Format:
1 Online-Ressource
Series Statement:
Western Political Science Association 2010 Annual Meeting Paper
Content:
In recent work, from Precarious Life through Frames of War, Judith Butler has not only lodged a strong critique of individual autonomy but also tried to illuminate a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and the claims of language and social belonging. Apprehending this new bodily political ontology has the potential for a better understanding of the ways in which 'we' are made (im)possible by social and political conditions on which 'we' depend. This paper will try to cash out some of the implications of Butler's theorizing of 'precarious life' in an analysis of the remarkable 2005 film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the hybrid production of from Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and American actor-director Tommy Lee Jones. The film concerns the Jones character's efforts to return his friend Melquiades to his family and bury him properly in his home town. This film's depiction of the complex human relationships between Mexicans and Americans in the Texas border context not only explodes the easy Manicheanism of the nativist immigration debate, but also illuminates many of the concerns animating Butler's concern with 'precarity' as what she calls 'that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death'
Note:
Volltext nicht verfügbar
Language:
English
