Performing interdependence: Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor in The Examined Life.

• Author: Abrams, Kathryn

When I was invited to participate in this symposium, I planned to talk about Judith Butler's 1994 essay Against Proper Objects. (1) This essay has always been one of my favorite examples of Judith's work: I love its transgression of a boundary between feminism and queer theory that was only beginning to take shape at the time of its publication; its excavation of the voices of dissident feminists that were otherwise often submerged by what was then a wave of support for a dominance approach; its invitation to renew or reconfigure a conversation that had already become difficult, but could potentially bear unexpected kinds of fruit. (2) Against Proper Objects has helped a small but determined group of legal feminists to see new directions for our thinking, and possibilities for collaboration and coalition at times when the most exciting work on sexuality and gender seemed to be happening far from the usual domains of feminist jurisprudence. But a funny thing happened on the way to writing that essay. As I was poking around a bookstore, I came across the book version (3) of The Examined Life, a documentary film (4) by Astra Taylor that is comprised of interviews with eight philosophers on the central ideas or themes that animate their work. One of these interviews features Judith Butler, and it is organized around the idea of "interdependence." (5) I found it riveting: It has a great deal to say (directly) about the body and (indirectly) about the law--both topics of the panel on which I was invited to participate. I then went out and rented the film: even better. So my comments--perhaps appropriately, for a talk originally presented two days before the Oscars--will focus on Judith Butler's debut as a star of the silver screen.

This description of my focus requires two qualifications. First, in this essay I will take my bearings not simply from the film but from the text of the larger conversation, though I will consider the way that that text is given a distinctive form of life through the vehicle of the film. Second, a defining aspect of the film is the decision Butler makes not to be the star of her particular section. The other seven philosophers respond to questions from Astra Taylor, the director, who remains mostly off camera. (6) They are, in effect, occupying the entire screen of their segments. Butler chooses to share the frame. She situates herself as the interlocutor, rather than the primary subject, and her segment foregrounds a disability activist--Sunaura Taylor, the sister of the director--whose work might at first seem orthogonal to her own. (7) The two of them take a walk around the Mission district of San Francisco, and talk about disability, gender, human permeability and solidarity. (8)

As they take this walk, Judith and Sunny Taylor both discuss and perform several kinds of interdependence: interpersonal interdependence, theoretical interdependence between gender theory and disability theory, interdependence between resistance and reform. I argue that these enactments of interdependence work in three ways with respect to law. First, they challenge a range of conventional legal assumptions about the body: I will detail these assumptions, and the ways they are interrogated by this conversation, in Part I. Second, this performance of interdependence points toward new, or at least less familiar, ways of deploying the law, a focus I take up in Part II. Finally, Judith and Sunny's enactment of interdependence may help those in the legal mainstream to understand the value of that "resistance" which takes place outside the scope of the law. I explore this final point in Part III.

1. Reconceptualizing Bodies

   One of Butler's signal contributions in this conversation is to pose a new, orienting question about bodies: what can a body do? (9) In formulating this question, she references an essay by Deleuze on Spinoza, (10) which she likes because of its focus on capabilities or possibilities rather than essences or ideals. Butler contrasts this question about the body with more conventional philosophical questions about the body, but I found myself juxtaposing it to the questions that the law most frequently asks about the body, questions like: How should we classify this particular body? Is this body similar to or different from this other body? What has been done, or is being done, to this body? Underlying these questions are certain assumptions about the body that pervade most legal contexts. First, the body has a prior, ontological status. It is the most foundational thing about us: although it can be acted on, injured, partially transformed, there is an underlying, unchanging reality to what it 'is.' Second, the body is the source and manifestation of our separateness from each other. My body is the boundary between myself and you. Ed Cohen, for example, has written a fascinating new book about how the metaphorization of the body in fields from biomedicine to politics have led us to figure the body primarily as a site of separation--bounded by an "epidermal frontier"--and a site of defense against intrusion by others. (11) This metaphor, which traces its origins among other things, to legal conceptions of immunity, resonates in contemporary law as well.

   The understandings of the body assumed by the question "what can a body do?" are very different. I would argue that the film actually gives this question two different glosses, with different implications for legal thought. The first formulation of this question is, "what is a body able to do?" This gloss highlights questions of variety, and of the social context of "ability." The second is, "what is a body permitted to do"? This formulation highlights questions of normalization. The first question begins with a focus or frame that is more characteristic of disability and uses it to reflect on gender; the second begins with a focus that ismore characteristic of gender and uses it to think about disability. Both of these questions challenge legal conceptions by refiguring the body as a source of interdependence.

   1. What is a body able to do?

      What a body is able to do is, first of all, various. This is clear from the visual setting of the film: not simply the vivid, varied environment of San Francisco's Mission district, but also the variety of forms of locomotion and self-presentation that thread their way throughout the segment. But what a body can do also depends critically on factors beyond the boundaries of the physical body itself. Certain features of that body's built environment play a role, as does its discursive setting. This is a key move in disability advocacy: the distinction between impairment (a unique form of embodiment) and disability (the way impairment is or is not addressed by society) (12) underwrote the original conception of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). But this vision has become increasingly embattled in the courts (13) --some say because the idea of a body constituted by its environment has exceeded mainstream legal norms, which posit the body as this kind or that kind, same or different, the static, determinate starting point for everything else. (14)

      But if this notion of the body formed by context is already a stretch for disability law, Butler takes this notion further, in two ways. First, she moves from a minoritizing to a universalizing conception. (15) "Nobody goes for a walk," she observes, "without having something that supports that walk, something outside of ourselves." (16) What Sunny is able to do is conditioned by her physical context, but that is also true for Judith, and for all the ostensibly able-bodied people moving through the streets of the Mission. The camera is constantly focusing on the determinants of mobility for all of them: the road (with all its bumps and textures), the flow of traffic, the skateboards and bicycles that enable smooth and graceful movement, an abandoned single shoe that Judith and Sunny...