Keaton’s Reviews > Second Skins > Status Update

To some extent in Bodies That Matter, the later term, "citationality," comes to displace the former of Gender Trouble, "performativity." Like a law that requires citing to be effective, Bodies That Matter argues, sex comes into effect through our citing it, and, as with a law, through our compulsion to cite it.

[sorry I cannot get past this page bc every time I get to the goffman reference I go "GOD that's sexy" and am no longer able to read on]

Gender Trouble inadvertently made possible two readings that Butler later returns to refute: first, that what was meant by gender performativity was gender theatricality

the subject does not precede but is an effect of the law

"queer" was reclaimed precisely according to the transformative mechanisms of camp in which what has been devalued in the original becomes overvalued in the repetition.

—a book very much, after all, about subjects' failure of embodiment.

In short, in retrospect, transgender gender appears as the most crucial sign of queer sexuality's aptly skewed point of entry into the academy.

Exceeding feminism's purview of gender

how transition as a geographic trope applies to transsexual narratives: that is, transsexuality as a passage through space, a journey from one location to another.

As the insider joke goes, transitioning is what transsexuals do (out occupation, as consuming as a career).