In Judith Butler’s From Gender Trouble, one of the things she talks about is what it means to be a female and how being a female is filled with endless possibilities of trouble. She discusses how there is this box of what a woman should be and if one does not fit into that criteria, there would be trouble. For example, a woman could get pregnant by the wrong person at the wrong time or not be able to get pregnant when the time is right. Similarly, a woman is supposed to be modest and should contain certain aspects about herself including sexuality or else she is considered “trouble.” All of that pressure falls onto a woman, not a man. Again, if a woman were to discuss her sexual partners openly it is looked at as “trouble” however for a man he is given props. While all of these issues are definitely still present today, women have been making huge strides to counteract these boxes of what we are supposed to be. For example, we almost had a woman president! A woman being in a position of that power or even coming close to achieving it is a huge mark of progress on its own. Another example can be women in the film/tv industry. Up until very recently, women were portrayed on screen as these stiff, non-complex, doll-like characters. They were essentially present as a prop for the male characters. However, now we have woman dominating the industry. We see this major stride very well in the area of Comedy. Comedy was predominantly male up until very recently. A perfect example of this is the tv show “Broad City” on Comedy Central. This show was created by and stars two female comedians and it is a show based on their real life odd-couple friendship while they are trying to make it in New York City. This show does not shy away from female issues of “trouble.” For example, Menstruation used to be something that nobody spoke about and was considered inappropriate to discuss while it is a natural process of the human body! There is an episode of “Broad City” where one of the girls gets her period on a flight and the whole episode surrounds her trying to find a tampon. It is absolutely hysterical and real. 20 years ago an episode like that would never have been aired. Therefore, while I think women still face discrimination and hardships, I also have tremendous hope because the “troubles” of being a woman are slowly becoming less and less.

Sexuality is not the spontaneous overflow of unfettered passion (2404), according to Zizek!, but a theatrical performance: the sadomasochist stage director, who enjoys the fantastical dominatrix onstage, that extends her hand toward the director in the empty audience, pulling him up, and physically reminds him: whose the master of his body. In other words, pain, less physical/more emotional, is the lynchpin to the fantasy of love. And love, if you ain’t know by now, is a construct. Oh, where in New York art thou construct-free spaces to engage our primate sense of love upon a mate, that’s not a dive bar? What is love (don’t go there Alexis)?

Let’s step back and ask a less daunting question: Does Zizek! exist? What position is he arguing of courtly love, as a relevant parameter (2407) that stages the conscious mating? One, Zizek sort of exist, verified by Norton & YouTube; and two, my assertion: courtly love adheres to only a minority of men, that value “conscious” pursuit for carnal love. Let’s break these three italics: Value, is how a man prioritizes his attention; pursuit, is the exercising, or Althusserian material existence (1354), of his attention aprori or vested with seductive tools; and carnal, is the biological hardwiring that, upon “lover’s” (a noun I’ll expound on later) sight, automates testosterone and adrenaline that’s pleasurable…which runs full circle: that runs back to an “unconscious” attention. Thus, the chemical pleasure, is the valued attention, to be pursued.

The pursued woman, in this case, will respond to his hail (1356), whether she ignores him or engages, because she being the judge of a future relation or not, because she’s being pursued (the roles would switch, if she pursued the male), has initially and/or ultimately judged, thru periphery or directly, his superficial façade: the face, hair, body, etc. The pursuer’s subsequent persuasive rhetoric use of, perhaps Jakobson’s poetic function (1151), if it passes thru the screening membrane between pursuer/pursued, would be the deciding factor. I’d argue this type of modern courtly man, on all degrees, from infrequent pursuer, or daily, as in a Casanovian libertine, or modern pick-up artist, may lean toward Zizek’s argument.

However, I do agree that, in most cases, empirically in majority of relationships, at least in Manhattan, there’s a symbolic love dyad, via both mates “always already subjected” by constructs of love (Church, advertising, parents), that, whether necessary or not, is there at love’s first sight. Which brings me to that seemingly impossible question of: what is love? If Plato’s Symposium is inconclusive, fast-forward 2000+ years later where Freud ask “What does a woman want?”, and excluding the Darwinian’s natural selection of procreation…love—as I avoid answering this philosophical conundrum—is better suited for it’s pragmatic synonym: process.

 First love, we misconstrue, or people tell us we do, for a crush, or “puppy love”. And because the greatest minds in history, can’t objectively agree on love: to that love struck kid in elementary school, love…this is love.

This is pre-puberty. Lust is not a biological feeling yet, or perhaps it’s felt another way (I can’t recall the 90’s). This may be the “Real”(2426) that Zizek mentions, when the catalytic discovery in The Crying Game, when the purser discovers the impossibility of his fantasy and the object-subject relation switches. Proceeding, then, this “puppy love”, I assume, unless the kid is a natural mack, has no conception of Jakobson poetics, does not like pain in any manner, and may even listen to his mom’s advice: and give this six year old girl, a bear and flowers…and it’s not Valentine’s Day! But until that inevitable day where both kids are just so confused, they “break-up” (if it gets that far), to the contrary argument: that courtly love still dictates parameters; that kid, with his sincere attraction of her, is boundless from an idea of love, or at least from Zizek’s one.

In “Gender Trouble,” Judith Butler ultimately argues that gender is performed. She also criticizes aspects of Feminist theory (and other well known theorists) such as the idea that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. For Judith Butler, the simple categories of “woman” and “man” are in reality super complex because of factors such as class, ethnicity and sexuality. She points out that these categories also empower a patriarchal society. Though ultimately she challenges the common idea that sex is biological and gender is culturally constructed. According to Judith Butler, both sex and gender are constructed! “Sexed bodies can not signify without gender and the existence of sex prior to discourse and cultural imposition is only an effect of the functioning of gender.” In other words, sex and gender construct each other. This is important because Judith Butler wants people to trouble the categories of gender through performance and in a way remove the gendered pronouns.

In a way Butler is asking to reconstruct the English language in such a way that gender-based pronouns cease to exist. To her, that will be progress towards a less gender based society. The idea of how language and society intertwine, support and complicate each other has been discussed throughout the whole semester, but in Butler’s case she is literally giving us the first action to take, which she makes sound simple, yet I could not see working out for a very long time. For example, I think reteaching our current society the English pronouns would not be very welcoming (because people aren’t crazy about change) and so a change as big as that would take A lot of time. People tend to stick to what they know because it makes them feel comfortable. The moment something as common as the pronouns are challenged then people will get uncomfortable. An uncomfortable society leads to a restless a society, that acts out without thinking (most of the time violently). Point being, that what Butler calls out for is not a simple task, yet I do think she is correct that sex and gender are constructed. Society constructs what it means to be of a certain sex and how one should behave since they’re from a certain sex. Society is what claims that sex is biological so technically that means society chose that, which technically means it constructed that idea.

“Sex in Public”

            Sex in Public by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner can confuse one into thinking that this text will discuss people having sex in public spaces. This text speaks nothing about that but about heteronormativity. Heterosexuality is normalized in our culture according to Berlant and Warner. They state that in our society heterosexual is deemed right whereas homosexuality or bisexuality are wrong. Berlant and Warner make the suggestion that there is a rightness of heteronormativity in things. In the text they stated, “Heteronormativity is more than ideology, or, prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life.” This portion of the text exemplifies that heteronormativity is an aspect of our culture that is deeply rooted to be correct. Reading this text and seeing the idea of heterosexual culture being prevalent in our world it made me think of Althusser’s theory of interpellation. From the moment we are born the idea of heterosexuality is embedded within us. Since we are trained from birth to believe that heterosexuality is right while other sexualities are wrong these thoughts are not our own. This ideology about sex and gender is something we have been taught. We have been interpellated about a lot of our thoughts.Heteronormativity is not just about sex but the sense of rightness that is embedded in things. It is seen as communal and is then imagines through intimacy, coupling or kinship. This idea of community is troubling to people of the gay community.

            Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner also speak on how some laws encourage heterosexual culture and helps it become reinforced. If one thinks about today’s society and looks at the things that are legalize and what is not it is shocking. It is shocking to know that most states only recently allowed for same sex marriages to be legal. The idea of heterosexuality as normal and correct can still be found in many places. It was a point in the text that heteronormativity gets its ideology through the “institution of intimacy”. Even though intimacy is supposed to have a sense of privatehood it is mediated by the public and makes “sex in public” seem out of place. According to Berlant and Warner institutions of intimacy are offered as a vision of the good life for those who are destabilized.

            Berlant and Warner also touches upon the types of people who are oppressed by this idea of heteronormativity. According to the text, “The nostalgic family values…and Clintonian familialism seek to increase the legal and economic privileges of married couples and parents”, this portion of the text exemplifies that heterosexual culture is being reinforced to fit values that society deem important like family. This text is not about having sex in public but about sexuality and what is heteronormativity described as.

With an outlook grounded in psychoanalysis, desire is never simply desire. Slavoj Zizek’s “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing” offers a perspective about romantic and sexual pursuits that is rooted in an asymmetry between subject and its object, how projections of ones’ ‘Thing’ will inevitably fill up the ‘black hole’ that is their object, whether transcendent, medieval lady or hardcore dominatrix and usually renders the woman-object passive. In discussing Zizek’s article, I could not help but be reminded of similar theories regarding desire, especially Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and how both are essentially rooted in the fundamental idea that however this passion or Lacanian ‘objet petit a’ comes to be mediated, it is always a black hole and an empty symbol indicative of the constructed falseness of these human interactions. “There is more truth in the mask we wear, in the game we play, in the ‘fiction’ we obey and follow than in what is concealed beneath the mask” (2410-11).

Mimetic desire differs from Zizek’s theory in that it is centered around a triangle, in which there is a subject of desire, its object, and a mediator whose principles or behaviors the subject seeks to imitate in its pursuit of the object. The object of desire is the least important element of the triangle, as the complex relationship between the subject and its mediator; whether an internal rival for intimacy or an external ideal that crept its way into the subject’s consciousness; reveals more about the root of desire and its intentions. For example, in Gustave Flaubert’s nineteenth century magnum opus, Madame Bovary, protagonist Emma Bovary takes up an adulterous relationship with a rich landowner, but she is obsessed with the notion of romantic fantasy and the escapist thrill that comes with occupying the role of ‘adulteress’. Her mediator stems from a fervent habit since childhood of reading popular romantic literature and extracting elaborate fantasies about luxury, wealth and romance from them. Rodolphe, the dashing landowner whose intentions are far less based in romance than they are in his own sexual pleasure, is the culmination of all of these ‘Things’ for Emma. It’s clear that she does not really desire him per se, but the opulent fantasy that he represents.

Zizek speaks about how the object of desire is constructed not only by obstacles that are essential to increasing its value, but “a network of detours, approximations and near-misses” (2413). By Zizek’s own example, the play Cyrano de Bergerac is predicated on those detours in mistaken identity and falsehoods of the self (plus, Cyrano must literally imitate another man in order to gain Roxane’s affections, a twist of fate that would please Girard to no end). Zizek’s points about desire show up in Madame Bovary just as well. Emma Bovary is infatuated with a law student, Leon, who shares her bordering-on-sentimental fantasies that mainly exist in literature. But, their adulterous relationship does not begin until much later in the novel as it appears initially inaccessible through a series of missed chances, goodbyes, buried opportunities and other obstacles, including her lackluster husband and Emma’s first lover, in the way which only serve to increase Emma’s infatuation with a person who literally mirrors her projections back at her.

Whether it is a Girardian or Zizekian reading of literature, both texts about desire interact with each other in fascinating ways that lay bare how romantic and sexual passion for another can become slant towards ourselves and a way to fill up that cavernous black hole with our own hopes, dreams, fears and resulting projections from things that swirl around in our collective unconscious. Either way, real love or elaborate fantasy, it scares the hell out of us.

Sex in Public by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner discusses about sex mediated by the public. Heterosexual culture is a big part of the discussion as it is deeply rooted into our lively hood that it became normalized. There is a sense of rightness when thinking about heterosexual relationship compared to other sexual relationship. Berlant and Warner describes this rightness as heteronormativity and they believe it is “more than an ideology or prejudice or phobia against gays and lesbians.”(Berlant & Warner, 554).

From the moment we are born, heterosexuality is involved. Even laws encourages heterosexual culture. “”New welfare and tax “reforms” passed under the cooperation between the Contract with America and Clintonian familialism seek to increase the legal and economic privileges of married couples and parents.”(Berlant & Warner, 550) This shows that heterosexual culture is reinforced. Furthermore the government repressed the LGBTQ by censoring adult entertainment. Adult establishments are restricted to reserved districts and mustn’t be within 500 feet of another adult establishment or house of worship, school, or day-care center. This will make adult establishments shut down by tons which can affect homosexuals because homosexuals may go to these adult establishments to hook up. With the closing of these establishments, homosexuals and heterosexuals will mingle together. Looking at statistics of hate crime can show this not being a good thing. “LGBT people are targeted for violent hate crimes at a rate of two times that of… Muslims or black people, four times that of Jews, and 14 times that of Latinos.”(Greve, 1). However technological advancements can help LGBTQ. With apps that allow people with similar or same interests to connect with each other instead of going to a dimly lit and shady store to meet up. I also believe society is accepting LGBTQ  much better than before. Based on statistics, entertainment industry and news media are more on friendly side for LGBTQ. (Pew Research Center, 1). These two cultural forms can help change what the masses think of LGBTQ and therefore help lessen the hardwired notion of sexuality. These cultural forms are able to reach large amount of audience which can influence their view. Also in 2013, 92% of Americans has become more accepting to LGBTQ.(Pew Research Center, 1).

In the beginning, Berlant and Warner wrote about Time‘s picture what the future of an American can look like. They talked about how it is nothing more but to scare the public so the public can be organized. Time‘s believes that during the 21st century interracial reproductive sex  will happen as a massive scale. With mass scale of interracial reproduction, everyone will be the same which create a family like feeling. A family like feeling that “displaces the recognition of structural racism and other systemic inequalities”(Berlant & Warner, 549) and the intimacy can help distract outside noise. However feeling unhappy in a heterosexual relationship will not solve any of these situation. As Marx wrote about forced labor, it can be applied to sexual relationship. Being in a relationship you do not desire will only alienate you and probably cause more harm.

Bibliography

Greeve, John. “LGBT America: By the Numbers.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 13 July 2016, www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/blog-post/lgbt-america-numbers.

“A Survey of LGBT Americans.” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project, Pew Research Center, 13 June 2013, www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/.

Berlant, Lauren , Warner, Michael. “Sex in Public.”
http://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/Berlant-and-Warner-Sex-in-Public.pdf

For Butler, the way in which our society employs the idea of trouble is such that trouble becomes inevitable; we are threatened with trouble in order that we might stay out of trouble. In response, Butler suggests that our task is “how best to make [trouble], what best way to be in it.” (2540) When considering gender, trouble can be perceived in the dialectical authority between feminine and masculine, between subject and Other. However, Butler takes issue with this view, wanting to make trouble with these binary distinctions inherent in popular conceptions of gender and identity.

One can observe these binaries at work in the popular distinction between body and mind. Butler questions the origin of this distinction, stating that “it is the result of a diffuse and active structuring of the social field.” (2544) So, rather than an inherent quality of existence, Butler suggests that the demarcation of the body is a product of social forces. As such, this demarcation is essential to the formation of one’s identity within society. We construct our selfhood upon a difference of interiority and exteriority this is defined by social hegemony. This hegemony draws the boundaries within which we establish our concept of self. Through this process, we expel those qualities which do not adhere to our “culturally hegemonic identities” (2546), and label them as other. “The construction of the “not-me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject.” (2546) By denoting those things as other, we are able to construct identities that are stable and coherent.

Though stable and coherent, these identities are limiting. If one does not construct their identity within the predetermined confines of the hegemonic structure, they are ostracized from society. “If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a site in which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment.” (2545) When the heteronormative gender boundaries are breached, it undermines the entire social structure through which individual identities are created. Hence, the regulatory society abhors those identities and practices which defy its parameters.

As one who promotes the right kind of trouble-making, Butler appreciates drag shows as sites of this beneficial kind of trouble, in that they defy the restraints imposed by hegemonic gender distinctions. While many feminists may find drag shows to be degrading to women, Butler argues that these shows are actually provide an effective challenge to the heteronormative, misogynistic ideology that dominates our society. “In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.” (2550) While the dominant ideology may portray gender relations as natural and inseparable from one’s biological sex, drag refutes this ideology and plays with the performative aspect of gender, emphasizing that all gender is socially constructed.

I relate to this concept in a minor way on account of my childhood, growing up with two sisters, no brothers, and a father who travelled for business often. I found myself surrounded by women for the majority of my childhood, adopting their mannerisms and interests. I played with dolls, watched innumerable “chick-flicks,” and even dressed drag on occasion (they called me Princess Erica, if you were wondering). Of course, these culturally feminine characteristics were constantly under barrage from the social milieu of masculinity that ordered me to stay within my “proper” place. Amongst my friends, I was considered the sensitive one, and often ridiculed for the things I was interested in and the way I acted. However, I had immense support from my family, who attempted to allow my sisters and I to find our own identities. While my family is not perfect in this regard, and they are only one influence amongst the many social pressures that shaped who I am, I feel that their allowance of these abject identifiers helped to make me into the person I am today, that is, someone who recognizes the value of making trouble with gender norms. In high-school, I had many friends who called me all sorts of derogatory names when I attempted to give a friendly hug. I persisted, and by the time a graduated, a few of those friends became life-long huggers. A few years ago, I left the restaurant industry and began growing out my hair. My grandmother at first asked me why I wanted to look like a girl. Last time I saw her, she said I look like Jesus. I may not be as courageous as a drag queen, but I will continue to make trouble whenever I can.

In Chapter 3, Subversive Bodily Acts, of “Gender Trouble,” Judith Butler challenges the ideas of the way society views sex, gender, and sexuality. She does this by examining the body along with the distinction between internal and external identity. In this examination, Butler writes that “‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds of the subject is a boarder and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control” (2546). She states that the inner and outer self is socially made and the hidden ‘inner self’ is forced into people: societal laws are “incorporated” and “manifested” into the subject. Butler describes this kind of image as the “soul.” She explains that often, the soul is seen as some kind of internal force that the body lacks, which is what creates the division between the inner and outer self. The soul is a deeper thing inside of the body. Butler disagrees with this idea. Using Foucault to strengthen her argument, she uses his quote saying “the soul is the prison of the body.”

       Connecting this idea back to her argument of gender and sexuality, Butler says that this inner self/soul that has been influenced by the politics of society is what creates the ideas of gender and sexuality that exists. Butler uses concepts such as “compulsory heterosexuality” to describe how sexuality has been taught and inscribed into our inner beings. She also uses the idea that the soul is the prison of the body to explain her theory that gender is a performance and is not something connected to one’s body. Gender is just another inner identity that works as an “illusion” to maintain political laws and regulations. To further explain her theory of gender as a performance, Butler uses drag queens as an example.

       Butler says that drag queens blue the line between inner and outer self. Using a quote from Esther Newton that says “[drag] is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion.” (2549). This quote goes onto says that drag says that one’s outside is feminine but their inside is masculine while also saying that one’s outside is masculine but their inside is feminine. Butler says that this relationship of inner and outer self in drag perfectly encapsulates the idea of gender as performance. It takes the idea of what it means to be feminine and blows it up to create the performance.

       When thinking about this, I thought about the new rise of female drag queens who, while female, that the idea of femininity and enhance it into a performance. I wonder how this performance would tie into Butler’s argument.

In “Gender Trouble”, Judith Butler focuses on the concepts of gender identities between gender and sex. In this exploration, Butler introduces the notion of gender as performative. To be performative, means a production of series of effects that consolidate an impression. To Butler, gender is a phenomenon where we as people perform gender constantly through what we wear, our posture, mannerisms, utterances, etc. Performative gender is produced socially through repetition. Butler stands to believe that no one is born with a gender but performs it, once they are born in a world that has already predestined their gender for them.

Butler argues that sex is a socially constructed  category stemming from social and cultural norms within a context that is reflective upon history and social/political aspects. Butler develops their performative theory of gender through the analysis of drag queens in order to prove that a gender identity is not a manifestation of something that comes naturally, but rather a product of actions and behavior that counts as performative. Butler argues that utterances, gestures, apparel, behaviors, even the fringe or taboos all work collectively to produce what is perceived as an essential masculine and feminine identity. This is problematic because it enable people to police another person’s gender identity, sexual orientation, gender, and validate/invalidate their own experiences.

Within this piece she outlines the relationship between the body and societies that construct them. Butler undermines the grounds in which modern theory attempts to frame which is a static understanding of identity markers that ignore the contracted nature of identity. Butler builds on Foucault (who is the go to guy which many gender studies theorists turn to) and his claim that “the body is a plane of inscription”. From what we know about his work from “The History of Sexuality” it is apparent how normative and juridical powers can mold and form impressions onto bodies. Institutions within both of these schools of power are tethered to their own beliefs that are reflective of political and social dynamics that can affect people (mentally/physically) and their perceptions. Butler highlights how bodies are under constant scrutiny of social norms where society and history construct their own values and meaning through their process of inscription to which the body indicates.
The affects that social norms have over bodies is where Butler references Mary Douglas’s diagnosis that the body and it’s limits are never only cosmetic or physical. They have the potential to be articulated into larger social orders. This process of construction allows for specific practices and bodies to be perceived as threats to he social order. Butler uses the AID’s epidemic and the media’s deviation of male homosexuals and other non normative sexualities. IT is because of this process that homosexuality was deemed unnatural and uncivilized. This goes against Butler’s stance that no one is born with a specific gender, therefor the performative gender identity of homosexuals is just as valid and the performative gender identity of a straight person. This helps combat the process in which specific practices and bodies are perceived as threats to society.
Butler uses Kristeva to help them formulate the concept of “the other” which is created by the repetition of something that is originally central to the body. Which leave us to question, how and why are these norms produced? Butler argues this yearning for inner coherence works to conceal the deviant iterations that exist along sexual contexts. This includes situations where gender, sex, and sexuality don’t align with each other to breach the understandings of the body. These bodies disrupt conventional understandings and reveal valued ideals as normative and fictional. Butler builds upon Foucault again to argue that the self is constructed outside of the body, hence the soul is never preexistent as it is presented in Western culture. Instead, the subject is defined by the actions being made by the body. Butler understands that social norms which are built on fiction and normative enforced ideals prioritize political rules and disciplinary practices which assist in producing subjects.

Butler utilizes the culture and lifestyle of drag queens in order to further prove their point of a performative gender. Drawing from “Paris Is Burning” the 1990 documentary of drag and queer culture, a large part of the drag culture were the ball circuits. These balls would have categories in which people could compete in, where one of the categories was “realness”. In this specific category, contestants would dress in a way of performing gender as Judith Butler explains through her concept. Their goal in this category is to be able to assimilate into the binary of social normalities of socially “acceptable” men or women. This categories and many others allowed the contestants to perform class, gender, and race within the ball circuits that allowed them to feel accepted into the world even though they were institutionally ignored. Butler references one of my favorite people on Earth, John Waters and his movie Female Trouble where Divine plays Dawn Davenport and performs a gender identity of a bratty high school runaway. In this case, Divine is literally acting but also is involved in gender performance because we all are involved in gender performance whether we know it or not. References of “Paris Is Burning”, “Female Trouble” and “UNHhhh” featuring Trixie Mattel and Katya display the degrees of femininity which also proves Judith Butlers theory that there is no right or wrong way to be feminine or no true way to be a woman. This is seen especially through the contrast of the contestants in the “Realness” category compared to Trixie Mattel. The contestants in “Paris is Burning” realness category are purposefully trying to align themselves to be viewed as passable for the gender identity they are performing. While Trixie Mattel is cosmetically challenging this notion. Her inspirations are rooted in 60’s artificial Barbie Doll aesthetics which led her to her intense appearance. But in her own way she is performing what it means to be a woman which is valid while challenging drag from the past. It seems that the more dynamic drag becomes, the more gender and it’s enforcers of social norms become questioned.

Butler’s example of drag is that this particular art subverts the inner and outer binary and mocks the notion of what it means to be a “true” man or a “true” woman or even having a “true” gender. Drag allows the imitating of gender and reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as well as it’s continuation in society. The parodic performance exposes the possibility for continuous resignification when original markers are put into a new context such as drag. The originality of this notion is then challenged and questioned if bodies are the boundaries. Butler uses the exemplification of drag to indicate the gendered self is always only a surface presentation that is achieved through social means of repetition.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDie8goaBDU

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjkZRluFZFk

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSwY31GMqY0

In “Sex in Public”, by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, the authors discuss how queer culture can survive and promote itself in a world of heteronormativity. The process described here reminds me of Louis Althusser’s idea of reproduction, in which “every social formation must reproduce the[…]existing relations of production”(Althusser 1336), meaning that an ideology must have a way of interpellating new subjects in order to survive. However, unlike Althusser, Berlant and Warner describe a situation in which a counter-hegemonic culture attempts to reproduce and survive.

Fittingly, the authors tell us of current (and by current I mean about 2o years ago) politics regarding queer institutions: “senators such as Ted Kennedy and Jesse Helms support amendments that refuse federal funds to organizations that ‘promote[…]sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or any individuals engaged in sexual intercourse'”(Berlant and Warner 2602). Althusser tells us that ideology is primarily promoted through the ISAs, which, in general, reproduce the mindset needed to support the current hegemony without the need of force. By attempting to cut off the institutions that would promote the “queer ideology”, these senators are attempting to cut off queer culture’s ability to reproduce itself, and therefore reduce its power. The zoning laws described in this essay do this by reducing the amount of physical space devoted to queer culture and, furthermore, put this “ideology” in a negative and degrading light.

Berlant and Warner’s idea of privatization of intimacy also does this, not only to those who are queer, but also heterosexual couples as well. It makes “sex seem irrelevant or merely personal, heteronormative conventions of intimacy block the building of nonnormative or explicit public sexual cultures.”(Berlant and Warner 2604). By keeping heteronormative institutions and practices in place, and attempting to remove individualized accounts of sexuality from the public sphere, heteronormativity becomes the only acceptable version of sexual life, to the point where even heterosexual couples must hide the fact that they enjoy using vibrators (Berlant and Warner 2614).

Even powerful ISAs, such as the media, are criticized for discussing problems within heterosexual culture. The problems within heterosexual relationships are often discussed on talk shows and in journalism. Even though these mediums rarely state the problem to be heteronormative culture, there is still a backlash against publicizing the problems within these relationships: “‘We’ve forgotten that civilization depends on keeping some of this stuff under wraps,’ he [William Bennett] said”(Berlant and Warner 2607). “Civilization”, in Bennett’s sense here, seems to be upheld by hiding the fact that heteronormativity produces public problems that many people suffer from, rather than issues that only a few, abnormal individuals face. Heteronormative culture is promoted in part by hiding the problems and cracks within it, creating dissatisfaction for both heterosexual and queer people.

Like I said in the first paragraph, ideology and the public’s relationship to it must be reproduced in order to survive. In “Sex in Public”, Berlant and Warner call this “world-making”, in which “Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counter public- an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation”(Berlant and Warner 2609). Traditional ISAs, in Althusser’s sense, are found in physical, relatively permanent space. Churches, schools, even media all inhabit physical, well-frequented places in which they can encounter the public. Beyond the physical, common and well-acknowledged social practices, such as paying taxes or getting divorced, further promote heteronormativity. These long-standing institutions and practices help to instill a social memory of of the dominant sexual practices and ideas, which in turn reproduce them. The laws and political actions against queer culture mentioned earlier attempt to erase the social memory of queer practices.

So then, how does queer culture promote and reproduce itself if it cannot do so in the standard ways that Althusser enumerates? Street is an interesting example of how queer culture is able to survive. It is noted that not everyone who frequents this area does so for explicitly sexual reasons, and yet because sexually-oriented businesses thrive here, a queer culture can develop within this physical space. The economic success of these businesses allow for the street to become queer (Berlant and Warner 2612), creating a mass centered around an area that suddenly has political power because of its concentration geographically. Maybe queer culture cannot reproduce itself through Althusser’s ISAs, as it is not the dominant ideology, but it finds a way through the creation, through sex commerce, of a meeting space where queer people can collect.