#2: 'Queerness' 25/10/2018
#2: 'Queerness' 25/10/2018 Thursday 25 October | 5 - 6.30pm | LHRI: Room 1 | All Welcome For our second session of the year, we will be reading the eighth chapter of Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993), entitled ‘Critically Queer’. We will be reading Butler’s discussion of queer identity, queerness and drag alongside a short section from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). In ‘Critically Queer’, the concluding chapter of Bodies that Matter , Butler evaluates the refunctioning of the term ‘queer’ from its pejorative origins. She urges for the ongoing critique of a totalising queer identity category as ‘crucial to the continuing democratization of queer politics’ (227). If, as Butler argues, a performative discourse succeeds only through its iterability and ongoing citation, then the reification of a queer subject must be interrogated for its own exclusionary practices. The reading for this week allows an investigation of Butler’s claims and a reflection on ho...