Wednesday, May 15

Gender in Society (5)


Overall, I find Judith Butler’s arguments to be very relevant in today’s debate over gay rights, and even more so in other gendered disputes.  The divide between different social groups, such as gay and straight, man and woman, will evidently be around forever.  The inherent differences will always cause people to form opinions and question the way things are.  The cycle that propagates certain ways of being is only powered by the way we carry ourselves and compare ourselves to some mythical precedent.  Our ways of being are so deeply engrained in our minds that we often forget that there was no “original”.  Butler claims “the entire framework of copy and origin proves radically unstable as each position inverts into the other and confounds the possibility of any stable way to locate the temporal or logical priority of either term.”  In other words, we cannot truly say what came first in regards to sexual preference.  Similarly, societal norms have always had opposing forces and they will forever validate each other.  After all, we wouldn’t have to call them “norms” if there were no other options. 

In conclusion, the Judith Butler’s book The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, lays a framework for arguments about many other aspects of the world, especially the division of man and woman.  Not one is legitimately better than the other, but there is constant struggle to prove the superiority of one over the other.  

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