Final Thesis Thoughts: Critically Queer and Imitation

In this final post, I want to consider how the bathhouse door policies limit or expand a notion of queer implicit in the formulation of the space via last session’s text material. Before addressing this question, I want to point to one passage in ‘Critically Queer’ from Bodies That Matter(BTM) that gets back to my recognition problem posed in the last post. Butler writes,

I can only say ‘I’ to the extent that I have first been addressed, and that address has mobilized my place in speech; paradoxically, the discursive condition of social recognition precedes and conditions the formation of the subject: recognition is not conferred on a subject, but forms that subject. Further, the impossibility of a full recognition, that is, of ever fully inhabiting the name by which one’s social identity is inaugurated and mobilized, implies the instability and incompleteness of subject formation (BTM 225-226).

As discussed in the last session, this passage is extended and nuanced in both Giving an Account of Oneself and Excitable Speech. When posing my earlier question regarding recognition and a particular trans subject, I think I overlooked this argument both in the context of this work and her later work. This argument illuminates the problem of recognition via its relation to unstable and constantly changing subject formations. Hence, where one should seek (proper) recognition is not the central question. Instead, as Butler argues, there is an impossibility of full recognition in the first place due to the difficulty of fully inhabiting the various interpellations one is afforded.

Also, as a quick response to Marie’s last post, I want to make clear that I was not trying to raise a one-sided anxiety of the political paralysis (tied to a loss of intelligibility and recognizability) that might occur when dis-identifying (although, looking back on my own words, I understand how this misunderstanding could arise). What I was trying to suggest with my dis-identification argument is that, like most identifications, it is accompanied by a dual enabling and constraining motion. The constraining aspect is, of course, the anxiety. (Dis)identifications, however, also have the enabling ability to critically position those terms we are afforded within the power relations that cast them. In other words, in dis-identifying, participants might be encouraged to BOTH critically ask why they dis-identify (to expand the parameters of thinkability) while at the same time, comfortably or uncomfortably residing in those dis-identifications for the sake of a pleasure derived precisely from becoming or being unintelligible. Also, below I highlight Butler’s performativity argument in BTM, and I think that too, responds to Marie’s suggestion that a dis-identification might risk becoming normative.

As mentioned in the previous post, The Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee (TWBC) indicates that events like these are purposeful political projects intended to dismantle preconceived and constraining notions of women’s sexualized and gendered selves. The TWBC traces these preconceived ideas back to a particular lesbian feminist ideology of the 1980s which created a politic that moved away from the freedom of sexual expression, emphasized a gendered code of sexual passivity, and berated (for example) butch and SM-loving lesbians for imitating heteronormative gender sex matrices. Accordingly, the TWBC and the organizers in Halifax continue to develop a spatial strategy which seeks to queer women’s sexualities within the bathhouse space. I want to address how this queering is deployed and what kind of limitations and possibilities it facilitates.

The organizers deploy a slippery notion of queer within their formulation and constitution of the space. I understand the deployment as slippery via the numerous inconclusive debates that occur among organizers and participants regarding the mission statement of the bathhouse. These inconclusive debates primarily concern the door policy. I want to suggest that the deployment of queer as a concept within the space is at once enabling and constraining. I also want to preface my discussion of queer. It seems to me that within queer theory, queer activism, and queer studies (three arenas I see as distinct though often attempt to overlap one another), everyone deploys the word queer while everyone means something a little bit different. I understand both a conflation of queer theory into queer activism (and reversed) and the sharp desire to make the two distinct as dangerous moves that displace theory’s unique impact on practice. However, as an attempt at clarity, in this post I want to consider queer as a concept in relation to these bathhouses in an effort to determine what sort of social work that theoretical position might influence. Due to this departure, I hope to avoid signifying queer as a (dis)identification and instead position queer as a productive critique of those (dis)identifications.

Informed primarily by the work of Michael Warner, David Halperin and Judith Butler, I understand queer as a concept appearing in a constant state of flux, molded from prior usages in ways that can never be delimited in advance. The concept functions as something always contested, something always ripe with questions of power, and thus, as something that often plays itself out politically either discursively or ‘on the ground’. As Butler writes,

If the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes . . . in ways that can never be fully anticipated in advance . . . The political deconstruction of ‘queer’ ought not to paralyze the use of such terms, but, ideally, to extend its range, to make us consider at what expense and for what purposes the terms are used, and through what relations of power such categories have been wrought (BTM 228-9).

I preoccupy myself with this question of deploying ‘queer’ within the bathhouse space in an effort to determine what kinds of social transformation can come from this dual motion (enabling and constraining). Although I am aware that these questions might not necessarily immediately spark some huge revolutionary change in how we come to understand certain bodies, I do believe the questions that queer as a concept raises in relation to these sites contributes to a rethinking of heteronormative codes.

First, the claim of gender imitation. Researchers working in these spaces have been relentlessly preoccupied with the negative consequences of sexual and gender imitation as it relates to the door policies. These researchers point to the regulatory implications of heterosexual imitation in the sites and with this claim I take issue. They ask how a space can transgress heteronormative codes when the most visible identification in that space is one that is traditional and heterosexual (for them, a butch-femme configuration). They conclude that imitation is politically regressive and that it upholds traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity, rather than dismantling those traditionalist constructions all together. Presumably, for them, a ‘proper’ deployment of queer should dismantle those constructions. Our last session readings highlight the danger of such a claim. Butler writes,

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. . . the naturalistic effects of heterosexualized genders are produced through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phantasmatic ideal of heterosexuality, one that is produced by the imitation as its effect . . . If heterosexuality is an impossible imitation of itself, an imitation that performatively constitutes itself as the original, then the imitative parody of ‘heterosexuality’ –when and where it exists in gay cultures—is always and only an imitation of an imitation, a copy of a copy, for which there is no original. . . It is important to recognize the ways in which heterosexual norms reappear within gay identities, to affirm that gay and lesbian identities are not only structured in part by dominant heterosexual frames, but that they are not for that reason determined by them. They are running commentaries on those naturalized positions as well, parodic replays and resignifications of precisely those heterosexual structures that would consign gay life to discursive domains of unreality and unthinkability . . . The parodic replication and resignifcation of heterosexual constructs within non-heterosexual frames . . . shows that heterosexuality only constitutes itself as the original through a convincing act of repetition. The more that ‘act’ is expropriated, the more the heterosexual claim to originality is exposed as illusory (‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ 127-130).

Here, Butler’s argument indicates the performative nature of all identifications and thus, that gender imitation is always a copy of a copy rather than a copy of some perceieved original. Butler’s argument that heterosexuality as an original construction is illusory brings a sense of agency to those subject-positions potentially present within the space of the bathhouse under its own terms and conditions. The passage illuminates the danger of the claims made by these social science researchers—if, for example, butch-femme constructions are read as blueprints of traditional heterosexual replication, then we run the risk of reading those phantasmatic ideals as somehow original and natural. Additionally another researcher objects to the idea that the sort of space building and the sort of expressions fostered at Pussy Palace and SheDogs are an instance (imitation) of gay male behavior; the impact to her argument suggests that the bodies playing in these sites are rendered passive and manageable via this comparison which again runs the risk of not deploying queer ‘properly’. Although, this researcher also engages the above Butler citation in her work, I argue that she and I understand these passages differently. By formulating an understanding of identifications and gender based on Butler’s arguments in this way, it is possible to understand the subject-positions that play in the bathhouse as chained iterations with specific histories and particular citations. In this sense, there seems to be no real danger in citing either heterosexual or gay male practices; instead, each citation intervenes in the larger discussion regarding the possibility for new (dis)identifications to emerge. In this sense, citational thinking illuminates how identifications are at once enabling and constraining via the phantasmatic ideals that inform those constructions. This dual motion complicates the level of predictability in the bathhouse setting and nuances how particular identifications come to intervene in existing dominant discourses sometimes with possibility, sometimes with perimeter. In response to these researchers, I would say it is not a question of ‘proper deployment’ but rather, a question of a particular deployment that largely depends on at what points those identifications enable the intelligibility of new and emerging selves and at what points the language of the citation might constrain that emergence.

Second, the question of trans inclusion. The TWBC and Halifax organizers highlight on their websites and promotional materials that the bathhouses are for women, regardless of sexual identification, as well as for those whose gender exceeds a normative reading of woman. Under the ‘FAQ’ section of the Shedogs bathhouse website, the following question is posed: “What does that mean anyway, ‘women and transfolks’?” The answer reads,

It means that the bathhouse strives to welcome lots of people who couldn't go to Seadog's [the male-only bathhouse which runs year round] on most other nights. It is a woman-positive space, and embraces those of us who come for the opportunity to celebrate and revel in our sexiness as women, whether we are lesbian, bi, straight, and/or trans. The bathhouse also welcomes those who feel that they don't fit conventional definitions of sex, gender or sexual orientation; are between genders; or neither gender... whether we call ourselves bois, grrrls, butches, bitches, genderqueers, or nothing at all (http://shedogs.ca/faq.php).

This passage illuminates Butler’s imitation argument cited above; the language used suggests the difficulty of categorizing gendered and sexualized selves. Recognizing the performative characteristic of all (dis)identifications, both on the discursive level and in practice, is an example of how queer as a concept may be deployed. If the (dis)identifications referred to in this quotation are understood as performative, the difficult categories such as ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian’ become situated within a frame that considers referentiality, a concept we discussed in Butler’s Excitable Speech. This consideration speaks to the very instability of queer and what questions the concept itself might raise. Reading (dis)identifications as performative already suggests a sort of unstable politics, an in-flux resistance to naturalized identity categories, while simultaneously fostering a constantly changing language that operates in accordance with those new and emerging (dis)identifications (those that illuminate the ‘problem’ of performativity and referentiality). Democratizing a politics that depends on queer as a concept hinges on the possibility to construct spaces in ways that resist narrow and constrained preconceived notions of identity. Because Shedogs and the Pussy Palace constantly engage in considerations of for whom the bathhouse is intended and continues to expand their definition of woman-positive and, in turn, queer, the space can be read as a transformative location—one that is under a constant enabling renovation.

I also want to suggest that the Pussy Palace and SheDogs events constrain a deployment of queer as a concept. As briefly mentioned in my last post, Pussy Palace explicitly excludes cismen. This exclusion, based on the idea that cismen are presumably legible and thus afforded social space elsewhere, highlights how a deployment of queer is constrained at the door. Here I imagine a queer-identified cisgender man. Because he is cisgender, he is presumably ‘easily readable,’ though his queer identification complicates this categorization of intelligibility. He very well may be woman-positive and seek out various non-normative sexual desires including those not found in typical gay male bathhouses; those desires might include mutual leather and SM-loving with butch women. For him, his desire to enter a space that might offer that sort of play, both Pussy Palace and SheDogs, is denied on account of his apparent intelligibility as a biological man who identifies as man, one that is neither formerly, presently, nor intends in the future to perform female-bodiedness. The exclusion resists a deployment of queer in the sense that the cisman is not approached indeterminately; rather, the specific exclusion of cismen suggests that those working the door have the capacity to approach and determine what bodies are presumably legible as cismen and thus not allowed in at the door. The presumption of legibility is based on biologically determined readings of the body that might reflect gender identifications, though neglects to consider asymmetrical sexual identifications. If queer were deployed differently in this instance, it would suspend immediate judgment and reconsider that presumption. This confrontation creates a social space that facilitates questions regarding embodiment, performativity, referentiality, and the (dis)identifications of new and emerging selves. For example, how do we come to make legible those desires of cismen who complicate the heteronormative gender/sex matrix? Without places like SheDogs and Pussy Palace, the above scenario of confrontation would never occur in the first place. The cisman who attempts to enter on account of his sexual desire and subsequent sexual identifications challenges the normative in such a way that asks how queer as a concept can expand to include new and emerging (dis)identifications. These questions within queer theory are so compelling and provocative that they encourage a continued rethinking of embodiment, performativity, and non-normative sexualities in actual (often political) spaces.

From Opacity to Legibility

Re-reading the first posts of this blog pushes me to draw a metaphorical bridge between the beginning and the end of our reading of Judith Butler’s thoughts and theories. In fact, I believe that the bridge is begging to be written down, being in the end but a very logical step in Butler’s theoretical approach.

We started with the notions of opacity and transparency, subject formation and dispossession, with the notion of the necessity to recognize the unacknowledged and un-acknowledgeable side both of the self and of the other. We ended our seminar with notions of intelligibility, eligibility and recognition.

Intelligibility, eligibility and recognition are again three notions demanding that we look very closely and attentively at what is being precisely meant. To sum up it short, it can be said that in order to be eligible, one must be recognized and intelligible. Recognition goes back to the scene of address, in which someone gives an account of oneself to an addressee. It is the moment when someone is being recognized as existing in all his/her differences and shared qualities. It is thus the moment when opacity is put at play, at least if the encounter succeeds in performing some ethical rules; for as Butler expresses it in Undoing Gender, “recognition implies that we see the Other as separate, but as structured psychically in ways that are shared” (UG 132). These “ways that are shared” refer to the state of shared vulnerability that becomes central within ethical encounters.
Intelligibility is that which gives a subject the possibility to be understood in the realm of language. It is that which gives the subject a place in a system/frame that is being (theoretically/intellectually) thought. Legibility is that which enables a subject to claim rights, i.e. to politically claim his/her recognizability and intelligibility.[1] In order to be legible, one must thus acknowledge a certain identity—be it provisionally. The complex and two fold aspect of such an acknowledgement is to be read in the following excerpt of Undoing Gender:

I want to maintain that legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will and will not count as an intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship. (UG 117)

Note that Butler insists on the “critical and transformative relation to the norms”. The importance of this transformative factor echoes the temporality of interpellation, i.e. the temporality of the effects of norms that produce a subject. A subject’s identity is thus something that is constantly transforming, being redefined again and again due to an infinite process of iteration and transformation (see Excitable Speech). Identity is thus an effect of the re-iteration process through history. This takes us back to the beginning of our discussion again, where we discussed the irrecoverability of the subject’s origin; for the process of infinite reiteration in performative identity forming disables any ontological quest all the same.

In my first post, I discussed the irrecoverability fo origin in relation to the Deleuzian notions of difference and repetition. These Deleuzian notions are echoed in “Imitation and Gender in Subordination”, as Butler appears to have chosen to quote Deleuze as heading to her essay. The quote goes as follows:

Beyond physical repetition and the psychical or metaphysical repetition, is there an ontological repetition?... This ultimate repetition, this ultimate theater, gathers everything in a certain way; and in another way, it destroys everything; and in yet another way, it selects from everything. (IGS 120)

The quote reminds us of the intrinsic complexity of subject formation. In fact, it is precisely this complexity that calls for an acknowledgment of opacity in our relation with others; for if the origin is indeed irrecoverable due to a process of repetition and difference, it means that not only the origin is irrecoverable, but also that only a partial part of the subject can be knowable. Therefore, identity will always remain provisional—and strategic (IGS 123). For be it in the context of gender activism, in the context of terrorism or in the context of injurious speech or excitable speech, it appears that we never can account for a subject’s identity without doing him/her some violence. Yet again, this identity remains sometimes necessary in order to maintain the subject’s legibility, i.e. the subject’s possibility to actively resist certain systems of powers.
This idea of a necessary error of identity had already been raised by Michaela in her comment to my post “Who is the Opaque Subject?” (March, 2nd), where we discussed the problematic of the opaque subject vs. the transparent subject in the frame of (medical) institutions. The problem that was then encountered was that identity appeared to be imposed on subjects who had been defined as pathologized in advance, thereby also preventing them to give an account of themselves as opaque subjects, the discourse accompanying these medical institutions being in fact utterly dominant and restrictive. The difference that can be observed between those discursive “victims” of medical institutions and people who consciously endorse a certain identity for political purposes is that the latter can be done strategically, whereas the former is usually viciously imposed on people who have been identified as having the so-called Down Syndrome—or other pathological syndromes.
Can it be suggested that in both cases, the subject is being dispossessed of himself/herself? In fact, in both cases, the subject appears to endorse an identity that submits him/her to certain norms of recognition.
Yes, perhaps; for it still seems important to distinguish between imposed identity and “self-chosen” identity. In fact, can an imposed identity also be accounted as a strategic endorsement in order to have some claim to legal and political rights? Isn’t it rather a case of radical dispossession, in which the subject is being threatened by ethical violence? It seems in fact that such an imposed identity leaves but very little room for resistance from an opaque point of view.

In “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification” (PLP), Butler gives a reading of the subject formation through a dialogue between Foucault and Freud. Quoting Foucault in the following terms, Butler accounts for the necessity to constantly revise our interpretation of who we are:

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind”, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. … We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. (PLP 101)

Michaela already raised an anxious question with regards to this dis-identification practice suggested here (see Michaela’s post of June, 7th). Her fear was that such dis-identification would eventually lead to a loss of recognition and intelligibility on the part of the subject (a tension that Butler herself also raises in Undoing Gender). This might be true if the dis-identification is definitive, i.e. if the dis-identification becomes normative; for dis-identification would then lead the subject to accept a continuous state of exception that may foreclose him/her from any legibility due to a lack of intelligibility and recognition. To compare it with another Butlerian query, it may be the same impasse as postponing judgment indefinitely. For in fact, isn’t it that judging is one possible way to impose a certain identity on someone?
The anxiety of loss of recognition and intelligibility can perhaps be resolved through a reading of dis-identification that leans on Butler’s performativity theory exposed in Excitable Speech. What pushes me to this reading is the following paragraph found in The Psychic Life of Power:

… the signifiers of identity are not structurally determined in advance. If Foucault could argue that a sign could be taken up, used for purposes counter to those for which it was designed, then he understood that even the most noxious terms could be owned, that the most injurious interpellations could also be the site of radical reoccupation and resignification. (PLP 104)

What Butler suggests here is that we should look at identity in terms of signifiers, i.e. in terms of language—thereby also restating her strong anchor in the psychoanalytic tradition. What she states is that whatever signifiers of identity might have been imposed on the subject by a regime of power, there should always remain some room for the subject to take distance and re-appropriate those signifiers in a subversive way. Yet, what if the signifiers of identity keep being imposed on a subject again and again? Isn’t it that the room to maneuver becomes smaller and smaller? To a certain extend, yes. Yet, there should always remain some room in which the subject should be able to perform a subversive reversal, be it only due to his/her own impossibility of to know himself/herself totally.
Ideally, the subject would indeed always have the power to provisionally accept the rules of subjectification and the violence of a certain transparency through identity. The provisional aspect of such an identification would then preserve a dialogue between the self and the subject, thereby also safeguarding a certain degree of opacity, which is according to Butler—and I profoundly sympathize with this view!—the primary ground for any ethical encounter to take place. So, however profound and personal the notion of identity may be, its expression and its practice remain a matter of relationality, being thereby directed toward the others; for as Butler has it,

it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to oneself, and if those relations to others are the venue for one’s ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds. (GAAO 20)


To conclude—which I can’t, what can I say more than to express a genuine wish to see one’s ethical responsibilities be taken in juridical-political institutions, expressing the recognition of a narrow bound between opacity and legibility. Hopefully we’ll come there. Hopefully.


[1] Note that ‘legible’ is defined as readable or decipherable in English dictionaries. Butler proves to use a slightly different meaning of the word by giving it a political content. Nonetheless, her usage of the word still directly refers to readability or decipherability due to its narrow connection with the notions of intelligibility and recognizability.

Constituting Recognitions

I’d like to respond to Michaela in this post as well as to extend our discussion of sexual coalitional politics by reconciling the space of the bathhouses mentioned with the discourses (de)mobilized via Prop 8 in California.

First, in ‘More Thesis Thoughts’ Michaela posits that the sexual-political goals of the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee, and, by extension, the bathhouse events offered, are “purposeful political projects intended to dismantle preconceived and constraining notions of women’s sexualized and gendered selves.” Michaela reads this alongside Butler’s account of psychic resistance within sexual subject formation in PLOP: that sexuality is the continuous ebb and flow of resistance and emergence, enablement and constraint, and therefore “speaks to the types of resistance available for deployment, especially within queer activism.” Representability is Michaela’s central concern, and she seeks answers to how those strategies of extending representability in the space of the bathhouse foster simultaneous exclusions to other forms of representation and intelligibility. Her penultimate question of this give-and-take recognition in bathhouses, asking “if excluded, is this to say that you are part of the prohibiting mechanism?”, leaves me feeling profoundly unsettled and eager to respond.

So, in grappling some of these concerns myself, its my sense that within this ‘enabling and constraining’ paradigm and within Butler’s meditations on resistance, there exists a space for one to extemporize sexuality and desire. Yes, in going to the bathhouse and being conscious of the door policy, one would be part of the prohibiting mechanism, but probably to the same extent I’m personally part of a prohibiting mechanism whenever I choose a toilet marked ‘Heren’ or ‘Dames’. If the TWBC is explicitly politicized against this “particular lesbian feminist ideology”, as Michaela affirms, then perhaps the operative questioning would be to interrogate what purpose the reanimation of biologically-based (mis)recognitions like ‘cismen’ serves within the contemporary political horizon? Yes, there’s an initial prohibition on ‘cismen’ at the bathhouses, and yes, this would seem to undercut the larger political project of the TWBC. However, I think we need to look past the explicit slogans rallied by the TWBC to see what kind of social work is being ‘done’ within these spaces; that is, these lovely ‘G-spot rooms,’ masturbation circles, private rooms, and ‘sexy’ labyrinths provide, and, indeed, incite, space for both unrepresentable and emergent sexualities to articulate themselves in unanticipated ways. Those new recognitions, new desires, and sexy surprises emerge precisely because the policy is both enabling and constraining. And that’s a warm fuzzy feeling. It reminds me of the opening section of UG (‘Acting in Concert’) where Butler positions gender as an “improvisation within a scene of constraint,” as well as our discussion of subject opacity in GAAOO, where the dispossession of the ‘I’ does not the end of political claims but instead opens and realizes them as relational and therefore a “question of so much more than the two of us” (UG 151). The rethinking of desire and recognition in this capacity does not entail a return to sexuality per se, but it does thankfully dislodge us from grander strategic political narratives of Freedom and Progress.

Second, to a similar extent, the TWBC problem is closely related to the Strauss case: what is the door policy on constitutional rights in California? Well, from 1911 onwards (when the process of popular initiative constitutional amendments became possible) the door policy could be considered to fall under the rubric of ‘popular sovereignty’ (both this view and the process it entails is warranted in the Strauss dissent by J Moreno). That is, aside from the normal legislative process to amend constitutional rights, it’s a majority rule situation, which presents its own sets of enabling and constraining conditions. But how do we make legible to a majority of California’s population desires and forms of sexual relations that are yet ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘unknown’ already (even though they may be already socially practiced)? Getting fifteen million voters on the same page as you is a tall order. Is the discourse of Equal Protection—in both its legal and vernacular circulation—elastic enough to bring different forms of recognition within its symbolic sanctuary? Care to wager on that? One the one hand, Strauss shows the ugly side of coalitional politics, where people gather to install exclusions on civic performativity; on the other hand, the sheer number of popular initiative constitutional amendments in California’s history coupled with the current discourses of outrage from same-sex marriage advocates makes certain Prop 8 will have an imminent expiration date.

But, of course, framing it that way is itself the seduction of coalitional politics, because this legal ‘debate’ is all a red herring (especially for Butler, see PL 25 and UG 20 again). The above outlined ‘gameplan’ to overturn Prop 8 (a perspective paralleled in J Moreno’s Strauss dissent), where coalitions come together in the initiative process to amend/repeal the Prop 8 amendment—by way of individuals’ ‘finding themselves’ and working towards specific ends, goals—perhaps advances along the same imaginary track as the TWBC. That is, how Michaela’s quandary of creating desires to meet the needs of a political end-result necessitates exclusions. Yet, what if it’s not about a ‘turn to the state’ so much as its about a turning to one’s neighbors, a turning toward new forms of kinship, a turn toward expressing those already existing unrepresentable forms of kinship, one which relies on the emergence of intelligibilities instead of a resistance to its legal prohibitions? For political action and social transformation, I think this is closer to Butler’s counsel that we have to “think politics from such a site of unrepresentability” (UG 106, emph mine).

This is about remaking one’s own world and urging its contamination within the dominant ‘popular’ ‘lexicon of legitimation’, not the other way round.

Recognition, Resistance, and Exclusion: More Thesis Thoughts

[In this post I return to the two previous session texts, The Psychic Life of Power (PLOP) and Undoing Gender (UG), and consider questions of resistance, recognition and exclusion, which are all central to my third thesis chapter. Throughout the post I deposit some questions with which I still struggle and welcome any and all feedback.]

Tim’s post “Constitutions, Recognitions” speaks to the recent Prop 8 ruling in California in conjunction with Butler’s kinship and recognition chapters in Undoing Gender. He posits the problem of coalitional politics when it is rallied to create exclusions and suggests that the exclusions occurring within the Prop 8 debates are so purposeful that one is brought to the voting booth to legally sediment those exclusions. In this post I want to consider something similar. I also concern myself with coalitional politics, though my preoccupation is with those coalitional movements that seek to include as many as possible in the face of prior limitation. The type of politics that unfolds in these scenarios, however, often also enacts a certain level of exclusion. Like Tim’s argument, those exclusions often play out within the frame of political resistance and the problem of recognition.

As mentioned in my previous post, the third chapter of my thesis considers two lesbian and trans folk bathhouses both of which exist in Canada. These spaces are both similar and different from ‘traditional’ gay male sex bathhouses which exist internationally. The events, ‘The Pussy Palace’ and ‘The SheDogs Bathhouse’, occur irregularly a few times a year in Toronto Ontario and Halifax Nova Scotia, respectively. The bathhouse events are intended to provide spaces supportive of casual social-sexual encounters and they cater to those women and trans bodies that formerly, presently, or in the future identify with some sort of female-bodiedness. When the events do occur, they reappropriate male bathhouse spaces and translate through citation a version of those gay male sites. The events include ‘women-of-color’ nights, ‘G-spot rooms,’ masturbation circles, private rooms, a ‘sexy’ labyrinth, and various sex workshops. Both transmen and transwomen are welcome with the only explicit exclusion being cismen. For the organizers, cismen refer to those individuals biologically categorized as male at birth and as a consequence identify as men. This classification is considered as synonymous with non-transgendered and non-transsexual men. Additionally, The Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee (TWBC) indicates that events like these are purposeful political projects intended to dismantle preconceived and constraining notions of women’s sexualized and gendered selves. The TWBC traces these preconceived ideas back to a particular lesbian feminist ideology of the 1980s which created a politic that moved away from the freedom of sexual expression, emphasized a gendered code of sexual passivity, and berated (for example) butch and SM-loving lesbians for imitating heteronormative gender sex matrices.

In chapter four of The Psychic Life of Power, Butler quotes Foucault on resistance at length. In the session, we read this particular passage closely. For the purposes of my third chapter object, the bathhouse events, I find the first and last lines of the quotation compelling. Butler citing Foucault writes, “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are . . . We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (PLOP 101). First, I think this is the very idea which influences Butler’s chapter on the enabling and constraining characteristic of the state sanctioned marriage debate in Undoing Gender. Second, this passage speaks to the types of resistance available for deployment, especially within queer activism. Because I understand the construction of these bathhouse events as a nod towards a particular queer activism/politics, I find the idea to refuse who we are also as at once enabling and constraining (as a side note, I intend to blog on this problem of the deployment of queer within the bathhouse events next week in conjunction with our reading of “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” and “Critically Queer”).

Although dis-identifying can certainly be understood as a way of identifying, I am left with this question: how are we to do activism and render tangible political movements when we constantly refuse who we are, risking unintelligibility and the lack of recognition. This is the tension raised by Butler in Undoing Gender. She writes,

Here a normative crisis ensues. On the one hand, it is important to mark how the field of intelligible and speakable sexuality is circumscribed, so that we can see how options outside of marriage are becoming foreclosed as the unthinkable, and how the terms of thinkability are enforced by the narrow debates over who and what will be included in the norm. On the other hand, there is always the possibility of savoring the status of unthinkability, if it is a status, as the most critical, the most radical, the most valuable. As the sexually unrepresentable, such sexual possibilities can figure the sublime with the contemporary field of sexuality, a site of pure resistance, a site unco-opted by normativity. But how does one think politics from such a site of unrepresentability? (UG 106).

To clarify, I think this problem of unrepresentability lies at the center of the bathhouse events. Because the organizers are constantly committed to allowing participants to dis-identify, this above passage becomes illuminated every time. In dis-identifying, participants might be encouraged to both critically ask why they dis-identify while at the same time, taking the dis-identifcation as a radical and possibilizing given (a site of pure resistance). Additionally and on the other hand, some of the organizers and participants point to the events as a place where one can ‘find oneself’ and ‘be who you really are.’ Although potentially politically empowering, I wonder how this sort of discourse relates to not discovering who we are, but refusing who we are. How do political projects that allow you to ‘find yourself’ compare with those political projects that allow you to ‘refuse who you are’? On a personal note, to which space would YOU be more drawn? On a utopian note, wouldn’t a happy medium of the two be wonderfully fabulous?! (Somehow I consider the bathhouse events as spaces where that happy medium has the potential to critically unfold).

The bathhouses depart from a particular politics which installs the space as a site of resistance to those limitations that come in the form of hetero-patriarchy and particular lesbian feminist ideologies. This particular strategic resistance (rather than say a general, multi-faceted emergence), thus, only welcomes a certain subject into the space which fosters a level of exclusion. Through my research, I have discovered that Pussy Palace and SheDogs are primarily for those ‘part of the sex-positive queer culture’. Hence, the very resistance deployed in these spaces has the potential to subjectivize a particular sexuality. How this subjectivization leads to identity is problematic. Butler writes,

For Foucault, a subject is formed and then invested with a sexuality by a regime of power. If the very process of subject-formation, however, requires a preemption of sexuality, a founding prohibition that prohibits a certain desire but itself becomes a focus of desire, then a subject is formed through the prohibition of a sexuality, a prohibition that at the same time forms this sexuality—and the subject who is said to bear it. . . In this sense, a ‘sexual identity’ is a productive contradiction in terms, for identity is formed through a prohibition on some dimension of the very sexuality it is said to bear, and sexuality, when it is tied to identity, is always in some sense undercutting itself (PLOP 103-4).

It is my sense that this is similar to the movement of subject-formation within the bathhouse events. Because the spaces are purposeful political projects that seek to resist limitations (prohibitions) like hetero-patriarchy and particular lesbian feminist ideologies (which often demand stable identities), a particular type of subject is formed behind the door of the events and subsequently a particular type of subject is excluded from even entering. Given this movement, I am left with this question: if excluded, is this to say that you are part of the prohibiting mechanism?

Additionally, although the door policy is explicit in its inclusion of trans folks, the question of recognizing those bodies is precariously situated. The question of recognition becomes problematic within the bathhouse space when there is a failure of mutual, multi-directional desire and a failure to make legible particular bodies. Although the organizers continue to work on trans-inclusion, some trans participants have voiced their concerns. Whether explicitly or implicitly vocalized at the events, sentiments such as “‘So, like, are you the token fag?’; Are you an honorary woman for the night? . . . ‘Is that a man?’” indicate that all those who enter are certainly not always already recognizable. Hence, even if a certain level of recognition occurs within the bathhouse space, the question of trans intelligibility complicates the authorization rendered. This complication destabilizes recognition in that a lack of multi-directional desire coupled with an inability to make legible particular trans bodies fosters neither the level of intelligibility needed nor the corresponding legitimation which might result from a certain level of recognition. I say ‘a certain level’ because I still am a bit confused as to where one should seek recognition. I suppose the question lies somewhere in what kind of recognition YOU demand, though I am unsure if there is such a thing as proper recognition. Certainly, the recognition sought by a trans person from the state in regards to her legal documents is different than the recognition she might seek from a cisgendered woman at the bathhouse. As Butler asks, “Does the turn to the state signal the end of a radical sexual culture?” (UG 105). When a trans person turns to the state to demand their sex identification be changed on legal document, does that turn jeopardize a radical sexual culture or challenge the limitations? Does the answer hinge on whether or not she is successful? Surely these questions are the crises of legitimation to which Butler is referring.

Constitutions, Recognitions

Under a rule of law, if a mode of recognition is held to be an inalienable constitutional right, is it possible to “carve out a narrow exception” to that mode of recognition by means of altering the constitution (codification) of that right by a majority vote? Are there any extraconstitutional or inherent limitations in the American legal conception of ‘equal protection’ (installed federally with the 14th Amendment, and applied slowly in parts to the states beginning with the Civil Rights Cases in the 1950s) which would precondition the attempt to deliberately thwart ‘equal protection’ for a suspect class of citizens (ie, the rigidly classified ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ citizens)?

Such were the questions answered for the state of California by the California Supreme Court last week in Strauss v Horton, the final installment of the state’s three marriage cases since 2004. In In Re Marriage Cases (Spring 2008) the Court held that both same-sex and opposite-sex couples enjoy the right to marriage under the state’s constitution, and that the denial of marriage--including the use of the moniker ‘Marriage’--violated constitutional rights found in both Due Process and Privacy. In November of 2008, California voters accepted (through a majority ballot) Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment adding a section to the state constitution whereby “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Last week, the California Supreme Court in a 6-1 decision both accepted this amendment as valid and accepted the means by which it passed (that Proposition 8 qualified as an amendment and not a revision of the governmental framework and plan in California).

As a direct result, an estimated 18,000 same-sex couples (wed between May and November 2008) are in a legitimation limbo: their marriages are valid, since it was constitutional at the time to become legally coupled with that moniker, but no more same-sex marriages will be recognized until another constitutional amendment is passed to annul Proposition 8.

The time of this week’s Butler readings are particularly apt to discussing ‘gay marriage’ and the thorny issues of recognition and legitimation at play here. What is at stake in opening the symbolic allocation of marriage, and is it “preferable to altering the requirements of kinship”? In the turn to the state for legitimation of a version of kinship, do we eclipse the “proliferation of sexual practices outside of marriage and the obligations of kinship?” Where are the possibilities of resisting “the lexicon of legitimation” braided by the state, but required to advance same-sex marital recognition?

In one sense, the latest discussion on this Blog over the arrangement of ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’ (or politics/ethics - wait, why is ethics the bottom here :p ?) and the ‘fields’ and ‘domains’ in which they might be understood to ‘operate’ is perhaps precisely the catachresis to which Butler points (UG p107) here, and, turning, compels the reader to take stock of our critical functions and “to scrutinize the action of delimitation itself.” In another sense, the critical perspective needed to perform that scrutiny “that operates at the limit of the intelligible”, she suggests, “also risks being regarded as apolitical.”

But rather than sliding into the well-covered ‘debate’ over the State recognizing ‘gay marriage’, a debate which Butler has still left us in the paradox where “both the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ works in the services of circumscribing reality in precipitous ways” (UG p130), I want to further investigate the curious means by which California has framed the debate. Namely, individuals (ie, voters) have decided the latest word on the statuses of marital recognition in the state via majority rule. Rather than interpreting legislative, executive, or other juridical action, the Court questioned whether or not California voters have the ability to “carve out a narrow exception” to constitutional rights for certain classes of people. Proposition 8 did not deny the right for same-sex couples to be legally recognized or afforded rights as such, “only” that same-sex couples could not employ the term (or fall within the jurisdiction of the term) Marriage.

How might “we”, as political beings, reframe kinship against majoritarian legitimation? Equal Protection is allegedly “by its nature, inherently, countermajoritarian” according to Justice Moreno, who dissented in Strauss. How do we mobilize that generatively without further exclusions, creating more margins? Is it possible to disidentify with the state using social/coalitional means while simultaneously referencing or making use of its networks? I ask this question because I’m not prepared to advocate a wholesale rejection of the state apparatus; I fundamentally believe in the concept of social welfare (if nothing else), and I think the project to bring as many people and groups within that communal welfare is a valid political task. Proposition 8 has the opposite effect (an exclusion of a class from a certain aspect of the social welfare system), yet makes use of the same organizing principal behind direct democracy (that is, people themselves initiating and voting on issues) which makes things like ‘rights’ coherent in the first place.

Even the most brittle of postmodernist legal scholars, like Stanley Fish, are open to this operation of rights-exchanges in democracy. Fish writes in the New York Times, “Democracy is a form of government not attached to any pre-given political or ideological ends, but allows ends to be driven by majority vote of its free citizens...it is the only form of government that (theoretically) contemplates its own demise with equanimity.” But in the case of Propositon 8, or any other voter-driven referendum on social classes, how do we seek legitimation from our neighbors? And is that the same “lexicon of legitimation” employed when we petition the state to recognize certain rights, classes, or individuals?

Even the “radical” move (with which I sympathize) to remove Marriage (and all of the religious baggage accompanying it) from the state/civil sphere completely and sanctioning only ‘unions’ for all couples in the eyes of the law, still includes a tacit fortification of monogamy as well as foreclosing sexual practices and kinship practices currently unintelligible (à la Butler). If it’s an issue of incrementalism, to what degree are we still making the mistake of taking “the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about” in the ‘radical’ move I advocate above? (PL p25, UG P20)

post summary

Hi all,
I've tried to change the layout settings so that we don't have full post view at first sight, but it seems not to be possible to change it by clicking here and there, you really need to change the whole html settings. I've found a notice of how to do it on the web, but it'll take some time. I'll do my best, but don't promiss to have this fixed.
have a nice week-end!
Marie

The Autistic Subject and Social Norms

Hey everyone,

Here is my first attempt to theorize my project. This is a long post (7 pgs) that incorporates both Michaela and Marie's posts. I tried to make the post less cumbersum by trying to use the "hide/show" function for Blogs, but could not figure out the html. If anyone knows how to do this please show me so I can lessen the immediate size of this post. Anyways, I know it is long, so bear with me and when you have time please comment.

In response to both Michaela and Marie, I would also like to intervene with my own project and demonstrate how the pathologized subject further complicates these political/ethical intersections. In this post I argue that a simple return to abstract ethical thinking forecloses the possibilities of seeing how the subject, specifically the pathologized subject of autism, is formed through the political appropriations of our material State. As an example, I contend that the shared discourse between doctors and teachers creates/defines the limits for understanding the subject of autism. They perpetuate a social discourse of what autism “is” or “looks like” by outlining distinct, linear pathologies. These pathologies become fixed over time (usually through the DSM) and in turn create an abstract, fixed subjectivity that forecloses possibilities for seeing autism’s actual living differences. Although this medical discourse begins with an abstract ethical consideration that attempts to incorporate a static subject of mental illness through medical/political strategies of social incorporation, the actual speaking subject of autism is still overlooked in the process. The difference of the actual speaking “I” of autism is flattened and turned into an abstract concept of mental illness in the process of creating our social institutions and understandings of autism. In recent years, the discourse surrounding the public understanding of autism has come under criticism, because authors such as Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron (both subjects of autism) wrote books that outline a speaking, self-reflective “I” of autism that conflicts with classic medical understandings of autistic pathologies.

I will show that it is precisely this gesture of returning to the abstract ethical subject formations of medical science that perpetuates misunderstandings and produces programs that unintentionally foreclose possibilities and avenues of social development for people with autism. When society (Western society) attempts to be ethical towards an opaque and dependant subject of autism, it usually begins with flattening the subject by creating an abstract concept of fixed pathologies that doesn’t anticipate difference. Therefore, it will always be necessary to engage the amalgamation of the ethical/political divide that exposes both the weakness in our medical appropriations of autism with the actual living difference of the autistic life. I will begin with outlining Marie’s and Michaela’s positions on the ethical/political divide and then introduce my object: the autistic subject in relation to social constructions of mental health and its questions of what, relationally speaking, constitutes ethical subject formation. I argue that if we are truly to be ethical towards the autistic subject, we must also be political; we must constantly challenge what autism “is” and what we think it will be; we must routinely engage the ambiguity of the ethical/political intersection and be open to a changing subject of (anti) pathological life.

Marie’s response to Michaela indicates that we should rather think politics and ethics as separate formations, where the political is external to the subject and acts violently upon the subject through misrecognition of a normalizing power such as the State. She suggests via her example of the embassy that recognition and sovereignty for the subject are always, already in conflict because the subject is formed at particular political intersections where the State assumes a universalizing ethics that forecloses individual difference. I understand this through Marie’s statement, “For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political program echoes the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole?” Marie seems to be suggesting a theoretical practice that emphasizes a return to the ethical, where we will be able to clearly expose the weaknesses of our political projects, or as she puts it, to think “…of politics and ethics separately as [is] precisely necessary so that we are able to distinguish where our responsibilities lie.”

Michaela theorizes this strategic intersection somewhat differently in her theoretical framework towards “Queer Hospitality.” Michaela claims that these two concepts should be seen as an ever-changing amalgamation: a desired amalgamation that is necessary for the two concepts to implicate each other in their theoretical practices. In her view, Queer Hospitality enacts a constant process of queer politics; a politics/ethics that emanates from a risky, ever-changing hospitality. Michaela is suggesting that Queer Hospitality is an ethical discourse that anticipates the risks of a political practice that assumes an unstable/changing subject of “queer” life. In Michaela’s theoretical model, when one enters the female bathhouse a form of exclusion is paradoxically at work even in counter-public spaces that are created to include those who are marginalized by social norms. In Michaela’s example of a Lesbian/Trans bathhouse door policy, a queer identified person may still be excluded by the normalizing power of a particular lesbian/feminist ideology enacted within the space. Thus, the door policy at Lesbian/Trans folk bathhouses is an example of Queer Hospitality already at work by implicating the ethics of those who are already excluded by social norms while simultaneously attempting to create a politics for the bathhouse organizers who determine who will be recognized as actually being female, trans, queer, etc. Therefore, it is not simply a matter of seeing the ethical/political as separate, but rather seeing them in a knot; where each instance of practicing Queer Hospitality will always garner an ever-changing queer politics that regulates who can enter “queer spaces”- or an impossible task of providing unconditional hospitality.

The difference Marie seems to be suggesting is that while the ethical and the political are imbricated in each other, it is rather a return to the ethical that should be considered if we are to understand how the political is operating. For Michaela, however, this return is perhaps just one aspect of her argument: namely, how does a queer community provide an ethical hospitality that doesn’t foreclose the possibilities of an ever-changing politics. I understand that a return to the ethical will not simply undo the political, though such a gesture undoubtedly raises questions about the political and creates avenues for further recognition and agency. However, it seems to me, if we only consider the ethics of inclusion and recognition, we thusly risk creating abstract subjects that can only be considered to be trapped within the political and thus we only theorize about subjects and their lack of political agency. In returning to the abstract ethical (as the case with medical science demonstrates), we foreclose the possibility of political situations that can arise and change how we think about the ethical as such. In so doing we overlook how the individual is a byproduct of conflicting ethical and political subject formations. This means, if we only focus on theorizing the ethical, we overlook how we come to embody the political in our ethical thinking.

I would like to consider the political/ethical divide should always been seen in tandem with each other, always an amalgamation, where the reduction of the one side of the equation necessarily forecloses difference on the other. I am not arguing for a better theory, but rather I would like to show through the pathologized subject of autism that a simple return to the ethical will not foster a self-reflexive and appropriate politics. I would therefore like to turn towards this challenging subject that resists, complicates and further demonstrates why a return to the ethical cannot be thought without the political and vise-versa. For the remainder of this post, I would like to continue to use the strategical value of Marie’s division of the ethical and the political. As Butler states, such a position can demonstrate that “theoretical positions are always appropriated and deployed in political contexts that expose something of the strategic value of such theories.” (ES pg. 20) I will therefore continue with a definition of the ethical as an appropriation of the abstract consideration of self-reflexivity in relation to social norms and the political as the embodiment of these social norms in material or concrete institutions that shape ethical thinking: i.e. State laws, schools, doctors, and teachers that all define what is a recognizable subject of value and ethics.

In 2005, Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron coauthored a book entitled The Unwritten Rules of Social Relations (UWRSR) or how to understand the immergence of social norms through the unique perspective of autism. Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron have decided to become Butlerian social theorists by demonstrating a larger “political/ethical” project that shows how interactions of everyday people, teachers and doctors (whom they refer to as “neurotypicals”) with people who have autism creates a conflict of misconception about what, in actuality, autistic children need/want for their social development. In creating delicately constructed oeuvres, Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron demonstrate how the subject of autism emerges as a conflict with the political/ethical of the “neurotypically” constructed social sphere. Although their book is written in a narrative form that is not theoretical, their book could be read as an ethical/political deconstruction that, when outlined in academic terms, demonstrates to its readers a return to an abstract ethical encounter. Through descriptions of their personal accounts of growing up with autism, Dr. Grandin and Barron locate a form of misconception that has developed by doctors, teachers and parents who assume and treat only the social effects of autism, or a public consciousness that only sees awkward, “bad” behavior. Their book explicitly demonstrates how children with autism learn how to interact with social norms and continually point-out that simply seeing the autistic child as an effect of a strict pathology further forecloses the emergence of seeing an actual thinking “I” of Being. I would like to add that Sean Barron’s first book was entitled There’s a Boy in There, where his title indicates how society sees autism as a lack or a mask that must be uncovered to reveal a coherent thinking “I” and his book shows how the autistic thinking “I” communicates and produces a coherent subject of value.

Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron show that there is no clearly defined, linear subject of autism, but rather a set of pathologies that change and develop over time (indeed, autism is not a fixed subjectivity). Dr. Grandin and Barron reconfigure the autistic child (subject) into two metaphorical categories that describe “paths,” or two schematics of autistic personalities that emerge from the medical definition of “classic autism.” Path A children, demonstrate high mental functioning and “their sense of connection to the world, their happiness may always stem from a logical, analytic place of being…”(emphasis mine, UWRSR introduction pg.xii). Path A children are usually non-verbal in their adolescence and pull away from social interactions because they are caught in loops of analytical thought where words have therefore abandoned them. Dr. Grandin tells how she would take comfort in looking at sand falling between her fingers for hours without words to express her obsession. Her behavior was seen as inherently anti-social and since Temple was non-verbal in her childhood she was therefore considered to be a subject that was deprived of a coherent thinking “I” of being. Ethical and medical norms dictated that she be “left alone,” allowing her to retreat from interacting with social norms and unable to express an external ego. It wouldn’t be until her later teens, when she would come into contact with highly analytical academic discourses, that she would develop the language to describe her inner thoughts as a child. Since Temple was seen as being inherently anti-social and uncommunicative, high-functioning analytic thinking and language were denied to her until she latter acquired the language of “neurotypicals” to actually see and express herself as a literal, scientific thinker.

In contrast, Path B children are described as “feeling emotional-relatedness right from the start…they ‘feel out’ their world through their sense of social-emotional connection and are deeply affected when they and their world are out of sync with each other.” (UWRSR, pg. xiii). In giving an account of themselves, both Dr. Grandin (Path A) and Sean Barron (Path B) use the language of the established medical discourse on autism to reconfigure the discursive limits of their own intelligibility and agency. In so doing, they recreate a language of autism that is at once part of their own making and simultaneously constructed through an external social world (or the political world) of “neurotypical” doctors and teachers. From this perspective, we can thusly see how Marie’s conception of returning to the abstract ethical creates a literary voice of autism that reveals how the political subject of autism is formed and how their voice of agency comes into contact with a world that is not their own. In order to do this both Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron require the political language of everyday “neurotypical” doctors and teachers that have defined and pathologized their social intelligibility in advance. Therefore, their book is only possible because Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron create an abstract ethical subject that is simultaneously dependant on a social/medical discourse that exceeds and precedes them. Their book is meant to demonstrate to the reader, if one is going to be ethical towards a subject of autism, one must not solely consider the medial discourse that establishes their intelligibility to the world. The reader must also assume an open, and unconditional “motherly” ethics, or an unstable politics, which will assume autism’s discontinuities and reformulations throughout social development and time.

In Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, he first introduces his theory of the subject (Butler’s theoretical starting point in Chapter 3 of Psychic Life of Power) as an effect of discourse. In this seminal work, Foucault shows that there is no linear ‘subject’ of madness throughout the genealogy of psychology, only discourses that treat and “cure” mental diseases through the creation of the pathologized patient. While much advancement has been made in Psychiatry and Neuro-chemistry, it is still true that the pathological subject is always an effect of discourse: one enters the clinic, learns of their pathological subjectivity and seeks therapy. In this sense, psychological treatment thus works on two levels of understanding: on the one level it is a psychological conditioning, where the patient self-reflexivity states, “Yes, I am sick/depressed/Bi-polar…” and on another level, the patient confirms/refutes the medical discourse of subjectivity by saying, “Yes, I feel better or No I don’t feel better because of this or that therapy.” Yet, the process for determining a ‘subject’ of psychological treatment and the correct medication requires a system of checks and balances (an economy of mental health) that underlines the ethical/political intersection.

In this sense, the analyst must determine pathology based not on the literal appearance of a “disease,” but rather paradoxically through a performance of an opaque speaking “I”. An analysand’s subjectivity (i.e. pathology) is then measured against a fixed understanding of mental illness and a medication is prescribed that may or may not work. Today, we can understand how psychiatry sees mental illness as a controllable “disease,” complete with the experimentation of a clinic, as trial and error, and the effects of an incomplete science that attempts to treat an ever-changing subject of Being. Thus, if mental illness is truly a “disease,” in the same sense as cancer, then a corresponding pill is all that is needed for all fixed and pathological illness. However, we also know this is not always the case, as mental illness may not have a single origin and is always bound to a complex material and psychic thinking “I” of Being—a being that grows, changes and is always in flux, never stable or completely pathological. All problems of the ethical/political intersection of mental health would be resolved if a wonder pill actually existed that “cured” all forms of autism, but sadly, no such pill actually exists. **(Please note, I am not arguing that there is no value to psychiatric medication;I am simply pointing to its inconsistencies, not the value of its successes or its failures)**

In this brief sketch of medical subject formation, I contend that the abstract ethical is already embraced in the practice of political medical science. The political/ethical intersection evolves in the clinic of mental health, where the patient learns and becomes a “subject” of the clinic. The clinic thusly becomes a space where a discourse of mental illness precedes the subject and in turn forms an abstract conception of the patient that seeks its theoretical treatment. If the subject is, as both Butler and Foucault maintain, an effect of discourse then it will be necessary to enact and question the ethical/political divide in each context of medical subject formation. I would now like to return to the subject of autism and focus solely on Dr. Grandin’s narrative as a non-verbal, highly gifted, autistic child (Path A). Dr. Grandin gives an account of herself as a child and lavishes much praise upon her mother for much of her success as a professional today.

Temple Grandin was born in the early 1950’s, at a time when psychotherapy and clinical psychology was in its “infancy” in America. This is a time when autism was not understood as it is today and was often treated by removing the child from the family, placing them in an institution and enforcing harsh behavior modification techniques (We all might share this “classic” image which has been depicted constantly throughout the arts). Dr. Grandin contributes much praise to her mother who refused to let her young and quite different/gifted Temple be sent to any institution. Temple’s mother was very critical of the doctor’s description and evaluations of her daughter’s autism, which determined that she would never develop social skills because she had a mental illness. The doctor’s evaluations, based on strict pathologies for autism, foresaw Temple as never being able to overcome her pathological “illness.” The abstract ethics of doctors and teachers in the 1950’s prescribed Temple to be put into an institution and removed from society altogether. This however was unacceptable for Temple’s mother, who insisted that her daughter could learn to become a functioning adult. Dr. Grandin reveals that through her mother’s persistent affection and care, she developed an open, “motherly” ethics that allowed her autistic, non-verbal daughter to grow into a professional PhD.

Dr. Grandin specifically credits her mother for creating a delicate system of discipline that would engage and incorporate her autism in innovative ways. She gives credit to her mother for her “…acute understanding of my boundaries and [knowing] when and how far she could push me.”(UWRSR, pg.5) Temple’s mother saw and engaged Temple’s autistic gifts of analytical thinking by catering and reinforcing the behaviors that already gave Temple pleasure. She would buy erector sets, complex puzzles, model airplanes and rockets that would feed Temple’s analytical gifts. She simultaneously refused that her child be left out of the classroom. She advised teachers and created reward programs that would force Temple into social interactions with other children. Her plan was successful because it functioned on two levels, first it allowed Temple’s gifts to blossom and become a source of inspiration and praise, while simultaneously putting Temple into “neurotypical” encounters where she could learn how other kids think and see themselves in relation to social norms. By refusing to adhere to the ethics of the doctors in the 1950’s, Temple’s mother created the social situations that Temple needed to be able to create a social personality for herself. These situations were also necessary, yet uneasy for Temple, but today she praises her mother for refusing to give-in and let her child fail as a social person.

In this sense, Dr. Grandin speaks of her mother as operating from a position similar to Michaela’s Queer Hospitality. Temple’s mother comprised an “ethics” that saw the need for a persistently open, ever-changing social discipline in relation to the subject of autism, where a new realm of hospitality could be possibilized by accepting her daughter’s changing autistic differences and by not foreclosing her social emergence by considering both her non-verbal social behaviors and her analytical thinking. Therefore, a “motherly” ethics/hospitality was constantly enacted for Temple, where her autism could find release in personal pursuits and take flight in learning from the necessary interactions of “neurotypical” life that included doctors, teachers and other children. Her mother became a bridge that could translate a world created by neurotypicals for neurotypicals, into controlled interactions that could support her throughout a world that would constantly misconstrue her autism and foreclose her social agency. It is precisely because her mother was positioned in between the discursive limits of a medical discourse that allowed her to see a new path for children with autism. While her plan for her daughter was not a public, “political agenda,” Temple’s mother demonstrates why just returning to the abstract ethical would have foreclosed possibilities for her child.

To simplify in three points: A) If Temple’s mother only accepted the abstract ethical reasoning of cognitive medical science in the 1950’s, she would only come to embody the abstract politics of medical science in her disciplinary thinking. Temple’s mother would only embody the ethics of an abstract conception of the medical subject as a strict patient and not see her daughter as a child with autistic difference. This is to say, if Temple’s mother only reasoned through an abstract medical discourse, she would have accepted her daughter’s non-verbal condition as fixed. She probably would have not let her child go to an institution, but she would have only “treated” her daughter’s anti-social behavior while overlooking her analytical gifts. B) Similarly, had Temple’s mother not questioned the social politics of autism at the time, she would not have been able keep her child in the classroom, a social space necessary for all children’s development. C) Underlining both A and B, and most importantly, if she was not also open to seeing Temple as thinking, changing and speaking subject of value, she would have not been able to praise her, love her and allow her to blossom. Strictly speaking, without her mother’s constant engagement and struggle with the ethical/political divide of powerful social norms, she would have continued to see and accept her daughter as a fixed, strictly pathologized, non-verbal subject that would never be able to become a functioning adult.

Her mother’s position was therefore constantly embracted in the ethical/political double bind, since it is also, paradoxically, this same abstract medical discourse of cognitive medical science that pointed out particular pathologies that Temple actually displayed. If her mother had never learned that her child was, indeed, autistic, she wouldn’t have created a special plan that catered to her special interests and needs. Therefore, the abstract ethical of medical science is always a necessary position to consider while simultaneously being open to a critical discursive political position. Without an amalgamation of the ethical/political discourses of Temple’s mother with the medical doctors and teachers, Temple would have never become Dr. Grandin. Temple’s mother had to straddle this ethical/political divide of social norms of the 1950’s and create an “ethics” that changed and allowed Temple to speak back, where she was able to interact with a speaking “I” of autism and form a self-reflexive plan that encouraged Temple’s social growth and praised her analytic being. Because her mother was positioned at this discursive limit between doctors, teachers and the limits of understanding her own daughter as autistic, she was able to deploy a strategic politics that could maneuver her child through an “unethical” medical and social world of neurotypicals.

Politics, Ethics and Responsibility; a Response to Michaela and Other Thoughts

In her last post, Michaela posed very interesting questions with regards to the relationship between politics, ethics, and responsibility. These questions pushed me to think more carefully about the link between the three elements in order to be able to formulate why, in my opinion, thinking of politics and ethics separately is precisely necessary so that we be able to distinguish where our responsibilities lie. As my own emerging thesis thoughts take me towards the concept of the embassy and the role it plays in the conception of nation state and hospitality, I will not go deep into the queer aspect of Michaela’s research, but stay within the notions of nation sates and sovereign powers.

First of all, rather than agreeing with the statement that Butler uses politics, ethics and responsibility interchangeably, I would argue that she demonstrates how the three themes are deeply interconnected, and yet not the same. To say it in a few words, I would suggest that in order to be ethical, politics needs to take responsibilities. According to Butler, these responsibilities lie in the initial human need of the scene of recognition, i.e. in the fact that a subject fundamentally needs the social encounter in order to exist. This is expressed in Precarious Life (PL) in the following passage:

When we recognize another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we were constituted prior to the encounter itself. Instead, in the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need and desire for the Other that takes place in language in the broadest sense, one without which we could not be. To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other. (PL 44, italics mine)

If the subject can only be a subject through the scene of address, then we all have the responsibility to address our ‘neighbours’ and to participate in an ongoing scene of (mutual) recognition in order to let human beings both be subjects and become subjects. Yet, Butler also notices that “when we are speaking about the ‘subject’ we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on the notions of sovereign power” (PL 45). Here, Butler makes the link between the subject and politics, and thereby also the link between politics and responsibility. In fact, if the notion of sovereign power may be a subject, which is also a “model for agency and intelligibility” according to Butler, then a nation state has the duty to echo the scene of address—presupposing that its purposes is to serve the nation formed by individual subjects. For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political programs echo the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole? In this responsibility lays also an ethical responsibility, not only towards citizens who are related to that particular sovereign power, but also towards humanity as a whole. So, in order to be truly ethical, one cannot only take into account those who are already part of a given system. The genuine ethical responsibility (and taking one leap forward I would like to suggest that this may be also one possible definition of hospitality) begins according to me in the recognition of those who do not belong to that given system, and who thus have difficulties accessing the “ritual” of the scene of address. Eventually, and following Butler’s thoughts, ethics begins with recognizing that, although the political, juridical and social system applies to a certain number of people who are pre-determined by their legal status, there still is no such thing as a system genuinely capable of uniting people, as we still preserve a degree of unknowingness both towards ourselves and towards the other; hence the difficulty to think a political system being indisputably ethical and open to perform the scene of recognition again and again.
Before drawing further on this thought, let’s look carefully at the paragraph on p.46 (PL) quoted by Michaela, which appears to reflect on the difficulty to truly bind politics, ethics and responsibility together.

I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others. In this sense, I cannot know myself perfectly or know my ‘difference’ from others in an irreducible way. This unknowingness may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics. Don’t I need to know myself in order to act responsibly in social relations? Surely, to a certain extent, yes. But is there an ethical valence to my unknowingness? I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames the problem of responsibility from the start. (PL 46)

The key sentence might well be the following:
“This unknowingness [which is the unknowingness of myself and of the other] may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics.”
The ‘unknowingness’ expressed here seems to anticipate what Butler has later on called ‘opacity’ in Giving an Account of Oneself. Our previous discussions around Giving an Account of Oneself already gave away the difficulty to fully embrace this notion of opacity within a political system—at least in a western countries. Yet again, the acknowledgement of one’s opacity and that of the other remains the necessary pre-requisite for a true ethical encounter to take place. So, because and thanks to this unknowingness or this opacity, we encounter each other in our differences (this is eminently expressed in Giving an Account of Oneself).
Yet, the question remains why it is a problem for ethics and politics? Probably because the western political frame of thoughts still appears to be embedded in an Enlightenment-like universalism prescribing that in order to be ethical and to conduct an operational political program, one must know each-other. This might be true to a certain extend, yet the degree of unknowingness must surely remain a respected and thoroughly integrated element within the ethico-political program. For if I claim to know the other thoroughly, where does the scene of recognition still be able to take place? Am I not already beforehand filling in the unknown space of the other by pre-conceived ideas which rather belong to myself than to the other? If this happens, then where can we still locate ‘recognition’?

Let me come back to Michaela’s question.
The danger to think politics and ethics separately lies perhaps in the possibility to do politics without thinking ethically at the same time. For it is also a political responsibility to integrate ethical elements within the political frame. Yet, the degree of ethical thinking in a political program may vary considerably from one country to the other; hence also the necessity not to conflate politics and ethics in order to do justice to ethics in a broader frame. Moreover, if we do conflate political and ethical thoughts, then we might fail acknowledging the existence of those who have no access to political systems. On the other hand, if we do not integrate politics and ethics in a systemic frame, we might fail to recognize the Other’s opacity as well as our own opacity within the frame of a sovereign power.
Moreover, I would like to suggest that the tension between politics and ethics is closely related to the tension present in excitable speech and in the acknowledgement thereof. Here, I join Michaela in her question regarding the political outreach and political embedded-ness of injurious speech.
The tension which is present in the concept of excitable speech lays in its ability to give somebody the freedom not to let his/her speech be performative, while at the same time being fully embedded within a complex of power, laws and narratives. So, it both enables the speaker to escape the power of a juridico-political systemic frame, while also incorporating the speaker within that same system. The first problem arising with the notion of excitable speech is again a problem of recognition. In fact, when does an utterance fall under excitable speech? Who does take the decision, and why? Is it because the law court has recognized the other in his/her differences, or because the court precisely failed in acknowledging the other’s differences, thereby immediately categorizing the speaker as a ‘non-reliable person’? Then, where does the strength lie of an utterance that is considered excitable?
I would like to suggest that the lack of performativity of an excitable speech may be precisely that which enables the speaker to create the gap that Butler claims to be necessary for countering injurious speech. The gap then can be seen as a temporal silence, or rather even as a temporal ‘noise’, which, if we think of M. Serres’ approach to noise, enables a infinite range of information and possibilities. In this optic, an excitable utterance might well have the potential to enable a gap in the re-iteration and historicity of words, thereby also enabling to counter or to resist the wounds of injurious speech. The question remains whether the gap and/or the counter speech are political, ethical and/or responsible. Perhaps is the gap in re-iteration that which enables the political frame to transform toward a greater openness to possibilities of differences within a systemic frame. So, the gap would be an element reminding us of our ethical responsibilities within the frame of juridico-political system. It would then also be an element reminding us of the need to de-centre the narrative “I” within the (international) political domain (PL 7). In this sense, I am tempted to agree with the idea that speech which has the potential to be injurious is already veiled in some sorts of politics, as it triggers a certain political response.
On a practical level, it seems however that such a gap only may affect the narrative of a political system if it is performed collectively. To take a concrete example, had the ‘sans-papiers’ in France succeeded in putting their case on the political agenda if they all had performed individually? Or does the lesbian woman in Michaela’s example have a chance to counter the utterance of the word “dyke” that to her sounds injurious? In other words, is there a chance of effectively countering-up injurious speech individually, or do we always need some sort of community? Perhaps that the answer does not lie in the notion of community, but rather in the notion of re-iteration and history. For as Butler has it,

If a performative provisionally succeeds …, then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because that action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through repetition or citation of a prior and authoritative set of practice. … What it means, then, is that a performative “works” to the extent that it draws on and covers the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized. In this sense, no term or statement can function performatively without the accumulating and dissimulating historicity of force. (ES 51)

Although this paragraph refers to the performativity of injurious speech, it seems to me that this applies all the same to speech that strives to effectively counter up or resist the wounds of injurious speech. But can one human being alone perform by means of accumulation against other performative utterances? Isn’t the notion of community or collectivity still a pre-requisite to a powerful resistance against the violence of injurious speech? This might well be what Butler means when she states that “an international coalition of feminist activists and thinkers … will have to accept the array of sometimes incommensurable epistemological and political beliefs and modes and means of agency that brings us into activism” (PL 48), which yet does not means that each of the activist must conform to a certain and unique system.

To finish, isn’t it that this acceptance of founding a collectivity in order to have a performative effect is in its form the embodiment of a relationship between politics, ethics and responsibilities?

Thesis Thoughts: Queer Hospitality

[Since I did not have a chance to reflect on the blog after the last two sessions, I would like to, now, return to both Precarious Life (PL) and Excitable Speech (ES) in a slightly longer post. I want to use this environment to present a few ideas that I am working on in my thesis and try to articulate how Butler’s work (though rarely explicitly cited in my work) has influenced my thesis. First I will offer a brief outline of my general theoretical argument. Then, the rest of the reflection will look to fragments of PL and ES to try to understand how Butler’s work influences my thesis. I would greatly appreciate any feedback!]

In the project, I formulate a conception which I call ‘queer hospitality.’ I situate ‘queer’ as: 1. an active and constantly changing disruption of the normative/dominant 2. a disruption that cannot be delimited in advance and 3. a disruption that has political implications. This employment of ‘queer’ comes, in part, from the work of Butler (and other contemporary queer theorists). I understand ‘hospitality’ through 1. subjective processes of role-making (hosts-guests) 2. intersubjective social practices and 3. the incalculability/risk within those processes/practices. Throughout the work, I explore what ‘queer’ does for ‘hospitality’ and what ‘hospitality’ does for ‘queer’ and how those concepts might come together productively. The objects of the project include the autobiographical work of Samuel R. Delany in relation to pre-1995 New York City Times Square and present-day lesbian and trans-folk bathhouse events in Canada.

So far in the project, I have suggested that by understanding ‘queer’ and ‘hospitality’ as briefly outlined above, it is possible to read the two concepts together; I argue that ‘queer’ adds an element of politics to ‘hospitality’ while ‘hospitality’ adds an element of ethics to ‘queer.’ In the thesis, I outline the political resistance facets of ‘queer’ and the ethical ‘sharing the world’(via Luce Irigaray) facets of hospitality. Together the two establish an ethico-political mechanism which I use to explore particular spaces.

Beyond ‘queer’ and ‘hospitality’, I add one more theoretical problematic to the analysis and ask how the traditional divide between the public and the private depletes a working conception of ‘queer hospitality.’ So, in other words, questions like, ‘what or who is a public?’ and ‘what is considered dominantly private or public?’ and ‘what constitutes a counterpublic?’ set the stage to intervene in existing, intersecting and opposing discussions of ‘queer’ and ‘hospitality.’ For me, public-ness and private-ness are both loaded with ethico-political dimensions which correspond with the ethico-political dimensions of ‘queer hospitality.’ Throughout the chapters, I attempt to determine what a public-private amalgamation instead of a public/private distinction does for both the constitution and formulation of a ‘queer hospitality.’

Both Precarious Life and Excitable Speech touch on a number of ideas that are related to my own work. At the very beginning of the Precarious Life, for example, Butler writes,

To decide what views will count as reasonable within the public domain, however, is to decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views that are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person . . . The foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of debate and democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views among the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity (PL xx).

Although here Butler refers specifically to nationalist norms, this passage relates to the public/private discussion present in my own work. Instead of ‘nationalist norms’ my thesis focuses on heteronormative codes and urban gentrification norms. In my second chapter, for example, I examine the gentrification measures taken by New York City’s redevelopment project through the autobiographical work of Samuel R. Delany. Delany, in outlining an interclass contact model, echoes Butler’s argument regarding the foreclosure of democratic contestation. He suggests that when Times Square was redeveloped, it increasingly became less intersectional and thus facilitated ‘deliberation’ among a vast amount of like-minded people. This ‘deliberation’, was in fact, not a deliberation at all; like Butler argues above, it ‘becomes a fugitive and suspect activity.’ For Delany, if what counts as reasonable within the public domain is expanded to include myriad intersectional perspectives, then, the deliberative processes have the potential to mirror real democratic contestation.

In an extension to Giving an Account of Oneself, PL contains a passage which has allowed me to think more carefully about the ‘hospitality’ element of my research. Butler writes,

I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others. In this sense, I cannot know myself perfectly or know my ‘difference’ from others in an irreducible way. This unknowingness may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics. Don’t I need to know myself in order to act responsibly in social relations? Surely, to a certain extent, yes. But is there an ethical valence to my unknowingness? I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames the problem of responsibility from the start (PL 46).

This passage has posed a slight problem for me in conceptualizing what I mean by ‘hospitality.’ As mentioned above, I understand ‘hospitality’ through the work of Irigaray and the general ‘problem’ of approaching the Other. What is particularly confusing for me is the way Butler seems to be using ‘ethics’, ‘politics’ and ‘responsibility’ interchangeably in both this passage and the pages which surround it in the text. The confusion enters because in the thesis I have begun to set up this initial difference between ethics and politics. As mentioned above, it is this play between queer politics and hospitable ethics that come together to form a productive mechanism with which to analyze particular spaces (the project’s objects). Does this mean, I also use the terms interchangeably? I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on this? Does it seem, to you, that maybe Butler does assume that ethics/politics/responsibility all mean something very similar? Do you think it is irresponsible  of me to create an opposition between the two concepts only to bring them back together again? In other words, what is the danger in thinking ethics and politics separately? Or, is there an obligation to always think the two together?

I am in the process of organizing my third chapter which brings into dialogue some of the discourses surrounding lesbian and trans-folk bathhouses in Canada and this ethico-political conception of ‘queer hospitality.’ Presumably, the chapter will look to the bathhouse door policy, the research conducted by one ethnographer, and the legal limitations the events have faced to date. The problem of identity and particular subject-positions Butler refers to in PL have offered me a few ways of thinking about these discourses. In the last session, Tim mentioned the following distinction made by Butler; she writes, “Perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about” (PL 25). In the last post I mentioned Butler’s idea of the necessary error of identity (we discussed this idea as ‘the persistence of identity’ in class). For Butler, it is true that often we must occupy particular subject-positions to legally afford ourselves rights. However, for her, there is a sharp difference between who we are (in the legal sense) and ‘what we are about.’ This ‘what we are about’ idea resonates with the argument that subject-positions outside the recourse to rights perpetually shift and occur in never-ending processes.

This sentiment has helped me immensely in thinking about the door-policy at the bathhouse events. The ethnographer to which I referred above takes a completely different approach to these ideas. The ethnographer argues that through her interviews and observations of the events she was able to assess participants’ subjectivities. At the end of the section of PL we read for last session Butler brings in this idea of cultural translation. She proposes a way to rethink international coalitions in ways different from assuming “that we are all fixed and frozen in our various locations and ‘subject-positions’” (PL 47). Although in the context of international politics, this idea that we are neither fixed in location nor identity certainly lends itself to further queries regarding who gets in at the door, what does it mean to identify as queer, and how can we ethically approach the other. Changeability and unforeseeability both continue to be important concepts in the third and second chapter of my thesis.

Perhaps the part of Excitable Speech that interests me most in terms of my thesis work is this idea of revaluation. Butler writes,

The revaluation of terms such as ‘queer’ suggest that speech can be ‘returned’ to its speaker in a different form, that it can be cited against its originary purposes, and perform a reversal of effects. More generally, then, this suggests that the changeable power of such terms marks a kind of discursive performativity that is not a discrete series of speech acts, but a ritual chain of resignifications whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable. In this sense, an ‘act’ is not a momentary happening, but a certain nexus of temporal horizons, the condensation of an iterability that exceeds the moment it occasions. The possibility for a speech act to resignify a prior context depends, in part, upon the gap between the originating context or intention by which an utterance is animated and the effects it produces (ES 14).

I posed this question in class regarding the ‘gap’ because my thesis deals with self-proclaimed subject-positions that are often contentious in other contexts (i.e. dyke, girl-fag, queer). In terms of political projects of resistance (those that resist heteronormative codes and carve out spaces to (semi)publicly enjoy non-normative sexual practices like the former Times Square neighbourhood and the bathhouse events in Canada), I wonder how big the gap needs to be for revaluation to actually occur.

More importantly, if the gap is never closed how much does the unclosed gap risk alienating demographics who don’t adhere to the re-valued term. I am thinking here, as an example, of a lesbian woman, who exclusively identifies as lesbian in regards to her sexuality; the woman enters a bathhouse event to meet someone new, and the woman behind the counter says “well aren’t you a pretty dyke!” The lesbian woman leaves immediately; for her the speech is injurious (the use of the word dyke) and conjures violent slurs from her childhood. So what happens in these political resistance processes when women can ride on motorcycles in Gay Pride parades as ‘Dykes on Bikes’, while other lesbian or queer women find that language morally reprehensible? I understand Butler’s arguments regarding iteration and citations, but is this the part where we “have to accept the array of sometimes incommensurable epistemological and political beliefs and modes and means of agency that bring us into activism?” (PL 48). Or is injurious speech different from incommensurable political beliefs? I have the sense, that in this context, speech that has the potential to be injurious (like dyke) is already veiled in some sort of politics. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Are we to accept our political differences, even if those differences are injurious? Who closes the gap and who, in subaltern resistance groups, has the power of ‘proper’ citation?

“Keeping such terms unsaid and unsayable can also work to lock them in place, preserving their power to injure, and arresting the possibility of a reworking that might shift their context and purpose” (ES 38).