GSFS 306 Study Guide - Winter 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes -
GSFS 306
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
WEEK Isult: laguage ad uee sujetiit
January 12, 2017
Recap from last class
• We discussed the key features that make queer experience distinct from other minority groups:
1. For the queer experience, it is normally an individual experience and not something that
your family can typically relate to
▪ Eribon: compared the experience of discrimination from a gay person since there
family is not normally gay and a Black person whos entire family would normally
experience the same form of discrimination
2. We are going to speculate that there is the possibility of hiding your sexual identity while if
you are visible minority you cannot hide your identity
3. Most of sexual identity and behaviour develops as you age. As a queer person you have the
possibility of turning out queer or not queer – there is a gap. It does not actualize itself right
after birth
4. We discover our sexual identity through speech and acquired knowledge
• Racial insult is different from queer insult, trans insult is different, etc. However, there is overlap
Subject
• Subjectivity and agency
o What is agency?
▪ Do or not do
▪ How is agency different than mastery?
▪ Mastery is complete control over something and agency does not equal mastery
because agency is limited to some degree (you do not have complete control over a
situation, there are limitations)
o Spotlight metaphor (Eribon)
▪ Within a spotlight, you can move around within the light but you cannot cross over
into the darkness – the perimeter in the boundary and defines the limits of your
movement
▪ You can still enter the darkness, but there may be social consequences
• Subordination (subjectivation)
o Subordination is being under control of someone larger and more powerful than you –
outside of this spotlight of agency there is a bigger entity that produces this spotlight for
you
o Subordination is beneath something or someone elses under control
Vignette: episode with the policeman
• )n this story there is a policeman shouting hey you and two men passing by and you turn around
because you believe he is hailing you
o Hailing: language
o Turn around: guilt and recognition
▪ There is guilt in this interaction (feeling as if you the one the policeman is
addressing)
▪ Price = guilt and subordination
o How is this speech performative?
o It constitutes the action and makes it active
• Performativity = words can produce a result
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• The policemans call is so magical and performative because it gives you life and transforms you
into a subject hat has agency. The result of this or prize is guilty and subordination
Humans are born prematurely
• The constitutional coordinates of human subjectivity, the (limiting and subordinating) conditions
that make possible for a child to survive and achieve some form of agency:
o Dependency on the OTHER
▪ Attachment/recognition
▪ Existential vulnerability of an infant, her need for the food/safety that the caregiver
provides; then adult forms of sociality that enable forming and managing various
forms of relating
▪ This defines a lot of understandings of subjectivity
▪ Unlike humans, turtles are born and fend for themselves and are not dependent on
their mothers once they leave their shell
o Embeddedness in LANGUAGE
▪ Meaning/symbolic
▪ All-encompassing pervasiveness of language as a means of communication,
(self)expression, access to social and cultural forms – nearly everything
▪ Butler: Butler acknowledges that language is harmful but its use is
unavoidable/inescapable
Althusse’s oept of itepellatio
• Main thesis: one is formed as a human subject capable of agency by being hailed addressed,
recognized, named by the OTHER) by the symbolic structures of LANGUAGE
• Therefore, ones psychic and social birth coincides with ones subordination
• A theoretical endeavour to conjecture a fabulous (i.e. inherently invented) account of the
subjects coming-to-life – we cannot speak objectively about language, for we are always already
inside it. Althussers hailing vignette (a policeman calling you on the street) is a just explanatory
fiction: it is not a real-life situation or developmental stage
Butle’s uestio: ho a laguage ijue?
• Performativity of language, the magical force of speech not only to describe things but do things,
either as:
o Direct consequences of speech (curse, court sentence, prayer)
o Through the process of saying and at its very moment (absolution, marriage
pronouncement)
• Absolution = moment of relief where your sin disappears
o Example of performative speech because when a priest says these things to you it absolves
you of any guilt frees you = magical
• There is language that describes and language that performs
o There are things that are said and things that are done
o Butler looks at injurious language that does not just describe but describes you in such a
way you are humiliated/threatened. So she brings the performativity aspect into it –
language has a performative force
o There is a magic force in language
• )nterpellation of bad subjects a complication of Althussers theory to explain the hailing of
impossible trans, queer, abject drug users, mentally ill, worthless Black, etc. subjects.
• Where does the injurious force of language reside?
o Context: who speaks, from where (power position)
o Historicity: individual insult succeeds by evoking all past instances of its use
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
It does not actualize itself right you are visible minority you cannot hide your identity: most of sexual identity and behaviour develops as you age. As a queer person you have the: we discover our sexual identity through speech and acquired knowledge after birth, racial insult is different from queer insult, trans insult is different, etc. The result of this or (cid:498)prize(cid:499) is guilty and subordination. So she brings the performativity aspect into it . January 17, 2017: our entrance into social order comes (birth) comes later than our entrance in biological order (sexual identity, the entrance into the social order happens through the process of interpellation, language plays a central role. Your existence also challenges and undermines language = two ways of looking at gender order. Genealogical grid or distantly related: marriage is a main social event in life.
