Queer Response Paper NUMBA 5, and actually the final one for this class

Judith Butler offers her readers one of the most clear and mind-boggling works of words that I have ever read. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” articulates the paradoxes encompassed not only in the conceptual and/or normative meanings of words like heterosexual, homosexual, gay, lesbian, but in how we take on these words by using them to identify our “I.” To someone unfamiliar with the topic, that probably sounds like absolute gibberish. What I mean is the concept of heterosexual, especially as a normative standard, is dependent on the concept of homosexual as either a deviance or a copy-cat version of heterosexuality for comparison and contrast in order to stabilize the definitive standards it’s attempting to maintain. And vice versa: homosexuality is dependent on heterosexuality to define what it’s not. At one part of her argument, Butler says “if it were not for the notion of the homosexual as copy, there would be no construct of heterosexuality as origin” (313). It’s a chicken or the egg paradox.

Also, when applied to an identity, both labels restrict thoughts, feelings, desires, and acts to what fits within the boundaries of that label. This effect is even more dramatic the more “specific” (or “loaded” or “confusing” or “opaque”) the label (male/female, lesbian, gay, butch, femme, straight, macho, etc.).

I love her analysis of “coming out of the closet” (308-311). When one is coming out, te [(s)he] is revealing ter [his/her] “true” identity to the world, affirming what te claims te already was, but haven’t been enacting in some way. Now te is free to enact their true identity? Now te is not only “free” to, but expected to embody characteristics of gayness (or whatever identity was claimed). But what does that entail. As Butler puts it, describing her coming out of the closet, “before, you did not know whether I ‘am’, but now you do not know what that means.” She goes on to say that “maybe that is a situation to be valued,” but is it really liberating? Also, once we’re out of the closet, what have we come out into? I have never encountered a closet that wasn’t confined within some other structure. Not that structure is bad, but perhaps the idea of “coming out” a liberatory experience, defying normative social ideas to be who you really are should be reevaluated.

Maybe transsexuals are more aware of the nature of what they’re doing that most of the GLBT community: Transitioning from embodying one socially structured identity to another, with some level of awareness that by saying yes to femaleness and femininity, it is to some extent necessary to say no to maleness and masculinity, whereby recognizing and reinforcing the existence and meaning of both entirely socially constructed identities and how they are dependent on each other to define what they are not. “[G]ender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original,” (313) it is an imitation of norms that are constructed through social, in our culture heterosexist discourse.

Which reminds me of our next reading by Lynda Johnston (I had to read that a couple times to distinguish it from Lindon Johnson… which I thought was kinda funny) entitled “Bodies: Camped Up Performances.” She uses her observances of all men or all women pride parades as examples of how we embody gender in different variations and on different levels. I’m apparently rather uninformed on the subject and had to look up “camp,” I figured she wasn’t talking about sleeping in a sleeping bag. I had no idea there were so many definitions for this word! Here’s what I think she meant:

Camp /kamp/ adjective & noun[1]
A adjective. Ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate, homosexual.
B noun. Camp behaviour, mannerisms, etc.

In other words, embodying some exaggerated version of, usually, normative femininity, generally with a male body. But she uses the term in examples of exaggerated normative femininity or masculinity embodied in a female or male body, or any combination thereof, as a why to not only make a statement about the necessarily theatrical nature of the manifestation of gender, and poking fun at it.

As for my www.sex-lexis.com/a selection, I chose “39”, because I just happen to like that number. Its meaning in this dictionary of sexual terms is: “Code for anilingus, based on the ideographic image of a face buried between buttocks, the figure 3 being the buttocks, 9 the face.” Of the 4 discursive trends in sexuality that we have discussed, I think it being an actual sex act makes it fit under “libidinal economies” as well as “discursive desires.” I have to say, this was a new one on me! (Not the act itself, but 39 being used to signify it)

[1] From my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth Edition. :)