She's simply saying that sex is naturalized in and through social practices. It's made to seem normal that men are always and only visual creatures, for instance, and that's why they like to look and, ostensibly, women don't. I just posted a brief summary of a book R brought home the other day, from the 20s, where the author devoted 14 pages to sex and olfactory perception, and about 4 to the visual aspect of sexual attraction and desirability --hafl of that devoted to Thomas's flagpoles and knots in trees. It was written by a scientist claiming that his was a dispassionate look at the facts of sexuality.
Now, if it's so fucking natural, this visual thing, then you'd think it's be so powerful that a scientist wouldn't miss it. But, only a few short decades ago, a scientist devoted very little attention to appearance and sexual desire. http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/11/do-you-have-sex-on-a-regular-basis/
But that's not all she's saying. She's saying that not only is sex naturalized in and through social practices (such as scientific discourse, etc.) but it's in the very process of naturalization that gaps or fissures are also produced.
IOW, there is no seamlessness to this process. There's a seam. We can find where it's been stitched together. The seam? What we think is abnormal -- what doesn't fit into definitions and social practices that constitute normal sexuality. BD/SM, GLBT, people with so-called diseases and genetic defects.
It's a way of looking at what we'd traditionally call ideology and saying, wait a minute, ideology isn't wholly seamless, it's not some monolithic entity. Traditionally, philosophers have thought that the only way to break out of "social structure" was to look to something external as the source of social change. But, what's outside society? How does society change if there's nothing outside? Butler's saying that the very process by which we normalize sexuality -- make it seem that sex and gender are normal (that it's normal to find the male body unattractive or be indifferent to it, for instance) -- is also the very process by which a naturalized body is destabilized.
It is, as she writes, a "productive crisis" Normally, we are taught to see deviants/deviance the not normal) as a threat. That's a mistake, she says. The deviant or not normal presents as a productive )(generative) crisis.
Wow. That was so hard. I'll bet, if you look around you or even examine where you, yourself, are defined as the deviant, you can understand exactly what she means.
And the thing about what she's saying -- people always misread, not unlike misreadings of Foucault. He's offering us "hope" -- not telling us its hopeless. He's saying, conversely, that the other way of looking at ideology is what is hopeless, what leads us feel "entrapped in the present" riding around on a cul-de-sac saying, how do we get out of this place? In some ways, Butler's saying the same.
there's more to the quote. I just unpacked the snippet boddi referenced.
At 07:42 PM 11/17/2005, boddi satva wrote:
>C. Joanna,
>
>I think he posted that ironically.
>
>lk
"Scream-of-consciousness prose stylings, peppered with sociological observations, political ruminations, and in-yore-face colloquial assaults" -- Dennis Perrin
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