The thoughts in this chapter may be read in dialogue with many contemporary issues and movements, such as Black Lives Matter or those relating to refugee and immigrant migrations, sexual minorities and others. Questions surrounding which humans count as human and are eligible to appear, what justice is, what we call those who do not and cannot appear as ‘subjects’ within hegemonic discourse, how the excluded appear and the living and social conditions of agency are just some of the ideas that are explored. She suggests that ‘gender politics must make alliances with other populations broadly characterised as precarious’. It explores how the gathering of individuals experiencing precarity demonstrates to the system, and to others, that their situations are shared, laying the building blocks for a common understanding of their experiences. The first chapter, ‘Gender Politics and the Right to Appear’, points to the situation of precarity that individuals find themselves in, due at least in part to the socio-economic and political system. Indeed, she states that the book’s thesis is ‘that acting in concert can be an embodied form of calling into question the inchoate and powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political’. From there, Butler questions how bodily acts become performative and explores the ways that lives and bodies are connected to one another and to larger systems. The book questions the role and aspects of public assembly, performative space and the performing body, explaining that ‘performativity characterizes first and foremost that characteristic of linguistic utterances that in the moment of making the utterance makes something happen or brings some phenomenon into being’. While the current book weaves ideas of precarity throughout, these concepts are used to complete a tapestry focused on performative assembly. She describes precarity as characterising ‘that politically induced condition of maximised vulnerability and exposure for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence, to street or domestic violence, or other forms not enacted by states but for which the judicial instruments of states fail to provide sufficient protection or redress’. Butler employs her past work on precarity as an angle into understanding aspects of public assembly. Her most recent book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, is a 219-page intellectual enquiry of public assembly politics. Judith Butler is a name that has been prevalent in academia for years, bringing us theories of performativity and precarity, amongst others. Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly. This accessible account is highly relevant to contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter, and will be of use to those working across the humanities and the social sciences as well as activists, writes Alexis Bushnell. In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler draws upon her influential theorisations of performativity and precarity to examine the politics of public assembly, discussing such themes as the crucial bodily component to acting in concert as well as the role of media.
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