Abstract

Judith Butler's (2006) account of vulnerability, resonant with other accounts offered by feminist theorists of embodiment (such as Margrit Shildrick [2000] and Rosalyn Diprose [2002]), underscores a "conception of the human... in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others" (31). She is concerned with how this state of being—"not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well" (24)—becomes recognized, or not, in the political production and recognition of vulnerability, and the suffering that occurs in the violent..