[Editors] world's worst sentence?

[Jennifer Schmitt]

Friends,

I never imagined to see Judith Butler on this list. I'm pleasantly surprised. My two cents:

When dealing with feminist theory, even the language and sentence structure is politicized -- rhetoric has long been a favorite discipline of gender and women's studies because there is room to play. (Language, too, is a social construction, no?) I don't think succinct or direct is necessarily the point. I certainly wouldn't rank it among the worst sentences ever composed, but perhaps a more difficult one.

Butler is critiquing a [structuralist] Marxist view of ideology as articulated by Althusser. Butler, as a post-structuralist, is bound in making the argument in such a way that grapples directly with Althusser's original (and clunky) text. Which also, by the way, nods to Gramsci, Freud and Lacan. The sentence in question must therefore reference not just Althusser, but Marx and friends to make a full and complete argument. The key to understanding is to break it down:
htto://tinyurl.com/baszgw8

For real feminist fun with words, check out Trinh Minh-ha, who has foregone traditional conventions, including punctuation, so as to call into question the very nature of scholarship about Third World and indigenous people in Woman, Native, Other. Sample sentence:

"Woman can never be defined. Bat, dog, chick, mutton, tart. Queen. madam, lady of pleasure. MISTRESS. Belle-de-nuit, woman of the streets, fruitwoman, fallen woman. Cow, vixen . . . .The old Woman image-repertoire says She is a Womb, a mere baby's pouch."
http://achoff.myweb.uga.edu/Untitled.pdf

--JS
Jennifer Schmitt | Assistant Director, MIT Office of Global Initiatives | e: schmittj at mit.edu<mailto:schmittj at mit.edu> | p: 617 253 5508 | m: 617 959 2171 |  global.mit.edu<http://global.mit.edu>

On Feb 25, 2013, at 11:06 AM, David Schultz wrote:

Scott,

My propeller doesn't spin fast enough for the first sentence, but I wonder if the second sentence isn't a clarification of the first?

Dave Schultz
SDM Media Development
MIT SDM E40-315
cdaslan at mit.edu<mailto:cdaslan at mit.edu>
617-252-1167




On Feb 25, 2013, at 9:54 AM, Scott R Campbell wrote:

Certainly a contender:

Often called “The most famous feminist philosopher in the United States”,  Judith Butler is the author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).


I believe she is deserving of a Bulwer-Lytton award for such exhausting sentences as:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

She also is known for succinct sentences, such as:  "I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic."

The friend who sent me this went on to comment:

Reflecting on the first sentence, I  wish I was smarter.  On the second, I wish I was laughing more frequently.

Which might be a contender for the best laugh I've had in a while.  (Yeah, I wish I were laughing more frequently too, but maybe that's TMI.)

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