queer ethics – Page 2

Is grief our only resource for how to stay in trouble?

I believe that staying in trouble is an important ethical practice. But, what do I mean by this? What sort of resources do we have for understanding how staying in trouble should be practiced? In this entry, I want to reflect on an important way in which my own thinking is different from Judith Butler’s: While Butler argues that grief is a valuable resource for staying in trouble, it is not the only resource. As someone who has spent the last 4 years grieving for a mother who was dying (and who died on September 30th of this year) of a particularly horrific form of cancer (pancreatic), I am not interested in mining the ethical/transformative possibilities of grief. I don’t want to keep grieving; I want to stop grieving and I want to think about what other resources we have for staying in trouble. What about humor and comedy? Are there ways to think about the state of being in trouble that are not connected to violence, grief and vulnerability (as something that is only negative and that always signals loss–of control, of autonomy, of stability)?

In many of her recent works, such as Undoing Gender, Precarious Life and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Butler focuses on the importance of grief. In Precarious Life, Butler asks:

Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its vulnerability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?

And concludes:

To foreclose the vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearing and find our way (30).

Refusing to leave our grief, where we are beside ourselves with sadness and pain, can be very productive for us; it reminds us how we are connected to others and it can make us more compassionate as we are compelled to recognize our own vulnerability. Grief—the loss of a loved one—undoes us. We can no longer believe in the illusion that we have control and that we are autonomous individuals who act freely and without constraint. When we grieve it is not that we suddenly become vulnerable. Instead, the belief that we are not vulnerable and the illusions that we construct to shore up that belief no longer work. Grief reminds us (or perhaps enlightens us) that we have always already been vulnerable. I agree that there is something extremely valuable about being compelled to face our own vulnerability; it can open us up to thinking about, respectfully listening to, and valuing the lived experiences of others.

We can understand Butler’s promotion of grief to be functioning in three different ways in her texts. First, Butler is particularly interested in valuing grief because public displays of grief and the right to grieve for those you love have been denied lots of folks within gay/lesbian/queer/trans communities (here, she is thinking about the AIDS crises and how so many folks were not able to publicly grieve for those that they lost to the illness). So, when she promotes grief, she is thinking about these communities and their important need—what she might even call their human right—to have their love and grief publicly acknowledged and respected. Second, she wants to value grief in post 9/11 America because it was so quickly foreclosed in order to violently respond to the attacks on September 11th. Instead of reflecting on what happened and allowing our grief to open us up to the world, the Bush regime swiftly turned to violent retribution. This lack of a space for grief made it very difficult for us to critically reflect on our grief. And the specific way in which we responded to the attack, through a politics of terror, anti-intellectualism, the production of the Arab-as-terrorist-abject, and the development of a policy of Us vs. Them, encouraged us to dehumanize (and not grieve) for any of those victims who we deemed to be not like us. In both of these instances, the specific ways in which grief has been foreclosed has been very violent. I find Butler’s desire to alleviate that violence through valuing grief to be very compelling.

These first two ways are in response to specific historical, cultural, social conditions. In these situations grief is the thing needed because grief has been so unjustly denied. But, there is a third way to understand what Butler is doing with grief. If we trace her work back through Gender Trouble, Psychic Life of Power and even Precarious Life, we see that she is promoting grief as a valuable state to be in as a subject. Her emphasis on not foreclosing grief is the idea that being in a state of grief, where we are undone and are forced to recognize that undone-ness, is “one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearing and find our way” (30). So, grief is fundamental to our experiences (and our effectiveness) as subjects.

Now, is Butler really suggesting that we should all try to stay in a state of grief all of the time? I don’t think so. But, what are to make of her claim that it is one of our most valuable resources, especially when she offers no other resources? I agree with Butler that being undone, that recognizing our vulnerability, is essential. But, I have become increasingly tired of talking about grief. Staying in a state of vulnerability-as-grief (like I have with my mom) for such a long time is too much for anyone. It is an important resource (my own experiences in grief have opened me up to more ways of being/doing), but it should never be the only resource. And, it should not be the model for how to recognize our fundamental connection and accountability to others and how to stay in trouble. Where is the laughter (and the fun) that Butler argued for in Gender Trouble? It seems to me that Butler’s overemphasis on grief has turned her into a Debbie Downer. (Yes, I am referring to the character on Saturday Night Live who is played by Rachel Dratch. I must write more about her and the laughter that accompanies her depressing rants. How do humor and grief work simultaneously in these sketches?)

So, what about playfulness, laughter, and joy? What sort of resource does humor serve as? How might laughter and humor enable us to connect with others and open ourselves up to those others? Why does trouble seem to lead directly (and exclusively) to tragedy, violence and being undone? As I continue to ponder the ethical value of troublemaking and troublestaying, I want to focus on the joyful, playful and fun (sometimes, but not always, funny) resources for living a virtuous life. This focus is not meant to deny the existence of grief (indeed, it is something that, for good or bad, I live with now), but to suggest that trouble isn’t always negative and that our practices of it may yield positive (dare I say, happy?) results.

How can it already be September 18th?

It seems like I am always asking questions like this: How can the summer be over? How can it be the end of the second week of classes? And, most important for this post, how can it already be just one week before I present at the FEAST conference? Earlier in the summer, I wrote an entry about this presentation; I “promised” that it would be the first in a series of entries in preparation for the conference. I wrote that entry on July 23rd. Now, on September 18th, a week before the conference, I am finally offering the second entry. I have been thinking about my paper (no, really, I have), but prepping for classes–putting together the syllabi, setting up the blogs, etc–took up a lot of my time in August and early September. Oh well, better late than never.

If you recall (and if you don’t, that’s okay, just look here to “remember”), my presentation is about the ethical possibilities in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, particularly in her project of trouble (which I describe as making, being in and staying in trouble–hmm…isn’t that the name of this blog?). In my first entry, I wrote about why I think it is important to consider the ethical import of Gender Trouble. In this entry, I want to focus on my conclusion and engage in a ‘lil bit of musing about what my project is–that is, what I want to do with the idea of troublemaking/troublestaying as a virtue.

In the manuscript I submitted last February, here is how I conclude my presentation:

In concluding this presentation on Butler and the ethical value of troublemaking, I want to make my own ethical gesture towards troublemaking as staying in trouble. Thinking about troublemaking as staying in trouble shifts our ethical attention away from developing the practices or rules that should always guide our troublemaking and towards cultivating qualities of character that encourage us to approach a wide range of activities with a troublemaking (that is, critical, thoughtful and questioning) spirit/ethos. One potentially fruitful way to think about this troublemaking spirit is as a feminist virtue, that is, as an ethical way of being, a mode of relating to the world, a quality of character, a disposition, or an attitude that influences our ethical/political understandings and shapes our ethical and political development. Thinking about troublemaking as a virtue encourages us to ask after how we should live as troublemakers and what kind of (moral and political) selves we need to be in order to stay in trouble. And, it enables us to value troublemaking as an important quality of the moral self.

Having run out of time in my presentation, I want to end with two final questions: What would a feminist ethical project that emphasizes the virtue of troublemaking look like and how does this project differ from one that emphasizes the virtue of care? How might troublemaking as a feminist virtue shift our understanding of feminist ethics and feminist virtue ethics?

One big reason that this conclusion is so brief is because my presentation is limited to a certain number of minutes–I have 40 minutes total, but that includes discussion and I am very interested in what people will have to say about my project. But even though my conclusion needs to be brief, I want to develop it a little more in the following ways:

Why virtue? A key part of my argument is that we should look at troublemaking as a virtue. But, why? What does thinking about it as virtue offer us that thinking about it in other ways doesn’t? I like thinking about troublemaking as a virtue because of the emphasis, within virtue ethics and virtue-talk, on quality of character/attitude/ways of being. For me, troublemaking is not easily defined by a practice (or set of practices). It is a approach–a critical/attentive/curious approach–to life (to ideas, to beliefs, and to practices, etc). In this way, we can’t simply say that the ethical value of troublemaking is found in this or that practice. Instead, we can talk about how our way of engaging in a practice (are we aware of the limits of that practice, are we attentive to the effects of that practice on others, are we open to other ways of practicing) enables us to be more or less virtuous. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of what counts as troublemaking (it is not reduced to any practice or practices) and provides for the opportunity to think through how a wide range of practices might be or might not be troublemaking in an ethical/virtuous sense.

My vision of troublemaking as an ethical attitude is partly inspired by Michel Foucault and his discussion of the limit attitude in “What is Enlightenment?.” He describes this attitude, which he also calls the “critical ontology of ourselves” as “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (319).

It is also inspired by Audre Lorde and her linking of the erotic with excellence and eros in “The Erotic as Power.” She writes: “For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (54). And, “in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea” (57). Focusing on character and excellence enables us to think about ethical practices differently; it centers our discussion on self-making and the cultivation of a self who can learn to practice ethical (and politically transformative) troublemaking everyday–in a wide range of practices.

And my vision of troublemaking as an ethical attitude is inspired by Maria Lugones and her discussion of the playful attitude in “Playfulness, ‘World-Traveling’ and Loving Perception.” In describing a game she is playing with a friend–they are throwing stones in the water–she writes: “The playfulness of our activity does not presuppose that there is something like ‘crashing stones’ that is a particular form of play with its own rules. Instead, the attitude that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play” (95). So the determination that something is playful is not based on the type of activity it is. Instead it is based on the selves-at-that-moment who do it and the spirit/ethos of their individual and/or collective doing. In this way, suggesting that troublemaking is virtuous is based not on what the activity is (protesting, violent rebellion, talking back in class), but on how it is being done. But, wait. I want to offer another clarification here. The “how” it is being done is not just about intention (what one’s purpose is for engaging in the troublemaking), it is also about attention or, more specifically, attentiveness (how one is aware of the effects of that activity, how one notices and thinks through the implications of their actions in doing the activity, how one takes care of and is responsive to the others engaged in or affected by the activity). [note: this idea of attentiveness is inspired by conversations with Naomi Scheman and Rebecca Moskow].

Now, in thinking about troublemaking as an attitude or approach to one’s actions, I am not suggesting that becoming someone who engages in virtuous making of/being in/staying in trouble is as easy as “changing your attitude” (which is a critique that Kelly Oliver levels at Lugones’ playful attitude in her book, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition). When we link the idea of attitude with character and excellence and virtue, we can see that troublemaking as a virtue is not something that we easily and immediately are able to do. Instead it requires tremendous effort: training, repeated practice (habit) and the striving for a balance between being deficient and excessive in one’s troublemaking practices.

In “Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White Character,” Alison Bailey discusses the value of cultivating a virtuous character (in this essay, the virtue she is thinking about is traitorousness or being-a-traitor). Here is a helpful example she gives for understanding how developing this process works (and particularly how it involves more than just doing practices with a certain attitude):

The activity of virtue resembles the workout example. Just as a person does not become fit by doing a series of sit-ups and then declaring, “There, I am fit!” so a person does not become virtuous by doing a series of good deeds and then declaring, “Finally, I am virtuous!” Virtue and fitness arise in the process of continually working out or doing good deeds. We become virtuous when we have the practical wisdom [developed through this habitual practice], to act courageously to the right degree, for the right reasons, and under the right circumstances (38).

I think there is a tremendous amount of value to be found in thinking through how a person or persons could be trained to practice troublemaking in political and ethically responsible ways. Virtue ethics, with its emphasis on character, training, practice, habit, gives us the language and framework for thinking through how to do this.

Uh oh. I have enjoyed writing this entry, but it is over 1550 words long. That is about 1350 words longer than I need for wrapping up my presentation. Maybe I should approach this differently…later. For now, I’m done.

A Disciplinary Problem? The unruly child as troublemaker

In the documentary, Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind, Butler recounts details of growing up in Cleveland:

I was never very good in school. I was what they call a problem child. A disciplinary problem. And, uh, I would speak back to the teachers. And I would not follow the rules. I would skip class. I did terrible things. And, yet, I was apparently smart in some way. But I didn’t understand myself as smart. I understood myself as strategic. One had to get through. One had to find one’s way in the school and in the synagogue. And I didn’t really like authority. My mother was called into the principal’s office…the principal who runs the school in fifth grade, I think. Probably the age of 11. She was warned that I might become a criminal and at that point they told me that I couldn’t go to the school anymore, to the Jewish Education program anymore, unless I studied privately with the rabbi. So, this was for me, terrific because I loved the rabbi.

Now consider how Liz McMillen shapes those details (given to her by Butler in an interview from 1997 entitled “Berkeley’s Judith Butler Revels in Role of Troublemaker” for The Chronicle for Higher Education) into a coherent—and rather neat and tidy—narrative and origin story about Butler as a troublemaker:

Long before Gender Trouble caused a stir, and before she became a prominent theorist with a devoted graduate-student following, Judith Butler was a kid in a Cleveland synagogue who frequently got herself in trouble. She disrupted classes. She made faces during assemblies. Finally, she was kicked out and told that she wouldn’t be allowed to return to the school until she had completed a tutorial with the head rabbi. The rabbi sized the 14-year-old up and decided that it was time for her to get serious.

So what do you want to study? he wanted to know.”Holocaust historiography” was her quick reply. Martin Buber and existential theology. Whether German idealism was responsible in any way for the rise of fascism. This after-school punishment laid the groundwork for a scholarly career marked by extreme diligence — and a knack for making trouble.”I was always talking back,” she says.”I guess I’ve elevated it into an art form.” Once a disciplinary problem, always a disciplinary problem.

So, according to McMillen, Butler was an unruly child. A student who refused to play by the rules and got into a lot of trouble. A disciplinary problem. Now, she is an adult who gets into a lot of trouble. She disrupts widely accepted notions of sex and gender. She challenges feminism as identity politics. She refuses to merely accept any idea as common sense. And she encourages others to be critical of their most treasured values. It would seem that Butler willingly (perhaps even proudly) takes on the role of unruly-child-as-troublemaker. Her acts of trouble (which up to the point of the interview included: Subject of Desire, Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, The Psychic Life of Power, and Excitable Speech) are at least partially inspired by a desire to continue to be a disciplinary problem. She finds pleasure in instability, being uncomfortable, and pushing at the limits. She enjoys laughing at/mocking the system and causing trouble for all those who perpetuate it. She even mocks herself and refuses to cash in on her status as superstar academic.

Samuel Chambers and Terrence Carver reinforce this assessment of Butler as the unruly child when they write in their introduction to Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics:

how else to read the line that Butler leaves on its own as the fourth paragraph of the preface to Bodies That Matter, ‘Couldn’t someone simply take me aside?’, than with more than a touch of sarcasm and sass (x)? What other way to hear this question than as Butler’s declaration that she plans to continue getting into trouble, that she never expects to get out it? While her critics will persist in their desire to force her into line, she will continue to make trouble–and to trouble them (2).

And while they aren’t certain that she is actively taking up the trope of the “unruly child” (“We could ask her–she might even answer us,” they ponder, “but we’d still never know“), they do suggest that Butler’s role as the “disciplinary problem” is proof that she is a troublemaker. See, she disobeys. She disrupts. She sasses back. She must be a troublemaker. Immediately following this discussion, Chambers and Carver suggest that, while Butler is engaging in unruly behavior, her actions “prove to be of the far more sophisticated and important sort” (2). So, Butler is not just your average disciplinary problem, she is a serious and sophisticated disciplinary problem.

So, as the story goes: once upon a time there was a little girl from Cleveland. She always got into trouble…big trouble. She challenged authority figures. Disrupted class. And got kicked out of school. Everyone thought she was a disciplinary problem. Then, she grew up and became an academic superstar. She learned how to turn her knack for troublemaking into some serious and sophisticated scholarship about troubling sex, gender and sexuality. And she remained a disciplinary problem.

Sounds great, right? I like the idea of rethinking what it means to be a disciplinary problem (and I can relate to it, having gotten into trouble a lot as a child), but this narrative (particularly about Butler’s beginnings and more generally about the origins of troublemaking for theory and politics) raises some red flags for me.

The purpose of the narrative
First, the story offers some background on Butler. It demonstrates that she is a person and not just a theorist. In the McMillen interview, Butler reflects on the desire, by her readers, to know who she really is:

I was so theoretical in my presentation in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter that you barely got a glimpse of who I was, which then produced this desire to expose this hyperintellectual, you know, hidden person.

Second, the story also offers some background on Gender Trouble and the idea of troubling gender. They come from someone on the outside, from a problem child, who always challenged authority. Gender Trouble, according to the story, is just one more (perhaps more sophisticated and “grown up”) example of how a “problem” child acts.

Finally, this story provides both Butler, as a queer theorist/theoretical activist/political thinker, and her work in Gender Trouble and beyond, with some credibility in queer activist communities. Butler isn’t just an academic who writes esoteric and overly complicated books like Gender Trouble; she is a bad girl! A rebel! She makes trouble for the establishment! She resists and fights back! And, where did it all start? When she was (*gasp*) a juvenile delinquent!

How much control has Butler had over the shaping of this narrative and the image of her as feminism’s and queer theory’s bad girl? Is the playing up of her as a problem-child a marketing ploy by others to sell more books? Or, could it be an attempt to discredit her work in troublemaking as childish? Oh, don’t bother with her, she’s nothing but trouble!?

The person as Subject/the author as Agent
The story, particularly the one articulated by McMillen, feels a little too neat and tidy. There appears to be a seamless connection between (1) the person who made trouble as a child with (2) the author who not only writes about trouble but makes it too (!), and (3) the book that successfully makes trouble for our understandings of gender/sex/sexuality. But, does Butler-the-person really fit that neatly with Butler-the-author? Does the move from Butler-the-person to Butler-the-author work that easily? And, does Butler-the-author have that much control over what her book did/does?

In the first chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler famously invokes Nietzsche and argues that “there is no doer behind the deed” (34). She challenges the idea of the agent as willful subject who has (total) control over their actions. She offers in place of the person who does, a subject who is created/perpetuated through the process of doing. Where might the story of Butler as a troublemaker fit in here? Is it reinforcing the notion of the person-as-willful-agent?

And, what about the connection between author and book? What control does Butler-as-author really have over what her writings do and mean for others? I need to think through theses ideas some more, but I wonder what we might make of this narrative in relation to Butler’s word at the end of Bodies That Matter. She is discussing the troubling question, “How will we know the difference between the power we promote and the power we oppose” (241)? In her reflections, she discusses her writings and the effects they might have on others:

The reach of their signifiability cannot be controlled by the one who utters them. They continue to signify in spite of their authors, and sometimes against their authors’ most precious intentions.…This not owning one’s words is there from the start, however, since speaking is always in some ways the speaking of a stranger through and as oneself (241-242).

Finally, in offering up this story of herself (through her written and spoken words) as an unruly child who turned into a troublemaking adult, what is Butler doing? Or, conversely, what is being done to her? In one of her more recent works, Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler argues that “telling a story about oneself is not the same as giving an account of oneself” (12). So, which is it–is the tale of Butler-as-unruly-child a story/narrative or an account? I am eager to re-read Butler’s ideas in Giving an Account to find out what she might say about all of this.

Okay, she was a disciplinary problem, but why?
The story of Butler as a disciplinary problem is compelling, but it leaves a lot out in the telling. Why was she considered a disciplinary problem? Or, more pointedly, what caused her to make (and be in) trouble? In “What is Critique?,” Butler writes:

One does not drive to the limits for a thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into a titillating proximity with evel. One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis…(307-308).

What sorts of crises did Butler run up against that made her push at the limits (against authority figures, etc)? Without a discussion of why, we are left with a narrative that is too easy and that could too easily become a story of a girl who was bad (maybe born that way?) and then found a way to continue to be bad (and earn money doing it!) as an adult. There is much that should be said/written about what causes girls to act out and/or to be dismissed/punished as troublemakers. In fact, the specific ways that gender and trouble get connected is part of the reason Butler wrote Gender Trouble. Take a look at her discussion of “female trouble” in her 1990 Preface for more. Of course, Butler speaks to the “why” in many of her writings. So, why is it left out of the narrative of unruly child–particularly the one shaped by McMillen?

*Note: At this point, I must veer off into a discussion of Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an entry about half-pint and the episode, “Troublemaker.” I promised to watch it and report back. I watched it yesterday morning. Actually, I had intended this article to be about Laura as one example of the “unruly child” and what kind of trouble they cause (or are accused of causing). As you can tell, this entry has gone in a different direction. I enjoyed the episode–aside from the fact that it convinced me that Mrs. Oleson is just plain evil. I was surprised out how much room there is for a feminist interpretation of how/why Laura is labeled as a troublemaker. I would like to devote an entire entry to it (and perhaps include the recent New Yorker review article about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane and some other thoughts from Little House in the Big Woods). Anyway, my point in referring to Little House and Laura here is that the “Troublemaker” episode offers one example of how/why a little girl might be dismissed and also punished for being a troublemaker. The (how/why) reasons have a lot to do with the fact that she is a poor little girl with no money who has very little status or, in Bourdieu-speak, cultural capital. The narrative of Laura as troublemaker in this episode has as much to do with how she has been labeled a troublemaker (and the consequences of that labeling) as it does with what kind of trouble she makes. What would a narrative of Butler that linked her troublemaking with her experiences growing up in Cleveland look like? Butler only hints at that in her 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble.

The origins of troublemaking:
The story of Butler as an unruly child seems to function as an origin story for gender trouble, both as a book and as a concept. To the question, where did gender trouble come from, we get the answer, a problem child who skipped class, made faces at assemblies, and did other terrible things. So, according to this line of thinking, troublemaking as a concept/practice/action is produced by someone who does it in order to disrupt/unsettle/disturb. And this disruption that they do takes some very particular forms: skipping class, disrupting assemblies, being kicked out of school, all of which conjure up images of the juvenile delinquent. But, is this the only source of troublemaking and the only way to imagine how children engage in it? Is the troublemaker fundamentally a bad girl (or bad boy) who willfully flouts the rules?

At this point, I have to stop writing this entry. I have more to say, but have run out of steam. I do like my final thought here. I will return to it an upcoming entry. The question becomes: is troublemaking all about daring to be bad (this is a reference to Alice Echols’ book) or could we think about it as daring to be good (another reference to the edited collection by Ann Ferguson and Bat-Ami Bar On)? What would that look like and what possibilities for ethics does it open up?

Can you ever really have too much trouble?

Last year I found this wonderfully titled article by Claudia Schippert in Theology and Sexuality: “Too Much Trouble? Negotiating Feminist and Queer Approaches in Religion.” (I also mention it here.) I have wanted to read it for a long time but, with all of the other things I have had to read, I just never got around to it. Now thanks to the summer (which is going by way too fast) and this blog, I have time and a reason to read it.

Schippert begins her essay by discussing the “troubling” relationship between queer-as-resisting-norms (Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet ) and ethics. She ponders two questions (actually, the same question, just worded differently): 1. “Are opposition to normativity and work in feminist ethics mutually exclusive endeavors” (47)? and 2. “Does Michael Warner’s well-known definition of queer theory as resistance to ‘heteronormativity’ contradict/preclude the doing of ethics or other engagement with norms” (48)?

The popular answer to this question, she argues, is yes. Many theorists believe that queer, as a practice and approach, is empty of ethical content. As a result, few studies of queer ethics exist (remember, this essay was originally a presentation at the American Academy of Religion conference in 1998). Even those ethical and/or queer theorists who answer “no” do so in a somewhat superficial way by merely replacing gay/lesbian with queer and simplistically equating it with defiant (52).

Linking her project with Janet Jakobsen’s essay “Queer is? Queer Does?” (which I discuss here), Schippert contends that queer ethics is possible but only by directly engaging with the tension (between resistance to norms–the queer project–and the production/analysis of norms–the ethical project) and by exploring the “specific practices of enacting and deploying norms” (53). She also refuses (in a wonderful moment of troublemaking) to offer a clear and final resolution to the tension between queer and norms. In particular, she does not want to resolve that tension by finding “better” norms (norms that are not heteronormative/oppressive/restrictive). She wants to shift attention towards: 1. examining “other” sites where the troubling of norms (through taking on the abject position) has been successful and 2. thinking through what those sites might have to offer scholars in their development of an ethics that takes queer resistance seriously.

Huh? I think I understand what she is saying here. Central to her argument is the concept of taking on the abject position. First, by abject she means the “realm of unintelligibility which contains that which is cast out” (58). The abject position is inhabited by those who don’t make sense, whose experiences/bodies/identities/practices aren’t recognized as normal or coherent and who exist outside of the dominant framework of white and heterosexual. By “taking on” the abject position, she means two things: 1. embodying or taking up the abject position and 2. defying/resisting that position. This abject position, which she discusses in relation to Evelynn Hammonds and her article, “Black W(holes) and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” and Judith Butler and her notion of “reworking of abjection into political agency” in Bodies That Matter, is not quite a position (because it is untelligible). But, in taking it on, it is possible to attend to the material effects of those norms that produce one as abject (taking on = embodying) and to reject/disavow (taking on = defiance) those norms.

Ummm…I thought I understood what she was saying, but now I am not so sure. I think I am almost there but her argument (which connects Butler, Hammonds and Katie Cannon with ethical critiques of queer and the citing of queer in religion) seems a little too crowded here. I do like her final paragraph (even as I am not quite sure how she gets there–almost…but not quite):

Expanding the very meaning of what counts as valuable bodies…

Wait, what does she mean here? Let me look at her earlier argument again. I think she is arguing, by drawing upon Katie Cannon and her work in Womanist Ethics, that taking on (embodying) the abject position but refusing to fully inhabit it (taking on as resistance) enables us to rework norms and open up new positions and understandings of what counts as normal/valued/valuable bodies.

…will, without a doubt, get us into more, and different kinds of, trouble.

Trouble in the form of disrupting disciplines (like religion/religious ethics), reworking what counts as resistance and a resisting position, and disturbing traditional notions of what counts as a valued and intelligible body.

But, finally, to answer the other questions I asked earlier [is trouble worth it?]: yes, it definitely would be worthwhile (63).

I like her emphasis on trouble in this essay. Trouble as having ethical possibility. Trouble (through taking on the abject position) as reworking/expanding our understandings of normativity and as attending to material effects of that normative process. As I mentioned before, I still feel as if I have a tenuous understanding of her argument. Maybe I need to turn to a later version of it in “Turning on/to Ethics” from Bodily Citations.

This essay is from 2006…8 years after the first article. At first glance, Schippert seems to be offering a very similar argument using Butler, Hammonds and Cannon again. Yet, one key ingredient is missing: trouble. Schippert has shifted her argument away from a focus on trouble (as that which connects the readings, as a popular and important way to think about Butler’s work and queer theory’s relation to ethics, and as the useful product of exploring tensions between queer resistance and norm production). The title of the essay is now, “Turning on/to ethics” and refers to how Butler’s work is not a turning on (as in evading, defying, betraying) ethics, but a turning to it.

Why does Schippert move away from the language of trouble? Could this shift reinforce my belief that one popular reading of Butler’s recent work as a turn to ethics is actually a turn away from the immature/youthful/anti-ethical ideas about trouble-as-disruption-and-subversion that permeate Gender Trouble? Sigh…Wait, could this move from “Too much trouble?” to “Turning on/to Ethics” play a key role in my analysis of Butler’s so-called shift? I think so. Excellent.

Of course, I still need to figure out exactly what Schippert’s argument is in both of these articles. More on that soon….

Queer is? Queer Does?

A couple of days ago I queried: Is trouble an adjective, a verb, a noun, or what? I came to the conclusion that all three of the ways in which to understand trouble (as describing a state; as an action; as a form of ethics/politics) were important. Today, as I was organizing my office (yes, I am still cleaning!), I came across a great article that I used last time I taught Queering Theory: Janet Jakobsen’s “Queer is? Queer Does? Normativity and the Problem of Resistance.” As “luck” would have it, the article was open to page 317–the page on which I have written in all caps: VERB NOUN ADJECTIVE. Sound familiar?

Jakobsen is discussing the nature of the term “queer”–is it just something you are, a queer (noun)? Or, is it something you do, engaging in resistance to norms and normalizations (verb)? Or is it something that describes who you are (adjective)? She concludes that queer is all three and that in order for us to fully engage with the term and to understand how it functions in specific and concrete practices we must consider how these three (noun, verb, adjective) are connected and how they work with and against each other.

One of Jakobsen’s primary concerns is that while we invoke “queer” as something that we should do (verb), we rarely interrogate how we should actually do it. Jakobsen argues that “queer” becomes the ending, and the last word, on critiques of lesbian/gay or feminist politics. “We stick with invocation,” she argues, “because we don’t fully know how to talk or write differently, to produce something other than an ending” (512). But, what would it look like to think through what it means (and how it feels) to do queer, or, as Jakobsen puts it, to make queer the starting point of our thinking and writing instead of the ending?

In “Queer is? Queer Does?” Jakobsen uses queer as the starting point for a “thinking through of the complications of embodiment, of resistance, of norms, and of the associated terms of normativity and the normal” (512). She asks: What is a norm and how does it differ from (hetero/homo) normativity or being normal? What ethical/political possibilities open for our understanding of how we can and do resistance (that is, have political and moral agency) when we think beyond queer doing as resisting the Norm? What happens when we start to unpack normal/normativity’s “matrix of multiple, contradictory norms” (513)?

Is any of this making sense? I have to admit that I have struggled with writing this entry for several days. It has gone through several permutations (including linking Jakobsen’s argument with Nikki Sullivan’s chapter, “Queer: A Question of Being or Doing?” and the complicated history of identity politics. Thankfully, I thought better about opening up that whole can of worms. It is July, after all. If I started writing about identity politics, I would still be writing this entry in October!). So, why is this article so troublesome? Why am I having difficulty writing about it? The last time I taught Queering Theory, I assigned it. We discussed it a little, but I remember thinking that we didn’t really get at the complexity of Jakobsen’s argument. Why?

I really like Jakobsen’s argument. The idea of thinking through how we actually queer (as a doing, as resistance) is very important. And her disentangling of “norms,” “normal” and “normativity” is crucial for developing a queer ethics. But, this article is long and complicated and takes on a lot. Her argument seems to require significant background knowledge of poststructural conversations about the” tension between the radical critique of subjectivity” and “the political project of undertaking resistance” (514). And, if that weren’t enough, she continues on by connecting her discussion with Barbara Streisand, her “queer nose,” and the intersections between being/doing queer and jewishness. Wow!

I will read this article again (and again and, perhaps, again). And I will try to figure out how to use it for my queering theory class. Maybe I should just use a part of it? Hmmm…

One last thing: As I was reading through Gloria Anzaldua’s “To(o) Queer the Writer–Loca, escritora y chicana,” I came across this related passage:

Oblivious to privilege and wrapped in arrogance, most writers from the dominant culture never specify their identity; I seldom hear them say, I am a white writer. If the writer is middle class, white and heterosexual s/he is crowned with the “writer” hat–no mitigating adjectives in front of it. They consider me a a Chicana writer, or a lesbian Chicana writer. Adjectives are a way of constraining and controlling. ‘The more adjectives you have the tighter the box.’ The adjective before a writer marks, for us, the “inferior” writer, that is, the writer who doesn’t write like them. Marking is always “marking down” (250-251).

This pasage is helpful for thinking about the implications of using and not using adjectives. Is discussing queer in terms of its role as a noun, adjective and/or verb, useful for thinking through what queer (and maybe trouble too?) is?