Hit the Nail on the Head

As I finished my SCD, I decided to reread Butler's Gender Trouble. For this re-viewing, I took off my critical hat and thought more about my own experiences and I realized that Butler is absolutely correct. She says "the very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms" and "there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the category of women" (2). These two statements have basically summed up my experiences with women as an adult. (I use the term adult quite loosely though.) By no means have these experiences been bad; in fact, most have been pleasant. But even so, the experiences have taught me that women are not easily identifiable, if at all. I think of them as an endless cavern with an ever changing hue and millions of paths. (Bad simile? I'm sorry, it's really early!) And this is a problem. Because, as Butler says "the qualifications for being a subject must first be met before representation can be extended" (2). So, if the term wome(a)n is not uniform, then they cannot be truly represented. (But really, is anything uniform? Does everyone think of the same thing when, say, someone says picture a refrigerator? I think not.) And that is the problem with gender and representation as a whole; no one thing can fully represent something else. But even so, I guess that having some sort of identity and representation is better than none.