JUDITH BUTLER DRAG HOW TO
JUDITH BUTLER DRAG SERIES

She begins with a series of disclosures, all of them tremendously provocative: “I’m permanently troubled by identity categories,” she writes. The best point of entry into the topic is perhaps the one Butler herself uses in her essay, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” which I will use extensively now, and which came after a lecture that she gave at Yale in 1989. Again, “Everything is discursive.” Words, bodies, dreams.

In other words, what this example shows is the fertility of the literary work for philosophical interpretation and speculation as well as the importance of reading itself, how reading occurs not just along the lines of the text, but along the curves of the body, and, as in psychoanalysis, through the dreams of the analysand. I read the performativity of gender by reading Derrida who read Kafka-this magnificent theory of hers is the product of a literary work filtered three times, or as we say in literary jargon, the theory is a product of metonymic reading, of a process of displacement. The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributed and installed, the anticipation conjures the object” (xv). “There the one who waits for the law, sits before the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits.

JUDITH BUTLER DRAG HOW TO

The second point I wanted to make perhaps merits no mention or at the very least it shouldn’t be necessary, but I want to make it for the sake of emphasizing the “truth” of one of Jacques Derrida’s phrases: “Everything is discursive.” Why is an English professor, you might ask, talking about philosophy and gender and society? Or what, as Foucault would say, gives him the right to speak? Here I want to bring in Butler who gives the answer: “I originally took my cue,” writes Butler in Gender Trouble, “on how to read the performativity of gender from Jacques Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law,’” (xv) which is a text some of you may have encountered in your ENC 1102 classes. The purpose of my talk is Butler’s philosophical exposition of how a gender can be constructed, how it is revealed as constructed, how an identity can be formed. This talk won’t debate with theories and viewpoints that claim that social expressions of gender are biologically determined and far less is it going to get embroiled in the on-going scientific debates about the extent to which the molecular and neurochemical differences they’ve found across genders may determine social behaviors. Therefore, what this talk will do is hopefully disentangle and clarify whatever that adverb-“ socially”-means. The first is a historical and contextual one and seeks to answer the question, Where does this talk I’m listening to right now fit within the broader field of the gender debate? In no ambiguous terms, Butler argues that gender is socially constructed. Now, certainly, before we delve into the good stuff, before we talk about sex, and penises, vaginas and everything in-between, I am compelled to make two introductory points. As a result, we can also say that our very subjectivity, that kernel of our consciousness and will, the awareness of which has formed since Socrates the basis for the quest for the good and examined life, may not be as stable as we may imagine, that as Lacan believed, the only thing that holds you together in this world is only a word, a linguistic construction, the word “I,” or perhaps even your name-though, if you’re like me and you’re named after your father, you may not even have that. As we’ll see shortly, the realization that gender is performed, in her view, can be generalized to include other aspects of our identities, to our sexuality, our class, perhaps even our ethnicity or race. This is not outside the purview of Judith Butler’s field of intellectual interest, for if any of you read her work, you’ll find that questions about gender are rarely raised in her texts alone without some ulterior philosophical question on the self, being, the self of being, and the being of self lurking in the background. Secondly, let me begin by mentioning by way of coyness that though gender is what will structure my talk today it will certainly be about far more than that.

(Talk given on March 4th, 2020, at Miami-Dade College, West Campus part of the “Fluid Lines: Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality Symposium” series sponsored by The Humanities Edge)īefore we get into it, and for the sake of clarity, let us define some terms that I will use with some interchangeability but which do have important if not strict definitions: let us define gender identity as what you believe yourself to be: man or woman or genderqueer gender expression as how this identity expresses itself: masculinity, femininity, androgyny and sex as the biological characteristics of the body: male, female, intersex, and so on.

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