McRobbie, Angela. "Book of the Week: FRAMES OF WAR." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION June 25, 2009.

Butler, Judith. Frames of Life: When is Life Grievable?. London: Verso, 2009. To propose that Judith Butler is one of the world's leading thinkers - a feminist philosopher whose writing has influenced a wide domain of disciplinary fields inside the academy as well as political culture in the outside world - is hardly contentious. We are, many of us, deeply indebted to a body of work that has illuminated issues at the very core of life, death, sexuality and existence. The tone of Butler's work conveys a modesty within urgency, a truly delightful need for precision, for caution as to how we proceed when intervening in matters upon which so much is at stake. In the case of her latest book, the issues explored are: lives that can be grieved and those deemed insufficiently alive to merit the privilege of memorialisation and grief in death; the Iraq War; the media and "embedded reporting"; photography and suffering; the instrumentalisation of feminist and sexual freedoms as a means of demonising Muslim culture; torture and the pornographic pictures from Abu Ghraib prison; and, finally, the possibilities of a new progressive Left coalitional politics of "precarity". While recent books by Butler - a trilogy of reflections that began with Precarious Life (2004) followed by Giving an Account of the Self (2007) and now Frames of War - may seem far removed from her earliest and still best-known books Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), there is nevertheless a clear thread of continuity. Her early work drew on Michel Foucault and the linguist J. L. Austin to argue that the seemingly indisputable fact of the sex with which we are born is instead a fictional coherence, a kind of ordering of organs into a duality of gender (male and female) for the sake of "normative heterosexuality". Rather, there is no fact of sex, no beginning with a sex that is then simply expressed as masculinity or femininity. Instead there is a compelled performance, and sanctions for those who do not or are unable to comply. Not being able to live within such dualities condemns vulnerable gay, lesbian or transgender people to threats to their lives, to their viability as subjects. Often their lives are considered not worth grieving, as was the case in the early days of Aids. Since then, Butler has also examined the way in which nation states such as France condemn to pariah status those gay and lesbian people who wish to have or adopt children. Eminent people across the media talk authoritatively of this desire as an imported American monstrosity against which French culture must be protected. Human vulnerability and the fragility of the lives of those condemned to such profound marginalisation compel Butler to reflect on the ways in which a politics able to "secure conditions for livable lives and do so on egalitarian grounds" could develop. In Frames of War Butler, cognisant of the power of grief and the political potential unleashed through rituals of remembrance, develops a theory of grievability. This concerns the lives of those whom we do not know, who are culturally different from or "other" to us, and for whom we often do not have the resources or the capacity to grieve when they endure losses because their suffering has no visibility, no public or legitimate face. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407098.