I found her "Imitation and Gender Insubordiation" article to be a bit easier for me to grasp her ideas, so I'll reference this one.
"And what's worse, I do not understand the notion of 'theory and am hardly intereted in being cast as its defender, much less in being signified as part of an elite gay/lesbian crowd," (125). I found this statement to be interesting for I could substitute it as my own use when it comes to girlhood (instead oxf elite gay/lesbian). I may have a privelege to be part of the new milienia girlhood/womenhood empowerment stage in what it means to be a female, but my views of girlhood aren't necessarily what everyone thinks, or what other females think. It's a daunting task to try to hold up the ideals of both what you believe and what society would most like to see from you.
"I'm permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable stumbling blocks and understand them, even proimote them, as sites of trouble," (124). I recognize this to be true--one can't truly be an individual human, because it seems that that identity category is gone, it starts just with male and female. Pick one or the other. I remember in 5th grade all the sections of classes (about 150 kids) put on a presentation of American History from the Civil War to present day. All the "boy" roles were really cool---presidents reading speeches to the crowd, having the largest bits of dialouge and stage time, etc. The girls' parts were horribly sexualized--all the girls got to do was be dancers in this program (girls pretending to be the Andrews Sisters during wartime, shaking their 11 year old butts, girls dressed as sock hop teeny boppers, shaking their butts, girls dressed as flamenco dancers (for an unspecified reaason as we didn't cover any sort of hispanic or Spanish history, it was just a 'filler' dance) and also, not dancing folklorico, but just, shaking their butts. Yes, female teachers choregraphed all of this... I wanted a substantial, meaningful part in this presentation and asked to audition for Abraham Lincoln (I didn't know the word rhetoric and diction then, but I liked the strong flow of his Gettysburg Address and wanted to be able to give a strong reading of it for the presentation). My teacher laughed at me, and said, "No, you're a girl. You'll get a dancing part. Leave the speeches to the men." I was devastated. I learned later that it made me look "less girllike" for asking for this role--and not that I had any problem with being a girl, I just liked being able to recite powerful pieces. I would have gone for a female role if they had a powerful female role to give (Harriet Tubman, Ameila Earhart, etc etc etc but they didn't)
A more extreme example (and about 180 degree difference) that I thought of when reading this quote was an article I saw on xojane.com a few weeks back: http://www.xojane.com/relationships/it-didnt-happen-me-i-am-genderqueer. I think this is the perfect example of what Butler means that society prescribes labels and sex onto gender. I reread this after reading Butler's theories and thought that the two seemed to be intertwined somehow.
Thanks for the link and for sharing your story, Christine. It is so amazing to read things like that and to know that your teacher probably meant no harm. She was just repeating the gender rules (according to Butler) that she had learned from her teachers. Yikes.
ReplyDeleteAnd Butler is a tough read. She was one of the first theorists to start pushing back against gender scripts and so had to come up with new language and new meanings for existing language to describe the comfort she and others feel about strict gender/sexuality categories. It's dense, but you got the gist. Gender is a construction, not a reflection of an inner, true gender/sex. It sounds sort of commonsense now, but it certainly didn't then and for many people it doesn't now. You might circle back to more Butler for your final project or proposal. The more you immerse yourself in the gender/identity fields the more she makes sense :)