I would like to write this week's journal about the essay that we didn't get to cover in class today (weds), Butler's "Imitation and Gender Insubordination". The essay was originally written for and published in the "Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader" even though it is the very title of "Lesbian" that Butler opposes. Again, let us look at the quotations with which she opens her work, there is Monique Wittig's that is aimed at the false ideals of the simulacrum as an "ontological joke" and then there is a quotation from Gilles Deleuze on the curious property of the ontological to gather, select, and destroy, simultaneously.
Here she again reminds us of the restrictions that go along with claiming an identity but here she is more interested in how it silently reinforces the Normative gender and the dichotomous context in which we exist. Butler goes into heavy deconstructionism with the understanding that there is such a thing as the provisional usage of an identity (this being the ability to identify) in such a way as to be strategic.
After establishing the fact that gender is an identity category imposed upon us and resulting in the creation of a body, she cites the example of drag queens. Drag is a parody of the institution of "femininity" it is a realization that, indeed, "femininity" is an intstitution. Within a dichotomous system one would have to recognize the drag queen as the anomaly, or a gender that cannot and does not exist. Outside of this binary system and in the space provided by queer theory, there is no normative and therefore, no gender that cannot exist.
And now for the idea of the simulacrum, or the copy of a copy of a copy...with no original in actual existence. We write the original whether it be the "god" in whose image we are supposedly created, or the supermodel in whose image we try to create ourselves, the movie star the ideal. Whoever we emulate we admire for their assumed properties, properties that are associated with specific genders or categorical groupings as such. These categories, genders these we have created and it is against these self generated images, that we are comparing each other and limiting ourselves. The perception of there existing some sort of normalcy somewhere out there from which all other "deviations" have sprung, is a dangerous one.
Butler asks us to consider what we disavow with every avowal, who we exclude when we are included into a category, and what we force back into the closet when we come out. For, Butler argues, in order to have an outside, there must be an inside. We reinforce the existence of the closet by coming out of it. We must make our own doors in other ways and with a different epistemology.
- Sam Franco