Contemporary Pragmatism Editions Rodopi Vol. 10, No. 2 (December 2013), 25–47 ©2013 Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey Erin C. Tarver Judith Butler's influential work in feminist theory is significant for its insight that sexist discourse in popular culture affects the agency and consciousness of individuals, but offers an inadequate account of how such discourse might be said to touch, shape, or affect selves. Supplementing Butler's account of signification with a Deweyan pragmatic account of meaning-making and selective emphasis enables a consistent account of the relationship between discourse and subjectivity with a robust conception of the bodily organism. An analysis of the popular discourse surrounding Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Presidential campaign demonstrates why this hybrid pragmatic/poststructuralist account is necessary. Popular political discourse tends to represent sexism and racism as encapsulated in isolated events with clearly demarcated victims and perpetrators – as in the case of a demonstrator at a 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign stop who held up a sign reading "Iron My Shirt." Many feminist theorists, on the other hand, maintain that sexism, racism, heterosexism and classism are institutional phenomena for which responsibility and consequences are less than simple to pinpoint. Much recent work in feminist theory has maintained that even when sexism is considered as a matter of discourse, it functions as more than simply hurtful language. Oppressive discourse, feminists have maintained, shapes lives, consciousnesses and bodies – it may even constitute subjectivities. Indeed, it has become commonplace in feminist theory to claim that language choices matter – whether the concern is with gender-neutral pronouns, or flagrant hate-speech – precisely because words have tangible effects on individuals and populations who are harmed or benefited by them. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to account for such a relation between linguistic or signifying phenomena on the one hand, and material bodies on the other. In order to explain how language might have effects on individual bodies, it would be necessary to offer an account of the ways in which such discourse operates both to dominate and privilege – and to do so in a way that does not reduce selfhood to textuality, or oppression to a type of utterance. My purpose in this paper is to offer an account of the relationship between discourse and selves with a robust conception of the materiality of the bodily organism, which, at the ERIN C. TARVER 26 same time, allows for a conception of the emergence of differently bodied selves in and through (racialized, sexualized, gendered, classed) discourse. In so doing, I will draw out the implications of a linkage between Judith Butler's notion of performativity and discursive power and John Dewey's interactional account of meaning and matter. A thorough analysis of the popular discourse surrounding Clinton both illustrates why Butler's citational account of embodied signification is necessary, and why it needs to be supplemented by attention to Dewey's pragmatic discussion of selective emphasis and his interactional understanding of meaning-making. My claim will be that reading Dewey and Butler together both circumvents the problems of "discursification" (with which socalled 'post-modernists' are frequently charged), and prepares the way for a theory of the constitution of subjects that has room for the feminist suggestion that language has real consequences. 1. Performativity, Discourse and "Hillary" By now, the claim that Hillary Clinton was the subject of sexist language in the mainstream media covering the 2008 U.S. Presidential election is commonplace – and yet, few are aware of its extent or flagrance. With this in mind, I want to mention a few moments of what most people would recognize as egregious sexism, with a view to showing why the approach I am offering here is necessary for understanding such discourse's efficacy as both sense-making and politically significant for populations beyond Clinton. First, I will analyze a representative sample of sexist language used against Clinton using a typical feminist theoretical framework, and then suggest why this would be helpfully supplemented using a pragmatic, post-structuralist approach. On his MSNBC show, Tucker Carlson famously said of Clinton, "When she comes on television, I involuntary cross my legs," (Tucker 2007) in conjunction with a segment on Hillary Clinton Nutcracker Dolls being sold online, which featured "stainless steel teeth secured inside upper legs to grip and crack nuts." (Eagleview USA 2010) Later, commentator Glenn Beck remarked, "There's something about her vocal range. There's something about her voice that just drives me – it's not what she says, it's how she says it. She is like the stereotypical ... bitch," (The Glenn Beck Program 2007) while Chris Matthews dubbed the political men endorsing her candidacy "castratos in the eunuch chorus." (Fortini 2008, 42) In a town-hall meeting, John McCain responded to the query, "How do we beat the bitch?" with the little-reported quip, "That's an excellent question." (Tapper 2007) The reiteration of the image of Clinton as a castrating bitch, whose very presence evokes fear or repulsion in men, could be understood, in part, as yet another manifestation of the no-win situation in which women find themselves: be 'nice' and appear weak, or be aggressive and be derided as bitchy. And yet, such an explanation on its own is insufficient, for it fails to account for the implicit centrality of the masculinity of the speakers in such rhetorical flourishes that ostensibly take a woman as their object. Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 27 How are we to understand such repeated and thinly veiled references to the male genitals in conjunction with the repetition of the appellation, "bitch"? A bitch, of course, is technically a canine, and the implicit metaphor drawn whenever this name is invoked functions to liken the woman in question to an animal – specifically, an animal with a jarring voice and threatening teeth, which must be caged or restrained rather than reasoned with. This particular evocation is evident in Beck's description of his reaction to the timbre of Clinton's 'bark.' Interestingly, however, what is not foregrounded in his statement is the middle section in which he cuts himself off: "there is something about her voice that just drives me – ." Before Beck's own repulsion or anxiety can become the central focus, it is foreclosed in favor of a return to Clinton's supposed vocal provocation. We are given to understand, though, that Clinton does constitute some form of threat. Her voice connotes biting teeth, she is something that "we" must conspire to "beat," if "we" are to have any hope of living without the vigilance required to shield "our" genitals with a leg crossed just in time. And lest we have any doubts about the potential threat that bitches such as Clinton pose to male genitalia, Matthews is ready to hold up those "castratos" for whom it is too late, whose feminized voices rise up as a warning cry for those who would avoid the unthinkable. It is true, of course, that not all references to Clinton as a bitch contain an explicit reference to castration, and neither do all references to castration explicitly use the nominative "bitch." All of the above statements, however, invoke Clinton as an explicit or implicit threat to the masculine subject(s) in question – a threat that remains, for the most part, inarticulable. Given the expression of this threat – in language that is alternately evocative of a dangerous animal and castration – one might reasonably look to the psychoanalytic tradition for an explanatory framework for this particular discourse.1 Specifically, Freud's writings on animal phobias and the castration complex make particularly salient the implications of these connections as containing more than they initially appear to contain. While Freud famously argues for the primacy of a literal fear of castration as the source of much generalized anxiety, this case has striking commonalities with Freud's analysis of his patient labeled as the 'Wolf-Man', whose anxiety manifests as a specific phobia of wolves. Freud analyzes the Wolf-Man's animal phobia as a symptom of his repression regarding his relationship with his father, but not on the common Oedipal model. The fear of wolves is not, as in the famous case of 'Little Hans', the displaced fear of an actual castration at the hands of the father; rather, according to Freud, the Wolf-Man has maintained the pre-Oedipal passive, tender attitude toward his father, which has given way to an "impulse to be loved by him in a genital-erotic sense." (Freud 1964, 105) However, this desire by itself does not cause the repression. Freud writes, "he thought that a relation of that sort presupposed a sacrifice of his genitals – the organ which distinguished him from a female." (Ibid., 108) The Wolf-Man would thus be symbolically castrated by maintaining this passive sexual attitude, and it is only ERIN C. TARVER 28 fear of this fate (which Freud directly links with femininity) that leads him to repress his fantasy. Thus, if Freud is correct, the fear of castration may not be the literal fear of the loss of the (power of the) penis, but a displaced anxiety about being made passive, which Freud rather problematically equates with repressed homosexual desire – an equation that is echoed in the rhetoric around Clinton. On a psychoanalytic reading, then, the discourse of anxiety or repulsion around Clinton can be read not only as an indictment of her public persona, but also as a paranoid concern about the status of the speaker's masculinity, and concomitantly, his place within normative heterosexuality. The fear of a symbolic castration at the hands of Clinton-the-bitch would thus be an expression of the perceived threat of homosexuality, and the vigilance required to stave off potential effeminizing.2 Indeed, the supporters Matthews referred to as a band of "castratos" were largely gay men. Clinton's popularity in homosexual communities was widely known during the 2008 campaign, especially subsequent to her interview with Philadelphia Gay News – which her political opponents had declined to give.3 Perhaps, then, this discourse figures Clinton most clearly as a carrier of the contagion of homosexuality, whose repudiation is necessary to shore up confidence in one's masculinity – which is to say, one's status as a heterosexual agent. The apparently curious inclusion of references to the masculinity of their speakers in insults ostensibly focused on Clinton might in fact be crucial to grasping their full meaning. None of this is to claim that there is a necessary connection between castration, sexual passivity, and homosexuality; neither is it to suggest that every deployment of the word "bitch" is a covert or unconscious confession of repressed homosexual desire. The presumption of epistemic universality such a psychoanalytic reading would require is untenable, and such a reading will not help us understand the ways in which the discourses around homosexuality, femininity, masculinity, and so on, get off the ground as meaning-full in the first place.4 That is, even if Freud's linkage of the return of repressed homosexual desire with anxiety about the security of the genitals and concomitant fear of feminization make partial sense of the bitch-discourse surrounding Clinton, the enabling conditions of this sense-making are still unclear. What pre-existing significations are necessary in order to even make sense of the use of canine and castration imagery in connection with particular sorts of persons? And in what respects are those pre-existing significations already involved in racialized and classed contexts that are not foregrounded in their ostensible meanings? Judith Butler's work on performativity in the making of bodily meaning might be read as a corrective to the universalizing impulses of Freudian psychoanalysis, since it problematizes the notion of a paternal law "that works the same way in every possible social and discursive universe," and instead interrogates "how the domains of the unconscious are produced" (Bell 2010, 132) in particular signifying contexts. In what follows, my concern will be with Butler's articulation of the means of such production, particularly as it is Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 29 conceived as contributing to the constitution of differently situated subjectivities. In so doing, my concern will not primarily be in a detailed engagement with Butler's particular formulation of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis Freud. Rather, my interest will be in drawing out Butler's account of the "how" of bodily signification – which, I suggest, may be useful for psychoanalytic accounts, but which is equally beneficial for the pragmatic account of meaning I will offer here. On the contrary, I will suggest that while Butler's own work does put discourse analysis and speech-act theory to use in the service of a specifically feminist psychoanalysis, her account of the production of meaning need not be used in exactly this way. In fact, the account I will offer here is not specifically psychoanalytic in its claims – though it does have affinities with some versions of some feminist or anti-racist redeployments of psychoanalysis (such as, for example, those offered by Butler, Fanon, Oliver, and Sullivan). This is not to reject the value of such a version of psychoanalysis as an explanatory framework or theoretical tool in particular circumstances; it is, however, to insist that psychoanalysis, like phenomenology or discourse analysis, is one theoretical tool amongst others that may be more or less useful depending on one's purposes, and not a necessary component of any theoretical account of the formation of subjectivity. I have chosen to pair Butler's account of signification with a Deweyan pragmatic account of meaning rather than an explicitly psychoanalytic account because I am wary of the potential tendency to foreground sex to the exclusion of other modes of signification (a potential that is, I think, exacerbated by psychoanalysis' reliance on the family drama) and Butler's tendency to emphasize rejection, repudiation, and disavowal of the "constitutive outside" in the formation of subjects, to the exclusion of a serious consideration of the various degrees or modes of relation-to that shape identity. In order to explain how Dewey's account might thus helpfully supplement Butler's in this regard, however – and why Butler's discussion of signification remains indispensable for me – it is necessary to recount briefly to her discussion of bodily meaningmaking. Drawing on the claims of speech-act theory, which suggests that particular sorts of signifying speech not only describe or refer, but enact the very thing to which they refer (as in the declaration, "I now pronounce you husband and wife"), Butler argues that practices beyond traditional speech function as performances that produce the bodily significations we understand as femininity, sexuality, and so on. Thus, these significations are not only external markers that enable us to more easily "read" pre-given selves, but are, for Butler, directly involved in the production of those selves. Indeed, Butler argues that there is no foundational 'self' of subjectivity, but that "subjects" are fabrications posited after the fact to serve as explanations for the reiterations of certain kinds of signifying practices, notably gendered practices. However, this subjectivity is not declared and instituted once-for-all-time, since becoming coherently gendered – which is, for Butler, becoming a coherent subject – is never ERIN C. TARVER 30 complete. Rather, for Butler, it is necessary to engage in a continual reiteration or reenactment of those gendered practices that suggest the ideal of a core identity. Butler understands these gendered practices as performative because they are engaged in producing the selves that they are ostensibly expressing or representing. And while some earlier philosophers would agree that the self becomes what it is through its actions, Butler is making a larger claim than this. In particular, she is arguing that the very recognition of 'actions' and 'selves' as discrete entities requires a prior discursive construction that categorizes them as such. She writes: "The enabling conditions for an assertion of an 'I' are provided by the structure of signification, the rules that regulate the legitimate and illegitimate invocation of that pronoun, the practices that establish the terms of intelligibility by which that pronoun can circulate." (Butler 2006, 196) In other words, in order for subjects and actions to be what they are in the first place, they must operate according to certain rules of signification. Thus, not only are subjects denominated retrospectively to account for certain patterns of action; those patterns of action are themselves regulated, produced, and recognized as patterns by virtue of their participation in a particular discursive regime. However, Butler suggests that such repetitive performativity is not to be understood on the model of a theatrical performance in which costumes are put on or changed at will. Rather, because this performativity is the very process of subject-construction, it is more often than not the case that we could not help but participate in particular performative acts. The constraint to which Butler refers here is, paradoxically, not merely (or even primarily) the constraint of external behavioral regulation, but a constraint that operates through delimiting the realm of possible acts of sense-making. Importantly, Butler suggests that this delimitation functions not only through its cognitive effects (that is, giving shape to the ways we 'read' or apprehend given phenomena), but as "the power of discourse to materialize its effects," such that what is given, inhabited or performed is itself the result of "the historicity of discourse, and, in particular, the historicity of norms [that] constitute the power of discourse to enact what it names." (Butler 1993, 187, italics mine) Thus, the signifying practices that make up gender become effective as signifiers – and as creating that which they signify – by virtue of their repetition of and participation in preexisting conventions of gender performativity, whose status as conventional or normative is re-secured in part through that repetition. And, the force with which such gendered significations operate is enough to effectively rule out certain possibilities of performance – or better, to render them (materially, psychically) impossible from the start. According to this notion of performativity, then, both the intelligibility and the lived experience of something called "femininity" (to name one example) is produced and reinforced through the reenactment of particular practices that work by circumscribing the available bodily possibilities. Borrowing a term from Derrida, Butler maintains that the regulative force of such gender discourse is its "citationality," which is to say, its repetition of Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 31 previous discursive acts which themselves have a history of meaning. My performance of femininity succeeds in constituting me as an intelligible (woman) subject to the extent that it continually 'cites' recognizably feminine symbolic practices – dressing, speaking, walking, and desiring in ways characterized as feminine. Or as Butler puts it, "a performative 'works' to the extent that it draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized." (Butler 1997, 51) What this means is that I, to the degree that I become a coherent 'I', am at the same time the effect of and an implicated participant in the discursive regime of gender. That is, the citational practices that constitute me as female both depend upon previous iterations of such practices for their normative force and contribute, as re-iterations, to their continued normative authority. In the case of Hillary Clinton, we might say that her performative enactment of "woman" (to isolate, for the moment, an artificial abstraction) draws on and reiterates certain conventions that make her intelligible as such – standards of dress, tone of voice, a propensity for smiling, and so on – and that her reiterations of these conventions act both on her and other subjects constituted as 'women', literally giving shape to the bodies of herself and those others. If Butler is right to claim that discourse acts on and constitutes bodies; that "discourse" as such is not limited to literal talking or writing, but includes all manner of signifying practices; and that repetitions of previous discursive practices reconsolidate the power of those practices to shape others for whom they are constitutive, then Clinton's participation in the discursive regime of femininity has effects on the bodies of many other individuals than herself – and these effects may well be more far-reaching in their efficacy by virtue of Clinton's status as a public figure. Additionally, it would seem that the popular political discourse that proliferates images of bitches and castration in connection with a particular performance (or perhaps, with a partly failed performance) of femininity has effects on the bodies and possibilities of populations far beyond Clinton – and, as I will suggest, beyond "women." That such misogynist language has consequences for all women is perhaps an intuitive feminist point, but it is by no means clear (as yet) how this might happen, or what would have to be the case in order for Butler to be correct in her claims about the effects of discourse on material bodies. In order for us to make sense of the claim that discourse 'materializes its effects', or that the formation of feminine bodies is a "discursive" process, we must have in mind a set of tacit ontological claims about the status of bodies and discourse. Making these claims explicit is the project of Butler's book Bodies that Matter, which seeks to refute the objection that conceiving gendered subjectivity as performative and discursive renders material bodies unimportant, and oppression more textual than bodily. Her argument in this book is interested in foregrounding the fact that the philosophical appeal to "matter" as undeniably real, especially in the case of the materiality of the body, is at the same time the tacit appeal to a particular discursive history, which "is in part determined by the ERIN C. TARVER 32 negotiation of sexual difference." (Butler 1993, 29) The notion of the body or material world as brute, opaque, inert stuff, for example, in contrast with the mind or spirit as active, intelligent, or intentional, is suffused with a philosophical inheritance transmitted at least since Plato's and Aristotle's formmatter distinctions, which themselves depend upon politically loaded assumptions regarding 'male' and 'female' principles. It is hardly the case, then, for Butler, that the materiality of the body should be taken for granted as a starting point, since to do so would "invoke a sedimented history of sexual hierarchy and sexual erasures which should surely be an object of feminist inquiry, but which would be quite problematic as a ground of feminist theory." (Butler 1993, 49) Still, it is unclear whether Butler's inquiry into those discursive histories does in fact offer a satisfactory account of their relation, since her claim that discursive or signifying practices shape what we understand as brute "matter" at times contains the implicit admission that "matter" as such is opposed to discourse, and for that reason able to be shaped or constructed by it. While Butler rightly points out that the materiality of the body cannot be understood as a bare foundation upon which social construction occurs, other moments within her text complicate these claims. My worry here is not that Butler has unwittingly discursified life in the manner of a caricatured postmodernist, in which all is discourse and oppression is merely one other kind of language game. Such readings are inattentive to the extent to which the "signifying process ... is always already material," (Ibid., 68) and it perhaps takes a philosopher to overlook the fact that words and signs are embodied things, which we see, hear, speak, write, groan and show. Rather, my concern is with her concurrent suggestion: "but if language is not opposed to materiality, neither can materiality be summarily collapsed into an identity with language ... what allows for a signifier to signify will never be its materiality alone; that materiality will be at once an instrumentality and deployment of a set of larger linguistic relations." (Ibid., 68) In view of the fact that signification as a phenomenon is always conducted materially, Butler's unwillingness to wholeheartedly embrace the coextensiveness of the material and discursive realms looks rather odd, at best rendering these claims needlessly opaque and at worst betraying a significant ambivalence at the heart of her work. Indeed, a closer analysis of the passage in Bodies that Matter in which Butler explicitly takes up the question of language and materiality undermines her ability to account for the 'materializing' effects of discursive practices. The passage in Butler's text containing her most overt discussion of materiality, referent and signifier is worth quoting in full: The materiality of the signifier will signify only to the extent that it is impure, contaminated by the ideality of differentiating relations, the tacit structurings of a linguistic context that is illimitable in principle. Conversely, the signifier will work to the extent that it is also contaminated constitutively by the very materiality that the ideality of Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 33 sense purports to overcome. Apart from and yet related to the materiality of the signifier is the materiality of the signified as well as the referent approached through the signified, but which remains irreducible to the signified. This radical difference between referent and signified is the site where the materiality of language and that of the world which it seeks to signify are perpetually negotiated. This might be usefully compared with Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh of the world. Although the referent cannot be said to exist apart from the signified, it nevertheless cannot be reduced to it. That referent, that abiding function of the world, is to persist as the horizon and the "that which" which makes its demand in and to language. (Ibid., 68–69) Butler thus suggests that signification only works because it is always to a certain extent "contaminated" – that is, it is never purely material (in the traditional sense of inert matter) nor purely ideal (in the sense of conveyed ideas apart from their instantiations). Thus, my writing of the phrase 'I am a woman' only functions as an effective signification (to the extent that it does) by virtue of its materiality as a strategically placed bit of ink on paper and its participation in or reiteration of particular ideas, such as subjectivity and womanhood. Still, while the fact that signification certainly operates both materially and ideally seems undeniable, it is unclear why we ought to think of this as a sort of 'contamination', unless we are approaching the question with a dualistic framework from the outset. Moreover, in view of her following discussion of the "radical difference" between referent and signified, dismissing the word choice of 'contamination' as a matter of semantics looks to be extremely difficult. Indeed, in suggesting that the referent of language is not only distinct from that which language signifies, but also only "approached" through that signification, Butler paradoxically claims that there is something about the material world – a "that which" – that both escapes discourse and functions as its ground. This is certainly surprising, given her prior claims about the impossibility of positing a materiality outside of discursive action. Yet Butler is clear about her position in this passage, especially in her invocation of Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh. While the flesh of the world is, for Merleau-Ponty, not strictly brute matter, it does seem to be a simply given, or as he puts it, "facticity, what makes the fact be a fact. And at the same time, what makes the facts have meaning, makes the fragmentary facts dispose themselves about 'something.'" (Merleau-Ponty 1969 140) In other words, the flesh of the world is, for Merleau-Ponty, a way of expressing the always-already meaning-full-ness or thickness of the material world prior to human intentionality or involvement. Indeed, it is this fact of the world's fleshy-ness that, for Merleau-Ponty, makes human involvement possible, since subjects are in truth only "hollows" within that flesh, caught up within it. And though this continuity of human life and the rest of the world might give reason to question the faithfulness of my reading of Merleau-Ponty, his assertion that this ontological fact means that ERIN C. TARVER 34 "language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves and the forests" (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 155) suggests that the ontology of flesh leaves us with a sort of metaphysical foundationalism, in which a universal given – whatever we may call it – underlies all signifying practices, as their physico-ideal guarantor. So, while the analogy to MerleauPonty's notion of flesh may well have the virtue of avoiding a materiality/ideality dualism, it nevertheless involves a problematic ontology that would posit a "that which" outside of the particularities of (political, gendered, racialized) discourse. Thus, while language and materiality may be, according to Butler, "interdependent" and "implicated in each other," her account of that interdependency implies the very sort of nature/culture or discursive/material dichotomy she elsewhere rightly disavows as untenable. Let me be clear, however, that my interest is not in arguing for the reducibility of language to biological exchange in the manner of scientific reductionism. It seems clear that discursive practices, such as the discourse linking Hillary Clinton with castration imagery, are inadequately conceptualized by a framework that would hold that they are most truly an exchange of particular patterns of sound waves. My contention, on the contrary, is that there is an important distinction to be made between the claim that such discourse is reducible to its materiality, and the claim that it is equally describable in these terms, given a particular set of interests. Butler's account could be made more consistent through a denial of the former and an affirmation of the latter – especially since her discussion of signifying practices includes those so tangibly embodied as gendered performativity. Thus, I view my purpose in the following not so much as an attempt at a refutation of Butler's primary point as a suggestion of an alternate vocabulary that avoids the sort of self-refuting metaphor that her explicit discussion of referent and signification tacitly imports. In order to get at the account of meaning I am advocating, I want to return for a moment to Hillary Clinton, this time in conjunction with the question of names – both because it goes to the central question of this section (that of the effects of discourse on bodies) and because it dovetails nicely with a discussion of Butler's on patronyms and referentiality that appears to problematize her account of the referent as beyond signification. Throughout the 2008 Presidential contest, Clinton's campaign produced and circulated literature that referred to her as, simply, "Hillary." The choice to use her first name only was almost certainly a complex strategic move with a variety of desired goals – appearing more 'likeable' and avoiding a reminder of the most recent Clinton presidency are both speculations of intent that have been widely discussed.5 My interest here is less in pinpointing the intended reasons for this re-naming than in articulating the ways in which that patronym and its (partial) shedding demonstrate, perhaps in spite of intent to the contrary, the discursified status of its referent. Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 35 That Sen. Clinton's adoption of the moniker "Hillary" was sufficiently sense-making to 'work' as a signifier – that is, that "Hillary" itself is immediately understandable as a particular person in public life in the United States – indicates its involvement in pre-existing discursive conventions. In particular, it is effective in virtue of an infantilizing tradition of the addressing of women by their first names (itself previously on display during Clinton's tenure as First Lady, when she was so commonly referred to as "Hillary" that the health care reform proposals advanced by her and the Clinton administration were dubbed "HillaryCare" by their political opponents (Blackman and Carney 1994)). The gendered nature of this signification is confirmed, for example, in a study finding that mainstream newspeople referred to Clinton by her first name at significantly higher rates than her male competitors, and even at a much higher rate than those male politicians who also printed campaign materials using their first name, such as Rudy Giuliani (Uscinki and Goren 2011, 890). As a signifier, then, "Hillary" works because of the same citational structure Butler mentions as essential for the construction and stability of gender – and what's more, the citational histories it invokes require not only the previous public iteration of a particular name, but the broader social conventions of sexuality on which that public naming relies. Ironically, then, it is only because of the implicit citation of the patronymic relation that the single name "Hillary" is effective, even though this relation itself must be explicitly effaced in order for that name to function as a name. Butler puts this well when she argues that the feminine name, as changeable in marriage, "can be conceived as referential and not descriptive only to the extent that the social pact which confers legitimacy on the name remains uninterrogated for its masculinism and heterosexual privilege ... The durability of the subject named is ... a function of a patronym, the abbreviated instance of a hierarchical kinship regime." (Butler 1993, 154) That is, the referential effect of the signifying name is the product of the apparent "naturalness" of the practice of the exchange of women, such that what we understand as the stable, given referent – in this case, Hillary Clinton – is as such by virtue of her complex position within that signifying practice. This is not to say that, were Hillary Clinton to divorce and be known henceforth as Hillary Rodham, she would undergo some sort of sudden ontological transfiguration. The ease with which the moniker "Hillary" was substituted for the more formal "Hillary Rodham Clinton," even as early as her husband's administration, makes clear that meaning here is less a function of this or that particular name than a social practice that makes women's names (and perhaps women) fungible. Rather, it is to claim that the discursive practices of naming, marriage, and the exchange of women are already involved in the emergence of Hillary Clinton, despite – or perhaps better, concomitantly with – the fact of her material existence. Thus, to borrow a construction from Butler, the referent of "Hillary Clinton" may be shown to have been the signified all along. ERIN C. TARVER 36 2. Interactively Emergent Meaning and Bodies How, then, to reconcile this reading of "Hillary" with the fact that she, like the rest of the world, exists not merely textually, but biologically, materially, as a particular body? I want to suggest that this reconciliation may be better made by adopting the pragmatic notion of meaning offered by Dewey – and moreover, that this articulation of the relation between discourse and materiality is largely in keeping with much of Butler's own work, especially in those instances in which she is not concerned to shield herself from charges of linguistic monism. As pragmatists are well aware, Dewey tends to approach traditional philosophical problems by dismissing them as dependent upon empirically untenable assumptions. The so-called 'mind-body problem', for example, can only get off the ground as an interesting philosophical question if we posit the mind and the body as radically distinct kinds of things from the outset. And this positing, Dewey claims, is so out of line with our experience of the world that re-uniting the mind and body becomes a philosophical mystery in urgent need of solving – but which is also "like the mystery that a man cultivating plants should use the soil." (Dewey 1981, 211–212) That is, to fret about the relation of mind and body is both to create for oneself a problem where none existed, and to ask a nonsensical question: to be a plant just is to grow in soil, as minds just are embodied. Rather, Dewey suggests that instead of conceiving human selves as minds and thus as intrinsically distinct from 'nature', we rethink the world as a continuum of organisms in interactions of greater and lesser degrees of complexity. That is to say, life in general is characterized by the experience of interaction – which extends from interaction between molecules of oxygen and hydrogen, to the interaction of soil with seeds and water, to the interaction of human beings with their environment, and so on. These multitudinous interactions tend to follow more or less regular patterns, and can be described and understood in a variety of ways, depending on the purpose at hand. Thus, we call some cases of sufficiently complex interaction "dogs," and some "people" – but we might just as easily have thought of them as "microbes" or "transmitters of parasites," if we had a different organizing principle in mind. Dewey writes, "Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves." (Ibid., 179) This is not to say that we cannot or do not in fact distinguish subjects from one another or from the world – it is rather to acknowledge that this distinction is always made with some purpose or "selective emphasis" in mind (assigning responsibility, conferring citizenship, etc.), and is not the simple apprehension of, say, differing essences. Human beings, like plants, are constituted by their physical interaction with the world. And, importantly for my purposes, these interactions – and the ways in which we recognize and classify them – are variably describable, depending upon one's particular operative selective emphasis. Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 37 The fact that some selective emphasis or other is always operative in perception (or knowledge, or judgment) is not, for Dewey, a human failing – or even, for that matter, a particularly human phenomenon at all. Plants and nonhuman animals also discriminate between important and irrelevant stimuli, what is useful for survival and what is not (Ibid., 197). This discriminatory selection of some portion of experience for emphasis over others does not constitute a failure of perception; rather, Dewey suggests, it is the very nature of perception itself – which is, he suggests, an active looking or taking-in, rather than a passive sensation.6 As he explains in "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," this means that we simply cannot assume the pre-existence of discrete "stimuli" to which perception responds: "the motor response [of perception] determines the stimulus, just as truly as sensory stimulus determines movement." (Dewey 1973, 141) This is not to say that theoretical or practical distinctions between stimulus and response are illegitimate, but instead to insist that these are "teleological distinctions, that is, distinctions of function, or part played, with reference to reaching or maintaining an end." (Ibid., 143) And the content of such ends, Dewey suggests, is dependent upon the particular interests governing them. The problem, then, is not that we selectively emphasize some features of experience over others – indeed, knowledge of the world depends upon it, both in the advancement of the sciences and in individual experience (Dewey 1981, 123) – but rather, that we fail to recognize those emphases as emphases, or as the products of our inter-action with the environment. In such cases, our settled or socially dominant ways of experiencing the world are taken for being simply 'the way things are.' Dewey suggests, on the contrary, that because our interests or emphases may shift or vary according to our social position or needs, that 'the way things are' is never univocal or finally settled.7 This implies, then, that the claim that human beings are complex organisms interacting in an environment is not equivalent to the claim that human existence is reducible to its organic makeup, or that it is more truly that organic makeup than it is life as we live it. Rather, Dewey argues that "nature" and "culture" are not oppositional terms, but the same phenomena viewed with differing selective emphases. It is hardly the case, then, that the affirmation of the undeniable materiality of the body necessitates the belief in a biological reductionism. Thus, he claims, the environment with which organisms interact and by which they are constituted is not only the biological environment as we typically understand it. Human selves become selves by virtue of their interaction with a socio-material environment. Or, as he puts it, "living as an empirical affair is not something which goes on below the skin-surface of an organism: it is always an inclusive affair involving connection, interaction of what is within the organic body and what lies outside in space and time, and with higher organisms far outside." (Ibid., 215) So, it is fundamentally mistaken to conceive of subjects as isolated entities that must somehow be brought together in societies, and not only because each individual is temporally preceded by some social community. If organisms are characteristic modes of ERIN C. TARVER 38 interactivity, and that of human organisms is variously knowable as social and material, then we ought to understand human organisms as emergent from particular patterns of interaction that are equally describable8 as signifying, signified, and the 'that which' of reference. This is not to say that a referent's meaning is subjectively arbitrary, or that anything goes. Indeed, such a misreading would require that we overlook Dewey's insistence that meanings, as modes of interactivity, are never produced in isolation, but are built upon sedimented histories of meaning (anticipating Butler) and the surrounding meanings from which they are distinguished, or to which they are related, such that our present purposes or emphases are dependent upon those others whose contextualizing interaction makes them meaningful. Thus, even those bodies or referents we regard as most essential "are themselves known in virtue of previous operations of inferential inquiry and test, and ... their 'immediacy' as object of reference marks an assured point of reflection." (Dewey 1984, 150) This is the case not only because we make use of the theoretical tools of those around us (learn to 'see' things in a particular way), but also because the use of those tools gives shape to the world itself.9 What Dewey's account offers us, then, is a way to conceive the material world – the referent – as thoroughly discursive, and our discursive practices – signifiers, signifieds and the play between them – as thoroughly material. Moreover, conceptualizing signification in this way not only enables the dissolution of the nature/culture dualism implicit in Butler's own accounting of the relationship between discourse and bodies, it also paradoxically leads us back to the indispensibility of Butler's work, insofar as it is insistent on the centrality of the hierarchical organization of bodies in that materializing discourse. Where Dewey's discussion of the materialization of meaning through interaction begins to parallel Butler's notion of performativity – specifically, in his account of habits – it falls short of Butler's in its inability to follow out its own implications in recognizing the significance (in the dual sense of import and having-been-signified) of gendered, sexualized and racialized habits. To show why this is the case, I want to turn for a moment to Dewey's articulation of the function of habits. Briefly, Dewey understands habits as "characteristic way[s] of interactivity," (Dewey 1981, 222) embodied by both human and non-human organisms, which become more and more likely to be repeated as a result of their physical – and in the case of human beings, social – shaping of those organisms. But it is not the case, for Dewey, that individuals have habits; rather, he writes, "We are the habit." (Dewey 1957, 25) My patterns of behaving in and interacting with the world make me the person that I am, such that it makes as little sense to claim that I could divest myself of my habits as it does to suggest that I could 'take off' my being-human. Such a taking-off is impossible, for Dewey, because there is nothing 'under' the habits to be laid bare. This does not, of course, mean that change is impossible; it does, however, mean that changing a habit requires replacing it with a new one (or perhaps better, transforming the old one), and that the new habit will have a collection of Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 39 old ones with which to contend. Over time, however, the continuous (yet occasionally shifting) interaction of localized habits can be recognized as a particular way of being, or what we typically call 'character.' "Character," according to Dewey, "is the interpenetration of habits." (Ibid., 37) These habits may take a variety of forms, some of which we might be inclined to characterize as bodily, and others of which we might typically view as cognitive. Such habits of thought are organizing features of experience, socially learned and transmitted (since mind is also a social phenomenon), which make us more likely to be sympathetic to some kinds of explanations than others, to "see" certain behaviors or persons as normal or deviant, and so on. Dewey suggests that the particularly solidified habitual thoughts of dualism, for example, have alienated us from primary experience so thoroughly that "we find it easier to make a problem out of the conjunction of two inconsistent premises than to rethink our premises." (Dewey 1981, 218) Interestingly, it is in this discussion of 'cognitive' and 'physical' habits that Dewey's account lends itself best to a specified articulation of the ways in which such hierarchicallyorganizing signifiers as gender and race constitute a continuum of differently situated bodies – but this potential is left untapped.10 Dewey's interactional – or, "transactional," as he puts it, to emphasize action across selves – notion of habit could allow him to conceptualize subjectivity as sexed and raced in such a way that both problematizes these phenomena as plainly biological or metaphysical entities and acknowledges their experienced reality, which is both 'cognitive' (as a classificatory schema) and 'corporeal' (as constituting particular kinds of bodies). It is, therefore, not only generic subjectivity – as if such a thing existed – that Deweyan pragmatism could account for as an emergent, intersubjective, organic phenomenon. In fact, because Dewey's notion of habit insists that embodied selves are always constituted in interaction with a socio-corporeal environment – and because he frequently cites class as a non-negligible factor in that constitution (Dewey 1957, 280; Dewey 1981, 99) – it is all the more surprising that his account omits gendered and racialized habits entirely. This is particularly striking considering his personal historical context of the early 20th century United States, a time and place openly obsessed with race,11 as well as his own philosophical engagement with the work of John Stuart Mill, whose The Subjection of Women was the subject of an essay by his pragmatic forerunner and correspondent, William James.12 Dewey's universal 'person', moreover, is ubiquitously referred to using the masculine pronoun, and he suggests at least once that, prior to social 'mixing', there are distinguishable "masculine and feminine virtues," which he lists as follows: "Vigor, courage, energy, enterprise here; submission, patience, charm, personal fidelity there." (Dewey 1957, 76) I point this out not for the sake of 'outing' Dewey as antifeminist, but for the purpose of demonstrating that, despite his explicit repudiation of a nature/culture dualism and useful re-conceptualization of discursive and material realities, he appears to tacitly accept the truth of discrete, foundational subjectivity – and that such assumed 'core' subjectivities are not ERIN C. TARVER 40 generic, but specified in particular ways. That is to say, Dewey's presumption of pre-social masculinity and femininity seems to require the existence of prediscursively sexed subjects, which makes his continual use of the masculine pronoun even more jarring. Thus, while Dewey's claim that differing selective emphases allow for a conceptualization of materialized signification that could make sense of the constitutive effects of gendered and racialized discourses on bodies, his assertion of the reality of pre-discursive sex flies in the face of his own argument's implications.13 His account of the function of habits and patterns of interaction is, then, seriously lacking, both on its own terms and in virtue of its tacit ontological assumptions. It would be insufficient, for this reason, to attempt to substitute Dewey for Butler in an accounting of the particular ways in which politicized discourse gives shape to a spectrum of bodies and populations, since, as Butler points out, it is essential in any such undertaking to problematize the ways in which our notions of "bodies" and "matter" – and, we might add, "organisms" – are shaped by prior discursive histories. Neither, however, would it be ideal to dismiss the value of Dewey's work for the current purposes, both because his pragmatic approach to the emergence of meaning as dependent upon purposes and emphases is (as I have argued) necessary for making sense of the signifier-signified-referent relations, and because his discussion of habit as a pattern of material interactivity has the virtue of avoiding some errors of misunderstanding typically encountered by the Butlerian language of performativity in an account of bodily signification. That is, while Butler's notion of gender as performative is often misread as implying that it is easily "put on" or "taken off," such that one could simply change genders at will, Dewey's insistence that habituation gives shape to the bodily organism and occurs within a particular physico-cultural milieu could, if coupled with a Butlerian attentiveness to the gendered character of such interaction, be effective in circumventing such misreadings. Thus, while Dewey and Butler come from differing philosophical traditions and make use of fairly different vocabularies, reading the two of them together has the potential to offer an account of the effects of politicized discourse on the bodies of individuals and populations that avoids the presumptions of foundational or pre-discursive subjectivity that derails other historically influential accounts of the effects of oppressive discourse. 3. Making Sense of "Hillary" and Relational Selves With this in mind, I want to return to the popular discourse surrounding Hillary Clinton, especially as it is evocative of the threat of castration, homosexuality and feminization. The repetition of this discursive linkage in connection with Clinton is, as I suggested earlier, not merely concerned with Clinton, or even femininity in the abstract. Since the implications of this language include a tacit anxiety around the security of the genitals and their status within the Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 41 signification of normatively heterosexual masculinity, its materializing effects must be understood within this wider context, and not merely confined to "women," or "men." Moreover, if, following the implications of Butler and Dewey's arguments regarding those materializing effects, we conceptualize the reiteration of particular patterns of naming as having a constitutive effect on those bodies with which it is in relational interaction, then we must recognize this discourse as participating in the constitution and emergence of a range of more or less oppressed and privileged bodies. The rhetoric characterizing Clinton as a castrating bitch is (unwittingly) effective in demonstrating this point. The fact that Clinton as a human individual does not pose an immediate threat to the intact state of the speaker's genitals suggests that they are standing in metonymically for some other perceived threatened object, the content of which is only discernible within the materializing structure of normative heterosexuality. That is, where the Freudian picture would have us believe that the threat of castration is a universal fear whose roots lie in a common psychical experience of the bourgeois family drama, Butler's account illustrates the ways in which the experience of heterosexual masculinity is thoroughly inflected by an ongoing (yet historically contingent) practice of societal organization that constitutes particular bodies, and the parts with which they are identified, as privileged. So, the expression of the castration threat in connection with Clinton is wrapped up with an anxiety about the security of masculine privilege, and a concomitant need to reiterate (and so to re-secure) the privilege of the penis as the locus of that power and the identifying feature of masculinity. At the same time, however, this anxiety alone is insufficient as an explanatory framework, for it does not adequately account for Clinton's apparent centrality in the discourse of castration. This problem may be remedied, however, if we recall (combining Butler and Dewey) that performative significations are only efficacious by virtue of their relation with (not just citation of) other performative significations – or, to put it another way, that signifying practices work interactionally and relationally. That is to say, the enactment of heterosexual masculinity is interactionally supported by a concomitant performance of heterosexual femininity, which means that an insufficiently normative performance of heterosexual femininity constitutes a threat to the stability of normative masculine power. Thus, it is not surprising that the rhetoric of castration and the nominative "bitch" were so frequently paired with reference to Clinton – for each contains a tacit reference to a normatively heterosexual relation (requiring a sufficiently passive expression of femininity) and simultaneous anxiety around its destabilization. And because the reiteration of this discourse functions through the citation of normative heterosexual relations and the implicit censure of an insufficiently normative performance of those relations, its citation serves in part to reconstitute the power of that discursive regime, and the sorts of bodies that will be recognized by it. ERIN C. TARVER 42 Still, this is not a complete account of the materializing effects of the discourse surrounding Clinton, for it is not yet able to conceptualize the ways in which the frameworks of normative heterosexuality, masculinity and femininity cited by that discourse are tacitly racialized and classed. In the context of the racialized hierarchization of the United States, which bodies, after all, are capable of performatively interacting in a satisfactorily feminine way? And to what extent did Clinton's representation of herself as a populist "fighter" – complete with photographic evidence of beer-drinking and burger-eating – serve to undercut her enactment of normative femininity, even as it functioned to reinforce her identification with white working-class Americans nostalgic for a time before the proliferation of Whole Foods and arugula? To point to the ways in which Clinton's self-representations draw on normalizing discourses in some ways analogous to those I have addressed thus far is not to claim that these citations in some way 'cancel out' other (sexualized, say) discursive effects, as though discourses of oppression were measurable on an abacus; rather, it is to suggest that the relationally constitutive effects of such signifying practices do more than is initially apparent. Indeed, if Dewey's interactional account of signification is correct, and meaning is made not only by drawing on older meanings, but by "behaving in conjunction and connection with other distinctive ways of acting," (Dewey 1927, 188) then it must be the case that discourses of normativity (and gender is only one) are efficacious by virtue of their interaction with some collection of normative and non-normative significations (whether this takes the form of repudiation, distinction, omission, etc.). Because the signification of performativity does not and cannot happen in isolation or through the abstracted action of a singular individual or group, every such signification draws on and participates in materializing effects on bodies both within and outside its ostensible domain of meaning. We can see this when we turn to the relation between discourses of sexism and racism within the 2008 presidential campaign and the questions of demographics and identity that, on the face of things, stand outside of it. The caricaturing of Clinton's supporters as disgruntled, irrational, middleaged harpies (Lithwick 2008, Caraway 2008), for example, is of a piece with the characterization of Clinton as a "monster" or "witch" with a piercing "cackle." In the same way that the rhetoric of the castrating bitch draws attention to Clinton's failure to adequately approximate a normatively feminine performance, the language employed both in descriptions of Clinton and her supporters designates its objects as old, angry and unpredictable – which is to say, both sexually repulsive and dangerous – thus implicitly reiterating both the requirements of heterosexual femininity and the presumption of masculine subjectivity. Moreover, that the differences between Clinton and her supporters are thus effectively elided (such that each can stand in for a de-sexualized, grotesque, threatening version of femininity) depends upon the presumption of their (racial, sexual, class) homogeneity and the implicit exclusion of nonconforming bodies as invisible or unintelligible. That is, the sexist discourse in Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 43 which Clinton and her supporters are constituted as a singular sort of signifying body is of a piece with the normative status of bourgeois whiteness. This is apparently confirmed by the standard demographic breakdowns of political supporters cited by pundits – in which white men and women are thematized as gendered, while working class people, Latino/as, and Black persons are primarily registered as a genderless voting "blocs" – becomes sense-making in the first place. Ironically, then, the reification of Clinton supporters in a non-normative identity category is tacitly connected with a concomitant white, bourgeois privilege, which is itself inextricable from the constitution of nonwhite bodies as aberrant. The ostensibly sexist discourse around Hillary Clinton, then, is not merely sexist in its related significations – nor is its efficacy traceable solely to its supposed perpetrators. In fact, as Shannon Sullivan (2006) and Cynthia Willett (2007) have pointed out, conceiving the locus of oppressive discourse in such overt examples of "old-style" sexism or racism tends to obscure the wider ranging effects of more subtle hierarchizing significations, upon which such glaring examples depend. Indeed, the citational structure of such signifying practices and their interactional materializing effects are two sides of the same coin – or, to put it pragmatically, the same phenomena articulated with differing purposes in mind. And because such significations do not occur over-the-top of pre-given "natural" bodies, such political discourse as I have addressed here is always involved in constituting subjects – beyond both Clinton and other bourgeois white women – as more or less privileged or oppressed. This paper's title, then, must be understood not only as referencing the signification of "Hillary" herself, but the ongoing, signifying interactions to which "Hillary," even unwittingly, contributes. NOTES 1. The reading that follows is a (feminist) Freudian one, though my intention in rehearsing it is not to argue for a Freudian – or even straightforwardly psychoanalytic – conclusion regarding sexist political discourse. Indeed, as I suggest below, while such a reading may function as a useful tool for making sense of the relations between seemingly disparate meanings in such discourse, it serves, at the same time, to foreground the extent to which standard psychoanalytic accounts themselves are in need of attention to that which is unexpressed: the socio-political practices that make them meaning-full. 2. Following Eve Sedgwick's account of "homosexual panic" in Epistemology of the Closet, we would thus understand Clinton's perceived "threat" as a projection of fear about the instability or impurity of one's own masculine heterosexuality – a feature which is "applicable to the definitional work of an entire gender, hence of an entire culture." (19) The claim, then, is not that the users of this sexist rhetoric are individually or personally insecure about their masculinity or heterosexuality, but that the normativity of normative heterosexuality requires the reiteration of this sort of homosocial public repudiation of homosexuality. ERIN C. TARVER 44 3. For evidence of Clinton's popularity among gay communities, see for example "Clinton Would Extend Same-Sex Benefits," (Associated Press 2008), "Gay Community Embraces Hillary Clinton as Presidential Candidate," (Carole) and "An Interview with Hillary Clinton." (Naff 2008) 4. Shannon Sullivan makes a similar point about what she calls Freud's "atomistic unconscious" (Sullivan 2006, 22). 5. See for example Funt (2007). 6. Indeed, for Dewey as for James, the closest we might get to truly passive sensation would be the undifferentiated "blooming, buzzing confusion" of a newborn infant. 7. It is the status of this settling that is perhaps Dewey's greatest divergence from James, who similarly suggests that "the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff ... " (James 1977c, 73) While both suggest that this selective account of experience is socially produced and contingent, James has a generally less positive view of the implications of that contingency than does Dewey, and does not spend much time on the possibilities it affords for social transformation. When James does discuss the prospect of the alteration of dominant ways of seeing or interacting with the world, he typically does so with reference to extraordinary individuals, as in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." (James 1977b, 627) Though Dewey does concur that such habits of experience and selective emphasis do result in a phenomenological stability that is necessary for life to be livable, he is aware of the propensity of such stability to reinforce social conditions that are unjust, particularly for working-class people, and thus emphasizes both continual self-criticism and the deliberate adoption of democratic projects in order to counter-act them. 8. Richard Rorty makes a similar suggestion in his reading of Donald Davidson against Quine (Rorty 1979); however, Rorty's account diverges from Dewey's in its general conclusions. While Dewey holds that this sort of account of verification of descriptions or meanings maintains a commitment to the philosophical (and indeed, social) importance of concepts like truth, goodness and empiricism – albeit with definitions that are quite different than those of the philosophical establishment – Rorty suggests that his account entails the end of epistemology and a rejection of Truth as such. I am interested in maintaining (socio-historical, contextual) Deweyan notions of knowledge and truth as both crucial and revisable. This commitment is, in my view, necessary for responsibly making the "equal describability" claim and for evaluating the suitability of such claims for particular feminist purposes such as those of this paper. 9. It is important here to take seriously Dewey's emphasis on meaning as a kind of cooperative tool or use-function, especially insofar as this makes salient the extent to which his notion of significance stresses relation, rather than the primacy of difference (as in the case of Butler and Derrida, to whom her account is in this regard indebted). 10. For detailed accounts of how such a pragmatic notion of habit could be deployed to better understand phenomena like gender or race, see Sullivan (2006 and 2001) and Tarver (2007). 11. It is noteworthy that Dewey's later address to a meeting of the NAACP sought to reduce racial discrimination principally to class conflict and a fear of "novelty," the latter portion of which seems, as Sullivan points out (2004) at odds with the emphasis on interaction found in the rest of his work. For a more sympathetic view of Dewey's general omission of race-talk, see Taylor (2004). Signifying "Hillary": Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey 45 12. For an analysis of James' review of Mill's book, see Seigfried (1990). 13. However, we might read this failing as a demonstration of the reality of Dewey's own selective emphases (say, those of gender and race privilege), and the importance of self-critique of such emphases within any pragmatic analysis. REFERENCES Associated Press. 2008. "Clinton Would Extend Same-Sex Benefits," April 4. Online at http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-250_162-3993547.html, accessed 28 October 2013. Bell, Vikki. 2010. "New Scenes of Vulnerability, Agency, and Plurality: An Interview with Judith Butler," Theory, Culture and Society 27.1: 130–152. Blackman, Ann and J. Carney. 1994. "The Once and Future Hillary," Time (12 December). Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech. London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble. 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