Performing Interdependence: Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor in the Examined Life

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. I. 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. …