PARTIAL MINING
19 “We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must) we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue of another.” !!
27 “power dissimulates as ontology.” !!!
3. Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality
71 “it is for the most part the gender essentialist position that must be voiced for transsexual surgery to take place, and that someone who comes in with a sense of the gender as changeable will have a more difficult time convincing psychiatrists and doctors to perform the surgery. In San Francisco, FTM candidates actually practice the narrative of gender essentialism that they are required to perform before they go in to see the doctors, and there are now coaches to help them, dramaturgs of transsexuality who will help you make the case for no fee.” !!!
4. Undiagnosing Gender
91 “The price of using the diagnosis to get what one wants is that one cannot use language to say what one really thinks is true.” !!
5. Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?
103 SAIDIYA HARTMAN “slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship” !!
104 “The petition for marriage rights seeks to solicit state recognition for nonheterosexual unions, and so configures the state as withholding an entitlement that it really should distribute in a nondiscriminatory way, regardless of sexual orientation. That the state’s offer might result in the intensification of normalization is not widely recognized as a problem within the mainstream lesbian and gay movement, typified by the Human Rights Campaign.” !!
104 “the debates in France targeted certain U.S. views on the social construction and variability of gender relations as portending a perilous “Americanization” of kinship relations (filiation) in France.”
104 “the kinship dilemmas of first-world nations often provide allegories for one another of their own worries about the disruptive effects of kinship variability on their own national projects.” !!
129 “To respond directly to Segal, as many people have, with an insistence on the normalcy of lesbian and gay families is to accept that the debate should center on the distinction between normal and pathological. But if we seek entrance to the halls of normalcy or, indeed, reverse the discourse, to applaud our “pathology” (i.e., as the only “sane” position within homophobic culture), we have not called the defining framework into question. And once we enter that framework, we are to some degree defined by its terms, which means that we are as defined by those terms when we seek to establish ourselves within the boundaries of normality as we are when we assume the impermeability of those boundaries and position ourselves as its permanent outside.” !!!
9. The End of Sexual Difference?
175 – 176 “It seems that feminism is in a mess, unable to stabilize the terms that facilitate a meaningful agenda. […]
this is a movement that moves forward precisely by bringing critical attention to bear on its premises in an effort to become more clear about what it means and to begin to negotiate the conflicting interpretations, the irrepressible democratic cacophony of its identity. As a democratic enterprise, feminism has had to forfeit the presumption that at base we can all agree about some things or, equivalently, to embrace the notion that each of our most treasured values are under contestation and that they will remain contested zones of politics. […] resisting the desire to resolve this dissension into unity is precisely what keeps the movement alive. […]
there is an important value in overcoming the fear of immanent critique and to maintaining the democratic value of producing a movement that can contain, without domesticating, conflicting interpretations on fundamental issues.” !!
179 “In the same way that the terms of an exclusionary modernity have been appropriated for progressive uses, progressive terms can be appropriated for regressive aims. The terms that we use in the course of political movements which have been appropriated by the Right or for misogynist purposes are not, for that reason, strategically out of bounds. These terms are never finally and fully tethered to a single use. The task of reappropriation is to illustrate the vulnerability of these often compromised terms to an unexpected progressive possibility; such terms belong to no one in particular; they assume a life and a purpose that exceed the uses to which they have been consciously put. They are not to be seen as merely tainted goods, too bound up with the history of oppression, but neither are they to be regarded as having a pure meaning that might be distilled from their various usages in political contexts.” !!
199 “heterosexuality doesn’t belong exclusively to heterosexuals.” !!
203 “if technologies of the body (surgical, hormonal, athletic) generate new forms of gender, is this precisely in the service of inhabiting a body more fully or does it constitute a perilous effacement?” !!
10. The Question of Social Transformation
206 “although we need norms in order to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us and which, for reasons of social justice, we must oppose.” !!!
206 “the “norm” creates unity only through a strategy of exclusion.” !!
215 “Having or bearing “truth” and “reality” is an enormously powerful prerogative within the social world, one way in which power dissimulates as ontology.” !!
217 “Fantasy is what establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points, it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.” !!!
219″The thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity.” !!!
11. Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?
240 “desire [..] is essential to self-reflection, and there is no self-reflection except through the drama of reciprocal recognition.” !!
245 “the very challenge to linear argumentation carries its own philosophical meaning, one that calls into question the power and appearance of reason, the forward motion of temporality.” !!