Quotes from Annamarie Jagose

For . Butler (1991:13-14), 'identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression'. Formerly assumed to be a prerequisite for political intervention, the assertion of collective identities is now routinely understood to put into circulation effects in excess of its avowed intention.

Such reliance on what everybody already knows is rhetorically but not intellectually persuasive. For what is being critiqued in contemporary theory is the very notion of the natural, the obvious, and the taken-for-granted.

To valorise common sense is naive, if not dangerous. For it does not follow that those formations of knowledge which coincide with the discourses of common sense manifest some truth beyond analysis. Rather, the convergence of knowledge and common sense may be understood more profitably as licensing the operation of unexamined ideological structures.

She [Judith Butler] specifies the ways in which the logic of identity politics—which is to gather together similar subjects so that they can achieve shared aims by mobilising a minority-rights discourse—is far from natural or self-evident. Michael Warner makes a similar point about the cultural specificity of identity politics when observing that, because its 'frame ... belongs to Anglo-American traditions', it therefore 'has some distorting influences'.

Like the Marxist structuralist approach to subjectivity, psychoanalysis makes culturally available a narrative that complicates the assumption that an identity is the natural property of any individual.

Yet the British group did not have the legislative focus of the Germans. 'We do not think', they declared, 'the time has yet arrived in England for a similar demand to be made

It has occurred because, within poststructuralism, the very notion of identity as a coherent and abiding sense of self is perceived as a cultural fantasy rather than a demonstrable fact.

Butler [Judith Butler] elaborates Foucault's argument about the operations of power and resistance in order to demonstrate the ways in which marginalised identities are complicit with those identificatory regimes they seek to counter

the power men everywhere wield over women . . . has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegal control' [Adrienne Rich]

they need complex social and political conditions for their emergence—to produce a sense of community experience which makes for collective endeavour. Five conditions seem to be necessary for this: the existence of large numbers in the same situation; geographical concentration; identifiable targets of opposition; sudden events or changes in social position; and an intellectual leadership with readily understood goals. [Jeffery Weeks]