Reading Notes for Butler text : "Critically Queer" for March 4 1998

This is an amazingly dense text, in which Butler makes use of a lot of terms and theories specific to philosophical discourse. The result is that her writing remains a web of concepts and terminology that leaves readers (me) with very little to grasp and comprehend.

With no hope to penetrate very deeply into this particular text in order to raise questions and write a real critique, all I'm going to do is try and summarize the absolute minimum gist.

Introduction: Butler's mission is to examine what surrounds the term "queer" in terms of the place it has held in society and the role it plays. This examination is concerned with the trend to "reverse the valuation such that 'queer' means either a past

degradation or a present or future affrimation'. The framework for her analysis involves a lot of perspectives because of the many factors involved with the re-appropriation / reclamation/recontextualization /resignification of the term and the phenomenon 'queer'. Butler prepares her readers to face many questions about the linguistic and sociological problems that surround the issue, such as gender identity, power politics, social values linked to emotional stability ...

* Performative Power: This section deals with the weight carried in acts (especially in discourse) that society uses to uphold power structures, by indicating one's place or an other's exclusion, by marking the beginning of the formation of 'subject' and

its limitations.

* Queer Trouble: "The term 'queer' has operated as one linguistic ppractice whose purpose has been the shamiong of the subject it names or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation" (p.226)

This section is a complex analysis of the relationship between historicity and performativity. This relationship is important because though a term such as queer is politicized and reclaimed in an empowering way, according to Butler those that seek to affirm themselves under such a "banner" can never succed entirely ... the term will remain "never fully owned, but laways and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage" (p. 228)

Butler points out the necessity in laying claim to politicized terms like queer in order that different generations continue to invest in such discussion and "democratize queer politics" (i.e. disassociate from its exclusionary use and make room for its use as identity and representation).

* Gender Performativity and Drag: Butler begins this section discussing the meaning of drag in terms of parodying gender identity and the way it may be subversive in a heterosexist framework. She discusses the the socialization after birth of children as a process of "assigning" their gender, a process which can only work through repetition of [heterosexist] ideals. Her Claim is that this process is destined to be incomplete and it leaves room for drag to operate subversively because drag mimics and exaggerates these ideals of heterosexual identities. The power of drag is in the fact that it allows people to overcome their sex and appropriate gender performatively, in ways that are similar to the way statements like "its a girl" etc. normalize the projection of feminity and masculinity. The last point in this section is about drag and theatricality. By this Butler means methods of hyperbole meant to provoke reaction (and repair some injury) in communiites that equate queer with shame.

* Melancholia and the Limits of Performance: Butler cautions against reducing performativity to performance , in reference to the act of being in drag. She examines the icon of the melancholic drag queen in an interesting framework, using Freud's terms of "unacknowledged loss" (p.234) to describe what about the taking on another gender actually symbolizes : a man dressing in drag both misses and is in denial of lacking a woman identity so he appropriates it and feels more incomplete . The reverse is true according to Butler for women in drag. Butler offers a new analysis of shaping an identity by describing how [straight] adults move away from merely being socialized into their gender towards enacting their gender because they "refuse to grieve" for an identity they never had. (p.236)

* Gender and Sex Performativity: In this section Bulter makes some final points about the inefficacy of the 'compulsory heterosexuality' as she ahs described it in previous sections. She states how drag highlights the shortcoming of heterosexual behaiour and agency in assignign gender and identity. She examines the urgency in heterosexual norms to regulate sexuality in as much as it is important in setting up gender: "the homophobic terror over performing homosexual acts [...] is often also terror over losing proper gender ..." (p.238)

Butler begins a series of concluding statements on page 239 when she questions the very ways heterosexuality has seen itself as founded upon (opposit sex attraction). The remainder of the text involves Butler's noting the need for new perspectives in regards to relating gender and sexual relations and resignifying sexual terms