To strive for utopia, it is important to understand “that the past has a performative nature” because “the past does things” and “not settling for the present, of looking beyond the here and now” (1252). The rules of the world “are not fixed” (1253). Muñoz declares, “It is important to understand that a critique of our homosexual present is not an attack on what many people routinely name as lesbian or gay but, instead, an appraisal of how queerness is still forming, or in many crucial ways formless. Queerness’s form is utopia” (1253). In order to reach utopia is to reach for ecstatic time instead of straight time: “Ecstatic time is signaled at the moment on feels ecstasy, announced perhaps in a scream or grunt of pleasure, and more importantly during moments of contemplation when one looks back at a scene from one’s past, present, or future” (1255). Muñoz writes that by opening oneself up to this ecstasy, that is where freedom lies. 

Ryan supports his argument with examples of the play “endorsing Jame’s political worldview” by having Lear “portrayed as a representative of the feudal order” which is what James very much believed even though the trend in society was that “the king should not have absolute power” (1259). Ryan also discusses Jame’s ill-manners in the countryside, taking over the people’s homes and food, which can be compared to Lear (1259). Another example that Ryan asserts is Jame’s belief that Christian “plainness is a necessary virtue of a good monarch” in both dress and speech, which are qualities that can also be compared to Lear (1260). Ryan also explains how “in Demonologie, James is particularly critical of women who are prone to become witches and succumb to the ‘greedy desire’ for power…Shakespeare, in his depiction of Goneril and Regan, would seem to agree” (1261). This argument makes sense to me when looking at Shakespeare's history. It was thought that he tried to flatter King James with Macbeth as well, which was written in 1606. This could be supported by Shakespeare's inclusion of witches in the play when James famously supported  the practice of witch hunting. Ryan continues to provide examples of comparisons, going into further detail on James’s strong desire of monarchical power and obedience (1263).

The conclusion of this essay is a push to encourage someone to write a modern adaptation of Origins by Engels, “recognizing the mutual interdependence of sexuality, economics, and politics without underestimating the full significance of each in human society” (1090).

QUESTION:
Nealon and Giroux acknowledge that there are not only two genders or sexualities, but also believe you cannot just wake up and choose to be one or the other. We know gender and sexuality is much more complicated than that. 

What I mean is, there are people who are nonbinary and present more masculine some days and feminine the other. Or just prefer an androgynous look altogether. Is that being considered different since they're changing their look and not gender?

I mean, I didn't wake up one day and choose to be bisexual, but I connected the dots of how I was feeling towards certain things in my life and how I was perceiving both men and women in the media. Did I have a crush on Selena Gomez and Gregg Sulkin when they were both in Wizards of Waverly Place? Uh, yeah, I did. But it was hard to sort through those feelings when nobody around me (seemingly) felt the same.

           We read Chapter Ten “Differences”. 

           Nealon and Searls Giroux in this chapter go into a discussion on gender, queer, race, and class within this chapter. Within these categories was the discussion of socially constructed ideas; “That things are ‘socially constructed’ tends to suggest that we simply get to choose how something is constructed or that it’s easy to reconstruct it in any way we want it to be; but the theoretical importance of differences…is that they represent sites where we don’t get to choose. At the same time, however, we are not wholly determined by these categories” (Nealon and Searls Giroux 201). This quote is incredibly important because it acknowledges that the beliefs about gender, race, class, and queer are all social constructs, but people also don’t get to choose how and where they fall into these categories. This ties nicely into the excerpts I read for my section because the idea of what society has constructed for people defines how gender and queer theory comes about. People do not fit into the “perfect” socially constructed mold of gender and sexuality, so by discussing how gender and sexuality fit into literature, readers and writers can start working their way outside of the socially constructed box. This is especially clear in “Chapter 4: The Laugh of the Medusa” in my section; “It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem” (Cixous 944). In this quote, Cixous is urging women to break their silence and break out of the imposed idea of male-controlled speech. The thing is, this is a social construct. Society and culture have constructed this idea that women should not speak, and now women must fight to break out of that construction. Tying this back into Nealon and Searls Giroux, women don’t get to choose whether or not this is their reality, but they get to choose if this social construct defines them. As Cixous says, women are not, they need to break their silence, break out of the construct. Nealon and Searls Giroux spend much of the chapter talking about social constructs, but they also explain how difficult it is to change them or break away from them because they are seen as universal truths. The excerpts I read heavily emphasize how multi-faceted the fight to break away from societal constructs is, and that everyone has a different idea of how to do it. “Chapter 6: Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality” readily shows the different ideas of how to deal with socially constructed ideas and ideals. 

           This ties directly into the poems/texts of this section because it allows the reader to think over what society viewed as a universal truth when the texts were written, but also how those social constructs have changed over the years. King Lear was written in the early 1600s, societal constructs differed vastly from what they are now. King Lear can be read from a historical standpoint, but it can and should be viewed from a modern standpoint as well. This is true for any literature, especially Bishop, who herself was a queer woman. That is one viewpoint that can be discussed when reading her works. The idea of gender as well has vastly changed over the years and it is another aspect that needs to be viewed from the historical standpoint but also the modern standpoint to get the most out of the text. Nealon and Searls Giroux talk about many things within this chapter, but I found the discussions of social constructs and how they fit into race, class, gender, and queer to be some of the most important. Especially when thinking about intersectionality and how these identities can come together and commingle in different ways for different people. 

           In this chapter, Cixous makes an argument for women’s writing using vivid language and tying it all back together with women’s sexuality, desire, and pleasure. The crux of her argument falls to “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies…Woman must put herself into the text…by her own movement” (Cixous 940). In this opening quote, Cixous makes her argument clear about what she believes women should do, which is writing, specifically writing themselves. As the paper goes on, the readers come to realize that this includes a woman’s sexual desire and pleasure as well. 

           As Cixous’s argument continues, she discusses in more detail why women need to write, and what men’s interpretation of women has done to women; “Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs” (Cixous 942). In this quote, Cixous reiterates what the narrative men have pushed forward has done to women, and how this narrative has drastically affected women. Throughout the essay, Cixous is insistent on female self-love. She pushes for it just as strongly as she pushes for women to write, tying the two together. For women to be liberated, Cixous believes women need to write, speak and come to terms with themselves as physical and sexual beings. 

           Cixous ends her essay again with a call to write, but specifically what it means when she writes. She again pushes for women to rewrite their history and be the change. The essay continuously goes back to writing and the importance of writing for women.  

            

“…there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes-any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible” (Cixous 940-941). 

 

“She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history, first two levels that cannot be separated” (Cixous 943). 

 

“To write. An act which will not only ‘realize’ the decensored relation of women to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty…” (Cixous 943).

 

“It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or in the harem” (Cixous 944). 

 

           These four quotes help exemplify the literary theory, gender studies in particular with a focus on feminism because it shows what writing can represent for women and the oppression they face. These quotes also point out the failings of society and what needs to change for society to change. The quotes also specifically show how multifaceted women are, but also what can be done with writing to help all women. 

           Cixous seems very much to be a woman’s woman from these quotes, and they show the importance of writing on society. To help change society, literature, and writing must change. The discussion of how women are viewed in literature and the lack of female authors are prevalent by how much emphasis Cixous puts on women's writing and it's being a foundation for female liberation.  

Bisexuality: Being romantically and sexually attracted to more than one gender. 

“Bisexuality: that is, each one’s location is self…of the presence—variously manifest and insistent according to each person, male or female—of both sexes, nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex, and, from this ‘self-permission’, multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my body and the other body” (Cixous 946). 

Historico-cultural: Cultural history. 

“Now it happens that at present, for historico-cultural reasons, it is women who are opening up to and benefiting from this vatic bisexuality which doesn’t annul differences but stirs them up, pursues them, increases their number” (Cixous 946). 

Signifier and Signified: Terms used to describe the components of a sign: the signifier, to put it simply, is the word, and the signified is the thing or idea it represents.

“Beware, my friend, of the signifier that would take you back to the authority of a signified!” (Cixous 952). 

Phallologocentric Sublation: The privilege of the masculine in the construction of meaning. 

“For the phallologocentric sublation is with us, and it’s militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration” (Cixous 947). 

Questions/Confusions

1.     My first is the fact that this chapter focuses so much on men. Why must feminism and femininity need to be so closely tied to men when it seems that Cixous wants to entirely break away from that tie? I understand that men have defined femineity for years, but she could have just discussed what women believe femininity is without discussing men. 

2.     My second confusion is the emphasis on phallic symbols and penises. How is this necessary when discussing women writers and female authorship? Again, it felt like an unnecessary amount of emphasis on men that could have been spent raising women up. 

3.     My third point of confusion is that Cixous at one point mentions the “right” type of female writing and how women “should” be writing. That made me uncomfortable because if a woman is writing then that is great. I don’t think that other women should be falling into the habit of saying that one type of female writing is “right” over another. Female authorship of any kind is important and necessary. This especially felt weird coming from Cixous after she emphasized how each woman was vastly different from every other woman. Why can’t writing be the same way? Why is there a “right” kind of writing? 

           In this chapter, Butler focuses strongly on the idea of imitation and how that relates to heterosexuality, but also homosexuality. Butler then ties this into the idea of “right” and “wrong” performances of masculinity and femineity: “There is no ‘proper’ gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some sense the sex’s cultural property. Where that notion of the ‘proper’ operates, it is always and only improperly installed as the effect of a compulsory system” (Butler 955). What Butler is focusing on in this quote is that gender only exists in how a culture portrays it. This idea permeates this essay throughout, with Butler using drag as a powerful example of how gender can be performed, imitated, and portrayed. 

           Butler goes on to discuss how gender is performative based on how society views gender should be performed; “In this sense, gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express” (Butler 957). As can be seen in this quote Butler emphasizes that gender itself is not a performance, no one is faking their gender, which is something that comes up in transphobic arguments, what is performative is society’s idea of how a specific gender should be represented. This distinction holds society, and not the individual, accountable for the “proper” idea of gender expression. 

           Butler ends the essay with a section on Psychic Mimesis. This section discusses a person’s own personal identity and how that identity is formed. This is specifically tying into gender identity. When the discussion of compulsory heterosexuality comes up, the essay comes to a close. Butler brings the difference between sex and gender into this discussion, along with the need for repetition for some of these ideas to remain. The essay closes by going back to drag, which was brought up in the essay's opening in order to tie the argument together that society is the cause for the performance of gender. 

This chapter argues specifically for intersectionality but has a major focus on what the different meanings of Transnational are in the different disciplines that the term inhabits. This discussion helps to strongly support Grewal and Kaplan’s discussion on intersectionality and the effects of globalization; “These power relationships are connected to inequalities that result from earlier forms of globalization, but they have also generated new asymmetries. Our task is to examine both the specifications and the continuities within the globalization of sexual identities at the present juncture” (Grewal and Kaplan 963). This quote shows how globalization is affecting the discussion of sexual identities. Grewal and Kaplan point out specifically that most research and discussion focus on Europe and America while viewing other countries as “behind” or “uncivilized. This discussion is important when it comes to intersectionality between disciplines. 

The discussion of the term transnational is a defining point of this essay; “Rather, we need to examine the circulation of this term and its regulation through institutional sites, such as academic, publishing, conference panels and papers, and academic personnel matters. By doing so, we can begin to understand how the study of sexuality remains bound by disciplinary constraints” (Grewal and Kaplan 964). This quote discusses that when someone thinks more critically of the term transnational, they can understand the study of sexuality needs to be looked at from an interdisciplinary approach, instead of just one specific discipline. Transnational is brought back in the conclusion of the essay in order to tie everything together properly. 

The other half of the essay is the portion that focuses on “The second instance of separated spheres that we wish to examine concerns the demarcation in the United States of international area studies from American studies” (Grewal and Kaplan 967). This quote is a good introduction to the portion of the essay that discusses how various studies have been viewed through a mostly Western lens, but also that there is a specific field for American studies, and yet every other culture and country is lumped into international or ethnic studies, with the argument being that they need to have their own specific fields as America does. This discussion helps put into context that, when looking at gender and sexuality, it is important to make sure that it is not being viewed just through a Western, European, and American lens. This section also discusses post-colonialism and ethnic studies, which reiterate the importance of intersectionality, as much of literary theory overlaps between the different schools.   

 

“First, it is necessary to consider that sexuality always exceeds  any given performance, presentation, or narrative which is why it is not possible to derive or read off a sexuality from any given gender presentation. And sexuality may be said to exceed any definitive narrativization. Sexuality is never fully ‘expressed’ in a performance or practice; there will be passive and butchy femmes, femmy and aggressive butches, and both of those, and more, will turn out to describe more or less anatomically stable ‘males’ and ‘females’” (Butler 958).  

 

“If gender is drag, and if it is an imitation that regularly produces the ideal it attempts to approximate, then gender is a performance that produces through the gesture, the move, the gait…the illusion of an inner depth” (Butler 960). 

 

“It may be that the very categories of sex of sexual identity of gender are produced or maintained in the effects of the compulsory performance, effects which are disingenuously renamed as causes, origins, disingenuously lined up within a casual or expressive sequence that the heterosexual norm produces to legitimate itself as the origin of all sex” (Butler 961). 

 

These four quotes help exemplify my understanding of the theory because, when discussing gender theory, a person needs to redefine and hone their definition of gender. All four quotes help to do this. These quotes show what it means to discuss gender in a more complex way. I found that these quotes, and this chapter as a whole, opened up my mind more fully to what gender is and how society and culture play a role in it. The discussion about gender performance is very powerful because everyone has an idea in their head about how they are supposed to perform the gender they identify with. 

I found myself understanding gender and queer theory more deeply with these quotes because this isn’t a surface-level discussion. This is a discussion that is meant to redefine a reader’s definition. I think this is incredibly important when interacting with and analyzing through this lens. The reader and writer should be open to having their ideas shifted and challenged, but also they should be ready to shift and challenge ideas. I felt these quotes exemplified this when I read them.

 

“Since ignoring transnational formations has left studies of sexualities without the tools to address questions of globalization, race, political economy, immigration, migration, and geopolitics, it is important to bring questions of transnationalism into conversation with the feminist study of sexuality” (Grewal and Kaplan 965). 

 

“The first divide is the separation of sexuality from the study of race, class, nation, religion, and so on. If Western, Judeo-Christian culture has viewed sexuality as the other within each individual, the study of sexuality in the U.S. academy has been limited by the inability of the human sciences to address this feared aspect of human life…And the Western body stand as the normative body in scholarly discourse and in public society” (Grewal and Kaplan 966). 

 

“...nationalist biases and geopolitics contribute to this binary formulation, in which the United States and Europe are figured as modern and thus as the sites of progressive social movements, while other parts of the world are presumed to be traditional, especially in regard to sexuality” (Grewal and Kaplan 968). 

 

            These four quotes exemplify my understanding of gender and queer theory by forcing me to acknowledge that much of that theory is looked at through a Western lens, European and American focused, as well as mostly focused on the white middle class. This allows me to understand that more diverse voices need to be uplifted within the discipline and given precedence. The discussions of transnational and how this ties into the study of sexuality is something useful in literature because books are not just written by American and Europeans, it is important to take into consideration what other cultures and countries have to say on these issues, and also to not make assumptions about someone else’s beliefs. 

           Literature builds empathy and understanding. Well, literary theory, especially literary theory that focuses on marginalized and oppressed groups, needs to make sure it is uplifting the voices that speak for all aspects of those groups. These quotes helped me see this and understand this. It is important to check our biases.

“…a kind of psychic miming—is a response to, and refusal of loss. Gender as the site of such psychic mimes is thus constituted by the variously gendered Others who have been loved and lost, where the loss is suspended through a melancholic and imaginary incorporation (and preservation) of those Others into the psyche” (Butler 959). 

Compulsory Heterosexuality: Heterosexuality is assumed and enforced upon people by society.  

“Although compulsory heterosexuality often presumes that there is first a sex that is expressed through gender and then through sexuality, it may now be necessary fully to invert and displace that operation of thought” (Butler 961). 

Mimetic Practice: Usually dealing with the self, but there are a wide range of meanings.  

“Consider that identifications are always made in response to loss of some kind, and that they involve a certain mimetic practice that seeks to incorporate the lost love within the very ‘identity’ of the one who remains” (Butler 959). 

Imitation: Someone copies someone else’s behavior. 

Inverts: The opposite of what it was before.  

“On the contrary, imitation does not copy that which is prior, but produces and inverts that very terms of priority and derivativeness” (Butler 956). 

“…the term transnational can address the asymmetries of the globalization process. Yet it has become so ubiquitous in cultural, literary, and critical studies that much of its political valence seems to have become evacuated” (Grewal and Kaplan 964). 

Globalization: the process organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale.

“In many works on globalization, the ‘global’ is seen either as a homogenizing influence or as a neocolonial movement of ideas and capital from West to non-West” (Grewal and Kaplan 963). 

Interdisciplinary: Relating to more than one field of academia. 

“Thus the disciplinary divides that emerge out of other political arenas are played out on campus and off, that is, in academic as well as in ‘community-based’ or activist locations” (Grewal and Kaplan 967). 

Intersectionality: Understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. It identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage

Articulation Theory: Account for consequences of the ideas, principles, and beliefs that make up ideologies. 

“In recent years, both ‘articulation’ theory and ‘intersectionality’ approaches have attempted to resolve this problem by arguing for complex or hybrid subjects” (Grewal and Kaplan 967-968). 

2.     If gender is performative based off of society then how does an individual know that the expression of their gender truly represents themselves? Where does an individual begin and the societal expectations end? 

3.     What about society would need to change in order to break out of these rigid performative gender expectations that society has implemented? 

2.     A confusion I have is about transnationalism. If there are so many definitions and ideas about it; then how should it best be used and described? How is it viable to use when there are so many definitions that go with it? 

3.     This article felt very much in conversation with racial, ethnic, and post-colonial theory. Is there ever truly a literary theory essay that does not dive into multiple schools and lenses? I feel that everything ties so closely together that it almost doesn’t make sense to try to separate them.