Subversive Habits: Beauvoir, Butler, and Finding Resistance in Repetition

• In Event: Subversive Habits: Resistance and Democratic Challenges

Abstract

When can repetition be a source of liberation and resistance? Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex offers a bleak outlook for the possibility that the repetition of daily habits can be any more than the reification of oppressive norms and structures, providing little outlet for women to find forms of resistance in their everyday lives. For Beauvoir, repetition traps women in a useless existence of cleaning toilets, washing floors, and performing beauty rituals. In this paper, I question how Beauvoir’s understanding of repetition can be reimagined through the language and practice of Judith Butler’s notion of subversive repetition and resignification. Can the repetition of certain habits disrupt the norms propagated by those in positions of power who seek to maintain the status quo and marginalization of certain groups of people? By applying linguistic theorizing of resignification to visual and behavioral forms of repetition, I stretch Butler’s understanding of subversive repetition to incorporate corporeal forms of resistance that exist outside of language and can operate as a form of resistance for those who lack a voice or the ability to exercise it. Implicit in the idea of resignification is the capacity to deploy hegemonic terms and language in a manner that produces counter-meanings and alternative readings, providing ways for language and habits to be used in new and unexpected ways and contexts. To illuminate my abstract claims, I turn to #insideoutabaya, a series of political actions in which women in Saudi Arabia turned the abaya inside out to protest its socially enforced wearing. I argue that as a practice of subversive repetition, the #insideoutabaya protests allow Saudi women to draw from their daily habits and the norms used to constrain them to enact disruption and collectivity in their everyday worlds. Ultimately, I argue that subversive repetition expands the tools and techniques that can be counted and read as resistance, allowing those existing at the margins of power to “speak” to those at its center.

Author

• Kimberly Killen, University of Colorado, Boulder