From Genderfuck: A Disruption of the Learning Process:
The need to study this court case [Pat Doe v. John Yunits] through the lens of Queer Theory is entirely important to this paper. It establishes the new ways of thinking about systems such as the judicial courts and schools, and society such as education and social thought processes. Queer Theory emerged as the study of sexuality in academia. Basically, the queer theory movement started in the late 1980s through academic conferences. The movement was primarily focused on “new ways of thinking and theorizing.” Queer Theory was an answer to what Judith Butler described as “unwritten and written codes of heterosexualized gender systems”(Butler qtd. in Stein 181). Queer theories are constructed upon the following guidelines:
a conceptualization of sexuality which sees sexual power embodied in different levels of social life, expressed discursively and enforced through boundaries and binary divides.
the problematization of sexual and gender categories, and of identities in general. Indentities are always on uncertain ground, entailing displacements of identification and knowing
parody which leads to deconstruction, decentering, revisionist readings, and an anti-assimilationist politics
a willingness to interrogate areas which normally would not be seen as the terrain of sexuality, and to conduct queer “readings” of ostensibly heterosexual or nonsexualized texts. (Stein 181-2)
There's more information about the court case in link, if you're interested. Don't think it's the one mentioned in this MetaFilter discussion, but some of the ill-informed commentary applies equally well. Or equally badly. Or something.
I was more interested in this bit, from the introductory paragraph of the paper:
Identity is a key factor of an individual in the society. Identity often is skewed despite the rhetorical statement: “You are who you are.” However, many times a society unconsciously attempts to mold the identities of individuals into homogenous products. The important thing is not to let yourself prejudge individuals or acts of people because this creates an assumption that brings a stigma against the individual.
I've been stumbling over my own ignorant assumptions quite a bit lately, plus having to deal with other people's, with the result that I'm really not liking a society that produced them, or me, very much at the moment.
That, and discussions of identity politics always give me a headache. It's usually in the context of a perfectly valid point, but the first person to post a comment using the word "essentialist" will win a very special prize.
"...having to deal with other people's [ignorant assumptions], with the result that I'm really not liking a society that produced them, or me, very much at the moment."
Welcome to the club, baby! [Must make you that card.] & let's all feel better by engaging in a good bit of camp, uh, I mean "parody." [What, is "camp" no longer an appropriately theoretical term?]
"Camp" is just so... so... Susan Sontag, Neo.
On a slightly related topic...In a class I taught a few years back we got onto the topic of the difference between kitsch and camp. One of my seniors offered the opinion that kitsch is when you use it to upholster the couch and camp is when you wear it as a dress. Couldn't have put it better myself.
There are days I really miss teaching.
Oh, I know. It's also too Butlerian for 21st-century theorists. I like your student's comment, though. For those of us in the trenches, it's always better to laugh than to cry, & sometimes I think theorists love their sobbing about as much as the Smiths did.
But maybe I'm just bitter.
Oooh, don't apologize. I totally agree. Why do you think that so much theory keeps circling back to BDSM themes? Very little theory seems to focus on humor . . .
let's see, how can i used "essentialist" in a sentence here.....now i'm going to be up all night. aaron, there are only two cures for the kind of headache you are describing, at least in my pitiful experience: caffeine and endorphins. and if you're not drinking coffee and jerking off too much then you've been outside academia longer than any of those other folks. i should be careful about pissing in my own sandbox though, as i'm going back to school in january...yeesh.
Jim, I ususally spend those discussions trying to hide the fact that I have nothing worthwhile to contribute.
Kind'a like this thread, only the people here are interesting and funny.
Think I just misquoted Sarah Vowell. And either just missed her reading here, or am about to in the next few days. . .
Kitsch is having an ideology that denies the mediating power of language.
What's the difference between an awful love song and a good one? The emotion may be the same, but the articulation is shoddy. The common definition of kitsch is to be "more Catholic than the Pope." The way to give it moral weight is through the narrative of it's images. If all you have is a plastic crucifix it does not mean you can not have real faith.
Fascism (as kitsch) is the violence of barbarism denuded of language and reduced to pure power, and denuded as well of narrative relations.
It is as much a mistake to see culture as nothing but power, as it is to see love songs as all equally about love. You'd listen to Barry Manilow all day, wouldn't you? And without the irony. Culture is a system of language used to describe a given set of power relations. Barbarism is a violent linguistic construct, that produces a violent reality (and the other way round too of course) There is such a thing as barbaric justice for example. Fascist justice is a contradiction in terms. Fascism has no linguistic basis it is anti-communicative and anti linguistic.
Parody is assimilationist in the worse sort of way. It replicates a relation that it is unable to overcome. Queer theory is as often as not only Bottom theory, the theory of the victim, of the fucked, that uses terms given it by the Top. It sees culture as power relations, which is why it shares ideological roots with Fascis, but in Judith Butler's case I imagine she just doesn't get it. She is a pet hate of mine. I'm waiting for someone to write something, anything on Homo-Fascism. [Take your Tom of Finland books and shove them up your ass etc...]
Greetings to the world of youthful rationalist theoretecians from a member of the empirical working class.
And, since you ask, I'm bi just like everyone else dear.
I knew there was a good reason I left academia.
If that was directed at me, I'm not in academia.
I make my living as a construction worker.
I do have a BA, however.
Not you personally, just grousing about grumpy theory generally.
Construction, incidentally, is cool. You can tell people you have something in common with Jesus when you work construction.
[mea culpa for the theory-talk, Hanne]
All who find Butler irritating, should take a look at a book called Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. It's a set of essays by Butler, the august Ernesto LaClau, & irrepressible Slavoj Zizek; and then 2 more sets where each comments/rebuts each others' essays. Fascinating to watch their fencing-like dodge-&- weave. It's not as purely gender-oriented as much of Butler's stuff, which offers a different perspective on her. Considered en toto, the volume is a sort of attempt to update Althusser.
I was about to add something in the comments, here, and then I was confronted with lots of theory.
I don't know shit about queery theory or Queery Theory or Identity Theory or whatever.
All I know is my personal application.
Please, 'Spider, please talk?
No sweat, Neo. A little bitching about the inadequacies never goes entirely amiss.
Have any of you ever come across a 'zine -- few years back, I think -- called Judith Butler Is A Muffinhead? I have one copy kicking around here somewhere. Periodically I come across it again in my bookshelf-foraging around the house and it always makes me giggle.
I will know I have truly arrived as an intellectual -- which I doubt will ever happen -- when I read a print headline with my own name followed by the phrase 'is a muffinhead.'
Muffinhead!!!
Neo, check your OED; is that a term for those living in HarmonyBunnyLand?
I could never disappoint you, Garrity...
Lone citation of "muffin-head" in the OED=
1892 in something called David Grieve, in dialect, but apparently synonymous with "good for nothing" and "donkey".
Although [& Hanne can join us on this one] perhaps the hip zinestress was referring to the shape of British muffins being similar to doctoral hoods. Thus, you, too, lovie, are a muffinhead along w/Ms Butler, & I'm an aspiring one.