Butler On Gender Quotes

If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.

As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts

The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.

...laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.

There is no reason to assume that gender also ought to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it.

...gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself...what they imitate is a phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity...gay identities work neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it, that it 'knows' it's own possibility of becoming undone

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.

If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.

a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it.

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?

Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.

The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.

Irigaray remarks in such a vein that "the masquerade... is what women do... in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up their own".

I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.

We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.

Why is freedom so frightening? Is that even the question? Or is rather: How has freedom been made to seem so frightening that people find themselves longing for authoritarian rule?

Destruction is thus always restoration—that is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology.

That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?

The exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject.

We can understand this conclusion to be the necessary result of a heterosexualized and masculine observational point of view that takes lesbian sexuality to be a refusal of sexuality per se only because sexuality is presumed to be heterosexual, and the observer, here constructed as the heterosexual male, is clearly being refused.

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, be the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel.

The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its object.

Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with “being a man,” others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years, offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate.

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.

The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes.

Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury – but a precondition of democratic life.

This utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs, a sexuality beyond "sex", failed to acknowledge the ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a "liberated" sexuality for women even within the terms of a "liberated" heterosexuality or lesbianism.

the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it. As

The dogged effort to “denaturalize” gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of “real” politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such.

I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation.

The fact that political efforts of dissent and critique are often labeled as “violent” by the very state authorities that are threatened by those efforts is not a reason to despair of language use. It means only that we have to expand and refine the political vocabulary for thinking about violence and the resistance to violence, taking account of how that vocabulary is twisted and used to shield violent authorities against critique and opposition. When the critique of continuing colonial violence is deemed violent (Palestine), when a petition for peace is recast as an act of war (Turkey), when struggles for equality and freedom are construed as violent threats to state security (Black Lives Matter), or when “gender” is portrayed as a nuclear arsenal directed against the family (anti-gender ideology), then we are operating in the midst of politically consequential forms of phantasmagoria.

That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.

...there is nothing radical about common sense.

Consider, then, the irony that the women most feared for having a penis may be among those people most disinterested in having one.

Those who claim to know what place women should occupy in social and political life are adhering to a very specific theory of gender.

Perhaps also part of what dialogic understanding entails is the acceptance of divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the often tortuous process of democratisation.

Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone, without finding a way to enter into community and discover the "right" in the midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is "right" and what is "good" consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know.

It is nearly impossible to bridge this epistemic divide with good arguments because of the fear that reading will introduce confusion into the reader’s mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil.

It seems we are not in a public debate at all, precisely because there is no text in the room, no agreement on terms, and fear and hatred have flooded the landscape where critical thought should be thriving.

The weaponization of this fearsome phantasm of “gender” is authoritarian at its core. Rolling back progressive legislation is surely fueled by backlash, but backlash describes only the reactive moment in this scene. The project of restoring the world to a time before “gender” promises a return to a patriarchal dream-order that may never have existed but that occupies the place of “history” or “nature”—an order that only a strong state can restore.

Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women’s supposedly distinctive reproductive function.

She’s twenty-one and just by her hairstyle you can tell she’s saving IT for the man she will marry. It’s short at the sides and high on top, with a sideburn-length curl in front each ear. Look around you next time you’re out strolling, there’s hordes of them like her. They all wore braces when they were kids, played a lot of sports, were considered tom-boys, spent endless hours worrying about pimples, black-heads and acne, and wanted only one thing out of life-- get married and be a loving motherto both their children and their husband. In the meantime, they work at meaningful jobs like teaching and nursing until the Right Man comes along. They’re the reason Canadian men are amongst the most neurotic, childish and apathetic males on the Western continent. They need the challenge of a mature woman in order to bring out their maturity, and instead they’re offered mamas. Yet it isn’t the girls’ fault. After all they’re only being what men want them to be, what they think men want them to be. And vice-versa. Both sexes being what they think the other wants them to be and neither one really knowing because they’ve never asked their opposite what they would like, and this total absence of communication being the root cause of this great void between modern man and woman

Informed public debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute. Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate grounded, focused, and productive.

...identification is always an ambivalent process. Identifying with a gender under contemporary regimes of power involves identifying with a set of norms that are and are not realizable, and whose power and status precede the identifications by which they are insistently approximated.

To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour.

Critique engages with problems and texts that matter to us in order to understand how and why they work, to let them live in thought and practice in new constellations, to question what we have taken for granted as a fixed presupposition of reality in order to affirm dynamic and living sense of our world.

As feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy.

I could hear the *click clack* of my heels on the brick walkway. *click* A boy starts a ballet class and doesn’t worry about what his friends will say. *clack* A college student reads Judith Butler. *click* A transgender person understands that, while they have a difficult life to face, they will not be alone. *clack* A sex worker reclaims her dignity and autonomy from a world that says she’s worthless. *click* A woman finds freedom from her abusive husband. *clack* A friend, struggling with bulimia, realizes that she is beautiful. *click* All people, man and woman, realize that in some small way, they have not been true to themselves, and the bonds of gender stereotypes and heterosexism dissolve into truth.

Although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti–gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely, the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at birth,” resume their natural and “moral” positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy.

The gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never fully be closed, which is why even those who happily embrace their sex assigned at birth still have to do performative work to embody that assignment in social life. Genders are not just assigned. They have to be realized or undertaken, or done, and no single act of doing secures the deal. Have I finally achieved the gender I have been seeking to become, or is becoming the name of the game, the temporality of gender itself?

This refusal of gender critics to read the texts they oppose—or to learn how best to read them—makes sense only if reading is taken to be an uncritical exercise. And if an uncritical reading or reception of the texts they deem authoritative is what they defend, they more purely illustrate what is properly called an ideological or dogmatic position, that is, one that refuses questions, challenges, and a spirit of open inquiry. This attitude is part of the broader anti-intellectual trend marked by its hostility to all forms of critical thought.

For power to be withdrawn, power itself would have to be understood as the retractable operation of volition; indeed, the heterosexual contract would be understood to be sustained through a series of choices, just as the social contract in Locke or Rousseau is understood to presuppose the rational choice or deliberate will of those it is said to govern. If power is not reduced to volition, however, and the classical liberal and existential model of freedom is refused, then power relations can be understood, as I think they ought to be, as constraining and constituting the very possibilities of volition. Hence, power can neither be withdrawn nor refused, but only redeployed.

Moreover, fantasy is part of the articulation of the possible; it moves us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualizable. The struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy, and the foreclosure of fantasy-through censorship, degradation, or other means-is one strategy for providing for the social death of persons. Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.

INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household.

An ethical query emerges in light of such an analysis: how might we encounter the difference that calls our grids of intelligibility into question without trying to foreclose the challenge that the difference delivers? What might it mean to learn to live in the anxiety of that challenge, to feel the surety of one’s epistemological and ontological anchor go, but to be willing, in the name of the human, to allow the human to become something other than what it is traditionally assumed to be? This means that we must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing in advance what precise form our humanness does and will take. It means we must be open to its permutations, in the name of nonviolence. As Adriana Cavarero points out, paraphrasing Arendt, the question we pose to the Other is simple and unanswerable: “who are you?” The violent response is the one that does not ask, and does not seek to know. It wants to shore up what it knows, to expunge what threatens it with not-knowing, what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of its world, their contingency, their malleability. The nonviolent response lives with its unknowingness about the Other in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question opens is finally more valuable than knowing in advance what holds us in common, as if we already have all the resources we need to know what defines the human, what its future life might be.

Se os atributos de gênero não são expressivos mas performativos, então constituem efetivamente a identidade que pretensamente expressariam ou revelariam. A distinção entre expressão e performatividade é crucial. Se os atributos e atos do gênero, as várias maneiras como o corpo mostra ou produz sua significação cultural, são performativos, então não há identidade preexistente pela qual um ato ou atributo possa ser medido: não haveria atos de gênero verdadeiros ou falsos, reais ou distorcidos, e a postulação de uma identidade de gênero verdadeira se revelaria uma ficção reguladora. O fato de a realidade do gênero ser criada mediante performances sociais contínuas significa que as próprias noções de sexo essencial e de masculinidade ou feminilidade verdadeiras ou permanentes também são constituídas, como parte da estratégia que oculta o caráter performativo do gênero e as possibilidades performativas de proliferação das configurações de gênero fora das estruuras restritivas da dominação masculinista e da heterossexualidade compulsória. Os gêneros não podem ser verdadeiros nem falsos, reais nem aparentes, originais nem derivados. Como portadores críveis desses atributos, contudo,m eles também podem se tornar completa e radicalmente incríveis.

In 1998, he won second place in Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest—beaten only by Judith Butler—for the sentence, If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

[El género es] la estilización repetida del cuerpo, una sucesión de acciones repetidas –dentro de un marco regulador muy estricto– que se inmoviliza con el tiempo para crear la apariencia de sustancia, de una especie natural de ser".

Es gibt kein Ich vor der Annahme eines Geschlechts.

Materie ist immer etwas zur Materie Gewordenes.

I am not sure I know when mourning is successful, or when one has fully mourned another human being. I'm certain, though, that it does not mean that one has forgotten the person, or that something comes to take [their] place. I don't think it works that way. I think instead that one mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with you agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance. So there is losing, and there is the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned.

[...] we must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing in advance what precise our form our humanness can and does take. It means we must be open to its permutations, in the name of nonviolence. [...] The necessity of keeping our notion of the human open to a future articulation is essential to the project of international human rights discourse and its politics.

Judith Butler, a feminist and LGBT scholar and activist who was foundational to the development of queer Theory, epitomizes the opposite approach to this dilemma. In her most influential work, Gender Trouble,17 published in 1990, Butler focuses on the socially constructed nature of both gender and sex. For Butler, “woman” is not a class of people but a performance that constructs “gendered” reality. Butler’s concept of gender performativity—behaviors and speech that make gender real—allowed her to be thoroughly postmodern, deconstruct everything, and reject the notion of stable essences and objective truths about sex, gender, and sexuality, all while remaining politically active. This worked on two levels. Firstly, by referring to “reality-effects” and social or cultural “fictions,” Butler is able to address what she sees as the reality of social constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. For Butler, the specific constructions themselves are not real, but it is true that constructions exist. Secondly, because the “queer” is understood to be that which falls outside of categories, especially those used to define male and female, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, disrupting and dismantling those categories is essential to activism. “To queer” can therefore be used as a verb in the Butlerian sense, and the “queering” of something refers to the destabilization of categories and the disruption of norms or accepted truths associated with it. The purpose of this is to liberate the “queer” from the oppression of being categorized.

I don't think, for instance, that you can invoke a Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. You can't say, "Oh, I'll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I'll apply myself to the aks, and I'll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me." I think that one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and one finds oneself foiled.

Speciellt då Franklin sjunger: "Now I'm no longer doubtful, of what I'm living for / And if I make you happy I don't need to do more", är det förståeligt att Butler något ironiskt avfärdar orden med att "Aretha" verkar "påtagligt glad åt att få sin naturlighet bekräftad". Borde inte hennes högsta önskan istället vara att undergräva patriarkatet, eller åtminstone att destabilisera det språkbruk som kan få en lesbisk eller transkvinna att känna sig som om hon vore onaturlig?

The year 1990 is remembered by many as the annus mirabilis of queer theory. In addition to the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, David M. Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, 1990 also saw Teresa de Lauretis’s coinage of the term queer theory as the title of a conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz. But 1990 was also the year when a new economic relationship of mutual vassalage between the United States and China began to take shape, one that would eventually lead commentators to speculate, in the wake of the 2007–10 subprime mortgage crisis, that an alternative Chinese economic model called the Beijing Consensus—with its huge holdings of US government debt, productive capacity, and high savings rates—would enable the formerly socialist country to displace the United States as the center of global capitalism.

And so, when we speak about "my sexuality" or "my gender," as we do and as we must, we nevertheless mean something complicated that is partially concealed by our usage. As a mode of relation, neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another.

People with wombs have always known that bodies and consciousness are cyclical, tied to a rhythm that is larger than the individual. The cycle is twenty-eight days, full moon to full moon. Moon sounds like a name or a noun. But let us remember that moon is a gerund. Always moving. Always moon-ing. It is time to give the masculine back its lunar knowledge. Wombs swell, yearn, mulch, and release in twenty-eight days. But a womb is not just an organ. It is an invitation that anyone of any physicality and any gender expression can accept. It is an invitation to dance inside change for twenty-eight days. To practice softness for a cycle. The masculine has a womb, too. A moon. All it need do is look up at the night sky. What is lunar wisdom? Even on a new moon night, the moon is still present: replete and whole, while also void and occluded. This is a completion that holds loss tenderly inside its body. It is neatly summed up by Octavia Butler’s powerful words: “God is change.”1 The moon is every gender, every sexuality, mostly both, always trans: waxing and waning. The moon only ever flirts with fullness or emptiness for a brief, tenuous moment before slipping into change. Here is our blended, androgynous Dionysus. Wine-drunk, love-swollen, wind-swept, in ecstatic union with the holy, the moon encourages us to dissolve our edges rather than affirm them. Lunar knowledge keeps us limber. Keeps us resilient. Awe, whether somatic or spiritual, transforms us. The alternative to patriarchy and sky gods is not equal and opposite. It is not a patriarchy with a woman seated on a throne. The Sacred Masculine isn’t a horned warrior bowing down to his impassive empress. The divine, although it includes us, is mostly inhuman. Mutable. Mostly green. Often microscopic. And it is everything in between. Interstitial and relational. The light and the dark. Moonlight on moving water. The lunar bowl where we all mix and love and change.

But what is the link between gender and sexuality that I sought to underscore? Certainly, I do not mean to claim that forms of sexual practice produce certain genders, but only that under conditions of normative heterosexuality, policing gender is sometimes used as a way of securing heterosexuality

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire.

Queer Theory’s most influential contributors were all Marxist in orientation. Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler inherited the core concepts developed by Marxists in the first half of the 20th century and applied them specifically to studying sex, gender, and sexuality. They used Marxist theology as a launchpad for their social critiques and, in so doing, created the new flavor of Marxism that we are all dealing with today—Queer Marxism.

The whip scars on my back weren't real to him. People's pain didn't matter to him unless he was the cause of it. Butler, 1979, p. 125

I could see it in his eyes- the wanting.It was always there, waking and sleeping" (page 95)

Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler didn’t develop their theories of sex, gender, and sexuality from scratch. Each of these thinkers shares a common philosophical starting point—a framework that they mapped their ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality onto. If Queer Theory is a vehicle for cultural and personal revolution, it runs on the engine of Marxism. In fact, Queer Theory is Queer Marxism. Queer Theory cannot be understood without peeking under the hood, revealing the Marxist mechanics that give it life.

For the first time in a long time, I was free. Dirty, scarred, and hurt, but finally free.

Por consiguiente, uno es su propio género en la medida en que uno no es el otro género, afirmación que presupone y fortalece la restricción de género dentro de ese par binario.

Queer melancholia theory, an especially lush account of how the mourning process bodies forth gendered subjects, insists that subjectivity itself is a record of partings and foreclosures, cross-hatched with the compensatory forms these absences engender. Within this paradigm, queer becoming-collective-across-time and even the concept of futurity itself are predicated upon injury—separations, injuries, spatial displacements, preclusions, and other negative and negating forms of bodily experience—or traumas that precede and determine bodiliness itself, that make matter into bodies. This paradigm is indebted, via Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, not only to Derrida but also to Freud’s theory that a bodily imago and eventually the ego itself emerge from raw suffering.

But if there is no subject who decides on its gender, and if, on the contrary, gender is part of what decides the subject, how might one formulate a project that preserves gender practices as sites of critical agency? If gender is constructed through relations of power and, specifically, normative constraints that not only produce but also regulate various bodily beings, how might agency be derived from this notion of gender as the effect of productive constraint?

It seems that every text has more sources than it can reconstruct within its own terms.

Lezbiyen teoriler, gey teoriler deyişi beni hiç rahatsız etmiyor, çünkü, başka bir yerde ileri sürmüş olduğum gibi, kimlik kategorileri -ister baskıcı yapıların normalleştirici kategorileri, bu baskıyı özgürleştirici bir damarla tanımamanın odaklaşma noktaları olarak olsun- düzenleyici rejimlerin enstrümanı olmaya eğilimlidir. Bunu söylerken, lezbiyen etiketi altında siyasal faaliyetlerde bulunmayacağımı kasdediyor değilim, ancak bu etiketin tam olarak neye işaret ettiği konusunda sürekli bir belirsizlik kalmasından yana olduğumu da vurgulamak isterim.

Zira, lezbiyen-gösterenine başvurularak neyin kastedildiği her zaman için kesin bir belirsizlik içinde kalmıştır; zaten onun anlamlandırılması her zaman için bir derece kontrol dışıdır, ayrıca özgüllüğü de ancak, kendi bütünsellik iddiasını çürütmeye yarayan dışlamalarla ayırt edilebilen bir olgudur.

Geylerin ve lezbiyenlerin kamusal düzlemden silinme şiddetinin tehdidi altında olduklarının tartışılacak bir yanı yoktur, fakat bu şiddete karşı koyma kararı alınırken onun yerine bir başka şiddeti getirmemeye de özellikle dikkat etmek gerekir. Hangi çeşit lezbiyen ya da geyler görünür kılınmalıdır ve hangi içsel dışlamalar bu görünür kılınmayı kurumsallaştıracaktır? Kimliğin görünürlüğü bir siyasal strateji olarak yeterli sayılabilir mi, yoksa siyasal yapının kökten dönüştürülmesini gerektiren bir stratejik müdahale açısından sadece bir başlangıç noktası mıdır?

Lezbiyenlik pek açık bir şekilde yasaklanmış değildir, çünkü düşünülebilir, tasavvur edilebilir olana (gerçek ve adlandırılabilir olan şeyleri düzenleyen kültürel anlaşılabilirlik kalıbına) girmenin bir yolunu bulabilmiş dahi sayılmaz. Öyleyse, lezbiyenin var olmadığı bir siyasal bağlamda nasıl bir 'lezbiyen' olunacaktır? Bu, lezbiyenliğe karşı şiddetin kısmen lezbiyenliği söylemin kendisinden dışlayarak sürdüren bir siyasal söylemde mi söz konusu olacaktır?

Aretha Franklin doğallığının teyit edilmesinden ziyadesiyle memnun görünmesine rağmen, bu teyidin hiç bir zaman güvence altına alınmamış olması, doğallığının etkisinin ancak o heteroseksüel tanınma uğrağının sonucunda sağlanması konusunda tamamen ve paradoksal bir ihtiyatlılık içindedir de. Yine de Aretha'nın 'Bana kendimi doğal bir kadın gibi hissettiriyorsun' şarkısı, bunun bir tür metaforik ikame, bir hilekarlık, sıradan heteroseksüel transvestitlik eyleminin doğurduğu bir ontolojik yanılsama kapsamında bir tür yüceltme ve anlık katılım olduğunu akla getirmektedir.

Eğer toplumsal cinsiyet transvestit ise, ve eğer bu, yaklaşmayı denediği ideali düzenli olarak doğuran bir taklitse, o zaman toplumsal cinsiyet, bir içsel cinsiyet ya da öz ya da psişik toplumsal cinsiyet çekirdeği yanılsamasını doğuran bir temsildir; içsel derinlik yanılsamasını tende, jestle, hareketle, yürüyüşle (cinsiyetin takdimi olarak anlaşılan bedensel temsiller silsilesiyle) doğurur.

El “sexo”, la categoría, obliga al “sexo”, la configuración social de los cuerpos, a través de lo que Wittig denomina un contrato forzoso. Así pues, la categoría de “sexo” es un nombre que esclaviza. El lenguaje “arroja manojos de realidad sobre el cuerpo social”, pero estos manojos no se desechan con facilidad y añade: al formarlo y configurarlo de forma violenta.

Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asserts that gender is a performance, an unstable identity that forms through how it is performed over and over. She writes, Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

Judith Butler asserts that gender is a performance, an unstable identity that forms through how it is performed over and over.

L'incapacité à reconnaître les processus culturels spécifiques de l'oppression de genre elle-même n'est-elle pas une forme d'impérialisme épistémologique?

No desafio de repensar as categorias do gênero fora da metafísica da substância, é mister considerar a relevância da afirmação de Nietzsche, em Genealogia da Moral, de que “não há ‘ser’ por trás do fazer, do realizar e do tornar-se; o ‘fazedor’ é uma mera ficção acrescentada à obra — a obra é tudo”. Numa aplicação que o próprio Nietzsche não teria antecipado ou aprovado, nós afirmaríamos como corolário: não há identidade de gênero por trás das expressões do gênero; essa identidade é performativamente constituída, pelas próprias “expressões” tidas como seus resultados.

I like domestic stuff,"he tells me, his voice falling to a sudden romance-novel huskiness. So fuck a butler. Men, it bears repeating, are so weird.

성적 소수자 영역에 놓인다는 것은 그 무엇보다도 우리가 공적이고 사적인 공간에서의 보호에 의존하고, 우리를 폭력으로부터 보호해줄 법적 인가에 의존하며, 우리에게 가해진 원치 않는 공격과 때로 선동된 폭력 행위에 맞설 여러 제도적 보호책에 의존한다는 의미다. 그런 의미에서 우리의 삶 자체, 욕망의 지속성 자체가 인간으로서의 생존 가능성을 생산하고 유지하는 인정 규범의 존재에 의존한다. 따라서 우리가 성적 권리에 대해서 말할 때 우리는 그저 개인의 욕망에 관한 권리를 말하는 것이 아니라 우리의 개인성이 의존하는 규범을 말하고 있는 것이다. 그 말은 권리에 관한 담론이 우리의 의존성을 선언한다는 뜻, 즉 타인의 손에 달린 우리의 존재 양식, 그것 없이는 우리가 존재할 수 없는 타인과의, 또 타인에 대한 존재 양식을 선언한다는 뜻이다.

While our conceptions of gender have evolved since the publication of Gender Trouble, there is a lot to be said for Butler’s theory, particularly when it comes to the ways in which women, knowingly or unknowingly, perform femininity and the ways in which women are sometimes trapped by how they are expected to perform their gender.

İçin fiilen dışa dönüştüğü dışkı geçitleri iç ile dış arasındaki sınırı bulanıklaştırır, dışkılama işlevi böylece başka kimlik farklılaştırma türleri için model teşkil eder. Neticede Ötekilerin boklaşması bu şekilde olur.

Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual. Imagine if you are Black and someone tells you that you are white, or that you are not racialized in this ostensibly post-racial world. Or imagine you are Palestinian and someone tells you that Palestinians do not exist (which people do). Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognize you in the name and sex you have given yourself, the ones to which you have arrived? Their definition is a form of effacement, and their right to define you is apparently more important than any right you have to determine who you are, how you live, and what language comes closest to representing who you are. Perhaps we should all just retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people who are struggling to have their existence known, denies the use of the categories that let many of us live, but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of victim exclusively, and if they seek to deny you of basic rights, then probably at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so.