Miranda Pain Signature Assignment Judith Butler was a philosopher who studies many things from feminism, to cultural

criticism. She has raised many upstream questions referring to a metaphor of traveling upstream to clean a river at the source of contamination rather than cleaning downstream where it doesnt really fix the issue and will simply get dirty again - regarding self-identification and sexuality that have contributed to the societal discourse surrounding those topics. She also took ideologies from numerous philosophers as well as other scientists and revised them to create a revolutionary idea on the study of sexuality, now known as queer theory. Butler has studied a variety of scientists throughout her endeavors. Jacques Derrida, a linguist who has many beliefs and theories that Butler has studied, once said that language is binary, exclusionary and judgmental. In other words, language creates two absolutes, one that is positive, and one that is negative. The example used by Derrida is the word chair. There are plenty of words that can describe a place to sit; bench, stool, couch, etc. But all of these things are wrong, or bad, because they are not chair. This is how language can be considered exclusionary, binary, and judgmental, but Butler extended on that and added that it can also be hurtful and dangerous. For this idea, we use the word man. Any word that does not describe a man is considered wrong or bad. Terms that fall into that category are woman, or gay man, and are thought in the sense of those absolutes, as bad. Language causes misinterpretations and misunderstandings that can be damaging to another person. Some other things that Derrida talks about is how the current metanarrative of the Western world is that we are guided by truth, knowledge and science and that is what has led to modernism. Modernism is the belief that society is on a continuous uphill journey towards discovering the ultimate truth. However,

Derrida doesnt believe that any of this is true, and created, through what he called deconstruction, post-modernism. Deconstruction is basically taking what we know to be the truth, breaking it down word for word and attempting to find the true intent of each individual meaning of each individual word to discover the truth in it all. Derrida also mentions discourse, or what is considered to be war. One way to think of it is taking a thought that has been on the same track for so long, and instantly derailing it by disproving what it was originally believed to mean. His theories are hugely important for queer history as he is taking critical thinking and implemented it into what has become basic knowledge, therefore causing people to think twice about what they believe to be right and wrong. Butler believes that knowing ones self isnt only impossible, but shouldnt be necessary. She believes that everyone should just be, and that knowing who you are doesnt necessarily define you, that you should act on what comes naturally to you and not worry about what it means. She extracted this from a philosopher she studied named Michel Foucault. The main points that Foucault had ideas about were The Self, the history of sexuality, and the Panopticon as an allegory. Foucault talks about The Self and how one is encouraged to know thyself, by Plato. He goes into detail about how, in attempting to know ones self, we become the questioner and the questioned and distort the process of attempting to define ourselves, which ultimately makes it impossible to know yourself. He offers the example of when you meet someone, you can shake their hand and talk to them about themselves and get to know who they are as a person, but you cannot step out of yourself, shake your own hand and get to know who you are the same way. Foucault also talks about the history of sexuality and how originally, sex was thought of as a basic human need. But with the introduction of Catholicism, sex and marriage were eventually intertwined. Sex slowly became spoken of as the thing not to be

spoken of. Catholicism encouraged to wait until marriage to have sex, stating that God thought it to be a sin if it was done outside of wedlock, causing discourse in the original believe that sex was something needed, much like the need to eat or drink. The last piece that Foucault discussed was the Panopticon as an allegory of todays society. Relating society to a glass prison where people do not know whether or not they are being watched by a guard, or in societys case, a God, Foucault believes that the goal is to create docile citizens that are capable of self-policing. If we constantly have the idea that we are being watched, we will stay better behaved, even in the most isolated of situations, maintaining that docile expectation. Butler believes that gender is performative, and the behaviors that are exhibited by men and women are all part of an act. She gained this knowledge from her studies on Alfred Kinsey and the chart that he created which specifies the areas of gender that are choice, biological, social construct, etc. Alfred Kinsey was a biologist who was famous for his studies in sexology at Indiana University, where he founded the Kinsey Institute. He is famous for his writings Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and, the less popular, Sexual Behaviors in the Human Female. These books were written from the studies he conducted throughout the United States based on his sexual history surveys. What he found while conducting his experiments was that people didnt talk about sex because of the taboo surrounding it, but everyone wants to talk about it. He also came to discover that everyone masturbates, and those who say they do not, are lying. In studying sexual behavior in females, he also found that women and men are virtually the same when it comes to sexual desire and needs, contrary to popular belief. He also created the Kinsey Scale, which gauges the level of ones sexuality. This scale is measured from zero to six, zero being completely heterosexual, and six being exclusively homosexual. What he came to deduct from creating this scale is that no one is exclusively one or the other, but that everyone is

bisexual. He didnt only take into account practice, but also thoughts and fantasies that one has. This also contributed to the development of a chart that outlines all that goes into determining sex, gender, orientation, etc. specifying what is biological, personal choice, and social construct. For example, orientation is a personal choice on how you identify yourself, while gender is a social construct given to you by society. Kinsey revolutionized the study of sex and reproduction with his controversial studies, and played a large part in what has become Judith Butlers queer theory. Judith Butler took theories from such historical scientists as Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, and Alfred Kinsey and deducted beliefs surrounding The Self, gender performance, and language. She believes that it is impossible to know ones self and that it shouldnt be necessary to, because self-identifying contributes to the social construct of gendering. She also believes that gender is performative and that we all play a role particular to what society has outlined for each gender. And she believes that language is not only binary and judgmental, but that it is also dangerous and hurtful, in that it can be used in such a way to catastrophically damage another person. She has changed the study of gender and sexual orientation forever, in what is now known as queer theory.