All right, on to more serious stuff.

Queer Manifesto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwF8dkSGRZY

I just thought this was very well done. I also think that it gives a very clear and poignant explanation of genderqueerness, particularly for those who do not know about it.

A Tribute to Judith Butler

So until this moment, I'd never extensively looked at pictures of Butler. Holy crap. This is what I aspire to be.

Since 2010, Judith Butler has been a professor of English and comparative literature at Colombia University. Butler previously was the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Butler is the author of Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performance, as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy, feminism and queer theory.

In her most influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler argued that feminism had made a mistake by trying to assert that 'women' were a group with common characteristics and interests. That approach, Judith Butler said, performed 'an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations', reinforcing a binary view of gender in which human beings are divided into two clear-cut groups, women and men.

Judith Butler notes that feminists rejected the idea that biology is destiny, but then developed an account of patriarchal culture which assumed that masculine and feminine genders would inevitably be built, by culture, upon 'male' and 'female' bodies, making the same destiny just as inescapable. That argument allows no room for choice, difference or resistance.

Judith Butler argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which, in turn, is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is commonly regarded as a kind of continuum. Judith Butler's approach – inspired in part by Michel Foucault – is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors.

Butler suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold, and calls for subversive action in the present: 'gender trouble' – the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders, and therefore identities. This idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to an 'essence', but instead to a performance, is one of the key ideas in queer theory.

Seen in this way, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic inner 'core' self but are the dramatic effect (rather than the cause) of our performances.