Judith Butler - Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion

Selection from text:

"To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that 'imitation' is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations. That it must repeat this imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety, suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can never fully overcome, that its effort to become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is consistently haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself. In this sense, then, drag is subversive to the extend that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality's claim on naturalness and originality" (Butler, 1993: 125).I chose this picture because it shows two women who feel they must act like men in order to be successful. This is so interesting, because the gender ideals have so many layers and complexities. On one level, we have men dressing up as women; on another level we have women who feel inadequate in a man's world and act like men. I think it goes along with Butler's arguments about gender as a construction of our society. As we discussed in class, these classifications have very real, and often painful consequences. By categorizing and separating we set up a two-way classification system without taking into account those who do not fit.



Juliette's explanation
This is a video clip created by a person who wants to explain her situation to the world.

Sources:
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive LLimits of "Sex." New York: Routledge.
http://images.google.com/imghp?tab=wi (Accessed August, 2007)
http://www.youtube.com/ (Accessed August, 2007)