The (Un)Representation of "Others"

My approach to Butler and George's texts was through a feminist lens. I baffled with both texts, confused and annoyed until I realized that it was more than that. Of course, both were talking about women and misogyny, especially towards Ms. Helen Keller. But, I got more confused because Ms. Keller was not the ordinary woman. She was disabled. She was visually and aurally impaired. So I figured, this is more than feminism and women trying to be canonical. It was all about how the "Others" of society are represented.

I remember reading Gates' article and he kept referring to minorities as the "others" in a society. This is how women on a whole are represented. According to Butler, representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women" (3). Butler, too, employed the word "others," to get her point across; not about the discourse in a society, but more about how minorities and those who are lower in hegemonic status are represented. Though more implicit, George rallied to show how Helen Keller was represented and understood in a society not just as a woman, but also as an impaired woman. She,too, was an "other," not just to men, but also to women who were not impaired in any way;simply because she was impaired.

George reminds us of Bissell and Donawerth's observation "...sometimes women's rhetorical theory looks very much like that of  canonical men, but, more often, it looks very different" (344). George went on to show how the society gravitated more towards Burke's literature than it did Keller's. Keller received a lot of backlash due to her otherness. She had to be in constant defense of her literature because she was a woman and because she was impaired; she was "other." Butler affirms, "...women are designated as the Other". Women are of the sex that is marked, while the men are unmarked. We are the "others." As a result, "Within a language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable" Butler (13). Representable, meaning, considered visible and legitimate.

In a society that was predominantly patriarchal, Helen Keller was unrepresentable. It was deemed impossible for Hellen Keller "...to have first-hand knowledge of what is going on in the world" (George 345-346). In other words, because Helen Keller was a woman, because she was impaired, she couldn't dare experience nor speak of things the way anyone else did. Her literature was dubbed "unauthentic, unreflective and strangely disturbing" (George 345). Butler explains, "The domains of political and linguistic "representation" set out in advance the criterion by which subjects themselves are formed, with the result that representation is extended only to what can be acknowledged as a subject"(2). Therefore, Helen Keller was not qualified to be a canonical subject, so she was not endowed the courtesy of representation. She was deemed as an "other,"so she could not be represented.
-Kelli
Works Cited:
Butler, Judith. “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.” In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. 1-17.

George, Ann. “Mr. Burke, Meet Helen Keller.” Rhetoric: Concord and Controversy. Ed. Antonio de Velasco
and Melody Lehn. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2012. 340-347.