Butler, 64-65

"...appearances become more suspect all the time. Reflections on the meaning of masquerade in Lacan as well as in Joan Riviere's "Womanliness as a Masquerade" have differed greatly in their interpretations of what precisely is masked by masquerade. Is masquerade the consequence of a feminine desire that must be negated and, thus, made into a lack that, nevertheless, must appear in some way? Is masquerade the consequence of the denial of this lack for the purpose of appearing to be the Phallus? Does masquerade construct femininity as the reflection of the Phallus in order to disguise bisexual possibilities that otherwise might disrupt the seamless construction of a heterosexualized femininity? Does masquerade, as Riviere suggests, transform aggression and the fear of reprisal into seduction and flirtation? Does it serve primarily to conceal or repress a pregiven femininity, a feminine desire which would establish an insubordinate alterity to the masculine subject or expose the necessary failure of masculinity? Or is masquerade the means by which femininity itself is first established, the exclusionary practice of identity formation in which the masculine is effectively excluded and instated as outside the boundaries of a feminine gendered position?"

From e-mail from poet C A Conrad

TEN YEARS AGO TONIGHT...

...Matthew Shepard was driven out to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming and tortured and beaten and left to suffer and fight for his life until found by another young man on his bicycle.

TEN YEARS AGO TONIGHT, after torturing Shepard, and beating him over and overhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif with his pistol, Aaron McKinney would decide to go back into town, go to a bar, get into a fight with a man much bigger than himself and be beaten so badly that he would also wind up in the emergency room three beds away from Matthew Shepard. Shepard would die five days later.

TEN YEARS LATER, queer teens still have the highest suicide rate. Queers of all ages, but especially African American transgendered people, continue to be murdered more than any other group. No one else I knew had the stomach for keeping track of this carnage like my friend, our friend, poet/artist/musician kari edwards. Up to the day she died she maintained blogs with the most harrowing evidence, which you can see

HERE

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, pg. 30 (Routledge, 2006 edition)

"The articulation 'I feel like a woman' by a female or 'I feel like a man' by a male presupposes that in neither case is the claim meaninglessly redundant. Although it might appear unproblematic to be a given anatomy (although we shall later consider the way in which that project is also fraught with difficulty), the experience of a gendered psychic disposition or cultural identity is considered an achievement. Thus, 'I feel like a woman' is true to the extant that Aretha Franklin's invocation of the defining Other is assumed: 'You make me feel like a natural woman.'* This achievement requires a differentiation from the opposite gender. Hence, one is one's gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair.

*Aretha's song, originally written by Carole King, also contests the naturalization of gender. 'Like a natural woman' is a phrase that suggests that 'naturalness' is only accomplished through analogy or metaphor. In other words, 'You make me feel like a metaphor of the natural,' and without 'you,' some denaturalized ground would be revealed. For a further discussion of Aretha's claim in light of Simone de Beauvoir's contention that 'one is not born, but rather becomes a woman,' see [Bulter's] 'Beauvoir's Philosophical Contribution,' in eds. Ann Garry can Marilyn Pearsall, Women, Knowledge, and Reality (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989): 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1996)."

See:
Blige
Clarkson
Franklin
King