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Now without technical difficulties…

Welcome back to a delayed entry in the Lounge.  Last night I tried to write again in my blog and my password was not working and the e-mail for the new one didn’t come until this morning so hence I’m writing about Butler now.  I don’t want to repeat everything said in class today since I got much more out of that then I did out of my inital reading of Butler (this wasn’t going to be a very long post based on what I understood) but I still have this nagging question that Butler has left with me.

WHY???  What do you want to accomplish with this essay?  I thought about it but I really didn’t even know how to ask a valid question that made any sense.  I just don’t understand how you can not only take the gender out of a person, but also take the human aspect.  In that regard what are we?  You can’t define yourself on nothing especially if your soul supposedly isn’t very important in the big picture.  Even the things that we do as a “performance”, most of them occur naturally without us thinking about them.  Even more to the point, isn’t a drag show a performance?  It has the word “show” right in the title!  I don’t know but this essay was not one of my favorites by any means.  Can we go back to the center please?

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This entry was posted on April 2, 2007 at 9:12 pm and is filed under ENG 330. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.

One Comment on “Now without technical difficulties…”

  1. atticfox Says:
    April 7, 2007 at 4:15 pm

    Hey John,

    I couldn’t help but feel as you did about Butler. You said:

    I just don’t understand how you can not only take the gender out of a person, but also take the human aspect. In that regard what are we? You can’t define yourself on nothing especially if your soul supposedly isn’t very important in the big picture.

    What are we without some sort of system in place? Indeed! Yet I don’t think Butler expects us to abandon all identity. It seems that, for Butler, exposing the system is her sole intent as a way to instill tolerance. For us to continually expose the system is to carry on Butler’s mission to expose the system - a domino effect on education. Unfortunately, as far as I’m concerned, vying for tolerance of alternate identities (rather than the obliteration of them), in the form of drag shows, does little to educate the public on the false truths of gender. A closed mind isn’t going to head to a drag show for an education.

    Butler is one of those people I admire for her ability to see how the social machine churns out what we believe. I’m just always disappointed when smart people like her fall short in finding a truly beneficial answer to the social problems they reveal.

    -Kim

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