Desconstruir o género

“(...) the “I” that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them. This is not easy, because the “I” becomes, to a certain extent unknowable, threatened with unviability, with becoming undone altogether, when it no longer incorporates the norm in such a way that makes this “I” fully recognizable. There is a certain departure from the human that takes place in order to start the process of remaking the human. I may feel that without some recognisability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation.
(…)
What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is livable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some. The differences in position and desire set the limits to universalizability as an ethical reflex. The critique of gender norms must be situated within the context of lives as they are lived and must be guided by the question of what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life, what minimizes the possibility of unbearable life or, indeed, social or literal death.

[Mas para salvaguardar um novo humanismo, afirma:] The category of the “human” retains within itself the workings of the power differential of race as part of its own historicity. But the history of the category is not over, and the “human” is not captured once and for all. That the category is crafted in time, and that it works through excluding a wide range of minorities means that its rearticulation will begin precisely at the point where the excluded speak to and from such a category.

[E conclui:] (…) to a certain extent sexuality establishes us as outside of ourselves; we are motivated by an elsewhere whose full meaning and purpose we cannot definitively establish [a in-determinabilidade do desejo, que nunca é mero efeito de uma causa, no que reconhece a contribuição da psicanálise]. This is only because sexuality is one way cultural meanings are carried, through both the operation of norms and the peripheral modes of their undoing”.
(anteriormente, e para salvaguardar de que psicanálise está a falar, diz: “It is important to remember that psychoanalysis can also serve as a critique of cultural adaptation as well as a theory for understanding the ways in which sexuality fails to conform to the social norms by which is regulated”.)

E é isto que ela, Judith Butler, começa por querer dizer quando fala em “Undoing Gender”…