Major works

[edit] Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
Main article: Gender Trouble
In 1990, Butler's book Gender Trouble burst onto the scene, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages. Alluding to the similarly named 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble starring the drag queen Divine[3], Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book was popular enough that it even inspired an intellectual fanzine, Judy!.[4]

The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural." Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.[5]

A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.[6] The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.[7] In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.[8]

The concept of gender performativity is at the core of Butler's work. It extends beyond the doing of gender and can be understood as a full-fledged theory of subjectivity. Indeed, if her most recent books have shifted focus away from gender, they still treat performativity as theoretically central.


[edit] Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up mis/readings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.[9] To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.[10]

Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.


[edit] Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)
In Excitable Speech, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. She argues that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance. She develops a new conception of censorship’s complex workings, supplanting the myth of the independent subject who wields the power to censor with a theory of censorship as an effect of state power and, more primordially, as the condition of language and discourse itself.

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities.[citation needed] In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state’s power to censor. Butler warns that such appeals to state power may backfire on progressivists like MacKinnon who seek social change, in her case to end patriarchal oppression, through legal reforms. She cites for example the R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul 1992 Supreme Court case, which overturned the conviction of a teenager for burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family, in the name of the First Amendment.[citation needed]

Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.[11] As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control.[12] Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".[13]

Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context.[citation needed] Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly.[citation needed] On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like Richard Delgado’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.


[edit] Undoing Gender (2004)
Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex for a more general readership than many of her other books. Butler revisits and refines her notion of performativity, which is the focus of Gender Trouble.

In her discussion of intersex, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, and ultimately committed suicide.[14].


[edit] Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself, the limits of self-knowledge. Borrowing from Adorno, Foucault, Nietzsche, Laplanche and Levinas, among others, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject as a relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms as precisely the very condition of that subject’s formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place. The subject is therefore dispossessed of itself by an other or others as the very condition of its being at all, and this process by which I become myself only in relation to others and therefore cannot own myself completely, this constitutive dispossession, is the opacity of the contemporary subject to itself, what I cannot know, possess, and master consciously about myself.

Butler then turns to the ethical question: If my narrative account of myself is necessarily incomplete, breaking down tellingly at the point precisely when "I" am called to elucidate the foundations of this "I", my genesis and ontology, what kind of ethical agent, or "I", am "I"?[citation needed] Butler rejects the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself it is necessarily free of ethical responsibility and obligations.[citation needed] Instead she argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself.[citation needed] Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human.[citation needed] To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.[citation needed]


[edit] Style and politics
Butler's academic (though not her popular) writing is dense and theoretical. Butler explains the density of her academic writing by reference to Theodor Adorno, who comments on the necessity to break from traditional language if one is to subvert the dominant cultural narrative.[citation needed]

In a London Review of Books article published in August 2003, Butler identifies herself as an anti-Zionist Jewish American who is concerned with the loss of academic freedom implicitly advocated by pro-Israeli groups.[15] She expounds upon her views on Zionism in a section of Precarious Life examining a debacle surrounding Harvard President Lawrence Summers. On September 7th, 2006, she partook in a faculty-organized teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley, scrutinizing the Israeli war on Lebanon during the summer.[16]


[edit]

If you really do not have the inability to distinguish between your sexual orientation, pedophilia, and moral actions such as theft, then the only thing standing between you and robbery, raping children, etc., is your religious beliefs. If true, that makes us very different, and that difference is very creepy. I’m sure you really do have the ability to make these simple distinctions and are just being difficult, however.

Butler's academic (though not her popular) writing is dense and theoretical. Butler explains the density of her academic writing by reference to Theodor Adorno, who comments on the necessity to break from traditional language if one is to subvert the dominant cultural narrative.[citation needed]

It was more fun when it was intertwined with Nuclear Iran.

Maybe Butler could use Klingon.

You haven't even answered basic questions that would allow me to understand your position, such as "Are you able to differentiate your sexual orientation from theft."

What one chooses to believe theologically as an individual or as a faith community is certainly their own personal concern. However, the argumentation you have used is classic SBC fundamentalist evangelical Baptism, which is very much an extreme for of religion.

You've got to be pretty tricky when you are subverting the dominant social norm.

It was more fun when it was intertwined with Nuclear Iran.

Sexual identity (how people think of themselves) sometimes has little to do with their sexual behavior. Three different people may have the same distribution of sexual behavior in the past and/or present, but have three different sexual identities: homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. This may be confusing at first, but is important to remember. This point is often useful in helping people to understand that just because someone has a different sexual identity does not necessarily mean that that person's sexual behavior is different from their own. Conversely, the fact that someone else has the same sexual identity does not mean that that person's sexual behavior is the same as their own.

People who think of themselves as bisexual, heterosexual, or homosexual may find they are quite similar in some aspects and different in others. For example, in choosing people to spend time with in social activities, most women hang out with women and most men hang out with men. That is, both women and men show a social preference for members of the same sex. According to many national surveys, whether their sex is male or female, and whether their sexual identity is homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, most people have an emotional preference for women as close friends. We may all be more alike than we think.

Klein's research and the experience of many people indicates that sexual identity can be fluid (at least for some people), and can change from one period of a person's life to another. A person's identity may move to a new position on the continuum; that is,

a heterosexual may change to a bisexual or homosexual identity;

a bisexual may change to a homosexual or heterosexual identity;

a homosexual may change to a bisexual or heterosexual identity.

Many people were sure that they would be, for instance, heterosexual all their lives, but discovered later that they no longer were. It therefore behooves one to treat others as one would like to be treated, regardless of one's current sexual identity, because one's sexual identity may change.

Both Kinsey's and Klein's work gives some evidence that older people are more likely to have been sexual with both sexes than are younger people. This contradicts conventional wisdom, which says that sexual experimentation is common among youths but uncommon among adults.

Despite the fact that someone may have had different sexual identities at different times, each sexual identity was appropriate and valid for that person in its time.

In some areas, the Lesbian and Gay male communities take the position that bisexuals are not welcome in the Lesbian and Gay communtites, that they do not exist, and/or that they are "traitors to the cause" and "sleeping with the enemy." This collection of attitudes is often termed "biphobia." It usually occurs with greater frequency and virulence in Lesbian communities, where it is associated with negative feelings about and political action against patriarchy and women's oppression. It is also clearly present in Gay male communities, often in the more subtle form of deprecation and ridicule of bisexual identity. In biphobic communities, an individual who might otherwise identify as bisexual may choose to suppress attractions to and activities with one gender or the other in order to identify as either heterosexual or homosexual. Alternatively, a person may switch back and forth, trying alternately to identify as homosexual or heterosexual.

Bub:

I'm curious. Given the definition you use for "homosexual" (that is, doing the deed with person of same sex rather than merely being attracted to same sex but refraining from the actual deed)...

What did you mean when you asked about experiences or events that led to homosexuality? Were you speaking of actual seductions/experimentations common among adolescents of both sexes, or something else?

I think all this dissecting, analyzing, categorizing, moralising, takes all the fun out of it. It IS fun, you know.

I think all this dissecting, analyzing, categorizing, moralising, takes all the fun out of it. It IS fun, you know.

I think all this dissecting, analyzing, categorizing, moralising, takes all the fun out of it. It IS fun, you know.

Never had the desire to experiment with the same sex so I'll just have to take your word on it.

I think all this dissecting, analyzing, categorizing, moralising, takes all the fun out of it. It IS fun, you know.

I didn't read the looooong posting, is that what it's about? Well, nevermind.

Dissecting, analyzing, categorizing are one set of activities. Moralising is quite another.

This may be what Bub was trying to get at. I know my grandfather's molesting me left me with a sense that hetero sex is "dirty" and secretive and painful and frightening with most men, and seriously allergic to people of either sex who are into dominance games, i.e., dykes or fems.

Darn, now I just HAVE TO KNOW what on earth "Klingon" sex is. Sounds like fun, maybe. ?

Darn, now I just HAVE TO KNOW what on earth "Klingon" sex is. Sounds like fun, maybe. ?

Klingon mating rituals involve limited domination and combative attitudes. Par'machpu' (singular par'mach) are chosen mates for dedicated recreational sexual congress, equivalent to fiancées among Terran humans. Lieutenant Worf, when questioned in this area of Klingon lore, said (perhaps obliquely) that females roar loudly, hurl heavy objects, and claw at their desired mate – the males, conversely, read love poetry aloud and duck a lot.[4]

Klingon females reportedly search for their own partners, whom they deem worthy of copulation. Normally this has to be a male of great strength, valour or who at least possess great courage. The mating process can be a very wild and sometimes violent affair. When Worf was questioned by Guinan while still onboard the Enterprise-D, as to why he had not taken a par'mach, the Klingon said he was only chaste in concern for the "safety" of his fellow female crewmates. Guinan joked that many would find a male Klingon "tame," producing a rare laugh of pleasure from Worf.[5] Later aboard Station Deep Space Nine, Worf engaged in romance with Jadzia Dax, a Trill with deep connections to Klingon society. Their first night of relations produced a surprising number of contusions and broken limbs for Doctor Bashir to treat. As they arrived, the Klingon woman Lady Grilka was already in the infirmary with a very injured Quark in tow. Bashir stated that "he did not want to know what had happened."

There has never been a representation or reference to anything but heterosexual Klingons, in the Star Trek canon.

I think I'm a little too old for all that action but I sure would like to WATCH!!!

Charlie Ray might have something on youtube...Inyer fer sure.

Why is everyone suddenly 'mum'? Can't we discuss these topics openly and extensively?

Waitin' for the link from Inyer...

Why? Why are petty 'rivalries' more important than a frank exchange of ideas and experiences?

Darn, now I just HAVE TO KNOW what on earth "Klingon" sex is. Sounds like fun, maybe. ?

Maybe we should move it back to the Iran thread, where folks were more open.

Actually Nomarchy did the decent thing by moving it here...perhaps we should approach this more seriously.

When I was married to my first husband I hated sex. He was physically and verbally abusive and only had sex to relieve himself. I felt like a toilet. ugh.

THEN I met my second husband. He really, really wanted me to have fun. Boy, DID WE.

One Valentines Day I didn't have any money to buy him a card or anything so I shaved my kootchie into a heart.

HE LOVED IT!!

It itched like hell growing back in.

I think watching porn with my hubby loosened me up. I saw that the things we did were not aberrations or naughty. I grew up in an extremely uptight household where sex was never mentioned except as something bad. My Mom didn't ever like sex, ever.

My husband thinks I'm just the greatest thing on two feet. That makes for a great sex life and a life long partnership.

I never had a bi-sexual relationship but I don't thinik it's a bad thing. Some women are so scarred from abuse they prefer to stay with their own kind. I don't blame them for that.

Is this the kind of post you were looking for?? Or is it WAAAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION?? Let me know.

When I was married to my first husband I hated sex. He was physically and verbally abusive and only had sex to relieve himself. I felt like a toilet. ugh.

THEN I met my second husband. He really, really wanted me to have fun. Boy, DID WE.

One Valentines Day I didn't have any money to buy him a card or anything so I shaved my kootchie into a heart.

HE LOVED IT!!

It itched like hell growing back in.

I think watching porn with my hubby loosened me up. I saw that the things we did were not aberrations or naughty. I grew up in an extremely uptight household where sex was never mentioned except as something bad. My Mom didn't ever like sex, ever.

My husband thinks I'm just the greatest thing on two feet. That makes for a great sex life and a life long partnership.

I never had a bi-sexual relationship but I don't thinik it's a bad thing. Some women are so scarred from abuse they prefer to stay with their own kind. I don't blame them for that.

Is this the kind of post you were looking for?? Or is it WAAAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION?? Let me know.

We will need verification...got pics?

When I was married to my first husband I hated sex. He was physically and verbally abusive and only had sex to relieve himself. I felt like a toilet. ugh.

THEN I met my second husband. He really, really wanted me to have fun. Boy, DID WE.

One Valentines Day I didn't have any money to buy him a card or anything so I shaved my kootchie into a heart.

HE LOVED IT!!

It itched like hell growing back in.

I think watching porn with my hubby loosened me up. I saw that the things we did were not aberrations or naughty. I grew up in an extremely uptight household where sex was never mentioned except as something bad. My Mom didn't ever like sex, ever.

My husband thinks I'm just the greatest thing on two feet. That makes for a great sex life and a life long partnership.

I never had a bi-sexual relationship but I don't thinik it's a bad thing. Some women are so scarred from abuse they prefer to stay with their own kind. I don't blame them for that.

Is this the kind of post you were looking for?? Or is it WAAAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION?? Let me know.

They're not necessarily...my comment was intended to be humor neutral.

That is...not neutral on the funny/not funny scale but neutral on the lefty/right scale.

Although...one could make a case.....

But I digress....

What was the question?

We will need verification...got pics?

We will need verification...got pics?

I prefer to keep those private.

You're a lucky woman...but then, so is my wife.

When I was married to my first husband I hated sex. He was physically and verbally abusive and only had sex to relieve himself. I felt like a toilet. ugh.

THEN I met my second husband. He really, really wanted me to have fun. Boy, DID WE.

One Valentines Day I didn't have any money to buy him a card or anything so I shaved my kootchie into a heart.

HE LOVED IT!!

It itched like hell growing back in.

I think watching porn with my hubby loosened me up. I saw that the things we did were not aberrations or naughty. I grew up in an extremely uptight household where sex was never mentioned except as something bad. My Mom didn't ever like sex, ever.

My husband thinks I'm just the greatest thing on two feet. That makes for a great sex life and a life long partnership.

I never had a bi-sexual relationship but I don't thinik it's a bad thing. Some women are so scarred from abuse they prefer to stay with their own kind. I don't blame them for that.

Is this the kind of post you were looking for?? Or is it WAAAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION?? Let me know.

So, sexual orientation is NOT a moral matter, whatever its provenance and etiology?

I am not asking whether it SHOULD be a 'moral' matter, but whether it is EXPERIENCED as a moral matter, treated as a moral matter, etc.

A more appropriate question would be: could one differentiate his sexual orientation from an equally substantial urge to steal?

I merely compared my beliefs to traditional Methodist/Baptist so I'm at a bit of a loss to understand how you can label me so subjectively or how the above might be construed as an extreme form of religion.

Surely you don't mean to suggest that since it ain't Catholic its gotta be a rogue?

No, mere sexual orientation isn't a moral matter, IMHO, since it is not chosen. Sexual behavior is open to moral argumentation - at least w/humans - since it is an act, and actions are chosen, and some actions can have moral components.

I don't experience sexual orientation as a moral matter any more than I experience brown eyes as a moral matter – for me it’s just something built into ones biology. I suppose if you wanted to form a moral argument against mere sexual orientation, or brown eyes, you would have to direct that moral argument against a deity, or other sentient being that may be responsible for guiding biological processes, if any exist.

Using an extreme example, even if pedophilia were someday upgraded to a sexual orientation, I would not consider it a moral matter. It’s acting on a pedophiliac orientation that would be open to moral argumentation.

Essentially, yes. There are two branches of Catholicism due to historical political circumstances, and I can see how it might be different to choose between them, but to claim to be a traditional Christian, but not be Catholic of some variety, is to misrepresent oneself from the perspective of a Catholic, IMHO, since Protestantism is a heretical doctrine. Now mind you, I have a great respect for the more liberal versions of Protestantism in that I feel that they best represent the life and philosophy of Jesus as a person, but your version of Protestantism is no more traditional Christianity than these liberal versions of Protestantism from the perspective of a Catholic. It's also important to note that I don't consider myself a Catholic any longer. I just recognize that Catholicism is the original and authentic Christianity. Of course, by the same token, I think of Catholicism as a heretical form of Judaism with more or less equal parts of Judaism, Paganism, & St. Paul. I’m sure I win no friend with this perspective. It’s just so ingrained from Catholic educational indoctrination. From the perspective of a Catholic, you follow a false religion that puts your salvation in jeopardy, and this wouldn’t qualify you as a “traditional Christian.”