Hello again!
Recently in class, we have been discussing the work of Judith Butler. While reading, I found that Butler’s writing was incredibly theoretical, which made me feel a little lost at times before I figured out what she meant. However, Butler’s work does call attention to a certain topic that has been gaining more public knowledge and attention.
This topic is specifically the “frames” people use in order to interpret the world around them, and thus how they should respond to it. By “frames”, one could liken it to a framework that provides a structure or basic foundation. These frames help us to interpret and organise information into something we can “understand”. This understanding and interpretation, however, is something quite subjective to the person doing it, and is very relative. Frames helps us to interpret and understand, yes. It also causes us to understand things in the particular way we were taught to by our societies and cultures.
We use prior knowledge as a lens to examine information and events in order to make sense of it. With this knowledge, we form the basis of our opinions and beliefs which we then use as we interact with the world around us. But this knowledge we gain from our communities, media, or culture tends to be biased or leaves out things that does not fit into the narrative that is being built up. Because of this, we tend to have an incomplete understanding of events. We only see things from one perspective, dismissing others.
Butler explains through the context of war, using America’s war on terror as her framework. With the comparison between “grievable lives” and “ungrievable lives”, she illustrates the results of our interpretative framing. All lives are human lives, yet why do we mourn the death of one but remain unaffected by the death of another?
It is all a matter of how we interpret something, how we make sense of things with the frames we have. As in the words of my sociology professor, one person’s terrorist could be another’s freedom fighter. Like this, we can truly see how subjective our understanding is.