Bulter -- Locating Subversion

I really do think that Foucault and Butler complement each other nicely, so here are some other notes I've been thinking about incorporating into my crazy late paper.

practices become normative -- performances and rituals of self

"Sometimes gender ambiguity can operate precisely to contain or deflect non-normative sexual practice and thereby work to keep normative sexuality intact" (p. xiv) -- I'm not thinking about sexuality here, but the ways in which the non-normative serves to render the normative all the more normal

"an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates" (p. xv)

subversion carrying market value

Butler focuses more than Foucault, I think, on political agency, but she certainly complicates it as well -- "The iterability of performativity is a theory of agency, one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility" (p. xxv) -- agency is never isolated from power

We can only express an "I" through the language available to us

Power produces the subjects that it then judges and represents -- Foucault -- this is really important in my thinking about innovative and risk-taking teachers

So ... Is there a teaching subject not constituted by the discourse of the discipline of school? Does that make sense?

"parading in the mode of otherness" (p. 17)

"Is 'unity' necessary for effective political action?" (p. 21)

Butler speaks in terms of gender, but can we use her thinking to understand the performance of any identity -- that the "incoherent" and "discontinuous" define the normative

there are multiple teaching identities, but always constituted by the "field of power" into which they are articulated

the perceived cause becomes its effect -- power produces

Butler asks a lot of questions, but doesn't answer them. Still, the questions are productive too: "What possibility exists for the disruption of the oppositional binary itself?" (p. 37)

Prohibition -- Lacanian theory

Can there be a subversive?

"Power, rather than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently generative) functions of differential relations" (p. 40) -- everything emerges in the matrix of power

Important question: "What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?" (p. 44) Do they become mere parodies of the original? And is that subversive? Hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation (p. 43)

Confusion as a site for "intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications" (p. 43)

Becoming, then, is essential -- there is no origination or end

On Foucault -- bodies produce their own regulation (p. 183); the soul is present through its absence (huh?)

identity is a fabrication (p. 185)

"Hence, as a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences" (p. 190)

Agency is in the incompleteness, the possible "blip" in the iteration -- the supplement, the et cetera (p. 196)

Agency becomes a question of how signification and resignification work (p. 197)

"Indeed, to understand identity as a practice, and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life" (p. 199)

Parody -- a failed copy

"For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary" (p. 201). "Construction is not opposed to agency; it is necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible."

The question is HOW to repeat and DISPLACE in local strategies