> So, through reiteration of norms we as individuals and a society come
> to recognize a certain form of female body as desirable, or "normal",
> thus pressuring women to conform to it by shaping their bodies to fit
> (or, despairing, plunging into the potato chips and achieving
> precisely the "opposite"?). How is this different from 19th century
> feminists griping about corsets?
It's the extension of the principle, from the mere physical restraints of the Steam Age to the complex biotechnical/surgical interventions of the Silicon Age, which is scary. Progress turns into regress.
> Ok, so she is talking about some sort of visualization, of imagining
> that you deserve to be free compels you in a sense to start believing
> it, to desire it, to work for it. I thought this was normally called
> "learning". How does an algebra-capable student get created out of a
> non-algebra capable student?
It's about imagining a social role, I think -- other people are watching you, see, and you're locked into this dialectic with them. Even if you ignore them, they're watching you and can potentially get in your face at any moment. Butler's point has to do with the invisibility of lesbian women, they're fitted into this heterosexual role, and end up acting that way (i.e. being afraid to kiss their partner in public, internalizing homophobia, etc.). So the performative isn't just any old street scene, it's the point at which subjects start messing with the script and create theater of their own.
> I'm going to have to go over this stuff again. How agency is possible
> "on the grounds made possible by those processes of social
> construction" is still eluding me --- why exactly it should be those
> very processes of social construction which provide for agency, other
> than it sounds kind of neat that this should be true ("Your very
> chains are your means to freedom!" sort of thing)...
Subjects are also objects -- both to the system, and to other people. So all subjectivity, in that sense, is objective, and conversely, all objectivity has an element of the subject in it (someone has to be conscious, somewhere, of the object). Subjectivity has this element of coercion in it -- we can't choose our parents or much of our upbringing, let alone our historical period or what language we learn as little kids or cultural group we grow up in -- and so the very agency of the subject which history has given us is also, on this other level, very limiting. Butler's hope is that by thinking through all this agency stuff, we'll understand our limitations better, and then move past them, somehow, via that performativity thing. That's where *I* have problems with Butler, myself -- I find her solutions to be too limited, she doesn't stress the aesthetics or materialities of rebellion quite enough. But her basic theoretical exposition is pretty sharp.
-- Dennis