Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.
A recent resurgence of Anglo-feminism in the academy has sought to restate the importance of making universal claims about the conditions and rights of women (Okin, Nussbaum) without regard to the prevailing norms in local cultures, and without taking up the task of cultural translation. This effort to override the problem that local cultures pose for international feminism does not understand the parochial character of its own norms, and does not consider the way in which feminism works in full complicity with US colonial aims in imposing its norms of civility through an effacement and a decimation of local Second and Third World cultures. Of course, translation by itself can also working full complicity with the logic of colonial expansion, when translation becomes the instrument through which dominant values are transposed into the language of the subordinated, and the subordinated run the risk of coming to know and understand them as tokens of their “liberation” (35).
The universal announces, as it were, its ‘non-place’, its fundamentally temporal modality, precisely when challenges to its EXISTING formulation emerge from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who’, but nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. At stake here is the exclusionary function of certain NORMS of universality which, in a way, transcend the cultural locations from which they emerge. Although they often appear as transcultural or formal criteria by which existing cultural conventions are to be judged, they are precisely cultural conventions which have, through a process of abstraction, come to appear as post-conventional principles. The task, then, is to refer these formal conceptions of universality back to the contaminating trace of their ‘content’, to eschew the form/content distinction as it furthers that ideological obfuscation, and to consider the cultural form that this struggle over the meaning and scope of norms takes (39).
When one has no right to speak under the auspicies of the universal, and speaks none the less, laying claim to universal rights, and doing so in a way that preserves the particularity of one’s struggle, one speaks in a way that may be readily dismissed as nonsensical or impossible. When we hear about ‘lesbian and gay human rights’, or even ‘women’s human rights’, we are confronted with a strange neighbouring of the universal and the particular which neither synthesizes the two, nor keeps them apart. The nouns function adjectivally, and although they are identities and grammatical ‘substances’, they are also in the act of qualifying and being qualified by one another. Clearly, however, the ‘human’ as previously defined has not readily included lesbians, gays and women, and the current mobilization seeks to expose the conventional limitations of the human, the terms that sets the limits on the universal reach of international law. But the exclusionary character of those conventional norms of universality does not preclude further recourse to the term, although it does mean entering into that situation in which the conventional meaning becomes unconventional (or catachrestic). This does not mean that we have a priori recourse to a truer criterion of universality.
It does suggest, however, that conventional and exclusionary norms of universality can, through perverse reiterations, produce unconventional formulations of universality that expose the limited and exclusionary features of the former one at the same time that they mobilize a new set of demands (40).