The Terministic Screen "Women" and the Problem with Representation

Though I've compared Burke's overarching philosophies to Butler's,  his terministic screens seem to parallel with her theories more than his others. Butler is concerned with the construction of gender. She asserts that feminist theory assumes this category of identification of "women," a terministic screen that "either reveals or distorts what is said to be true about the category of women" (Butler, 2). Here we will observe how Burke's problem with representation - his idea that our symbol systems create our reality, construct the subject, and fundamentally direct the attention to something specific rather than the whole - how his ideas present a direct parallel to what Butler is saying about women in a gendered world, and what kind of problems this presents for representation.

"Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of women is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought" (Butler, 4). Clearly, Burke would agree as he asserts "observations are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made" (Burke, 46). Here, we see both Burke and Butler struggle to work through the complicated process of what our terminology has done to our perception of reality - and how our reality has shaped how we have come up with this terminology. Butler wonders if the presumed universality of the gender "women" is undermined by the representative discourse in which it functions! Here we see what she's getting at - what exactly denotes a women? Does the term women flatten the female experience, and how can the term fully encompass all that is "women?" Is women even a category that should assume universality? Female is only female because it is not male, because it is the sex that wasn't thought of until it was, having to bring about a new set of linguistics to represent it after it wasn't. And herein lies the problem - can ANY term fully represent what it is denoting? Of course we all understand that the sign does not equal the signifier, but the nature of language as a symbol system is just that - it is a SYMBOL system - something that stands for another. When I use the word "bed" of course the word bed cannot simply mean a twin sized bed, but a waterbed, canpopy bed, king sized, queen sized, flat-bed, anything! However, when we move into the world of animate objects, the subject of representation becomes blurred, because we as humans feel a desire to be represented by something. We yearn to be a part that is represented as a whole, while at the same time we yearn to maintain our individuality. Here forms a new binary - a binary between existing and symbol, between all encompassing existence and a communication of that existence; some elements are bound to be lost in translation, no matter the gender, no matter the situation. As Burke would say, "He (Man) clings to a kind of naive verbal realism that refuses to let him realize the full extent of the role played by symbolicity in his notions of realty" (Burke, 48).

And yet, the binary between masculine and feminine is perpetuated in this representative system that tends to let details fall through the cracks. Butler emphasizes that in a phallogocentric system such as the one we live in, it tends to let the details of alterity fall through the cracks, signifying a difference, rather than an essence. Butler closes out her argument with, "Instead of self limiting linguistic gesture that grants alterity or difference to women, phallogocentricism offers a name to eclipse the feminine and takes its place" (Butler, 16). She argues that this system, this system is inescapable. The hegemony we have built has been built around a communication system that is inescapably flawed, inescapably 2-D, especially in regards to women.

So where do we go from here? Is representation a problem we cannot simply solve? Both Heilbrun and Butler seem to be headed towards a direction that suggests a new symbol system, a new representative system, but on what grounds can we develop this system but on the phallogocentric system we already have? It is clear that this new system will have to be an evolutionary process; one that uses its symbols in a non-gendered way through an evolution of time, creating new discourses for women and how they are represented.