adrienmundi

So, I can (almost, barely, sort of) manage to read Butler if I don't take it as directly pertinent to me, my life, or my experiences, but instead as something of general, theoretical interest. That this seems to run directly counter to Butler's style and stated intent isn't lost on me.

I'm finding her surprisingly fixated on norms as they exist, and in a certain way, defending them. I, unsurprisingly, have issues with this. I also get really irritated at her seeming conflation of transsexualism and transgenderism, of them being functionally the same thing save for how one negotiates the idea of surgery/hormones. She also seems to operate under the assumption that all/most readers live in normative but liberal utopias in which insurance or state assistance will cover "transition costs" (without ever questioning, seemingly, if "transition" is recursive, progressive, etc), and seems to hyperfixate on this as almost an apology for retaining diagnosis of GID. I don't get that, really, as general instantiation of those criteria seem so limited as to be exceedingly far from generalizable.

Obviously, I don't do such a good job of reading her work as not pertinent to me, and I'm not sure I should, since descriptions and related areas of her scrutiny seem to touch upon large, contentious aspects of my own life (even though she either explicitly excludes me, or forces me into definitions to which I strenuously object, in her enumeration of those she intends to cover). Why is it that the more I read of theorists and gender stuff, the more disillusioned and cynical I become?