Killing the father/becoming uncomfortable with the mother tongue: Rethinking the performative contradiction

Educational Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 489-500

  Mccoy, Kate ^a,b  

^a JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE   (United States)

^b CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748200888     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1997.00489.x     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Jacques Derrida, "Passions: An Oblique Offering," In Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), quoted in Gayatri Spivak, "Responsibility," Boundary 221, 3 (1994): 19.
2. William V. Spanos, The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "Delirium: World-historical Not Familial," in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 120.
4. Harold Bloom, "A Meditation Upon Priority," in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 705-9.
5. Spivak, "Responsibility," 35.
6. Patti Lather, "Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible Language," Harvard Educational Review 66, no. 3 (1994): 525-45
7. Jean Anyon, "The Retreat of Marxism and Socialist Feminism: Postmodern Theories in Education," quoted in William Pinar, William Reynolds, Patrick Slattery, and Peter Taubman, Understanding Curriculum (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 311
8. Anyon is commenting on Cleo Cherryholmes, Power and Criticism: Poststructural Investigations in Education (New York:, Teacher's College Press,). A common confusion is revealed in her use of the term "postmodern," despite Cherryholmes's use of the term "poststructural." These terms, though, often used interchangeably, do not refer to the same thing. Furthermore, lumping the many theoretical perspectives that address problematics of language, power, knowledge, or subjectivity, under the term "postmodern" implies a coherence that is highly suspect.1988
9. Tugrul Liter, in"The Unassimilable Otherness of the "Post" of Postmodern and the Radicality of Radical Sociology," Critical Sociology 20, no. 2 (1994): 54, questions this practice as a kind of "modernist othering of the postmodern." Similarly, Judith Butler asks: Is this a name one takes on for oneself, or is it more a name that one is called if and when one offers a critique of the subject, a discursive analysis, or questions the integrity or coherence of totalizing social descriptions?" See Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3.
10. Anyon is referring to Patti Lather, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern. (New York: Routledge, 1991
11. Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy," Harvard Educational Review 59, (1989): 297-324.
12. Spivak, "Responsibility," 19.
13. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," In The Foucault Reade:, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books,), 87, 85 respectively.1984
14. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), quoted in Jacques Daignault, "Traces at Work in Different Places," in Understanding Curriculum as Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992).
15. Spanos, The End of Education, 221.
16. Trinh Minh-ha T., Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 16.
17. Spanos, The End of Education, 221. Emphasis is mine.
18. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammalology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,). I briefly address Derrida's reading of Heidegger in the last section of this essay.1976
19. Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Random House, 1963), quoted in Peter McLaren, "White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism," in Rethinking Media Literacy: A Critical Pedagogy of Representation, ed. Peter McLaren, Rhonda Hammer, David Scholle, and Susan Reilly (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995), 87.
20. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.
21. Lather, Getting Smart.
22. Patricia Hill Collins, "Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought," In Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research, ed. Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993).
24. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
25. Kate Bush, "Mother Stands for Comfort," On Hounds of Love [CD] (New York: EMI America Records, 1985).
26. Spanos, The End of Education, xx, 194
27. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 28.
28. Butler, Gender Trouble, 147. Note that I have substituted the term "conventional critical endeavor" for Butler's term "identity," the focus of her critique.
29. Judith Butler, "Poststructuralism and Postmarxism." Diacritics 23, no. 4 (1993): 10.
30. Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator's preface," in Derrida, Of Grammatology, xlix.
31. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), 87.
32. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 39.
33. Spivak, "Translator's Preface to Derrida, Of Grammatology," Ixxv
34. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in The Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David Richter (New York: St. Martin's Press.). It is interesting to me that Richter draws parallels between Bloom's idea of misreadings and Derrida's notion of freeplay. My readings of both of them, however, produce crucial differences.1989
35. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. R. Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 15-16.
36. Spanos, The End of Education, xvii.
37. Zizek, Looking Awry, vii, viii, respectively.
38. Patti Lather borrowing from Nancy Fraser uses "leaky" to describe "practices 'which have broken out of discursive enclaves...a species of excess.'" Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,), quoted in1989
39. Patti Lather, "Fertile Obsession: Validity after Poststructuralism," The Sociological Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1993): 682.
40. I want to suggest, too, that solid, traditional practices are also leaky, but not admittedly so by their practitioners.
41. Eugene Holland, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis (New York: Cambridge University Press,), 11. Holland is speaking here of "decoding" in the schizoanalytic work in Deleuze and Guattari.1993
42. Mary Leach, "Can We Talk? A Response to Burbules and Rice," in Teaching for Change: Addressing Issues of Difference in the College Classroom, ed. Kathryn Geismar and Guiteie Nicoleau (Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1993), 32.
43. Spivak, "Translator's Preface to Of Grammatology," Ixxiv.
44. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 5.
45. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 81.
46. Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism," 6-7.
47. Derrida, Of Grammatology.
48. Spivak, "Translator's Preface to Of Grammatology," xxxiii.
49. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 19.
50. Spivak, "Translator's Preface to Of Grammatology," xxxiv.
51. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20.
52. Spivak, "Translator's Preface to Of Crammatology," xxxiii.