Thursday, May 17, 2012

Redeployment house

At the end of "Critically Queer," her account of the often unsubversive possibilities of drag as a result of their being framed within the limiting citationality of gender norms, Butler asks whether the drag documentary Paris is Burning might have a role to play in redeploying or reforming gender norms. In doing so, Butler veers (as is her habit) from the film's central topic--drag shows--and instead focuses on the alternate forms of domesticity depicted in the film "it is in the reformulation of  kinship, in particular, the redefining of the 'house' and its forms of collectivity, mothering, mopping, reading, and becoming of legendary, that the appropriation and redeployment of the categories of dominant culture enable the formation of kinship relations that function quite supportively as oppositional discourse" (622). In so doing, she imagines that the house might genuinely rework gender and sexual norms by acknowledging its "[implication] in the very relations of power it seeks to rival" while remaining "[irreducible] to those dominant forms" (623). I'm intrigued by the way Butler here imagines a refigured domesticity as a site of resistance, but also by the implication that domesticity operates itself by citing norms. This has implications, for the refigured domesticity of the small room and its alternates, as depicted by Lee in Native Speaker; the small room in the father's house is, in some sense, queered, and as such denatures the authorized small room of power.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Thackeray amongst men

Amongst men:

"Thackeray's bachelors created or resinscribed as a personality type one possible path of response to teh strangulation of homosexual panic, their basic strategy is easy enough to trace: a preference of atomized male individualism to the nuclear family (and a corresponding demonization of women, especially mothers); a garrulous and visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, toward objects male or female; a corresponding emphasis on the other senses; and a well-defended social facility that freights with a good deal of magnetism its proneness to parody and to unpredictable sadism" (Sedgwick 525).

Sunday, May 6, 2012

An open sky of one's own

Rereading Woolf's A Room of One's Own for my theory seminar. First, it's a delightful essay: Woolf neatly mirrors abstract argument and embodied journey, walking her readers through the British Museum, where her quixotic distance from male influence takes shape in her caricatured doodle of Professor Von X and her catty disdain for the researcher next to her, even as she recognizes their unwarranted superiority over her and other women. But the lively part, for my purposes, lies with her discussion of money, and how it frees her to see an open sky instead of a statue. Male knowledge, here and elsewhere, is figured as ordered, organized by looming statues that warp and bend the space around them, creating their own aura of authority. It's facile, perhaps, but that's just what conspiracy theory makes visible: the urgent desire to be meaningful, to represent one's knowledge as essential firmament, when it is, in truth, as arbitrary as the strained logic of conspiracy. Woolf sets the statue in contrast to the unstriated open sky, a space without division or hierarchy. For all her urging about private room, this essay revels in open spaces, spaces where movement is unimpeded.