Page 211 - Cyberculture and New Media
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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,
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