Things I learned Part 2:)

I feel that I've shortchanged Butler on all she has taught me. The problem is that her writing lures me into a place that I'm timid to try and translate in my own words. Her deconstructive work is fascinating, and a little bit infuriating. Like I have said before, I don't like some of her suggestions about language, since I feel that language has provided her with an excellent array of subversive weapons thus far. She has truly utilized her words in a most perplexing and informative way. Here writing forces the reader to bracket information in the mind until it is called upon once again to bundle with another idea.

Foucault's ideas about the confessional also are revolutionary. The idea is that the Church tried to enforce a lockdown on people's libido's, minds, words and actions, but they did not anticipate these repressed thoughts to simply burst out like a hole in a sinking ship via the confessionals. I was watching Jurassic Park recently, and the line "life finds a way" always sticks with me. These things are not going anywhere. Even if they lay dormant, they are about to be bursting at the seams. As long as the power structure is imbalanced, there will be a flushing of the old, and an unstoppable progress of the new. Our job is to facilitate that progress and to flush the constraints that are doing us harm.

I feel I've written a great deal in my blogs on what it means to be queer, and Jagose's explanation of it, but I feel I could write volumes more. Queerness is the breath of fresh air that you breath into your body after exhaling the old. It keeps things vital and healthy. It prevents stifling and choking. I think Butler's idea of a "domain of Abjection" was quite illuminating for me, because of the ideas I'd already learned from reading a bit of Lacan. For queerness, I think this abjection is the fossilized crap that forms when you are not exercising your right to go against the obedient tide, or to resist tradition just because that is the way that it has always been done. Changing things is Queer. Hissing the hissers is queer. Pulling the rug out from under the oppressive dominant structure is queer. As for sexuality, we have a long way to go as far as "queering things up." Isn't it a little bit shocking, when you take a step back and think of how much work is to be done? Imagine the progress that courses of study, like this one, will accomplish in the decades to come. I suppose that is the unknowable future that Queerness has reserved for us.

One last thing I'd like to talk about is the usage of the word "Given." This is used in Jagose and Butler quite often. When a gender's "givenness" is concerned, you can rest assured that there is something rotten in Denmark. There is nothing that is a given. If analytical theory, including all of the readings from this course, has taught me anything, it is that as soon as something is assumed as a given, then you must look at it again. Turn it over, and re-examine it as many times as it takes for the seams to show. Through time, our collective cultural experience births us into a state of affairs that we didn't ask for, and convinces us that it is normal. We unquestioningly accept what surrounds us. What investigating the "given" does for this is open up a whole new realm of possibility for our lives. There are other ways of doing things, saying things, and understanding things out there that we have yet to learn. It is our duty to keep learning, and acquiring new tools to do so. This is key to understanding what Queer means.