After three weeks in this class, I am starting, once again, to wrap my brain around queer theory and to immerse myself in the ideas and terminology used by the theorists we are reading. Some of the most interesting points that I have absorbed so far, are:

1. The very idea of queer as an elusive, transitory term that changes over time and is, by nature, undefinable. I think the very best reintroduction I could have received to queer theory was at the end of Jagose's first chapter: "In deferring any final assessment of queer as a critical term, this book acknowledges that if queer lives up to its radical potential - and does not solidify as merely another acceptable (though oppositional) category - its ongoing evolutions cannot be anticipated: its future is - after all - the future" (Jagose, 6). To put queer into the context of the dominant heteronormative society almost seems to reaffirm that heteronormativity, but the important point is that queer, then, accounts always for the marginalized sexualities or genders.

2. The second idea to rattle me was the idea that sex, as we know it, has a component of medicalization that shapes society's discourse on sexuality. "Throughout the nineteenth century, sex seems to have been incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction, and which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formation" (Foucault, 54). Throughout the History of Sexuality, Foucault shows how the discourse around sex began to focus on the reproductive (married) couple and how, at the same time, the discussion of their sex was medicalized. In my mind, this is how the modern idea of heternormativity/queerness really take shape (since, in a sense, there cannot be one without the other): through the discourse put forth by the politics of power.

3. Another point that stood out to me under the larger umbrella of gender is the finer point of gender identity and how is different yet inextricably linked to sexuality. In her accessible article "How to Bring Your Kids up Gay," Sedgwick says of society's view of gender and sexuality as "continuous and collapsible categories" that, traditionally, "anyone, male or female, who desires a man must by definition be feminine; and that anyone, male or female, who desires a woman must by the same token be masculine. That one woman, as a woman, might desire another; that one man, as a man, might desire another: the indispensable need to make these powerful, subversive assertions has seemed, perhaps, to require a relative deemphasis of the links between gay adults and gender-nonconforming children" (Sedgwick, 72). The queering of my own preconceived notions about gender and sexuality have forced me to view the two as related but separate entities, all theories about construction aside.

4. Related to that, Butler's discussion of gender has really blown my mind. "If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes," she writes in "Gender Trouble," "then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders" (Butler, 10). This is different from point 3 in that, once you train your mind to view gender and physical sex as separate but related components to the triangle, you then, in a sense, have to turn that knowledge on its head and look at both sex and gender as two types of the same construct, as sex itself is a gendered category.

5. Finally, the touch/tactility discussion from our recent reading - though difficult for me to follow, I must admit - made me think about the ways in which we assume sensation and pleasure should be felt, and the assumptions queer theory makes about a sensuous future. "The conflation of touch and tactility is what enables a queer critique of [intersex] surgery. This is because surgical desensitization impairs touching only if touching is assumed to entail tactility. After all, desensitized genitals can still touch and be touched; it is their tactility that surgery damages" (Morland). Queer theorists should be mindful not to confuse the two, nor to assume that one begets the other. The example of the stone butch is offered - though functional in the sense of genitalia according to sex, the preference for no penetration destroys our assumptions about the "normal" function of female genitalia. Likewise, surgery to correct intersex genitalia to appear "normal" renders them such only in appearance but makes no progress on their function in the context of the individual's tactility.