2006-05-03

Honey ! It's a lesbian !

To work on your master thesis is like living in the hell.
For the past two months, my routine life has became like:
Wake up in the morning, sit myself in front of the laptop
and then spend the rest of the day, staring at the computer,
thinking. (Perhaps I am a bit over exaggerated, no one can have
such super concentration) I do spend time on the daily chore
and working three hours every evening. Every day is such a
long day to me. Two more months to go~~~~
I do wish it will end more quickly or at least, on time.
Today,I read across a part in Sara Salih's book "Judith Butler"
and laughed so loud at this:

To claim, as Butler does, that sex is always (to a degree) performative is to
claim that bodies are never merely described, they are always constituted in
the act of description. when the doctor and nurse declares "It's a girl/boy!',
they are not simply reporting on what they see (this would be on a
constative utterance), they are actually assigning a sex and a gender to a
body that can have no existence outside discourse. In other words, the
statement 'It's a girl/boy!' is performative. Butler returns to the birth/
ultrasound scene in the final Chapter of Bodies, "Critically Queer', where,
as before, she argues that discourse preceded and constitutes the 'I' i.e.
the subject:

To the extent..............

It's a girl!' is not a statement of fact but an interpellation that initiates the
process of 'girling', a process based on perceived and imposed differences
between men and women, differences that are far from 'natural' . To
demostrate the performative operations of interpellation, Butler cites a cartoon
strip in which an infant is assigned its place in the sex-gender system with the
exclamation 'It's a lebian!'. Far from an essentialist joke, the queer
appropriation of the perfomative mimes and exposes both binding
power of the heterosexualizing law and its expropriability. (88-89)

I think, to deconstruct female gender doesn't mean to negate the male
gender and make female gender the subject or the other the weaker part.
Instead, it is , as what Butler is trying to do, to embrace a multi-formity
of gender.

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