ideas from ‘Gender Trouble’ Judith Butler

Sex and gender are both constructed.

…….. gender is performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly “express” gender, and these acts constitute, rather than express, the illusion of the stable gender identity. If the appearance of “being” a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender: constituted through the practice of performance, the gender “woman” (like the gender “man”) remains contingent and open to interpretation and “resignification”. In this way,

……heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender identities and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality, which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, they point again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates and regulates approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists before the law………..

the practice of drag is a way to destabilize the exteriority/interiority binary, finally to poke fun at the notion that there is an “original” gender, and to demonstrate playfully to the audience, through an exaggeration, that all gender is in fact scripted, rehearsed, and performed.

…….let us construct a feminism (via the politics of jurido-discursive power) from which the gendered pronoun has been removed or not presumed to be a reasonable category. They claim that even the binary of subject/object, which forms the basic assumption for feminist practices—”we, ‘women,’ must become subjects and not objects”—is a hegemonic and artificial division. The notion of a subject is for them formed through repetition, through a “practice of signification”

Personal objects, my silver jug (photo) & my stone ( pocket)

Quick sketch
Drawing from my phone in class (wide shot)
Reflections, my favorite
Continuous line
Exploratory drawing, I decided to work on the photo of the jug, the stone possibly less interesting
Quick stone drawings
I picked this up under a cliff at Co Clare W Ireland about twenty five years ago , a turbulent, happy time of my life, it has been in my pocket most of the time since. When I am anxious or scared I handle it. The stone is metamorphic rock , slate marbled with molten limestone. The slate is softer and i have worn a very comforting indent that fits my thumb. As i was looking for a pencil sharpener preparing for yesterdays class i slipped it into my pocket
Erasure, willow charcoal and putty rubber, pretty boring picture but fun to do in a tearing hurry