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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