Homosexuality Theoretical Issues
Theoretical issues
Judith Butler is a post-structuralist feminist. Butler has done plenty of work on Gender, identity and sexuality. According to Butler (1990, 1993) the tabooing of homosexuality takes place in our culture from when the child takes birth. There will be implications with the production of the subject. To, Butler ‘identifications substitute for object relations, and identifications are the consequence of loss, gender identification is a kind of in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as prohibition (Butler 1993:63). Here she discusses gender in relation to melancholia. It is based on Freud's findings on how lost desires live on as psyche identifications. To Freud, mourning was a process that had to work to release the losses one had suffered. ‘Freud isolates the mechanism of melancholia as essential to “ego formation” and “character” but only alludes to the centrality of melancholia to gender' (Butler 1990:57). In the Ego and the Id (1923) Freud discusses the structure of mourning as the beginning structure of ego formation, this theory's information can be found in the 1917 essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia'(Butler 1990). So melancholia was the form whereby the lost but unmourned objects were combined. Freud has done influential work on the theory of personality, ideas about the role of sexuality in early human development and the role of the unconscious. Butler closely reads Freud's work. The emphasis is put on incest taboo which remains important in generating heterosexuality.
Butler also uses the term ‘heterosexual matrix' to explain the permanence of sexual orientation. This is like a linked group through which bodies, desires and identities are produced as natural and necessary. This helps us to understand how men and women become social individuals by the linking. The matrix that Butler mentions draws a kind of coercing boundary between desire, identity and body directed towards the opposite sex (Lindholm 1996).
The connection between gender and sex in relation to human beings is linked with power strategies that maintain gender. Butler looks at Foucault work on regulatory ideals. Foucault discusses the different meanings of the word subject and one of the meaning is to submit. Therefore an individual is brought under meanings of concepts like sexuality, normality, gender. The categorisation is understood as unnecessary in order to be oneself and to be recognisable subject for others.
In many cultures the hegemonic power structures represent homosexuality as a taboo. It is ‘the other' which is subordinate compared to normal heterosexuality. The power hegemonic structures contribute to the maintenance of normal gender identities based on attraction towards the opposite sex.
What Judith Butler is trying to explain to us as students of gender studies is that gender is articulated in our culture and time, goes beyond our understanding without the consideration of early repression. It is the unconscious which cannot be seen clearly and which sets the limits as to what and how the psyche finds expressions. The is point is what is performed can be understood by what is hidden.
In the closed doors we find desires and objects which are not accepted by the dominant culture.
To Butler (1993), gender is not purely a psychic truth framed as ‘internal' and ‘hidden' and it is not reducible to the surface appearance, on the contrary; its undecidability is to be traced as the play between psyche and appearance. In addition it becomes a play conducted by the heterosexist constraints though not, for that reason, fully reducible to them. Gender then has to be highlighted in the play between the psyche and the performance of it.
DRAG AND BUTLER.
We now have to discuss some ideas about Drag as pointed out by Butler (1993). Drag ‘fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity' (Silverman 1993: 337). So performing gender ‘subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space'(73). Drag can be understood as a hidden performance or a picture over heterosexual masculinity. It can be read as an acknowledgement of being normal as in loving the opposite sex rather then the same. ‘What does seem useful in this analysis, however, is that drag exposes or allegorizes the mundane psychic and performative practices by which heterosexualised genders form themselves through renouncing the possibility of homosexuality, a fore-closure which produces both a field of heterosexual objects and a domain of those it would be impossible to love'(146). Can improvisation be interpreted as allegory over heterosexual feminity or masculinity? Understanding, closeness and identification are important to good Jazz.
Grooving in Jazz is tied to the body Monson (1996). Grooving is like a great happiness or a ‘buzz' as Merlin puts it. The musicians get this kind of feeling when they play good music. According to Monson, the instruments that are being played bring a lot of physical pleasures. Therefore language and bodily experience go together in the satisfaction of pleasures.
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