Show and Tell

First off, I would like to say I really enjoyed everyone's show and tell and I liked the idea for the project in general. As you all know for my show and tell I brought in the movie Chasing Amy and I strongly reccoment you watch it if you have not already as it is an excellent film. Honestly, this was the first film that really got me thinking about sexuality in a productive way. what I mean by that, is that it was the first film that actually made me question sexuality, how it defines, what categories of identification mean and how they oftewn fall short of actually identifying the person. Alyssa Jones is a very interesting character with an undefined sexuality. Most people would probably define her as bisexual though I do not think that is acurate. When she is first introduced she claims to be a lesbian. Then she dates a man. Does that make her bisexual or does that make her a lesbian who is having sex with a man? Then it is later revealed that this isn't thew first time she has had sex with a man. In highschool she apparently had sex with two men at once earning her the nickname "fingercuffs." Her sexuality is undefinable throughout the whole movie and the beauty of it is that she doesn't try and define or limit herself she just is who she is, a girl with no map to follow. This film is also full of fruitfull conversations about sexuality that really challenges they way I used to generally think about sexuality. I also find it extremely interesting that a relatively main stream movie tackles these ideas and concepts in a very Butler way- just opening up more questions. For my final remarks, I'd just like to say watch the film and I really enjoyed having class with all of you!
Thanks,
Michelle

Going Back to "Sex in Public" For my project

So, as luck would have it one of the weeks early on in the semester that I didn't to a post for was the week we read "Sex in Public" which is the essay I used to help create my own theory. To refresh everyone's mind as to what it is about  their main focus with this essay is to tease out how sex is mediated by publics. By far there most intruiging and pervocative idea is that "Heteronormativity is more than ideology or prejudice, or a phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life" (Berlant and Warner 554).  In essence everything social inis filtered through heteronormativity. This idea is huge to me as I think of all it's implications. Practically everything we do, see, feel, hear has been mediated through heteronormativity. For my project I worked on the way I thought heteronormativity effected film and images in general. My theory was that it privleges filmic space and he most privleged position was being in the position of the spectator (aka directly facing the camera obviously looking at something- generally in a head shot). For my project I tried to switch up how people generally took pictures by having women do men's poses and men do women's poses. For me the most interesting thing by far was how much heteronormativity really did affect life. All of my models felt some discomfort nd found it very difficult to pose as the other sex, especially the men. One guy commented on how wierd it felt to be so close to another man in the picture, he said, "it's really weird that I can feel his warmth." I guess I always knew that thew world is based heavily on heteronormative ways  but I find it interesting  to see how far the world really is controlled by the male heterosexual culture.

Butler- Wraping it up

One thing I have stuggled with in Butler is not only her complex sentence structure (:p) but also her idea on unintelligability. In our last readings for the class Butler talked a lot about the travesty of a person beign unintelligable. To me, as I read it, unintelligable means they are not able to be recognized for what they are. According to dictionary.com it means "not able to be understood; incomprehensible " so I seem to be on the right track. My question, I guess is why are these people unintelligable? Is it because we do not have an adequate discourse with which to describe them? Is it because they do not fit into defined indentifcatory categories?Is it because the world is seen through a heteronormative lens and they just don't fit the bill? Is it because the majority of people are unable to identify with their situation? Or is it something else? Or all of the above? My ending conclusion from Butler is that these questions are not meant to be answered but explored and pushed and used to generate more questions. Answers just seem to provide more categories and more limits to our understanding while questions open up new avenues of thought and I feel thatthis is her main point. By constantly questioning what it means to be intelligable or what it means to have a livable life it causes us to explore or world and the lives of others for an answer and this increasesour understanding and just allows us to explore further. I am glad this is the final note we end on because to be honest, I feel like I have more questions now then I did at the begining of the course and I guess according to Butler that is a good thing.

Undoing Gender- The intro

Near the very begining of her introduction Butler states that "the essays are about the experience of becoming undone in both good and bad ways. Sometimes a normative conception of gender can undo one's personhood, undermining the capacity to perserve livable life. Other times, the experience of a normative restriction becoming undone can undo a prior conception of who one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one that has greater livability as its aim" (1). A phrase she uses a lot in this passage is "undone" and I am curious to figure out what exactly she means by it.

My gut is telling be that by undone she means unintelligable, but she uses this specific word later and I feel if she meant for them to be the same thing she would not have used two different phrases. Perhaps, an easier question would be what does "done" mean. " If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms , then the possibility of my persistence as an "I" depends on me being able to do something with what is done to me."( 3). Here done seems to be used in a couple of different ways. In the first part where she says "If my doing is dependent on what is done to me" she seems to be saying "to be done" by norms is to have norms define you, to have them make you intelligable and to restrict you to being a certain discursive identity. As such, she seems to be saying that the ability for some to gain autonomy is dependent on their ability to the identity society has given them.

It is interesting that he chose the word done in particular instead of, for example, defined, identified, made intelligable, ect. Done, to me seems to imply that something is finished, it is at its end it is complete. Perhaps Butler is using these connotations on purpose because she believes that once society has defined you in a particular way that is it, you are done. But if these are the implications she was trying get people to draw, how could anyone ever become "undone?" Butler says towards the end of the introduction that, " Or does it turn out that "I" who ought to be bearing its gender is undone by being a gender, that gender is always coming from a source that is elsewhere and directed toward something that is beyond me, constituted in a sociality I do not fully author"(16). I feel like to be done is to have an autonomy that is derived from you way are made intelligable. Being "undone" then seems to mean, unintelligable, and unable to be discussed in discourse. Then, by that thought, one can be undone by being defined as a specific gender and having that be lacking in personal intelligiableness.  Butler seems to be focused on one's ability to be intelligable and how that is tied to personal and cultural autonomy. Being undone seems to be becoming unintelligale then.

I would appreciate others' thoughts on this because this is still a bit unclear to me.