oh, judith butler

from gender trouble

"the political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression of womyn has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination.  that form of feminist theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-western cultures to support highly western notions of oppression, but because they tend as well to construct a 'third world' or even an 'orient' in which gender oppression in subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, non-western barbarism.  the urgency of feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism's own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a categorial or fictive universality of the structure of domination, held to produce womyn's common subjugated experience."

"are the specificity and integrity of womyn's cultural or linguistic practices always specified against and, hence, within the terms of some more dominant cultural formation? ... the masculine/feminine binary constitutes not only the exclusive framework in which that specificity can be recognized, but in every other way the 'specificity' of the feminine is once again fully decontextualized and separated off analytically and politically from the constitution of class, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power relations that both constitute 'identity' and make the singular notion of identity a misnomer."

"contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism.  perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative valence.  to make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble.  the rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: 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.  as time went by, further ambiguities arrived on the critical scene.  i noted that trouble sometimes euphemized some fundamentally mysterious problem usually related to the alleged mystery of all things feminine.  i read beauvoir who explained that to be a womyn within the terms of a masculinist culture is to be a source of mystery and unknowability for men, and this seemed confirmed somehow when i read sartre for whom all desire, problematically presumed as heterosexual and masculine, was defined as trouble.  for that masculine subject of desire, trouble became a scandal with the sudden intrusion, the unanticipated agency, of a female 'object' who inexplicably returns the glance, reverses the gaze, and contests the place and authority of the masculine position.  the radical dependency of the masculine subject on the female 'other' suddenly exposes his autonomy as illusory.  that particular dialectical reversal of power, however, couldn't quite hold my attention- although others surely did.  power seemed to be more than an exchange between subjects or a relation of constant inversion between subject and an other; indeed, power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame for thinking about gender."

"laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable for feminism."

"her/his performance [divine in the john waters' film female trouble] destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about gender almost always operates."

"the mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes.  that is no reason not to use, and be used by, identity.  there is no political position purified of power, and perhaps that impurity is what produces agency as the potential interruption and reversal of regulatory regimes."