Who is afraid of sexual difference? Judith Butler meets Jacques Lacan (original) (raw)

Interview with Judith Butler to Sara Ahmed - Sexualities (2016)

SA: I have been asked to interview you about Gender Trouble and how this book has shaped the field of Queer Studies. In the preface to the second edition of Gender Trouble, you write that 'the life of the text has exceeded my intentions, and this is surely in part because of the changing context of its reception'. I really like this description. I like the idea that texts have lives other than the ones we give them as writers, and that these lives are partly about how texts are 'picked up'. Could you comment more on these changing contexts of reception for Gender Trouble within the academy? What were some of the surprising pickups? JB: It is always a little odd when I have to answer questions about Gender Trouble because I do not fully remember it. I remember more the arguments I have had to come up with to explain or defend the book, but very few sentences from the book actually come to mind. And I never reread my work, so it is not really possible to check the text. Anyway, the idea of checking the text is strange, since one can certainly go back to see whether there is textual evidence for an interpretation, but textual evidence is not exactly data. And we end up interpreting it again. I sometimes think about that text as a manic defence of activity. At least the 'incessant' quality of performativity, understood as a kind of action, seems to dominate the final pages and seems to constitute, for some, the main theoretical contribution of the text. I have even been told that the sections on melancholia do not fit well with the general theory of performativity, but I am not sure that is true, but the suggestion troubles me, so maybe it is. Perhaps I was trying in a preliminary way to think about marking losing, acknowledging, and acting. I think of demonstrations that are focused on public grieving as one place where those two dimensions come together, those sites where the funeral is already a certain kind of demonstration, asserting and making collectively known that another valued life has been lost.