Imitation+and+Gender+Insubordination


 * =Title= || "Imitation and Gender Subordination" (1991) ||
 * =Author= || Judith Butler ||
 * =Date= ||  ||
 * =Summary By= || Tatiana ||
 * =Summary= || Judith Butler “ Imitation and Gender Insubordination”

General note: It appears that se spends a lot of time applying the structure of Foucault’s argument about the nature of discourse to homo/heterosexuality. What do I mean? “Heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmic idealization of itself –and failing” (568), and “is it not possible that lesbian sexuality is a process that reinscribes the power domains that it resists, that it is constituted in part from the very heterosexual matrix that it seeks to displace….?”565) sounds very similar to discourse at once reinforces the very power in the language it seeks to dismantle.

“Identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression”(563).

· Discusses the implications of choosing a public identity of “coming out”. Logically, to have “come out, there must have been a closet to begin with, and the assumption of the closet as metaphor means that a person is constantly faced with the possibility of being IN the closet. While she specifically talking about the gender spectrum or sexuality “categories”, I think it applies to other identities that cannot necessarily be perceived visually. o Interestingly she admits, that by invoking in this case the “lesbian signifier” one has no control over what it ends up meaning to the receiver. Is there agency? I get the impression that we FEEL there is agency when there really may not be. Sure we can choose whether to “come out” or not, but according to the author, the terminology we use to frame the ideas ensure that, there is always something for us to need to escape, and that by living within the realm of the “other” it reinforces the norm, even though that is a copy of itself?

What is the nature of human nature? To categorize and control

Discussion questions:

How is this notion of identity as a sexual “other” applicable to the field of IR?

How does “coming out” color our work or the perceptions of out work as social scientists? And as she asks, what are the risks? || = = = = = = = = = = = =
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