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202 The Différance Engine
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‘Gender Trouble’ are more useful, relevant and exciting
than some of the more cautious ideas in Butler’s later
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works
This above statement of ‘intent’ in itself performs a radical
misunderstanding of a quotation it so recently (on the same page) utilised.
Gauntlett finds some of Butler’s later positions too “depressing” and
“cautious”‘ and would prefer to take ideas from an earlier more vital time in
her writings. But is not Butler pointing out within the quotation that in the
previous book she had already said what she was so “depressingly” saying in
the later one? She does this because she says that she is (having to) anchor
and restate her position for those who skipped too lightly over what she had
originally stated: thus in a strong sense she is here arguing for this later book
contribution to be placed, as an interpretative buttress, within the space of
those earlier passages to fend off such misinterpretations. Like the one
Gauntlett is here making. For she says:
One of the interpretations that has been made of Gender
Trouble is that there is no sex, there is only gender, and
gender is performative. People then go on to think that if
gender is performative it must be radically free. And it has
seemed to many that the materiality of body is vacated or
ignored or neglected here – disavowed, even […] I think
that I overrode the category of sex too quickly in Gender
Trouble. I try to reconsider it in Bodies that Matter, and to
emphasise the place of constraint in the very production of
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sex.
Thus a double (portfolio) choice is being made here by Gauntlett as
to what one takes from an informing theorist but without uniformly sticking
to their word: one on the surface, the other buried out in the open. Whilst our
point here may seem just a little too ‘pedantic’ there seems to be operating
within Gauntlett a radical free-wheeling form of ‘choice’ radically
independent of the materials being foraged upon. Taken within this rather
flexible context there can never be any such thing as a (wilful) misreading
and one can never then be accused of being selective or deceptive in cutting-
up and wearing the parchments of one’s sources: a very anarchic database or
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portfolio .
These notions of ‘reflexivity’ and the individualised ‘performative’
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along with related notions of what have been termed ‘portfolio identities’
aim towards a free-floating subjectivity cut free from the shackles of the
traditional pre-reflexive, ‘tied’ or localised identities. A reflexive
performativity such as this however appears to be a rather crude notion,