February 2011 Archives

A loooooong introductory note from Remy: Half-way into hours of struggle with reading and analyzing this essay, I decided to google the author. Who is this person, and why are they writing about someone who is transgender? I think this is always a significant question to ask. Why do you want to use the life and death of a trans person (to back up your theory)? So, backing up, I'm going to "out" myself as prone to being rather prejudiced toward cisgender people writing about trans experiences. I don't think for a moment that "'they' just can't get 'it' (gender)," but I am forever wary of intentions (oops, there's that word again). There's a difference, and I think intention matters here! [A bit below, I dig into Judith Butler's trouble with using trans life and death in Gender Trouble.] I am now working on the assumption that Chávez is cisgender because there's this thing that happens... where, okay, in flippant terms, if a prominent-at-all (academic, authorial, theoretical) figure is transgender, we know all about it-- Kate Bornstein, Patrick Califia, Leslie Feinberg, Dean Spade, Susan Stryker, the list goes on-- because, more or less, it's their "duty" (only slightly tongue in cheek) to be outspoken trans folks. Let's be honest: the only other option is seamlessly passing for cisgender and managing a careful relationship to discussing issues of (trans)gender (and I also know some academics who are doing just that-- sounds even more stressful than being a/the token trans academic!). So, with this thing that happens, there's an accompanying other thing that gets talked about even less. See, if I can read bios and profiles about a (and intros to essays by a) prominent-all-all (academic, authorial, theoretical) figure and I don't see anywhere that they are transgender (or other rude yet sometimes necessary artifacts such as prior name-- necessary only if one has known/published work under said name), then I get to assume that they are cisgender. Get to. Do you know why? This whole process means that transgender people, on many levels, are consistently not granted the same privacy as cisgender people. [More on that.] Cisgender folks who use trans figures to prove a point, often (most of the time) just don't seem to feel the need to "out" their own cisgender status/identity and its relevance to the knowledge production that they do, so I'm left to find my way with the unsettling key "transgender = transgender (oh, that's why they're interested in this)" and "unmarked = cisgender (ooh, isn't it impressive that they're interested in this)." I think that there are other options to be explored more carefully. Here it is: if my trans identity is so related to my work on gender (and I believe that it is, that I need to examine my personal relation to my work time and time again), then why isn't your cisgender identity just as relevant? Ugh!!!

In "Spatializing Gender Performativity: Ecstasy and Possibilities for Livable Life in the Tragic Case of Victoria Arellano," Karma Chávez follows Butler's meticulously mapped arguments from Undoing Gender and the chapter "Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy" specifically, in order to examine Victoria Arellano's detainment, death, and subsequent responses from cellmates, as reflective of the possibility for subversion (not fully actualized, but at least) opened by gender performativity. Key for Chávez is first defining Butler's work on gender performativity and what it does (or aims to do). Chávez initially explains that "Resignifying norms to make life more livable for those rendered unintelligible through current norms is the ultimate political goal of the theory of gender performativity" (1).

I find myself immediately wondering... is that what this is really all about? Something about defining an "ultimate political goal" of gender performativity in this way just doesn't feel familiar to me, as Butler's theory on occasion does. I'm also curious about what, contrastingly, the ethical goals of the theory of gender performativity might look like. This middle bit about, about "making life more livable" certainly often strikes a(n ethical) cord with me, but still, I have trouble understanding the meaning here of resignifying norms. Do we resignify norms in order to normalize, and bring within the normative, currently marginalized experiences of gender and sexuality? How is this different than or preferred to assimilation strategies? Could we instead resignify (certain) norms in a different way, as partial, incomplete, even unnecessary? Why does the former feel like inclusion?

...In any case (whether I agree or not), Chávez's work thus becomes a project of possibility, and the ways that possibility works with ecstasy in relation to processes of resignification. Whew. Ecstasy comes up in "Beside Oneself" as, well, a directly related term. Chávez writes that "According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ecstasy refers to "the state of being 'beside oneself,' thrown into a frenzy or a stupor, with anxiety, astonishment, fear, or passion."" (2). Ecstasy is a non-specific way of being in somewhat skewed relation to the self (and presumably then also "other").

What Chávez then adds to this picture of Undoing Gender revisited is the idea of spatiality-- that, in ecstasy, with others receiving/viewing/reading performance, "facing our own mortality or someone else's in a way that pushes past any limit of life and bodily or psychic comfort, we are in a space to subvert the norms of the heterosexual matrix, so enabling the subversive and political utility of gender performativity." (Mona Lloyd in /Chávez 2). I have to admit that most of what this setup for how Chávez will now use someone's (Victoria Arellano's) life and death ("the case") "to demonstrate this argument," really doesn't sit well with me. I'm reminded of critiques of Butler's use of transgender figures [Venus Xtravaganza] in Gender Trouble, and hit frequent mental stopping points [Is this learning?] while trying to think through the problem with focusing on (reportedly at least mostly cisgender and/or heterosexual) reactions to transgender life and death. Was anyone else perplexed by this?

It's just... it's very difficult for me to stay focused and continue summarizing an argument with which I rather fundamentally disagree due to its treatment of the central transgender figure. Ugh! Okay. I need to move instead into some more critique, because I need perspective (Mel? Sara? Anyone?) on how to better deal with what this author is actually trying to say. I want to understand and appreciate the theory, but my problems with method are overwhelming... I just need to get them out for discussion. It feels like what's most important in this moment.

I'm deeply troubled by the repeated categorization of Victoria Arellano's "case" as "tragic." I guess lots of "tragic" things happen, but this trope of the "tragic transgender death" could stand to be looked at another way, I think. We could be horrified by the mistreatments that led to her death without regurgitating the tragic trans trope.

We could honor and celebrate her life by: not somewhat basing our theory on how her life/experience itself was so "not subversive," not making/reinscribing assumptions about her body, not digging up and playing on the name she was given birth (6-7).

That transfeminine (or MTF) people with "M" markers on identification frequently get placed in "M" marked facilities like jails, prisons, and detention centers, is not a new phenomenon. Who gets to decide that Victoria is "male bodied" for the purposes of this argument (regardless of how she was treated by ICE-- why must we repeat the same ideas in the very same words?)? Why does there need to be any focus at all on the name that Victoria was given at birth?

Winding down, I'm reminded of the media fuss I've been a part of since Krissy Bates was murdered in her downtown Minneapolis apartment this past month. Have you heard of Krissy Bates? In short, the Star Tribune, along with many other slips, called out Krissy's prior name in news about her death, and has been growing beside an uproar of local LBGTA activists ever since.

As a friend put it in a Facebook status update at the beginning of this media mess (that has now included a Star Trib trans panel and the creation of a new media guide to writing about trans folks), "If I am misnamed or mispronouned after death, I am going to haunt the shit out of you."

Somerville's newest project is entitled "Queering the State," which as she puts it intends to "de-naturalize naturalization" or to queer it. In this case, queer is meant to be used as a term that calls into question categories, particularly categories of identity. For Somerville, queering categories is a project that ultimately shows how categories are produced as social constructions. She notes that historically, identity categories have been used to police the lines between "normal" and "abnormal" -- she extends the analysis in this case to refer to the categories of "citizen" and "alien." She begins by discussing her intersectional approach, which is a notion we've been introduced to via "Queering the Color Line." Intersectionality is also central to her current project. Her intersectional approach is meant to highlight the notion that sexuality should not be studied in isolation, but should be studied in conjunction with other categories such as race. While the research that Somerville has looked at so far includes both laws and policy surrounding the naturalization process, for this particular lecture she looks closely at the rituals and ceremonies surrounding citizenship. Her project is to historicize the naturalization ceremony paying particular attention to discourses surrounding sexuality and race.
This is clearly just a short snapshot of Somerville's lecture, but you can start to see how this analysis is a continuation of her project in "Queering the Color Line." For my part, I found this lecture to be quite interesting -- particularly the images of the heterosexual nuclear family that are part of the armory of booklets that are given to newly naturalized citizens. It is clear from this image how the discourses of heteronormativity and citizenship overlap in order to instruct and compel various behaviors via the naturalization ritual.

A certain M. has long been known to blog scans of post-it notes from reading sessions [Queering Desire Fall 2010], and it is with inspiration from this history of sharing one's notes (specifically notes on Butler and this first chapter from Undoing Gender) [Queering Theory Fall 2009] that I present the first page of "Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy" as it appears in my worn copy of Undoing Gender, with both new and original notes (from Fall 2009). I hope that M. isn't too horrified by the minimal scribbles in my book. At least she can't see the highlights.

Central to this chapter are the ethical questions that Butler is asking around the figure of the human and the many possible ways in which it may be recognized, remembered, understood (or not).

Back in 2009 in an entry titled "Beside Myself", M. was already curious about these kinds of questions, and I remember so was I. She wrote:

"What constitutes the Human... and what does not?"
-- a question for ethics: whose lives count as lives?

As pictured above, Butler is already making clear on pages 17-18 that this (these) "question(s) of the human" are where she wants to venture. She writes:

I would like to start, and to end, with the question of the human, of who counts as the human, and the related question of whose lives count as lives, and with a question that has preoccupied many of us for years: what makes for a grievable life?

Sprinkled throughout these first pages: livable, bearable, valuable, grievable, vulnerable. All of these are themes which we've already explored this semester through Butler's newer works, the main difference being that in this chapter Butler specifically looks to the limits of gender (un)intelligibility in order to explore, in short, who counts as who does not. Alongside these questions, Butler more broadly encourages consideration of what it means to be tied to, beside, or undone by each other. This comes close to the idea that, as Leslie Feinberg has said, "My right to be me is tied with a thousand threads to your right to be you."

In this way, Butler also reflects our ongoing conversations in relation to intersectionality, assemblage theory, and Cathy Cohen's essay "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens." She explains that, "In a sense, the predicament is to understand what kind of community is composed of those who are beside themselves" (Butler 20). I wrote a note in 2009 asking myself if this might be one place to explore connections between grief and desire and across "individual" bodies. How do we talk about and understand movements toward and away from self? Other?

Another related passage that captures the feel of this whole chapter is this bit from near the middle:

I suggested... that the way in which the body figures in gender and sexuality studies, and in the struggles for a less oppressive social world for the otherwise gendered and for sexual minorities of all kinds, is precisely to underscore the value of being beside oneself, of being a porous boundary, given over to others, finding oneself in a trajectory of desire in which one is taken out of oneself, and resituated irreversibly in a field of others in which one is not the presumptive center. (Butler 25)

...and what does this mean? In a blog engaging with JHalb from Fall 2010, I write about a similar process as interbeing. Interbeing does away with the ridiculous notion of "individual" autonomy and opts instead for seeing those threads so precious to Feinberg, the ways that we are all interdependent on one another in our very existence.

If many of this chapter's queries are ethical, then it is also noteworthy the way that Butler later discusses the real and true. "The question of who and what is considered real and true is apparently a question of knowledge. But it is also, as Michel Foucault makes plain, a question of power" (Butler 27). This "nexus of knowledge-power" is explained through the inseparability of the two terms, and finally the way they work together to determine the very ways this world may be thought. This is how reality is determined-- and Butler also notes that reality claims made by those ascribed to unreality cannot be simply explained as assimilationist. Something different happens to norms in such a scenario. Their instability, emptiness, tenuousness, can be made visible, and they may even become "open to resignification" (Butler 28).

Along with questions of ethics, this chapter articulates quite clearly Butler's position on (gendered) possibility. In response, she writes:

Some people have asked me what is the use of increasing possibilities for gender. I tend to answer: Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. I think we should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those for whom the very issue of survival is most urgent.

It is my hope that together we can explore more of what Butler is getting at in this passage and how it relates back to the terms of livability, bearability, grievability, and vulnerability. How best to rattle the norms of gender in order to open possibility, "space to breathe"?

Pedro Zamora's Real World of Counterpublicity
Munoz

This chapter looks at Pedro Zamora's time on MTV's The Real World as a public performance of ethics of the self. Zamora is a HIV+ gay, Latino activist who "used" the show to educate viewers and fellow housemates about people living with HIV and AIDS. Zamora passed away in 1994.

The ethics of self is a Foucault term that entails working on the self for others (p. 196).
Munoz finds interest in how Zamora did such productive work, or creating a possibility for a queer and Latino counterpublic, through a corporate production. Although there are elitist restrictions on Foucault's work on the ethics of self, Munoz disidentifies with that and restructures it in the service of "minoritarian identity...imagining an ethics of the minoritarian self" (p. 196).

Munoz clarifies that Zamora's work was not for other activists but preached to the not-yet-converted, for those who do not have access to Zamora's type of grassroots activism. Munoz briefly situates the timing of Zamora's appearances on the Real World (TRW) during a surge in the Republican "homohatred" and "Latino bashing" (p. 200) -a time which sadly sounds a lot like what is happening today with Republicans. Later in the article Munoz situates this moment in regards to status of queers on television (pretty weak) and the backlash by jerks such as Rev. Louis Sheldon (206).

Munoz is interested in unveiling moments when the public sphere publicity is met with performances of counterpublicity that defy the public sphere's discriminatory ideology (200).
"The act of performing counterpublicity in and through electronic/televisual sites dominated by the dominant public sphere is risky" (201). Munoz approaches his analysis of Zamora and TRW through a blending of Habermas and Foucault. Habermas and Focualt are often pitted against each other when discussing the public sphere due to their differing opinions on rationality. Munoz is working from a "post-Habermasian" use of the public sphere (201).

Like the general understanding of disidentification, Zamora worked with and against dominant publicity via TRW (203). Munoz argues that Zamora saw political potential in the show by isolating some of Zamora's thoughts in his application for TRW (204). He exploited MTV; he used MTV more than it used him (206). Munoz discusses the amount and type of queer people that have been on TRW and argues that Zamora was a queer anomaly--he was a star of the season and his love and political life was followed closely. His love life was followed closer than any other relationship thus far on TRW (209).

In Munoz's brief analysis of Zamora and TRW, Puck's homophobia and relationship with a woman is oddly paralleled with Zamora's marriage to Sean. "Pedro's and Sean;s individual performances and the performance of their relationship were narratively undermind by a strategy of weak multicultural crosscutting that was calibrated to dampen the radical charge that Pedro and Sean gave The Real World" (214).

Munoz ends the chapter with a hopeful summary of Zamora and TRW: "I see the televisual spectacle leading to the possibility of new counterpublics, new spheres of possibility, and the potential for the reinvention of the world from A to Z" (216).

Qs:

1. This chapter leaves me wanting more. The analysis was too short. If you have seen this season of TRW, what else could we discuss? What needs to be teased out more?
2. TRW has changed very dramatically since this chapter was written. Munoz's brief note that romance has yet to spark between cast members (p. 213) is humorous. If you are familiar with the show, how has the ability for queers to create counterpublicity on the show changed? Have other "types" of people been able to craft counterpublicity?
3. What is another media example of counterpublicity? And why is it a form of counterpublicity?

I am working on the other Munoz piece summary right now, but wanted to get this up before the Friday deadline passes.

Oh hey! It is Disidentifications; the book Raechel wished Somerville brought into QtCL. I was not in class, obvi, so my summary will be just of the text and will ignorantly leave out any discussion you all had about how Munoz's work connects to QtCL. Just sayin'

Munoz uses the introduction to do two things: discuss influences for this book and expand on conceptions of disidentification. Munoz weaves in works that embody disidentification that inspire (e.g. Gomez) with existing theories that help build a theory of disidentification all the while explaining what disidentification can understood to be. In this book Munoz charts the ways that minority subjects enact identity as they work with/resist dominant culture (p. 6).

For my project, I hope to present a creative work--poem, performance, action documents, lyrical essay--considering the physical, political, environmental, and cultural effects of the drug DES (Diethylstilbesterol) within the framework of Butler's ideas about norms, normativity, aspiration, bodies, precariousness, the human/non-human, failure, and a more generalized focus on the importance of sustained mourning. DES is a synthetic estrogen that was prescribed to pregnant women through the mid-1970s primarily to prevent miscarriage. Although early studies on animals and pregnant women, even as early as 1941, set off alarms about the dangers of this drug, it was swept up into the market and prescribed liberally, sometimes even as a hidden additive to prenatal vitamins, and also used as a "morning after" pill, to stunt the growth of "too-tall" girls, to treat breast and prostate cancers, to treat menopausal symptoms and certain STDs, and as a growth hormone in the beef and poultry industry. In 1971, a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine showed a link between rare forms of vaginal clear cell carcinoma in girls and young women who had been exposed to DES in utero. This made DES the first transplacental carcinogen known in humans; that is, it not only crossed over the placenta, but its toxic effects manifested sometimes decades after initial exposure. (Some older DES Daughters--as these exposed female offspring came to be known--are now faced with increased risk of breast and uterine cancer as well as auto-immune disease into their 60s.) Nevertheless, it was not until 1975 that the FDA finally banned the use of DES during pregnancy (although many doctors continued to prescribe it until as late as 1980.) The women, most in their late teens and early twenties, diagnosed with these clear cell carcinomas underwent extensive surgeries that included vaginectomy, or actual removal (castration?) of the vagina.

In time, more anomalies were linked to in utero DES exposure, including increased risk for cervical and other reproductive tract cancers, infertility, higher rates of miscarriage, and a variety of reproductive tract deformities including uteri that are t-shaped, stenosed, mottled, and variously misshapen, vaginal and cervical adenosis, cervical hoods and other cervical anomalies, menstrual disorders, and other physical defects as well as higher occurrence of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. In addition to being carcinogenic, DES is also a known teratogen (meaning it causes physical birth defects; teratogen is from Latin meaning "monster-making.") The typical dosage of 125 mg/day for a pregnant woman is the equivalent of 700 birth control pills (a day!). DES, like bisphenol-A, DDT, and others, is an "endocrine disruptor," synthetic hormones loosed into the environment that greatly impact the expression and function of bodies (not only human bodies.)

I am a DES Daughter, and while I have thus far dodged cancer, I do house various teratogenic effects of DES and consider the drug in many ways to be a kind of "pharmaceutical parent" or ground zero of identity. In her book DES Daughters: Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Women's Health Politics, Susan Bell (Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin University), who has interviewed many DES Daughters, talks about their experience of feeling like "cyborg babies" and "cyborg women"--"Their bodies are hybrides, mixtures of machines--that is a pharmaceutical--and organisms."

I (many doctors/nurses have claimed "miraculously") managed to carry a baby almost to term (she was 4 weeks early) 20 years ago, but have had 5 known miscarriages, one an early stillbirth, and essential infertility since my early 20s. Additionally, I have a deformed uterus and cervix, severe endometriosis, have had countless cervical and endometrial biopsies and, due to scar tissue from those, episodes of cervical stenosis, irregular and abnormal menstrual cycle since menarche, and the constant anxiety of future cancers and other potential problems. Additionally, studies are now being done on DES Granddaughters who may also (though it's not proven at this point) have higher risks of infertility etc.

Much of Butler's ideas about normativity and gender, if not embodiment, bring to mind for me the situation of DES. Unlike Sanaura Taylor, my and other DES Daughter's "disabilities" are invisible, the non-normative physical manifestations and precariousness of gender are embodied but not readily expressed. Nevertheless, I know I'm not alone in having assumed throughout my life an identity of being "not normal," "not pure," "not feminine," indeed of somehow being hybrid or contaminated, which has had enormous impact on my experience of identifying as a "woman." DES Daughters (and sons, who also were affected) were bathed almost from conception in synthetic hormones and so were never "all human" in a sense. This ties into notions of ethics and gender for me on many levels, notably the unquestioned ethics of the medical community, largely a patriarchal structure, whose assumed control over the bodies and health of women--especially pregnant and birthing women--has evolved uncensored for centuries and has in many ways come to define the terms of physical femininity and feminine "disease." My work as a doula (birth assistant) has been illuminating in terms of birth politics and the pervasive fear-mongering imposed upon vulnerable pregnant women by the market and the medical patriarchy.

Is the DES-damaged body a queer body? Has that body been queered by synthetic estrogen (deemed, by Charles Dodds who is the discoverer of "Stilbestrol," "The Mother Substance"), the very hormone that is primary to female sexual expression and function, and further queered by corporate (e.g. pharmaceutical) pressures on ethical boundaries? Does this project seem too off-the-beaten track from the topics at hand in our class? I admit to feeling as if I've come radically late to the conversation, as an English major and poet with little academic training in gender and ethical theories per se, and sometimes fear that what I bring to our readings and discussions might be largely irrelevant in the context of the class. But I'm deeply interested and invested in transforming/radicalizing notions of ethics, and eagerly participating in troublemaking, even if the way I "take a walk" looks a little queer, if I can say that.

Any feedback or ideas or off-the-top-of-your-head references would be greatly appreciated. Look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow (if the snow stops) and to digging further into the incredibly thorough and helpful diablog!

Sarah

For my major project for QE I am thinking of looking at "The Kids Are Alright" informed through Somerville's project of looking at the ways race and sexuality are intertwined. In terms of this film, it seems like a case could be made that gayness becomes a site of privilege and a version of moral superiority at the expense of the racialized characters who are minimized, mocked, and rejected. In this sense, "The Kids Are Alright" ideologically functions to accept "difference" but only a narrow, white, privileged version of difference. In particular, the character of the Latino gardener is probably the most offensive characterization in the film, reminiscent of a minstrel performance. Also, although maybe unintentionally, the film as a whole delivers a scathing critique of marriage between women. Fatherhood, after 18 years of a maternal parenting situation, is framed as necessary in order to intervene amidst the cloying and smothering behavior of maternal love. It would also be interesting to look at the ways in which desire is framed in the narrative in this film. While Paul (the sperm donor turned father) has women basically throwing themselves at him, the lack of desire between the moms (Nic and Jules) naturalizes his sexual prowess and tips the scales in favor of male heterosexuality. In the bigger picture of the project of ethics, this piece might interrogate the ways in which norms, normativity and normalization function via the narrative of the film. I think the queer futurity issue/debate will also become relevant here as the the title of the film implies, the narrative trajectory of the film asks us to primarily be concerned with the next generation. Lisa Chodolenko's film tells us that change and the future equal settling down passively for the long haul and that there is not much hope for future generations, and in that sense, maybe the kids are not alright.

See trailer here

In Chapter 4 Somerville provides a textual analysis of how both mixed-race identity and interracial desire function and become intertwined with issues of gender inversion and homosexuality in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (anonymously published in 1912, reissued with credit in 1927). Somerville contends that the heterosexual (interracial) marriage that is pursued in the narrative is secondary to the "perverse" desire that is explored in regard to the protagonist's male homosexuality. As she states, "the representation of the mulatto body is mediated by the iconography of gender inversion, and interracial heterosexual desire functions in the text as both an analogy to homosexual object choice and a screen through which it can be articulated" (112). Importantly, the ex-coloured man is an unnamed protagonist, who is constructed as both object and subject of desire through the course of the narrative. "The very proximity of these oscillating racialized and sexualized 'perversions' is integral to Johnson's fascination with, and critique of, his unnamed protagonist" (112).

In the introduction to Queering the Colorline, Siobhan Somerville introduces two important legal cases that took place in the late 1800s. The first, Plessy v. Ferguson, illustrates the origins of "Jim Crow" segregation; and the second, the Oscar Wilde trial in which he was charged with "gross indecency" through the Criminal Amendment Act of 1885. In juxtaposing these two events, Somerville introduces her theory that "the simultaneous efforts to shore up and bifurcate categories of race and sexuality I the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were deeply intertwined" (3). Somerville stresses that she is not trying to say that race persecution was "like" sexual persecution, but rather tries to "historicize and therefore denaturalize their relationship" (7).

Somerville sets up the book by defining the terms she uses throughout. Her use of the term "sexuality" refers to "a historically and culturally contingent category of identity" (6). She defines race as "a historical, ideological process rather than [a] fixed transhistorical or biological characteristic" (7). She is influenced by Omi and Winant's definition of "racialization," defined as "the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group" (7).

Somerville continues to explain how and why race and sexuality must be viewed as simultaneous historical social constructions, highlighting the material effect of "language and representation" (8). She states: "Those whose bodies were culturally marked as nonnormative lost their claim to the same rights as those whose racial or sexual reputation invested them with cultural legitimacy, or the property of a 'good name'" (9). Although she begins with examples from legal decisions, Somerville reveals that the remainder of the book will focus on other ways that discourse constructed race and sexuality (and the lines that otherized those that were "abnormal"). From medical and scientific literature, to early cinema, to African American fiction and non-fiction, Somerville's goal is to show how sexual and racialized identities were created through "repetition, resistance, and appropriation" (14).

In Chapter 1, Somervile focuses on race and sex in scientific and medical discourses. She utilizes a literary and historical method to conduct a textual and contextual analysis. Her goal is not to prove how racist or not racist the authors of the medical texts were, but "on how these writers and thinkers conceptualized sexuality through a reliance on, and deployment of, racial ideologies" (17). First, she explains the field of "sexology" as emerging in an effort to make medicine the definer of sexual "abnormalities" rather than the law. Thus, "deviant" sexual attraction (referred to as "inverted") shifted from being seen as "criminal" to "pathological." For example, the first terms used in this field to describe same-sex behavior were "Urnings" ("to describe the model of a female soul in a male body" (18)) and "contrary sexual feeling." One of the most important books to emerge from the field was Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion, which made some effort to "defend homosexuality from 'law and public opinion'" (19). Another essay, "The Intermediate Sex" by Edward Carpenter also tried to fight the stigma against homosexuality, and Carpenter's writings suggested that "inverts" were "'intermediate types' on a continuum of male and female characteristics" (20). Somerville notes that the audience for these writings extended beyond the medical field, and she sights one gay male as saying both works helped him understand his own sexuality. Sexology was challenged with the onslaught of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis which suggested that "homosexuality played a part, in differing degrees, in everyone's sexuality" (20).

From here, Somerville expands on evidence of scientific racism. She explains the meanings of two commonly held beliefs about race, monogeny and polygeny. Monogeny refers to the life that "all of the so-called races were members of the same species and that they had descended from common ancestry" (22), and polygenists believed that "different races were actually different species with distinct biological geographic origins" (22). Both were ways of maintaining white supremacy. Similarly, evolutionary models of race and sex were prevalent, including the idea that women and people of color weren't fully evolved in the stages of "evolutionary 'progress'" (24).

In what is perhaps the most disturbing part of the chapter, Somerville describes the horrifying method of "comparative anatomy," which "gave sexologist a ready-made set of procedures and assumptions with which to scan the body visually for discrete markers of difference" (25). This process enabled scrutinization and exploitation of bodies of color and women, but it was black women that were targeted most. The infamous image of the "Hottentot Venus" is an example of this kind of practice; scientists Flower and Murie focused on the "protuberance of the buttocks" and "the remarkable development of the labia minora" (26). Focusing on the sexed female body parts of women of color provided another way for race and sexuality to be simultaneously othered and objectified. Flowers and Murie's account of female genitalia as "appendages" also invoked a sexual and gender deviance in the African American women, invoking "the anatomy of a phantom male body inhabiting the lesbian's anatomical features" (29).

From here, Somerville explains that the eugenics movement as one that "advocated selective reproduction and 'race hygiene'" (30). Eugenics becomes another clear way to illustrate the connection between race and sexuality; Somerville notes that "eugenics was tied to the concerns of sexology, even though most eugenicists did not generally emphasize question of homosexuality" (31). Despite that blatant language against "inverts" wasn't common in eugenics literature, the hatred for all things "mixed" emphasized a disdain for same-sex practices. Mulattos, for example, were often seen as a threat to "white purity."

The next section of the chapter focuses on an article written by Margaret Otis called, "A Perversion Not Commonly Noted" (1913). In it, Otis writes about the same-sex relationships between black and white students at an all-girls school. Somerville asserts that the reason Otis found this important to write about is less about the same-sex "lovemaking" and more about the interracial element of the sex. Otis asserts that "the difference in color...takes place of the difference in sex" (36), and Somerville draws on other theorists who suggest that representations of lesbian desire "requires an added measure of difference, figured racially" (36).

In the conclusion, Somerville analyzes two more recent examples of race and sexuality construction through a reading of the 2000 Census and Leslie Feinberg's novel, Stone Butch Blues. Questions of language and interpellation emerge again, and Somerville notes that the history of the census has denied agency to people of color to name themselves; after only giving the option of "black" or "white" in the early 1900s, Sommerville explains that the 2000 census may be designed with a new "multiracial" category---(if anyone knows what ended up happening with this, I'd be curious to know!). Somerville then points out the way that race is a category that the government is willing to see as fluid, but gender is not. From there she brings in Feinberg's masterful novel (IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY, READ THIS BOOK!!!). She discusses ways that the gender non-conforming character Jess is simultaneously riddled with racialized elements to her narrative. From Jess' identification with Native American Dineh women who helped raise her, to her friendship with an African-American butch who provides Jess with W.E.B. DuBois' writing (which emerges at pivotal moments in the story), Feiberg "demonstrates how discourses of race have been available and indeed instrumental in providing a language and conceptual framework for [trangender] embodied subjectivity" (175).

Questions:
1. In the introduction, Somerville goes to great length to critique the absence of discussion of race in LGBT scholarship, and the absence of discussions of sexuality in literature about race. In light of that, I was surprised that Somerville makes no mention of class. Do you think that there is an absence of discussion about class in this text? When it is mentioned (such as in Ch 3 when she sidenotes that Hopkin's protagonists are middle class), does she do it in a way that explicitly problematizes how class identity intersects with race and sexuality? Is it okay that it isn't made more prominent since it's not the focus of the book, or is it an integral component to this history that shouldn't be ignored?
2. In Chapter 1, Somerville highlights the F.O. Matthiessen response to the sexology literature that helped him understand that "[he] was what [he] was by nature" (20). Clearly, I cringed at this response, but then felt guilty about cringing over someone's own experience/feeling. This reminded me of the conversations we've had about "skipping to step 3." What's at stake in the challenging of biological notions of sexuality being an essentially determined thing vs. a choice? I also thought of Butler and her belief that "possibility is as essential as bread" for those whose lives are made unintelligible. Did problematic sexology literature act as a form of "possibility" and "intelligibility" for this population? Is the evolution of "queer" a result of more time to be imaginative and the ability to create more possibilities?
3. Reading about the exploitation of black female genitalia reminded me of the discourse around female circumcision (or, more commonly called, "female genital mutilation"). How can we compare the very public campaigns about black female genitalia in the present to what was occurring in the early 20th century? Are there problematic parallels?
4. What other examples do we see of interracial homosexuality in contemporary popular culture? Do you agree that there is often an interracial element in the depictions of lesbian relationships in an effort to show difference? I can think of a whole lot of that on "The L Word"....Other examples?
5. Outside of the items discussed in the conclusion, what other contemporary examples can we understand through Somerville's framework more generally?

Chapter 2 of the book discusses the use of blackface and drag both in stage productions and in film. In this chapter, Somerville uses the story A Florida Enchantment to demonstrate how the the use of cross-dressing both on stage and in film, "evoked contemporary excitement and anxiety over changes in gender norms," (Somerville, 46). In the time that passed between the novel and the production of the film, gender ambiguity and cross-dressing became increasingly associated with "abnormal" sexual practices and homosexuality. The chapter discusses the differences in how the two "mannish" women conduct themselves sexually. Lawrence's white masculinity is portrayed as being within the limits of genteel codes of behavior, while Jack's sexuality is portrayed as uncontrollable and agressive.

The white women who attended these movies also become a topic of discussion. Somerville explains how their attendence was a product of a shifting economy. As the economy shifted to a consumer based economy, in which women were responsible for much of the purchasing, walls between the tradition male and female spheres began to break down. Women were now moving from the domestic sphere into the public, formerly male, sphere.

Chapter 3 focusses on race and homosexuality in Pauline E. Hopkins' fiction. In this section, Somerville explains that, "because African American women were associated with sexual accessability under slavery while white women were priveleged as sexually 'pure,' it was crucial for African American women to begin to redefine their own sexuality," (Somerville, 93). This chapter also discusses how love between women in literature is often difficult to decipher and has come to be labeled "romantic friendship". Almost always, these "romantic friendships" end it heterosexual endings for both female participants.

She also discusses a story of male homoerotic desire, cross-dressing and interracial relationships. Hopkins explores ideas of interracial and homosexual desire as a means of establishing African American female sexual freedom. Importantly, though, Somerville explains that "in stories of impersonation, the exposure of the 'true' identity of a character usually signals a return to the established social order of a fictional world," (104).

One of the most important elements of the conclusion is the focus on black/white, male/female, homo/hetero binaries.

Topics to discuss:
-connections between drag and blackface in terms of performance and identity
-how and why are binaries established? Why are binaries problematic?
-Homosocial vs. homosexual desire
-female movement into the public sphere
-the literary convention of heterosexual resolution

Sara starts class with a clip from Funny Girl "His Love Makes Me Beautiful"

Announcements: See Sara's blog entry from earlier today.

Pick your brain activity: Sara shows us a video a student posted in Politics of Sex on the topic of heteronormativity.
"Impasse (Reel 13)"
Reactions?
Sara asks is the video problematic? Does it buy into thinking of female bodies as hypersexualized? Raechel thinks that yes the film is problematic. Desire and attraction as a way to break down racist ideology as displayed in this context is problematic. The classroom seems to come to some agreement that the film is problematic. Sara asks whether it would be helpful to show this video to a classroom to expose heteronormativity? Reina reads the video as looking at the guy character as the "hero" and argues that each body is sexualized differently. Where he's protected, "he sees her completely", her role is contingent on his cues. We can only understand her through understanding him.

Two announcements:

1. In order to help you start thinking about your final project, you should post one blog entry about your project before spring break (by 3.8). This post should serve both as a way to document your preliminary thoughts on the project and as an opportunity to get feedback from the rest of the class. Shortly after spring break (the week of March 28- April 1, you will need to set up a time to meet with me to discuss your project. I will distribute a sign-up sheet soon. 

2. Come here Melody speak at the Feminist Spring Colloquium:

Presentation: "Frontin' Gangstas, Getting Down With Thyself: Hip Hop, Sexuality, and Feminism in Afrodite Superstar 

Date: Friday, February 18 Time: 2:00pm  

Location: 400 Ford Hall, East Bank

The topic for today's discussion is: Norms, Normativity and Aspiration

One goal that I have for our discussion of J Butler, J Jakobsen, D Taylor and R Ferguson is to disentangle norms from normal, normativity and normalization. 

• What do these different terms mean? 
• How are they connected in a network of relations (Ferguson) or through "working alliances" (Jakobsen)?
• How do they become conflated? Intertwined? 
• What are the implications of paying attention to how these terms function differently for queer/ing ethics projects?
• What do norms do? Can we imagine other ways of using them? Are norms necessary for ethics? 
• Do developing normative constructions/regulations/understandings of how to behave properly (how to be good, as opposed to bad) = ethics/morality?

Here are two clips from Funny Girl to consider: The Swan  

Sara reviewed important themes that come up through Butler and the notion of queer ethics in general. (See blog post below for list). We then watch three Judy clips!

Clip 1: Judy discusses how she reposes questions of grief, mourning, melancholia in relation to AIDS and the war in Iraq. What is a grievable life? Her questions become deepened and more complicated, but she doesn't try to reconcile her old and new writing/questions. "It's not a system, it's a process that's on its way."

Clip 2: Gender is about doing, acting, making, becoming. What are the various things we can do with gender? Now she's asking a different question: how do the norms that constitute gender do us and undo us...They make us but they also prevent us from making ourselves. We don't want to say "we never want to be undone again, we only want to undo ourselves." We are undone by other people; we don't always know ourselves. Be open to a future of what we cannot know.

Clip 3-"The Examined Life": Judith Butler&Sanaura Taylor (What does it mean to take a walk?)
Sanaura says that most disabled people will use the language of "taking a walk." She notes that SF is most accessible place in the world. More access means more socialability, acceptability. "Physical access leads to a social acceptance." There is discomfort that is caused when she does things with body parts that people don't think is their proper use. No one takes a walk without there being something that supports that walk outside of oneself. Maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is radically self-sufficient. We all have our own unique embodiments; then there's disability-social repression of disabled people. Socially and economically isolated. Disabling effects of society. Says it's a political protest to go into a coffee shop and demand help. "Help is something that we all need, but it's something that's looked down upon in our society." Judy says that gender and disability converge in a lot of ways; both get us to rethink what the body can do. Deleuze asks "what can a body do?" Challenge traditional ways we think about bodies. We are assemblages of our abilities/characteristics. The question is not what a body should look like. Tells the story of the effeminate walk leading to his murder. How could it be that someone's style of walking could engender the desire to kill a person? The walk could be a dangerous thing. The disabled body invokes hatred for being a reminder that we are going to age, to die.
Do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other? There's a challenge to individualism that happens in the moment you ask for assistance with the coffee cup.

Discussion:
Melody brought up the question of help versus agency. How does this relate to vulnerability or precariousness? How do we read and value precariousness? To recognize dependency is not to have agency. She does assert agency by asking the question. Remy suggests that it is important to also realize that not everyone in a wheelchair actually needs assistance. Does this make you more human to recognize their humanity as maybe needing it, maybe not needing it; should we risk embarrassment--is not asking a selfish act to protect our embarrassment?

Raechel asks the group: is this a political act to ask for help if the others don't recognize it as a challenge to individualism? Ashley suggests that individual forms of resistance create visibility, which can lead to structural change (like more public access). What does it mean for her to use body parts in ways they weren't "meant for." What kind of visibility disruption is caused through her picking up a coffee cup with her mouth? Remy recollects an image from their past when they saw someone using their feet to do different tasks, such as eating, and remembering that they felt weirded out/grossed out by that. They then make the connection to gender and how others respond to their gender as a similar thing, and gender visibility does create space for actual change. Remy challenges the word "individual" and prefers word "solo"--Sanaura's act impacts other people; it's not just about her. Liora points out that coffee is treated as a basic human need. Some agree that it is. : )

Sara P. asks: How can we think about Butler as a body? What are the implications of the mundane experiences we witness? What does this do to our thinking about ethics? (This reminds me of "Stars: they're just like us!" Is Us magazine challenging our ethics?) There are issues that non-normative bodies experience in the everyday experiences--dressing rooms, for example. Sarah and Ashley note that Victoria Secret, for example, demands a lot of rules, a lot of surveillance. Remy notes that waiting for bathrooms is a similar experience.

(In Yo' Face!/) Precarious Life
How do these clips connect to the readings? Let's talk about Levinas' face. Remy points out the quote: "That language communicates the precariousness of life that establishes the ongoing tension of a non-violent ethics" (139). Mary points us to, ".....language arrives as an address we do not will." Is the address the same as interpellation? Althusser discusses being hailed by authority, versus hailed by the Other.

*Mini-lecture on interpellation!: Althusser suggests that one is hailed or interpellated by authority. His example is of the police saying "hey you!" When you respond and recognize yourself as the 'you' in "hey you" makes you come into being.

Sara struggles with the "ethic of non-violence": that struggle between self-preservation and resisting urge to kill other in order to preserve other, as our "duty to the other" (132)? Sarah compares it to being a mother and growing an Other inside your body. There's no violence in pregnancy, in putting your fetus before yourself. Can we relate this to the coffee shop incident? Remy says that the coffee shop doesn't seem like a kill or be killed situation. Ashley thinks the Other is more intentionally villianized in the other readings, but the precarious life reading every Other is a being to be killed. Remy reminds us of his feelings about the foot-tasks--there are ways in which we're taught to having other-ing thoughts about not quite as obvious Others. Butler highlights that Levinas never says the face is; the face, verbless: "The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other" (quoting Levinas, 134). Also, recognizing the precariousness of the Other as just about the Other and not about your own precariousness means ethics is entwined with a removal of the ego. There is an interdependence that is necessary (we see this in the clip as well).

Undoing Gender. [let's face it. we're undone by each other.]
We point out, on pg. 3: "If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an "I" depends upon my being able to do something with what is done with me. This does not mean that I can remake the world so that I become its maker. That fantasy of godlike power only refuses the ways we are constituted, invariable and from the start, by what is before us and outside of us. My agency does not consist in denying this condition of my constitution. If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility."

I'm confused! I pipe up. She sounds all structural-isty. I want to figure out her theoretical foundation here. Is my reading Marx in this just wishful thinking? Sara responds (helpfully): Our agency comes through the excess (Derrida); we always have the possibility to do something to them differently, even though they're given to us. This chapter is heavily influence by post-Marxist, radical democracy Ernesto Laclau. We have to undergo this process without knowing where it will lead--this democratic process is always 'on the horizon.' Sara P remarks, "She's a whole lot of 'posts'!" Looking at structures is looking at failures or excess.

Remy adds a helpful passage, p.7: "Conversely (and as a consequence), it turns out that changing the institutions by which humanly viable choice is established and maintained is a prerequisite for the exercise of self-determination."

The notion of "the livable life" is a salient, important Butlerian theme. On pg 8: "What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is livable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some." Butler says we must "distinguish among the norms and conventions that permit people to breathe, to desire, to love, and to live, and those norms and conventions that restrict or eviscerate the conditions of life itself" (8). Remy and I talk about trickiness in policy language. In MN "gender identity and gender expression" are included under the "sexual orientation" human rights declaration. Is using Butler in policy a good idea? Must you know the rules first before you can break them, Remy asks?

Moving on (quickly through): "Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion Between Judith Butler and William Connolly" (2000)
Responding to critiques that Butler has no place for politics in her work. So Connolly asks what are the political ethics in what you do? Critics ask "how can we tell the difference between acts that resist and acts that reinforce; you give us no way to proceed, no political vision." But in not responding, Butler may be queering ethics. Is a way of doing queer ethics, though, a shift away of giving rules or norms, to doing something else. For Butler this means, "possibility." Butler goes on to say that we need to "understand the relation among...language, discourse, practice, institution" (10). She also draws on Foucault to talk about codes: "it is not possible to study this moral experience without understanding both the codes and the shifts that happen between and among them, and the modes of subjectivation and the shifts that happen between and among them" (11). Then, Butler on universality: "Those who enact the performative contradiction, weighing in on the side of the excluded, positing their ontological effects, not only deepen the impression of the exclusionary universality's spectrality, but enact an allegory, as it were, of those performative acts by which ontological effects are achieved within the field of politics"(17). Finally, builds on Foucault/critique: "Do you know up to what point you can know?...is there any way to think the limits without undergoing that danger? And for a political reflection on the future of universality, is there any way for this question that I have just posed to be anything other than open?" (18)

And, "Frames of War":
Butler in conversation with Sontag. Butler says that question isn't about good representation v. bad representation, or representation v. lack of representation, but rather being able to capture the failure to fully represent. Sontag says "Narratives can make us understand: photographs do something else. They haunt us" (quoting Sontag, 69). Butler says that narratives can haunt, and photographs can make us understand. Sara P brings up Ahmed to address the relationship between affect, emotion and theorizing? What is the value of "being haunted"? Mel says that she has been moved by photographs, so she doesn't agree with Sontag. Ashley brings up the passage on disgust, when Bush responds to the pictures as "disgusting." Butler asks, "why did he use that word, rather than wrong or objectionable or criminal?" (87). Melody thinks a good take away is to be aware how involved photographs actually are. Mel likes last line: "...the circulation of the image outside the scene of its production has broken up the mechanism of disavowal, scattering grief and outrage in its wake" (100). Sara wonders about the ethical value of care; "I want to pay attention/care about this."

I ask how we can put this in conversation with Egypt? Mary suggests maybe "precarious life" is more helpful to answer that question when Butler asks which "Other's" we respond to/not respond to.

fin.

*note: do not call her judy. this term is reserved for those to whom she is connected intimately. because she is my girlfriend, it makes sense that i would call her this. but if you try it, she may get kind of mean, a la her response to the 'zine, "judy!" (http://90swoman.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/judy-the-judith-butler-zine/)

Judith Butler: An Ethical "Evolution"?

Today serves as a small/partial introduction to J Butler's engagement with ethics. We are discussing excerpts from Undoing Gender, Precarious Life and Frames of War. We are also discussing an interview she did with William Connolly on ethics and politics. Here's what I want to do today:

• Brief overview of some influences/traditions that Butler draws upon
• Introduction, through video clips, to some key themes
• Close reading of essays/troubling passages

An Overview of some influences/traditions/themes

• Jewish Philosophy: Spinoza
• Hegel and recognition/Subjects of Desire
• Foucault
• Nietzsche
• Frankfurt School of Critical Theory: Adorno/Horkheimer
• Ernesto Laclau and Radical Democracy
• ACT UP, Queer Nation
• Althusser and interpellation
• Levinas and the face
• Intelligibility and recognition
• Ambivalence
• Anxiety/difficulty
• Grief, mourning, melancholy
• suffering
• AIDS
• 9/11
• Norms
• Non-violence
• Precariousness
• Bodies
• Livable life/possibility/unlivability
• Critique/dissent
• Unknowingness
• Trouble/being undone
• failure
• limits
• Agency/resistance
• Space/room to breathe/to live (freedom?)
• the human/non-human
• Struggle

Butler Speaks...

"It's not a system" (at 5:10) from Judith Butler: Philosopher Encounters of the Third Kind

What is meant by Undoing Gender? (2:27)

"What does it mean to take a walk?" (with Sunaura Taylor)

The focus of this week's readings are on the ethical "evolution" of Butler's work. I thought I would start an open thread to get us started thinking and reflecting. Here are a few questions:

1. How does Butler describe/discuss/imagine ethics in these readings?
2. What common themes do you see emerging in these essays?
3. How do they fit/don't fit?
4. Any particular passages that you want to read really closely on Tuesday?

Here's a clip from a documentary on Butler, Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind.

Here's a reminder about the diablog assignment:

Diablog (dialogue + blog = diablog) 200 points
You and one other class member are required to engage in an online dialogue via our blog and twitter. You will sign up to discuss one of the course readings. Over the course of one week you will each post summaries of the reading and then post comments, follow-up entries and/or tweet responses to each other. Then you will be responsible for our class discussion. Finally, you will post a collaborative summary of your diablog. Here's a breakdown of point totals for this assignment:

• Initial summary blog entry = 40 points
• Follow up posts = 60 points earned through combination of entries (@20 pts), comments (@10 pts) and tweets (@ 5 pts) [example: 1 entry + 3 comments + 2 tweets]
• Class presentation/discussion = 50 points
• Collective summary = 50 points

Sneak preview screening this Friday, February 4th, 7-9 pm, at the office of MN Transgender Health Coalition, Trans Youth Support Network, and Rare Productions, 3405 Chicago Ave S in Minneapolis.

Announcements:

Before we get to our discussion for today, a few announcements:

• Readings for next week will be posted on WebVista this evening
• Read Queering the Color line for Feb 22
• Questions about blog assignments? Diablog, etc?

Discussion:

Here are a few key passages from the authors that we read for this week. I'd like us to put them into conversation with each other as we critically reflect on what it might mean to "resist morality and the call to be good":

Halberstam:

If we want to make the antisocial turn in queer theory, we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zones of polite exchange to embrace a truly negative political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate.. (824).

Muñoz:

hope is spawned of a critical investment in utopia that is nothing like naive but, instead, profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present....The corrective I want to make by turning to utopia is attuned to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critique of the way in which paranoid reading practices have become so nearly automatic in queer studies that they have, in many ways, ceased to be critical....Utopian readings are aligned with what Sedgwick would call reparative hermeneutics (826).

Dean:

Nothing is more promisculously sociable, or intent on hooking up, than the part of our being separate from selfhood (827).

Edelman:

we must respond not only by insisting on our right to enjoy on an equal footing the various perogatives of the social order, not only by avowing our capacity to confirm the integrity of the social order by demonstrating the selfless and enduring love we bestow on the partners we'd gladly fly to Hawaii in order to marry or on the children we'd eagerly fly to China or Guatemala in order to adopt, but also by saying explicitly what Lave and the law of the symbolic he represents hear, more clearly even than we do perhaps, in every public avowal of queer sexuality or identity: fuck the social order and figural children paraded before us as its terroristic emblem; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Miz; fuck the poor innocent kid on the 'Net; fuck Laws both with capital "l's" and with small; fuck the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop (29).

Butler:

I've also worried that it [a turn to ethics] has meant a certain heightening of moralism and this has made me cry out, as Nietzsche cried out about Hegel, "Bad air! Bad air!" I suppose that looking for a space in which to breathe is not the highest ethical aspiration, but it is there, etymologically embedded in aspiration itself, and does seem to constituted something of a precondition for any viable, that is, livable, ethical reflection ("Ethical Ambivalence" 16).

The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it ("1990 Preface" vii)

Frye:

I am seeing the need for ethics in lesbian and feminist communities where I reside--understood as a need to know right from wrong, know the good, act rightly and be good--as a need particular to women trying to earn or maintain a certain status....this leads me to wonder if instead of seeking to create a lesbian ethics...we might consider learning to do without ethics entirely (58).

Now, some questions:

• How do these different authors describe ethics? How are they positioning themselves in relation to ethics?
• What does it mean to be good? How does goodness connect with status and citizenship?
• Should "goodness" be a goal for (queer) ethics?
• What would it mean to "do without ethics"? How can this be accomplished?
• What might an ethics of "fucking shit up" (a la Halberstam) look like? Is this a version of learning to do without ethics? How else can we imagine a project of cultivating selves/communities who don't need ethics?

Annie and the ethics of reproductive futurism?