Is Queer Theory a step ʻbeyondʼ Gender Theory? What implications do you think it has for understanding identity and identity politics more generally? Can you think of ways it might be applied to studying religious traditions and phenomena?
Sandalwood tinging the air and clouds dominating the sky. Can we seriously step beyond gender theory? Our intense subject, without concerning sexuality, must move somewhere further. Those totalities of identity which make all of us to some extent queer. Curiouser and curiouser. No-one is around to answer, the trouble of such questions have obviously frightened them all away. Yet calmly and with a gentle hindsight we may see queer theory as this extra. But the loose nature of just criticising the apparently binary distinctions of gender theory is immediately troublesome for its sheer lack of vision. It exists somewhere beyond the base of gender theory, but probably only an half step beyond.
My notes at this point seem to descend into increasingly angry questions and references to a concept of the soul as created and instilled in me by a Japanese cartoon in the mid-nineties. Creating our soul from individual to individual is not the subject, instead there is a pondered soul for the whole of (mankind) humanity. For me this does not apply to the instrumental man and is thus of no to little interest. Why is there a demand for this 'we' with no concern for individual from individual. Strange babblings.
In looking beyond simply the differing aspects and analysing the whole of human sexuality, queer theory is, as a matter of course, able to produce a more accurate discourse on the self. For religions perhaps this provides some respite for those extreme portions of religious thought usually discounted by academics. For phenomena... seriously? I guess it allows recognition for those more extreme reports that are usually set aside as exaggeration and incidents of obsceneignorance. This of course presents and illustrates the problem, whereby queer theory takes on a body of study altogether too grand for any essential ideal. At some stage a filter needs to exist, to prevent those with initially good aims from being lost in a study of the whole of humanity.
We can look at all the infinite variations society, and identity, but will it actually teach us anything, or just tell us more about ourselves, about our perceptions and prejudices. Appreciating the range at hand, and actually generating helpful information from it are two very different things. Put together such thoughts seem bizarre to the mind which so desperately tries to see patterns even where they do not exist. We can eventually start accepting that humanity exists in such multitude variation, but not without first challenging the very way in which our minds view the world.
What does Butler mean when she describes gender and sexuality as ʻperformativeʼ? Can her theories in this regard be extended to consider other aspects of identity? What about religious identity?
Butlerian performativity implies that at every moment of our lives we are inhabiting certain roles and acting in specific ways for a grander audience that may even include ourselves. The ways in which we act differently around different people and on our own reveals just how comfortable we are with our displayed identities and indeed just how unified these identities may be. Every action is of course performative, even those that are performed without thinking and yet I feel that these performances become such an integral part of ourselves that perhaps there is no player behind the role. We occupy a void that has manipulative and sensing powers over an otherwise inert collection of matter, through various choices, both conscious and unconscious, we can produce what can be perceived by others as a unified person occupying a chosen social role.
It is foolish to claim that these performative actions apply only to gender and sexuality. Every action, political, physical, the way we choose to carry ourselves and identify with certain branches of humanity, is loaded with performance. Even in things which apparently hold no actual choice a decision is made on how to take the hand we have been dealt and how to respond to it.
With religious identity, although at certain stages we might have the options to be completely free with our choices I think we can never escape the Pavlovian identity generated by years of acting in specific ways. In this way performative identity is to some degree made up of conscious choices in the moment and also by the way we have been nurtured during childhood.
Week 10: Jacques Derrida: The Film
Do you think that biography is incidental or crucial to understanding a philosopherʼs thought? Does knowing (or not knowing) about Derridaʼs life enable you to understand what might be at stake in the process of deconstruction? What role do you think the concept of biography plays in the film and how is it deconstructed?
While it could be argued that only a philosopher's writings should be engaged with, deliberately viewing only what they want you to see, in order to have the purest theatrical experience; that is all that action is, theatre. It means taking a single viewpoint and allowing yourself to be taken in with the greatest visual effects at hand. But if one were to walk around the side and view the production from the wings it might become clear whether or not what you were viewing had any substance behind it.
The background, the small details, I believe are what reveal the most about the philosophies you are trying to learn about. Additionally, when you learn about things a person has taken care to deliberately conceal it can grant a much greater insight onto their thought processes and reveal just how their philosophy has come about. I believe in personal privacy, but I also feel that so long as life is lived morally and with no regrets a person ought to have little or nothing to hide, and therefore no problems in allowing another to view that life 'warts and all'.