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A Bad Reader Bites Back

 1. "Why are some of the most trenchant criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?" This is the question I expected Butler to answer in the op-ed "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back." If there was an answer, I missed it or misunderstood it. Butler suggests that complex, radical critiques of "common sense" cannot be made in ordinary language using the legacy of the Frankfurt School to show how [intellectual] language can challenge our social realities. My questions are: What about the "common sense" or power that haunts the "intellectual" world? How does this theoretical & intellectual work reinscribe the politics of domination or the "game of hegemony"("Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies" 267)? 

2. In "The Meaning of New Times," Hall notes how the individual subject is no longer a stable or whole "self," but an amalgamation of different selves produced by the different social worlds they inhabit. Furthermore, towards the end of the piece, he calls for the return of ethnicity, which he defines as: "the astonishing return to the political agenda of all those points of attachment which give the individual some sense of ‘place’ and position in the world, whether these be in relation to particular communities, localities, territories, languages, religions or cultures” (236). What are the pros and cons of addressing ourselves as part of a network or collective identity? Is identity a "bureaucratic nothing" (thinking of Xandra Ibarra's critique here)? 

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