of accounts can we make of ourselves? And when we do give accounts of ourselves, who judges these accounts? There are ethical questions inherent within our accounts, as well as the dubious nature of accounting for just about anything, even something as apparently simple as a lemon. But how hard is it to account for oneself if you were the incredible daring, courageous, intelligent person that Renee Richards, is and was!
Ms Butler describes what I think Sarte was getting at, when in his tomb,
"Being and Nothingness" he speaks of the human ability to only be able to a part of a lemon, when we are viewing a lemon, due to the three dimensional, actual shape of a lemon.
The documentary that is being noticed here, called, "Renee", Eric Drath, hopefully is less judgmental than another NY Times article which is called, "The Lady Regrets" shamefully has taken a sniping and hostile evaluation of Renee. The normative and mainstream ethics which presumes to judge Renee harshly as rather unsatisfied in the article from 2007, takes the position that Butler would call unethical because it demands that subjects be "self-same every minute."
The Lady Regrets
by dogwood