![]() "Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated theatricalized, worn, and done it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation ad approximation. She says that drag is not the act of putting on the trappings and clothing of another gender but the way that all genders are repurposed and reenacted (Butler, 2004, 127-128). Butler says that homophobic discourses and compulsory heterosexuality posit homosexuality as an appropriation and copy of heterosexuality (Butler, 2004, 127). Perhaps the most important part of this essay for my project are Butler's ideas about the drag and performing gender and appropriation. It is not usually seen as being potentially negative or as a way of reproducing problematic institutions and binaries. Coming out has traditionally a very important political act for LGBT people. It may also be a way of being more explicit about sexuality and identity than may be visible in regular spaces because feminine identity and presentation are rarely questioned or seen as queer in people who are perceived as being biologically female. I want to explore the idea that people may use internet as a way of coming out or proclaiming identity that they may not be comfortable proclaiming in physical spaces. Hence, being "out" must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as "out."(Butler, 2004, 122-123).įor this project, the idea of coming out as a problematic concept or a regulatory action is particularly important. For being "out" always depends to soem extent on being "in" it gains its meaning only within that polarity. "Conventionally, one comes out of the closet (and yet, how often is it the case that we are "outed" when we are young and without resources?) so we are out of the closet, but into what? what new unbounded spatiality? the room, the den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some new enclosure whose door, like Kafka's door, produces the expectation of a fresh air and a light of illumination that never arrives? Curiously, it is the figure of the closet that produces this expectation, and which guarantees its dissatisfaction. She goes even farther to say that the idea of being out is necessary to create and maintain the concept of the closet. It can also put people in very real physical danger as well as open to other types of discrimination and violence. A person may be freer to act in a way that matches their inner self, but one will also now be judged by the stereotypes of that identity. Being out in society simply puts different constraints on people's behavior. She also describes the problems with the discourse of "coming out." She says that the process of coming out as homosexual does not free people from the constraints of the "closet" (Butler, 2004, 122). By criticizing the idea of stable categories as regulatory features, Butler is opening the door for current discourses of queerness and fluidity of sexuality. This is very provocative statement, particularly in the face of mainstream homosexual discourses that rely heavily on proclaiming oneself to be part of an identity category such as Gay or Lesbian. ![]() To install myself within the terms of an identity category purports to describe and this might be true for any identity category which seeks to control the very eroticism that it claims to describe and authorize, much less "liberate." (Butler, 2004, 121) ![]() ![]() In fact, if the category were to offer no trouble, it could cease to be interesting to me: it is precisely the pleasure produced by the instability of those categories which sustains the various erotic practices that make me a candidate for the category to begin with. I'm permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them, as sites of necessary trouble. According to Butler, homosexual identity categories cannot be stable and if they became stable they would stop being appealing to her because she is attracted by their instability. She thinks that identity categories are regulatory institutions, even when people claim them. She begins the essay by discussing her reservations on writing for a Lesbian and Gay anthology because she has problems with identifying as a Lesbian theorist (Butler, 2004, 120-121). The essay originally appeared in Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss and published by Routledge in 1991. I read this piece as part of The Judith Butler Reader, which was edited by Sara Salih and Butler. In Butler's 1990 piece "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," she dissects a number of issues surrounding queerness, identity, and performativity. Judith Butler's ideas about gender very influential to my understanding of gender and queerness.
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