Page 40 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

BUTLER, JUDITH (1960– )

• Associated concepts Agency, consumption, cultural capital, culture, habitus,
structure.
• Tradition(s) Hermeneutics, Marxism, structuralism.
• Reading Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 17
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bricolage The concept of bricolage refers to the rearrangement and juxtaposition of
previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh
contexts. Bricolage involves a process of re-signification by which cultural signs
with established meanings are re-organized into new codes of meaning. That is,
objects that already carried sedimented symbolic meanings are re-signified in
relation to other artefacts under new circumstances. For example, cultural studies
writers have pointed to the construction of the Teddy Boy appearance (that emerged
during the 1950s and was re-worked in the 1960s) through a combination of the
otherwise unrelated Edwardian upper class look, the bootlace tie and brothel-
creepers as a form of bricolage in the context of youth cultural style. Likewise, the
boots, braces, cropped hair, Stayprest shirts and Ska music of Skinheads during the
1970s was read as a stylistic symbolic bricolage which communicated the hardness
of working class masculinity.
The other main usage of the term bricolage comes with the juxtaposition of signs
in the visual media to form a collage of images from different times and places.
Thus, the global multiplication of communications technologies has created an
increasingly complex semiotic environment of competing signs and meanings. This
creates a flow of images and juxtapositions that fuses news, drama, reportage and
advertising etc. into an electronic bricolage. This kind of bricolage as a cultural style
is a core element of postmodern culture and is observable in architecture, film and
popular music video. Shopping centres have made the mixing of styles from
different times and places a particular ‘trade mark’ while MTV is noted for the
blending of pop music from a variety of periods and locations.
The term bricoleur has been used to suggest someone who constructs a bricolage
and has most commonly been applied to those who stylize themselves using the
clothing and artifacts of popular culture. Here the idea of the bricoleur has been
deployed to discuss the ways in which commodities – notably those of the fashion
world – form the basis of multiple identity construction. In doing so, attention is
drawn to the meaning-oriented activity of consumers in selecting and arranging
elements of material commodities and meaningful signs into a bricolage that forms
part of identity construction.

Links Articulation, identity, multiple identities, postmodernism, style, youth culture

Butler, Judith (1960– ) A US-born philosopher and feminist thinker, Butler has
established herself as one of the foremost writers about sex/gender, subjectivity and
identity. Her originality lies in the way that the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault
and Jacques Derrida is combined with psychoanalysis (courtesy of Lacan) and
speech act theory to generate a theory of sex as performative. Butler argues that ‘sex’