Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Like many others essays of this week’s blogging, mine has the same questions. What is gender and what is sexuality. To be more precise could we find another body binary that we could deconstruct? If there is this binary sexuality-gender, could we talk about other constructed binaries within our body? like respiration-x, or circulation-x. What other relations can a body create? Could we deconstruct the body in its wholeness? This would probably take us back to Deleuze concept the “body without organs”. In the Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick talks about Roland Barthes liberation from from the binary prison. Once this achieved a state of infinite expansion is possible. In other words the world itself is not a structure anymore, but rather a set of arbitrarinesses. So Deleuze starts to make a lot more sense when he talks about a body without organs where the mouth could very well serve as any other orifice. The question is how much can we deconstruct and why stop at a certain point. Sedgwick attempts an answer and clearly states that he disagrees with Barthes, but to me his answer is a circular one. He says that the deconstructive contestations occur “ only in the context of an entire cultural network of normative definitions”; doesn’t this idea draws us back to where we started off with. Foucault as well as Buttler think that culture itself instituted these binaries that denied the right to choose of everyone, that it is the culture which constructed these concepts. I hope things will clarify when we will have a deeper look in today’s session.

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