I asked the original poster to explain in simple words the drivel we saw - but still no answer. I will send you a cookie if you can even just to explain what is it about and what are the objects in that sentence.
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It's about the Butlerian concept of "performativity", the idea that none of us essentially IS one of the things that makes up our identities automatically and without effort, that everything you think of as true about yourself is a role you dress up for and act out onstage
3 replies 3 retweets 96 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
There is no meaning to just BEING a man or a woman, a man or a woman is something you PERFORM, you only get defined as a man by other people by going out on the stage of the public sphere every day and ACTING LIKE a man according to certain rules that define "manhood"
1 reply 4 retweets 60 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
So this first passage is about how Victorian literature is from a time and place that, on the surface, rejects this philosophy out of hand -- it's a time when people outright said everything about you was determined from the moment of your birth by your genetics
3 replies 2 retweets 58 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
Not just that a man is born a man and a woman born a woman, but that an aristocrat is born an aristocrat and a commoner a commoner, that your skull shape or your posture or whatever was a physical marker determining how you'd go on to speak, dress, act, work and live
2 replies 2 retweets 49 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
But, as always, repressive essentialism contains within itself the possibility of its own defeat, because it's simply not true By insisting on things that aren't true and insisting we believe them, Victorian ideals actually make their own norms really easy to attack
1 reply 3 retweets 48 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
Because they insist that it's just a FACT that EVERYTHING about an aristocrat is aristocratic from birth -- even as obviously contingent, changeable things like how people dress and talk -- it's really easy to fuck with a Victorian audience just by dressing up and acting
2 replies 2 retweets 53 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
So, for instance, this paragraph refers to the fortune-teller episode in Jane Eyre -- the whole premise of Jane Eyre is about this unbridgeable social gulf between Jane's station and Mr. Rochester's, but Mr. Rochester dresses up as a Romani fortune-teller just to mess with Jane
1 reply 2 retweets 43 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
Mr. Rochester in this moment becomes someone who's the *opposite* of himself in every possible way -- a woman, non-white, an "exotic" foreigner, an outcaste permanently excluded from the Victorian social hierarchy
1 reply 2 retweets 40 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
And yet it's in this guise, when he's "not himself", that he's *able to speak most honestly as himself* -- to say all the shit about the other members of his household that he can't say normally, to honestly express his feelings for Jane
1 reply 2 retweets 45 likes
It's just one example, and maybe not the strongest example, but it's a demonstration that 1) Mr. Rochester does *change something* very important about his identity when he dresses in drag as a fortuneteller, 2) he's still *himself*, in some real sense he's not *lying*
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Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
That this time period and culture that's supposedly rabidly essentialist and therefore anti-performativity is actually obsessed with it Victorians were really into the concept of disguises, secret identities, slumming and drag
1 reply 3 retweets 50 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @LakyLudke and
At the same time, of course, you can't say that this whole two-faced at-war-with-itself nature of Victorian social norms means the norms weren't really norms That's what the second paragraph means Playing around with drag in fiction is *kinda* pro-self-ID but also anti-self-ID
1 reply 2 retweets 44 likes - Show replies
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