Queering the Carnivalesque (original) (raw)

Queering the Carnivalesque

Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a natural sort of being (43). The question of "what makes something thinkable?" suggests a meticulous strategy attempting to get at the untouched and dismissed work on the study of limits. Engaging in the study of limits means to interrogate a specific mode of thought that relies on over-deterministic truth claims to reality that reinforce the production of normalcy. The question of what makes something thinkable, as a strategy pushing at the very limits of study, is meant to move beyond the binary presumption of a contingent foundation, such as male/female, gay/straight debates, and is meant to push outside of those boundaries that confine these questions of thinkability. In this way, the goal for this paper would be to move beyond questions of knowability and thinkability to highlight what was already there but was rendered unthinkable. To question, "where thought stops, what it cannot bear to know, what it must shut out to think as it doesallows consideration into the cultural conditions" that makes for the relationship of something like queer[ness] and bodies matter (Britzman 156). But these limits of study, in order to be acknowledged as limits, requires the interrogation of whatever is ignored, cast out, and deemed unworthy of study. In line with what Judith Butler calls the "confrontation with the limits of what is knowable," we begin to see how the recognizable, as discursively collated by scientific knowledge, begins to unravel when questioned (Butler 215). To understand and strengthen the critique against knowability, we need a place to fantasize other possible ways of thinking and