STUDENTS' RESPONSES TO JUDITH BUTLER
Butler resembles Foucault in her insistence on the political nature of EVERYTHING! At the same time, he seems to contradict herself when she says that she is tired of being queer, which I read as being tired of being on the political soapbox. In that situation, you get to be like one of those pull-string toys that utters a certain variety of phrases, you write a best-seller and get booked on conferences and on Oprah . . . Butler also seems to be trying to reconcile the dilemma touched on by Foucault: How do we bring theory and practice together? Is it at all possible? (Julie Wroblewski)
I was fascinated by Butler's idea that gender is "a kind of imitation for which there is no original," and her claim that our conception of the "original" depends on there being an imitation (kind of like Derrida's father and son?) (Julie Wroblewski)
Butler's approach is fundamentally that of deconstruction . . . She is stuck with a kind of double bind, because she sees (and feels) the necessity of giving as yet accepted gender categories a viable political position, while also seeing the many ways that those categories can reinforce the "original" category it is trying to define itself against . . . For Butler, drag is like the pharmakon or Theuth--it is a kind of indiscriminate medium, the unpole between poles, which plays at being one or the other, or neither or both, but above all never couches in any "sure" attire for more than a masked-moment. (Seth Warren)
What next?