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>
>Doug Henwood wrote:
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>>
>>Never hurts to rerun this...
>
>Awww, Jesus, Doug, I can't read stuff like this.....
>
>"As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex
>acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of
>this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the
>constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which
>escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined
>or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is
>the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition,
>the power that undoes the very effects by which "sex" is stabilized,
>the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of "sex" into
>a potentially productive crisis."
All right, I've got a little more time now.
What I like about this is that she's arguing that so many of these things that the Boddhi's among us think are "natural," even encoded in our genes, are reproduced every day in social practice. Constantly repeated social practice (like Boddhi's, "but that's so GAY!"), in which the caps and exclamation point suggest an anxiety about just how precarious these identities really are. And since these allegedly natural distinctions must be constantly reinforced through speech and practice, that means they can be disrupted by interfering with the repetition.
It's always interesting to note when people turn to biology for a grounding of their position. As Butler says, that invocation always presumes some pre-existing sense of physicality outside discourse, but that's to assume what's under investigation. The invocation usually occurs around some anxiety, and there are few anxieties more profound than when the allegely fundamental difference between M and F is questioned. In other words, when people invoke biology, that's the time to get extra suspicious.
Also relevant to the SSRI question.
Doug