I Was Off To Yale To Be

Sometimes There Are Ways To Minimize The Importance Of Gender In Life, Or To Confuse Gender Categories So That They No Longer Have Descriptive Power. But Other Times Gender Can Be Very Important To Us, And Some People Really Love The Gender That They Have Claimed For Themselves.

We Act As If That Being Of A Man Or That Being Of A Woman Is Actually An Internal Reality Or Something That Is Simply True About Us, A Fact About Us, But Actually Its A Phenomenon That Is Being Produced All The Time And Reproduced All The Time, So To Say Gender Is Performative Is To Say That Nobody Really Is A Gender From The Start.

I Want My Arguments To Be Good Arguments On The Basis Of What I Actually Have To Say.

What Does It Mean Then To Live With One Another? It Can Be Unhappy, It Can Be Wretched, It Can Be Ambivalent, It Can Even Be Full Of Antagonism, But All Of That Can Play Out In The Political Sphere Without Recourse To Expulsion Or Genocide. And That Is Our Obligation, To Stay In The Sphere With Whatever Murderous Rage We Have, Without Acting On It.

The Important Thing Is To Think About Theory In Life In That Way. And I Think We Don't Have To Be Theorists, We Don't Have To Have Gone To The Academy, Or To The University To Learn Theory And To Be A Theorist Of Gender.