Queer Theory Quotes

“No longer a natural basis for solidarity, gender is refigured by Buder as a cultural fiction, a performative effect of reiterative acts: 'Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being' (ibid.:33). Consequently, there is nothing authentic about gender, no 'core' that produces the reassuring signs of gender. The reason 'there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender' is 'that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results'.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“She [Judith Butler] specifies the ways in which the logic of identity politics—which is to gather together similar subjects so that they can achieve shared aims by mobilising a minority-rights discourse—is far from natural or self-evident. Michael Warner makes a similar point about the cultural specificity of identity politics when observing that, because its 'frame ... belongs to Anglo-American traditions', it therefore 'has some distorting influences'.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“To valorise common sense is naive, if not dangerous. For it does not follow that those formations of knowledge which coincide with the discourses of common sense manifest some truth beyond analysis. Rather, the convergence of knowledge and common sense may be understood more profitably as licensing the operation of unexamined ideological structures.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“Such reliance on what everybody already knows is rhetorically but not intellectually persuasive. For what is being critiqued in contemporary theory is the very notion of the natural, the obvious, and the taken-for-granted.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“For . Butler (1991:13-14), 'identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression'. Formerly assumed to be a prerequisite for political intervention, the assertion of collective identities is now routinely understood to put into circulation effects in excess of its avowed intention.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“Butler [Judith Butler] elaborates Foucault's argument about the operations of power and resistance in order to demonstrate the ways in which marginalised identities are complicit with those identificatory regimes they seek to counter”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“It has occurred because, within poststructuralism, the very notion of identity as a coherent and abiding sense of self is perceived as a cultural fantasy rather than a demonstrable fact.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“Against the popular concept that sex both exists beyond power relations and yet is repressed by them, Foucault (1979:36) argues that power is not primarily a repressive force:
In defining the effects of power by repression, one accepts a purely juridical conception of that power; one identifies power with a law that says no; it has above all the force of an interdict. Now, I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow and skeletal conception of power which has been curiously shared. If power was never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really believe that we should manage to obey it? What gives power its hold, what makes it accepted, is quite simply the fact that it does not simply weigh like a force which says no, but that it runs through, and it produces, things, it induces pleasure, it forms knowledge, it produces discourse; it must be considered as a productive network which runs through the entire social body much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“For Saussure, language is not some second-order system whose function is simply to describe what is already there. Rather, language constitutes and makes significant that which it seems only to describe. Moreover, Saussure defines language as a system of signification that precedes any individual speaker. Language is commonly misunderstood as the medium by which we express our 'authentic' selves, and our private thoughts and emotions. Saussure, however, asks us to consider that our notions of a private, personal and interior self is something constituted through language.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“Like the Marxist structuralist approach to subjectivity, psychoanalysis makes culturally available a narrative that complicates the assumption that an identity is the natural property of any individual.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“Reconsidering Karl Manx's emphasis on the framework of constraints or historical conditions which determine an individual's actions, Louis Althusser has argued that we do not pre-exist as free subjects: on the contrary, we are constituted as such by ideology. His central thesis is that individuals are 'interpellated' or 'called forth' as subjects by ideology, and that interpellation is achieved through a compelling mixture of recognition and identification. This notion is important for any thorough examination of identity politics, bécause it demonstrates how ideology not only positions individuals in society but also confers on them their sense of identity. In other words, it shows how one's identity is already constituted by ideology itself rather than simply by resistance to it.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“In the second half of the twentieth century, however, such seemingly self-evident or logical claims to identity have been problematised radically on a number of fronts by such theorists as Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Collectively, their work has made possible certain advances in social theory and the human sciences which, in the words of Stuart Hall (1994:120), have effected 'the final de-centring of the Cartesian subject' (cf. Chris Weedon, 1987; Diana Fuss, 1989; Barbara Creed, 1994). Consequendy, identity has been reconceptualised as a sustaining and persistent cultural fantasy or myth. To think of identity as a 'mythological' construction is not to say that categories of identity have no material effect. Rather it is to realise—as Roland Barthes does in his Mythologies (1978)—that our understanding of ourselves as coherent, unified, and self-determining subjects is an effect of those representational codes commonly used to describe the self and through which, consequendy, identity comes to be understood.”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“the power men everywhere wield over women . . . has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegal control' [Adrienne Rich]”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“In particular, he singles out the black liberation (rather than the civil rights) movement, the women's movement and the youth revolt, which saw many 'turn on, tune in, drop out', partly in response to American involvement in Vietnam. Although not always committed to the same causes or principles, these different countercultural movements were unified in their opposition to the dominant culture. They criticised the unexamined grounds of the 'great American dream', with its ethos of hard work, individualism and family values. Altman argues that these various movements created a 'new consciousness', a suspicion of hypocrisy and a strong distrust of authority. [Altman]”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“they need complex social and political conditions for their emergence—to produce a sense of community experience which makes for collective endeavour. Five conditions seem to be necessary for this: the existence of large numbers in the same situation; geographical concentration; identifiable targets of opposition; sudden events or changes in social position; and an intellectual leadership with readily understood goals. [Jeffery Weeks]”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction

“Yet the British group did not have the legislative focus of the Germans. 'We do not think', they declared, 'the time has yet arrived in England for a similar demand to be made”
― Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction