WEEK 3: BUTLER AND SEDGWICK. TOWARDS QUEER AND QUEER ACTIVISM

**** This exhibition is currently cancelled because of an occupation, but if it becomes available we will try to attend: 

This will lay the foundation for thinking about the public health discourses of normatively that circulated during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. To prepare the session, read :

Sedgwick, Eve Kofosky, ‘Queer and Now’, in Tendencies (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.1–8.

Secondary Reading:
David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Munoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?, special issue, Social Text, 84 – 85, (2005).

Seminar questions :
Butler:

• -In the Big Think video, Judith Butler says: “We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time. So to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start. I know it’s controversial, but that’s my claim.”
  
• Does the ‘performance’ of ‘male’ or ‘female’ change over time and according to cultural or geographical context? Why is Butler’s claim controversial, as she notes
• -Reflecting on your own experiences, what are some examples of the ‘gender performativity’ that Butler discusses? Can you think of specific examples within the French and Francophone cultural context? 
  

Sedgwick

• How does Sedgwick challenge identity categories?
• What does she mean by 'outness'
• How could we define a discursive epistemology?
• What relation between queer thought and public health discourse that will underpin AIDS crisis?
• What connections between Foucault, Butler, and Sedgwick in collapsing monolithic notions of identity?