Claims-Making as World-Unmaking in Euripides' "Hecuba"

• In Event: Doing Things with Performativity

Abstract

Feminist political theorists are accustomed to thinking of performative claims-making as world-making (Zerilli 2005, Zivi 2011, Nedelsky 2013). Performative speech-acts make the world by informing political judgments based not only on what listeners can know, but also what they can feel or experience about the world. However, as others have argued, overarching structures like patriarchy can foster systems of investment and attachment to ideas of what is beautiful and therefore just that are based on domination (Srinivasan 2021, Marasco 2021). In this paper, I argue that performances of voice can quite literally un-make patriarchal authority by re-making the audiences of women’s voices. More specifically, I engage with Euripides’ tragedy Hecuba by tracking the relationship between beauty and justice. By doing so, I illuminate how Hecuba and the Chorus judge the beauty of a so-called just action as ugly. Thinking with Eve Sedgwick’s concept of deformative speech-acts, I conceptualize the mode of aesthetic redescription undertaken by Hecuba and the Chorus as world-unmaking. I define world-unmaking as a mode of aesthetic redescription that enables actors to mutually constitute themselves to materially destroy patriarchy. In other words, world-unmaking reveals how performative speech-acts both make the world and un-make it, too. World-unmaking reveals how aesthetic judgments can reflect different formations of politics, because the evaluation of whether an action like a speech-act is beautiful or ugly, and therefore what is just or unjust, depend on how listeners hear it. In short, I argue that Hecuba portrays how the beauty of women’s voices—and therefore of justice—is gendered. Beauty functions as a frame through which women’s voices are appropriated by patriarchy, but also functions as a resource for the collaborative resistance against patriarchy.

Author

• Ani Chen, Cornell University