["Gender is Burning" from Bodies that Matter by Judith Butler]
"''being a man' and 'being a woman' are internally unstable affairs. They are always beset by ambivalence precisely because there is a cost in every identification, the loss of some other set of identifications, the forcible approximation of a norm one never chooses, a norm that chooses us, but which we occupy, reverse, resignify to the extent that the norm fails to determine us completely." (126-127)
"The film [Paris is Burning] attests to the painful pleasures of eroticizing and miming the very norms that weild their power by forclosing the very rever-occupations that the children nevertheless perform.
This is not an appropriation of dominant culture in order to remain subordinates by its terms, but an appropriation that seeks to make over the terns of domination, a making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in as performance, which repeats in order to remake- and sometimes succeeds. " (p. 137)
