Perseverance: Destruction as Restoration
"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Judith Butler describes literature’s ability to trouble “the hierarchical division of gender” as a destruction that is also a “restoration” of a prelapsarian unity: “That is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology.” Both philosophical and physical forms of resistance and destruction have unfolded in the 35 years since the publication of Gender Trouble across identity categories and communities, leaving us wondering about the status of these groups’ “restoration,” if it exists. As new identity categories have been delineated to more accurately represent the subtleties of lived experiences, has this troubling been one of destruction as further division—ontologically, socially, and politically—or of perseverance in the face of suffering? How individuals and communities persist or fracture in the wake of disaster, internal or external, is foundational to creation. Literature and poetry are a mediation of suffering; the art is a mark of the artist’s destruction and of their perseverance.
We invite you all to consider how destruction does or does not function as a form of restoration—in a Butlerian sense or beyond. What are the different ways authors and poets have attempted to capture the pain or pleasure associated with perseverance? Is Butler's theory an accurate framing for how those fields have developed since the nineties? Does it only apply to philosophical forms of destruction, or is this a valuable way to frame physical forms of resistance and destruction (of communities, of the environment) too? Does this framing make perseverance through struggles against the forms that would be destroyed more possible, or is it primarily a retrospective structure? Does it suggest new methods of perseverance? And perhaps more importantly: can a process be restorative without also being destructive?
Paper presentations should be approximately 15 minutes in length, with prospectives in the form of a 300-word abstract, submitted by January 13, 2025. Please send them to englcolloquium-ggroup@bc.edu as a PDF/Word Document that interrogates any aspect of the theme in our title. Subjects may include, but are not limited to:
Queer Theory & Gender Studies
Ecocriticism
Disability Studies
Trauma Studies
Critical Race Theory
Narrative Theory
Postcolonial Studies & Orientalism
Indigenous Studies