Resisting the Mark: Shifting Identities and Assumptions in Foster’s Coming Out Speech

Autor: Sheena Malhotra
Rok vydání: 2014
Předmět:
Zdroj: QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. 1:173-179
ISSN: 2327-1590
2327-1574
Popis: Those of us who navigate borders in a daily way also learn to navigate the disciplining of markers assigned to us by others. We do this by constantly shifting and crossing borders at the intersections of culture, geographic location, gender, and sexuality as a form of resistance to the marking of identity categories. Some of us do this as a way of simultaneously occupying multiple cultural spaces. Others do it to define their sexuality or their gender identities on their own terms. This mode of being evokes different possibilities for resisting “the mark.” After all, if one is marked as a “woman of color” or a “lesbian,” the urge by others and ourselves to essentialize our identities can be pervasive. Judith Butler argues that coming out only produces a “new and different closet” and considers identity categories to be, “instruments of regulatory regimes.” Her argument lays out the always shifting meaning of these categories and rejects the need to fix our subjectivities into any particular box. The term “queer” has evolved in response to such critiques, unstable in its production of meanings, continually questioning the norms of gender and sexuality, even as it provides a broad identity umbrella that has built in fluidity to account for the evolving manifestations of queerness. Resisting the mark is perhaps one specific strategy, one manifestation of queer, allowing those of us who cross borders in various ways to navigate categories with greater nimbleness and fluidity. It calls into question the very
Databáze: OpenAIRE