Judith Butler -Resignification as subversive repetition

Power works in part through discourse and it works in part to produce and

destabilise subjects.

The notion of performativity, and performative speech acts in particular

-understood as those speech acts that bring into being that which they name. This is

the moment in which discourse becomes productive in a fairly specific way. So what I'm

trying to do is think about the performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the

capacity to produce what it names. Then I take a further step, through the Derridean

rewriting of Austin, and suggest that this production actually always happens through a

certain kind of repetition and recitation.

To make the problematic of reproduction central to the sexing of the body?

I am not sure that is, or ought to be, what is absolutely salient or primary in the sexing

of the body. If it is, I think it's the imposition of a norm, not a neutral description of biological

constraints.

I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what

conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological

differences become the salient characteristics of sex.

The heterosexual matrix [in Gender Trouble] became a kind of totalising symbolic, and

that's why I changed the term in Bodies That Matter to heterosexual hegemony. This

opens the possibility that this is a matrix which is open to rearticulation, which has a

kind of malleability. So I don't actually use the term heterosexual matrix in Bodies That

Matter.

There's a very specific notion of gender involved in compulsory heterosexuality: a

certain view of gender coherence whereby what a person feels, how a person acts, and

how a person expresses herself sexually is the articulation and consummation of a

gender. It's a particular causality and identity that gets established as gender coherence

which is linked to compulsory heterosexuality. It's not any gender, or all gender, it's that

specific kind of coherent gender.

The politics of queer theory, the ideas of subversive repetition and

transgressive reinscription