Are The Lips A Grave Analysis
Are The Lips a Grave – Lynne Huffer (2013)
In her monograph “Are The Lips a Grave?”, Huffer works to stitch together queer and feminist theory in a productive antifoundational synthesis that can then be utilized as a genealogical analysis to explore – and perhaps even answer – the question of why we culturally seek (are driven?) to attach to modern sexual subjectivity a perhaps unsuitable moral code/standard. I found her intended project to be compelling, even provocative in both its theoretical and political reach, as it consciously seeks to transcend the politically contentious dichotomy that has plagued the two epistemologies.
Huffer calls upon on Foucault and Irigary as proxies for queer and feminist theory, respectively, to carry on a …show more content…
By seeking and seeing common ground in anti-foundationalism, Huffer allows their differences to remain in a way that is workable (and echoes the political project of difference and differentiation of Audre Lorde). At first this association would seem untenable – or at the very least, awkward, like exes milking their drinks on opposite sides of a social party. But Huffer sees their overlapping commonalities as places of productive inquiry. It is their shared questioning of historic social relations, for instance, that allows her to re/discovery the buried sexual politics of Albertine (Chapter 5) and to hear (and therefore amplify) the “silent lesbian” that haunts Queer Theory (Chapter …show more content…
It is this potential that I see as informative (if not imperative) to my reading list (and by way of extension, my dissertation work). In considering the politics of formation of the Self and Subject (and how this will inform the construction of dichotomous gender identities), the common political debates reconstitute queer and feminist theory (and politics) into oppositional sides, seeing their projects (post-structural/post-modern/de-centering/deconstructive and pro-identitarian, respectively) as antithetical to the other. It’s this assumed relationship that Huffer challenges and likewise one that I wish to confront and rework as to not reproduce many of the same tired politics that have long defined the debates of gender identity construction and
In her monograph “Are The Lips a Grave?”, Huffer works to stitch together queer and feminist theory in a productive antifoundational synthesis that can then be utilized as a genealogical analysis to explore – and perhaps even answer – the question of why we culturally seek (are driven?) to attach to modern sexual subjectivity a perhaps unsuitable moral code/standard. I found her intended project to be compelling, even provocative in both its theoretical and political reach, as it consciously seeks to transcend the politically contentious dichotomy that has plagued the two epistemologies.
Huffer calls upon on Foucault and Irigary as proxies for queer and feminist theory, respectively, to carry on a …show more content…
By seeking and seeing common ground in anti-foundationalism, Huffer allows their differences to remain in a way that is workable (and echoes the political project of difference and differentiation of Audre Lorde). At first this association would seem untenable – or at the very least, awkward, like exes milking their drinks on opposite sides of a social party. But Huffer sees their overlapping commonalities as places of productive inquiry. It is their shared questioning of historic social relations, for instance, that allows her to re/discovery the buried sexual politics of Albertine (Chapter 5) and to hear (and therefore amplify) the “silent lesbian” that haunts Queer Theory (Chapter …show more content…
It is this potential that I see as informative (if not imperative) to my reading list (and by way of extension, my dissertation work). In considering the politics of formation of the Self and Subject (and how this will inform the construction of dichotomous gender identities), the common political debates reconstitute queer and feminist theory (and politics) into oppositional sides, seeing their projects (post-structural/post-modern/de-centering/deconstructive and pro-identitarian, respectively) as antithetical to the other. It’s this assumed relationship that Huffer challenges and likewise one that I wish to confront and rework as to not reproduce many of the same tired politics that have long defined the debates of gender identity construction and