Undoing gender Judith Butler 305.

3 B9 (2004)

Introduction- Acting in concert

“…normative conception of gender can undo one’s personhood , undermining the capacity to
persevere in a livable life”. P1

“…can undo a prior conception of who one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one that has
greater livability as its aim.” 1

“…one does not “do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing with or for another, even if the
other is imaginary”. 1

“…the viability of our individual personhood is fundamentally dependent on…social norms”. 2

“The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition , claiming that desire is always a desire for
recognition…it is only through the experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted
as socially viable beings”. 2

It misses a couple of important points

1 the terms by which we are recognized as human are socially articulated and changeable”.2

“If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by
norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do sth
with what is done with me”. 2

“if I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never
chose”.

“… a model of coherent gendered life that demeans the complex ways in which gendered lives
are crafted and lived.” 5

“Discrimination against women continues –especially poor women and women of color, if we
consider the differential levels of poverty and literacy not only in the United States, but globally
– so this dimension of gender discrimination remains crucial to acknowledge”. 6

“…gender now also means gender identity , a particular salient issue in the politics and
theory of transgenderism and transsexuality”. 6

Transgender – persons who cross-identify and live as another gender-may or may not have
undergone hormone treatments. – others with or without surgery identify as transmen or
transwomen

1
“Intersex activists work to rectify the erroneous assumption that every body has and
inborn truth of sex …”

“…queer theory opposes those who would regulate identities or establish epistemological claims
of priority for those who make claims to certain kinds of identities , it seeks not only to expand
the community base of anti homophobic activism, but, rather, to insist that sexuality is not
easily summarized or unified through categorization”.

According to Kate Bornstein the trasexual desire can be treated as a pursuit of identity as a
transformative exercise” 8

Non of these movements is postfeminist.

Workings of gender in global contexts helps us to understand what problems are posed for the
term “gender” but also to combat false forms of universalism that service a tacit or explicit
cultural imperialism”. 9

“Terms such as “masculine” and “feminine” are notoriously changeable ; …their meanings
change depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining
whom and for what purpose”. 10

Women complain that the technologies have replace maternal bodies with a patriarchal apparatus
, however they are content with the enhanced autonomy that those technologies have provided
for them. 11

Trans people argue that their sense of personhood depends on their access to technology, so
some feminists argue that technology takes over the business of making ppl and human will
become nothing other than a technological effect. 11

“…sexuality establishes us as outside of ourselves; we are motivated by an elsewhere whose full

meaning and purpose we cannot definitively establish”. 15

“Sexuality does not follow from gender in the sense that what gender you are determines what
kind of sexuality you will have. “16

1 Beside Oneself: on the limits of sexual autonomy

“…when we speak about…sexuality or …gender,…we mean something complicated by it”. 19 “

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”. 19

“…it is through the body that gender and sexuality become exposed to others, implicated in
social processes, inscribed by cultural norms, and apprehended in their social meanings”.20

2
“…to be a body is to be given to over to to others even as a body is emphatically , “one’s own”
20

“Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are
not quite ever only our own”. 21 “The body has its invariably public dimension;…” 21

Lesbian and gay and bisexual seem to as what are the cultural contours of the notion of the
human at work, how do the contours that we accept as the cultural frame for the human limit the
extent to which we can avow loss or as loss. 24

The sustaining webs of relations created by gay, lesbian and bisex constitute a breakdown
in the traditional kinship patterns which assumes that biological and sexual relations
structure kinship centrally. 26

Therefore “sexuality is no longer exclusively regulated by the rules of kinship at the same
time the durable tie can be situated outside of the conjugal frame” 26

“…butch, femme, and transgendered lives are not essential referents for a refashioning of
political life…” 28

if we give differential reality to different kinds of humans, as a result, then transgressed lives
have a potential and actual impact on political life. 28

“…they show us how the norms that govern contemporary notions of reality can be questioned
and how new modes of reality can become instituted.” 29

“…our sense of personhood is linked t o the desire for recognition , and this desire places us
outside ourselves…” 33

“As sexual we are dependent on a world of others, vulnerable to need, violence , betrayal ,
compulsion, fantacy;…” 33

“…the human is defined in advance , in terms that are distinctively western, very often American
, and therefore , partial and parochial”. 37

“…the category of women has been used differentially and with exclusionary aims, and not all
women have been included within its terms; women have not been fully incorporated into the
human”. 37 ( for example , there are conferences on women’s human rights and gay and lesbian
human rights)

These terms are defined in relation to one another.

7 quandaries of incest taboo

3
“…primary incest taboo becomes the way in which sexual positions are occupied,
masculine and feminine are differentiated and heterosexuality is secured.” 152-153

Incest is a punishable fantasy but is it real or a fantasy

“With regard to incest, the question thus turns on the relations among memory, event and desire.

Those who despise this as an abusive family practice link it to an invent and that in so far as it is
a memory, it is a memory of an event. 153

In psychoanalysis , “it insists that trauma takes its toll on narrativity; that is insofar as incest
takes traumatic form, it is not recoverable as an event ; as trauma it cannot take the form of a
remembered or narratable event. 154

9. The end of sexual difference

Feminist theory is never fully distinct from feminism as a social movement”. 175

What is sexual difference?

It provides a necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in

the world.

“Irigaray makes clear that sexual difference is not a fact , not a bedrock of any sorts, and
not the recalcitrant “real” of Lacanian parlance”. 177

“ Sexual difference is not a given, not a premise, not a basis on which to build a feminism;
…”178

Irigaray refers to the question of sexual difference as a question of our times, and refers it to
modernity.

“Others have argued that all the key terms of modernity are premised on the exclusion of
women , of people of colour , that they are wrought along class lines and with strong colonial
interests”. 179

“Gender…is not to be mistaken for sexuality,…” 181

“They claim that sexual difference is the preferred term to gender, that “sexual difference”
indicates a fundamental difference, and that gender indicates a merely constructed or variable
effect”. 181

“…feminism is said to have gender as its object of inquiry, lesbian and gay studies is said to
have sex and sexuality as its “proper” object”. 181

4
Gender became intensified as a code for homosexuality. –in the one case gender appears to
stand for homosexuality and in the other it seems to be its opposites 183

“In the international debate the Vatican denounces the use of the term ‘gender’

La Repubblica claims that in the US the number of genders has leaped to five: masculine,
feminine, lesbian , homosexual and transsexual” 183

“…in becoming homosexuals , they cease to be men or women , and that gender as we know it is
radically incompatible with homosexuality;…” 183

“…indeed , it is so incompatible that homosexuality must become its own gender, , thus
displacing the binary opposition between masculine and feminine altogether.” 183

“Homosexuality in particular leaves the gender behind”. 184

“…no simple definition of gender will suffice,…”184

“…the domestic US example in which gender is often perceived as a way to diffuse the political
dimension of feminism, in which gender becomes a merely discursive making of masculine and
feminine…”

“Gender is thus opposed in the name of sexual difference precisely because gender endorses a
socially constructivist view of masculinity and femininity, displacing and devaluating the
symbolic status of sexual difference and the political specificity of femininity”. 185

“If for her (Rosi Braidotti) sexual difference is a difference that is irreducible to biology and
irreducible to culture or social construction…” 185

“Sexual difference is neither fully given nor fully constructed , but partially both”. 186

Ultimately Butler says that

“As I understand it , sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the
biological to the cultural is posed and reposed , where it must and can be posed, but where it
cannot, strictly speaking, be answered”. 186

“…sexual difference has psychic , somatic , and social dimensions…” 186

VATICAN-the official residents of the pope in the Vatican city

“The regulation of gender has always been part of the work of heterosexist normativity …” 186

“The presumption that gender is a code for homosexuality , that introduction of lesbian is the
introduction of a new gender, and unnatural one that will result in destruction of maternity
…is irreducibly homophobic and misogynist at once.” 188

5
UN conference – wordings of paragraph 16 of the conference’s Platform for Action “ The
human rights of women include their right to have control …over their sexuality, including
sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion , discrimination , and violence….Equal
relationships between women and men in matters of sexual relations and reproduction…”189

“…Vatican refers to the possible inclusion of lesbian rights as “anti-human” …but it might also
be to imagine the human beyond its conventional limits”. 190

“…Braidotti cautions us against thinking that we might produce and transform the body in any
and all directions “. 193

“…some critics of post structuralism have maintained that there can be no agency without a
located and unitary subject , Braidotti shows that activity, affirmation , and the very capacity to
transform conditions are derived from a subject multiply constituted and moving in several
directions”. 193

For her “…multiplicity is a way of understanding the play of forces that work upon one another
and generate new possibilities for life.” 194 “Multiplicity is not the death of agency but its very
condition

“ 194

“Braidotti argues that sexual difference is often rejected by theorists because femininity is itself
associated with a pejorative understanding of its meaning”.

Butler believes that “ future symbolic will be one in which femininity has multiple
possibilities…where it is released …from the norm devised for it by phallogocentric means”.
196-7

“Butch desire may …be experienced as part of “women’s desire,” …as a kind of masculinity ,
one that is not found in men”. 197

This negative judgment occurs when it is defined as an instrument of phallocentricism 197

“…there may be ways that masculinity emerges in women , and that feminine and masculinity do
not belong to differently sexed bodies” 197

………………….

Undoing gender Judith Butler 305.3 B9 (2004)

Introduction- Acting in concert

6
“…normative conception of gender can undo one’s personhood, undermining the capacity to
persevere in a livable life”. P1

“…can undo a prior conception of who one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one that has
greater livability as its aim.” 1

“…one does not “do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing with or for another, even if the
other is imaginary”. 1

“…the viability of our individual personhood is fundamentally dependent on…social norms”. 2

“The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition , claiming that desire is always a desire for
recognition…it is only through the experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted
as socially viable beings”. 2

It misses a couple of important points

1 the terms by which we are recognized as human are socially articulated and changeable”.2

“If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by
norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do sth
with what is done with me”. 2

“if I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never
chose”.

“… a model of coherent gendered life that demeans the complex ways in which gendered lives
are crafted and lived.” 5

“Discrimination against women continues –especially poor women and women of color, if we
consider the differential levels of poverty and literacy not only in the United States, but globally
– so this dimension of gender discrimination remains crucial to acknowledge”. 6

“…gender now also means gender identity , a particular salient issue in the politics and theory of
transgenderism and transsexuality”. 6

Transgender – persons who cross-identify and live as another gender-may or may not have
undergone hormone treatments. – others with or without surgery identify as transmen or
transwomen

“Intersex activists work to rectify the erroneous assumption that every body has and inborn truth
of sex …”

“…queer theory opposes those who would regulate identities or establish epistemological claims
of priority for those who make claims to certain kinds of identities , it seeks not only to expand

7
the community base of anti homophobic activism, but, rather, to insist that sexuality is not easily
summarized or unified through categorization”.

According to Kate Bornstein the trasexual desire can be treated as a pursuit of identity as a
transformative exercise” 8

Non of these movements is postfeminist.

Workings of gender in global contexts helps us to understand what problems are posed for the
term “gender” but also to combat false forms of universalism that service a tacit or explicit
cultural imperialism”. 9

“Terms such as “masculine” and “feminine” are notoriously changeable ; …their meanings
change depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining
whom and for what purpose”. 10

Women complain that the technologies have replace maternal bodies with a patriarchal apparatus
, however they are content with the enhanced autonomy that those technologies have provided
for them. 11

Trans people argue that their sense of personhood depends on their access to technology, so
some feminists argue that technology takes over the business of making ppl and human will
become nothing other than a technological effect. 11

“…sexuality establishes us as outside of ourselves; we are motivated by an elsewhere whose full

meaning and purpose we cannot definitively establish”. 15

“Sexuality does not follow from gender in the sense that what gender you are determines what
kind of sexuality you will have. “16

1 Beside Oneself: on the limits of sexual autonomy

“…when we speak about…sexuality or …gender,…we mean something complicated by it”. 19 “

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”. 19

“…it is through the body that gender and sexuality become exposed to others, implicated in
social processes, inscribed by cultural norms, and apprehended in their social meanings”.20

“…to be a body is to be given to over to to others even as a body is emphatically , “one’s own”
20

“Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are
not quite ever only our own”. 21 “The body has its invariably public dimension;…” 21

8
Lesbian and gay and bisexual seem to as what are the cultural contours of the notion of the
human at work, how do the contours that we accept as the cultural frame for the human limit the
extent to which we can avow loss or as loss. 24

The sustaining webs of relations created by gay, lesbian and bisex constitute a breakdown
in the traditional kinship patterns which assumes that biological and sexual relations
structure kinship centrally. 26

Therefore “sexuality is no longer exclusively regulated by the rules of kinship at the same
time the durable tie can be situated outside of the conjugal frame” 26

“…butch, femme, and transgendered lives are not essential referents for a refashioning of
political life…” 28

if we give differential reality to different kinds of humans, as a result, then transgressed lives
have a potential and actual impact on political life. 28

“…they show us how the norms that govern contemporary notions of reality can be questioned
and how new modes of reality can become instituted.” 29

“…our sense of personhood is linked t o the desire for recognition , and this desire places us
outside ourselves…” 33

“As sexual we are dependent on a world of others, vulnerable to need, violence , betrayal ,
compulsion, fantacy;…” 33

“…the human is defined in advance , in terms that are distinctively western, very often American
, and therefore , partial and parochial”. 37

“…the category of women has been used differentially and with exclusionary aims, and not all
women have been included within its terms; women have not been fully incorporated into the
human”. 37 ( for example , there are conferences on women’s human rights and gay and lesbian
human rights)

These terms are defined in relation to one another.

Gender regulations

“…the regulatory apparatus that governs gender is one that is itself gender specific” 41

“…but …gender requires and institutes its own distinctive regulatory and disciplinary regime”.
41

“Gender is not exactly what one “is” nor is it precisely what one “has””. 42

9
“Gender is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and
naturalized,…”42

According to Irigaray ‘sex’ is neither biological category nor a social one but a linguistic
one that exists on the divide between the social and the biological 43

“Gender is thus a regulatory norm …”53

“For MacKinnon, the hierarchal structure of heterosexuality in which men are understood to
subordinate women is what produces gender: 53

Symbolic positions and social norms

“…the prohibition of incest can be one of the motivations for its own transgression, which
suggests that the symbolic positions of kinship are in many ways defeated by the very
sexuality that they produce through regulations”. 44

“…the phallus is not merely a privileged signifier within the Lacanian scheme but….apparatus in
which that signifier is introduced”. 46

“One’s gender …is an index of the proscribed and prescribed sexual relations by which a subject
is socially regulated and produced”. 47-48

5. is kinship always already heterosexual

“…in the US a number of kinship relations exist and persist that they do not conform to the
nuclear family model and that draw on biological and non-biological relations,…” 102

“ Carol Stack’s now classic study of utban African –American kinship, All Our Kin , shows how
kinship functions well through a network of women…” 103

“…the sexual field is circumscribed in such a way that sexuality is already thought of in terms of
marriage and marriage is already thought of as the purchase on legitimacy”. 106

Gay marriage shows us various sexual practices and relationships that fall outside of the purview
of sanctifying law and these hierarchies produce tacit distinctions among forms of illegitimacies.
106

“…options outside of marriage are becoming foreclosed as thee unthinkable, and how the terms
of thinkability are enforced by narrow debates over who and what will be included in the
norms”. 106

10
“…the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy are social practices , specially sexual
practices that do not appear immediately as coherent in the available lexicon of legitimating” 108

“…the proposition that marriage should become the only way to sanction or legitimate sexuality
is unacceptably conservative.” 109

Normative crises – options outside marriage are becoming foreclosed as unthinkable – forms of
thinkability are enforced by the narrow debates over who and what will be included in the norm.
106

“…the distinction between the legitimacy and illegitimacy are social practices , specially sexual
practices that do not appear coherent in the available lexicon of legitimation” . 108

“…marriage should become the only way to sanction or legitimate sexuality is unacceptably
conservative”. 109

In France legally allied gay ppl have children 110

Sylviane Agacinski a French philosopher says that the decision to allow gay ppl to form families
is going against the symbolic order 112

Butler suggests that we should look for some other ways to legitimize gay marriage without
waiting for the state approval. 114

Gay marriage is a response to AIDS and promiscuity 115

“The state is not reducible to law, and power is not reducible to state power”.116

According to Sylviane Agacinski sexual difference is irrefutably biological and gains its
significance in the cultural sphere as the foundation of life in procreation. 118

“The hypostatized heterosexuality , construed by some to be symbolic rather than social…has

been the basis of the claim that kinship is always already heterosexual”. 123

“…cultural reproduction takes place solely or exclusively or fundamentally through the child”.
124

“…the figure of the child is one eroticized site in the reproduction of culture, one that implicitly
raises the question of whether there will be a sure transmission of culture through heterosexual
procreation..” 124

11
“…the story of kinship as we have it from Levi Strauss , is and allegory for the origin of culture
and the symptom of the process of naturalization itself…” 126

7 quandaries of incest taboo

“…primary incest taboo becomes the way in which sexual positions are occupied, masculine and
feminine are differentiated and heterosexuality is secured.” 152-153

Incest is a punishable fantasy but is it real or a fantasy

“With regard to incest, the question thus turns on the relations among memory, event and desire.

Those who despise this as an abusive family practice link it to an invent and that in so far as it is
a memory , it is a memory of an event. 153

In psychoanalysis , “it insists that trauma takes its toll on narrativity; that is insofar as incest
takes traumatic form, it is not recoverable as an event ; as trauma it cannot take the form of a
remembered or narratable event. 154

9. The end of sexual difference

Feminist theory is never fully distinct from feminism as a social movement”. 175

What is sexual difference?

It provides a necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in

the world.

“Irigaray makes clear that sexual difference is not a fact , not a bedrock of any sorts, and not the
recalcitrant “real” of Lacanian parlance”. 177

“ Sexual difference is not a given, not a premise, not a basis on which to build a feminism;
…”178

Irigaray refers to the question of sexual difference as a question of our times, and refers it to
modernity.

“Others have argued that all the key terms of modernity are premised on the exclusion of
women , of people of colour , that they are wrought along class lines and with strong colonial
interests”. 179

“Gender…is not to be mistaken for sexuality,…” 181

12
“They claim that sexual difference is the preferred term to gender, that “sexual difference”
indicates a fundamental difference, and that gender indicates a merely constructed or variable
effect”. 181

“…feminism is said to have gender as its object of inquiry, lesbian and gay studies is said to
have sex and sexuality as its “proper” object”. 181

Gender became intensified as a code for homosexuality. –in the one case gender appears to
stand for homosexuality and in the other it seems to be its opposites 183

“In the international debate the Vatican denounces the use of the term ‘gender’

La Repubblica claims that in the US the number of genders has leaped to five: masculine,
feminine, lesbian , homosexual and transsexual” 183

“…in becoming homosexuals , they cease to be men or women , and that gender as we know it is
radically incompatible with homosexuality;…” 183

“…indeed , it is so incompatible that homosexuality must become its own gender, , thus
displacing the binary opposition between masculine and feminine altogether.” 183

“Homosexuality in particular leaves the gender behind”. 184

“…no simple definition of gender will suffice,…”184

“…the domestic US example in which gender is often perceived as a way to diffuse the political
dimension of feminism, in which gender becomes a merely discursive making of masculine and
feminine…”

“Gender is thus opposed in the name of sexual difference precisely because gender endorses a
socially constructivist view of masculinity and femininity, displacing and devaluating the
symbolic status of sexual difference and the political specificity of femininity”. 185

“If for her (Rosi Braidotti) sexual difference is a difference that is irreducible to biology and
irreducible to culture or social construction…” 185

“Sexual difference is neither fully given nor fully constructed , but partially both”. 186

“As I understand it , sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the
biological to the cultural is posed and reposed , where it must and can be posed, but where it
cannot, strictly speaking, be answered”. 186

“…sexual difference has psychic , somatic , and social dimensions…” 186

VATICAN-the official residents of the pope in the Vatican city

13
“The regulation of gender has always been part of the work of heterosexist normativity …” 186

“The presumption that gender is a code for homosexuality , that introduction of lesbian is the
introduction of a new gender, and unnatural one that will result in destruction of maternity …is
irreducibly homophobic and misogynist at once.” 188

UN conference – wordings of paragraph 16 of the conference’s Platform for Action “ The

human rights of women include their right to have control …over their sexuality, including
sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion , discrimination , and violence….Equal
relationships between women and men in matters of sexual relations and reproduction…”189

“…Vatican refers to the possible inclusion of lesbian rights as “anti-human” …but it might also
be to imagine the human beyond its conventional limits”. 190

“…Braidotti cautions us against thinking that we might produce and transform the body in any
and all directions “. 193

“…some critics of post structuralism have maintained that there can be no agency without a
located and unitary subject , Braidotti shows that activity, affirmation , and the very capacity to
transform conditions are derived from a subject multiply constituted and moving in several
directions”. 193

For her “…multiplicity is a way of understanding the play of forces that work upon one another
and generate new possibilities for life.” 194 “Multiplicity is not the death of agency but its very
condition

“ 194

“Braidotti argues that sexual difference is often rejected by theorists because femininity is itself
associated with a pejorative understanding of its meaning”.

Butler believes that “ future symbolic will be one in which femininity has multiple
possibilities…where it is released …from the norm devised for it by phallogocentric means”.
196-7

“Butch desire may …be experienced as part of “women’s desire,” …as a kind of masculinity ,
one that is not found in men”. 197

This negative judgment occurs when it is defined as an instrument of phallocentricism 197

“…there may be ways that masculinity emerges in women , and that feminine and masculinity do
not belong to differently sexed bodies” 197

14
Language emerges from the body , …the body carries its own signs , its own signifiers in ways
that remain unconscious. For Deleuze- psychoanalysis seems centered on lack, for Butler, on
negativity and Braidotti does not oppose psychoanalysis while Deleuze opposes it

Quoted …Shoshan Felman’s view in The Scandal of the Speaking Body Body gives rise to
language, and that language carries bodily aims, and performs bodily deeds that are not always
understood by those who use language to accomplish certain conscious aims. 199

“…heterosexual practices are not the same as heterosexual norms…” 199

Butler tries to how heterosexual normativity creates problems in ontological truths

“…a prohibition on certain forms of love becomes installed as an ontological truth about the
subject: The “am” of “I am a man” encodes the prohibition “I may not love a man” 199

“ I fully support Braidotti’s view , for instance , that a child is always in love with a mother
whose desire is directed elsewhere…” 200

“…the theory of heterosexual dispositions presupposes what would defeat it, namely a
preheterosexual erotic history from which it emerges”. 200

………………………………………

Imitation and gender insubordination – Judith Butler

identity categories are the instruments of a governing system and they exist as as normalizing
categories of oppressive structures or as an assembly for liberating from that oppressive system.
(Butler 308)

she tries to recolonize the term gay and to show what that sign signifies. (Butler 308)

invocation of a new identity is a risk but resistance to it does not mean that it is a symptomatic of
a self-inflicted homophobia.(Butler 308)

according to Foucault the affirmation of homosexuality is an extension of homophobic discourse

but the discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power as well as a stumbling block.
(Butler 308)

how " i" is determined and operated under the lesbian sign. this identity category should not be a
stumbling block in identity categories. (Butler 308)

how " i" is determined and operated under the lesbian sign. this identity category should not be a
stumbling block in identity categories. (Butler 308)

in order to establish the new identity category one has to turn against the existing sexuality which
seeks to control the very eroticism of the individuals. (Butler 308)

15
in order to establish the new identity category one has to tern against the existing sexuality which
seeks to control the very eroticism of the individuals. (Butler 308)

the discourse of coming out serves the purpose of establishing this new identity.(Butler 308)

the discourse of coming out serves the purpose of establishing this new identity.(Butler 308)

"when i can determine self , such a statement presupposes that i exceeds its determination and
even produces the act which seeks to exhaust the semantic field of that I. in this act would
disclose the true and full content of that I" (Butler 309)

come out of the closet but into what, being out depends to some extent on being in and it gains
meaning only in that polarity" (Butler 309)

"except for homophobia there is no common element among women that prevent them from
coming out of the closet" (Butler 310)

"according to Butler lesbianism is not a copy or derived from heterosexual norms.

Heterosexuality is not the norm from which lesbianism has been derived. Her aim is to turn the
homophobic construction of the bad copy which privileges heterosexuality as origin" (Butler
310)

it is through the repeated play of sexuality that the I is insistently reconstituted as a lesbian "I"
(Butler 311)

"if the i is the effect of a certain repetition then there is no I that precedes the gender that is said
to perform" (Butler 311)

"According to Helms gay men exist as objects of prohibition but there is no mention of lesbians.
Here the oppression works through the production of a domain of undrinkability and
unnameabiality"(Butler 312)

there is a political imperative to render lesbianism visible. because this is a kind of gender
oppression against femininity. Where homosexuals have crafted their locus in society lesbians
have not yet been able to create a niche for themselves as lesbians in society"(Butler 312)

"drag is not the putting on of a gender that belongs to some other group. ex. that assumes that
gender is the rightful property of sex, that masculine belongs to male and feminine belongs to
female. There is no proper gender , a gender proper to one sex rather than an; other" (Butler 312)

which in some sense that sex's cultural property" (Butler 312)

"compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic. the norm that
determines the real implies that being lesbian is always a kind of mining " (Butler 312)

16
"there is no proper gender ,a gender proper to one sex rather than another ,which is in some sense
that sex's cultural property. (Butler 312)

"drag is not the putting on of a gender that belongs to some other group. ex. that assumes that
gender is the rightful property of sex, that masculine belongs to male and feminine belongs to
female. There is no proper gender , a gender proper to one sex rather than an;other" (Butler 312)

which in some sense that sex's cultural property" (Butler 312)

"compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as th original, the true, the authentic. the norm that
determines the real implies that being lesbian is always a kind of mining " (Butler 312)

"there is no proper gender ,a gender proper to one sex rather than another ,which is in some sense
that sex's cultural property. (Butler 312)

drag implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. 313 in this sense
there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for
which there is no original"(Butler 313)

heterosexualized genders are produced through imitative strategies, what they imitate is a
phantasmatic ideal of heterosexual identity. (Butler 313)

compulsory heterosexual identities are theatrically produced effects that posture as grounds ,
origins, the normative measures of the real. (Butler 313)

"the being of the subject is no more self identical than the being of any gender. the coherent
gender achieved through an apparent repetition of the same produces as its effect the illusion of a
prior subject"(Butler 314)

"gender is performative in the sense that it constitute an effect the very subject it appears to
express"(Butler 314)

"sexuality is never fully expressed in a performance or practice. there are no direct expressive or
casual lines between sex, gender presentation ,sexual practice , fantasy and sexuality"(Butler
315)

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