Back in Time When Bulgaria Was Still an Outsider

Today I was going through some of my writings from previous years just to see whether I am progressing or regressing in my thoughts and if I've become even more cynical than I used to be.. .Here's what I bumped upon... 2005 discussion on Bulgaria's entrance in the European Union. I remember this paper because when I started writing it I was so optimistic and in the end of my research the picture which I seemed to portray was not so rosy as I imagined to describe... Here is the conclusion of my Bulgaria in the European Union:

In conclusion, it seems that the European Union will bring about difficulties for Bulgaria. Integration will not be so much useful for a developing country like this one.

An alternative solution to the idea of integrating, however, does not exist. There is no other regional integration organization in Europe and soon there won’t be anything of the kind. What is more, a small and feeble country which isolates itself from integration processes, the entering of the European Union in this case, is taking greater risk than it can handle.

For countries like Switzerland and Norway keeping disintegrated may be possible but this is surely not useful for a country like Bulgaria. Bulgaria doesn’t have a bright future outside the European Community. But its future as a member of the European Union at this moment of time doesn’t seem much better either. There is also something else at work which holds true for any poor developing country – poor developing countries never have the chance to choose an alternative for themselves which alternative is a hundred percent for their benefit and well-being.

Thus, it is inevitable for Bulgaria to enter the European Union but the main conclusion here is that this entering is just not coming at the right moment. After entering the European Union in January 2007, Bulgaria will not be able yet to use all its rights and to fulfill all the EU demands. It seems that for a long time to come Bulgaria’s role in the EU will be to plead for help and understanding. This prediction doesn’t sound much positive even if it is merely for the fact that partners which do not have what to offer cannot be trusted and respected. They can be in the best possible case just treated with sympathy and understanding.

The case of Bulgaria in the European Union seems to represent the above stated. In the case of Bulgaria’s entering the European Union there is also a saying which holds true and it basically says that there are no life-long friends and life-long enemies, what is the only life-long thing that persists in time are your own interests. The European Union will reach its brightest future only if it manages to become the best developed integration organization known in history. This will only be possible if the European Union stick to the fundamental principles with which they started, namely the idea of collaboration and taking decisions which will be beneficial for the common good of the Union. If this is possible to happen or not, we can only predict.

Reviewing Butler on gender/sexuality/identity

Imitation and Gender Insubordination by Judith Butler is a path-breaking, postmodern feminist piece of social theory in which Butler eloquently manages to obliterate many heterosexist assumptions rooted in Modernity, Enlightenment and ‘post-structural’ psychoanalysis on issues of gender, sexuality, identity and agency. Butler goes against the totalizing ‘grand’ narratives of these schools of thought and tries to deploy an anti-essentialist world-view. Not surprisingly, there is strong reference to works of Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Lacau and Mouffe and in a more straightforward way Michel Foucault.

In her conceptualization of gender and sexuality, Judith Butler puts a strong emphasis on the linguistic turn by focusing on the way, in which language constitutes social reality. Butler takes a Foucauldian perspective on discourse in which “discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy (2001)”. Main arguments in her article are that discourses function to constitute the ‘subject’ and that discourses on sexuality and identity serve as totalizing discourses by their treatment of identity as a natural attribute while there is no foundational moment in the doing of identity. Judith Butler touches upon the idea of language as a symbol of totality when she states that gender is performative and there are no fixed identities. Performativity, however, is not seen as a chosen performance, but rather as a forced repetition of social norms which constrain heterosexuality and sustain gender identity. Subjects are seen as being compelled to perform the identities which are being prescribed to them and to continuously remake their gender and sexual identification through repetition. True to the ideas of postmodernism, Judith Butler dismisses the existence of the autonomous, goal-oriented subject who acts on the basis of feelings and intelligence where she denounces that people are free to choose their own sexuality because there are norms and conventions that precede us and which reinforce homosexuality as the “unnatural” and ”false” form of sexuality.

On the other hand, however, Butler also tries to move away from the structural determinism, which her writing implies from the treatment of the subject as unidirectional effect of totalizing discourses, and she admits that there are cases in which certain conditioned agency is being exercised; it is the ‘situated self’ who might have the chance to act depending on context. Butler relates to the iterative dimension of agency where agency is being contingent upon the repetition of social norms. Gender and sexuality are seen as obligatory social performances which are being learned, repeated, internalized and carried out in accordance to the heterosexual social matrix.

This shift in Butler’s work makes the notion of agency within the text problematic because Butler does not make clear the conditions under which the restricted minimalist iterative dimension of agency translates into intentional autonomous human practice which could potentially result in the materialization of new social forms and successful transformation of the dominating social discourse. Interesting addition to this criticism is the fact that Butler is against the practices of other feminists who claim an essential female identity and use this to promote a single feminist political agenda. What Butler sees in such practices is a reinscribtion of the already existing heterosexual/ masculine dichotomous matrix and reinforcement of the female/ homosexual ‘subject’ as the derivative other. Having Judith Butler’s position in mind, it would be reasonable to pose the question of how is then change in society going to happen and what should the vision and the actual practices of feminist politics look like.

Additional criticism on the conceptualization of agency in this work is that Judith Butler fails to develop the more active account of agency and thus she is unable to depart from the structural deterministic note in her piece. What is more, the normative goal of the paper to liberate and develop autonomy in sexual matters seems impossible to achieve where agency is being conceptualized so restrictedly and where too much power is being attributed to discourse (and culture). To consider the subject as being merely subjected to social discourse seems essentialist in its own terms.

Another point of criticism of this work is the fact that, although Butler denies foundationalism and ‘grand theorizing’, the way in which she puts her message across is still quite totalizing by her ambitious goal to reveal the truth of gender and sexuality formation.

Last critique, but not less important, concerns the research methodology and the data on which the paper is based. Although Judith Butler uses already available and well-established academic literature for basing her main arguments, she still relies too much on individual narratives based on her own experience and feelings of being homosexual.

There is this one argument based on a song of Aretha Franklin (“…you make me feel like a natural woman…”) which aims to reveal the totalizing nature of gender/sexuality discourses but this type of argumentation inserted within such a serious piece of social theory seems in a way childish and loosens the credibility of the text.

Referential to the original text:

Butler, J. (2001). Imitation and Gender Insubordination. In S. Seidman & J. Alexander (Eds.), The New Social Theory Reader (pp. 333-345). London: Routledge.