“I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.”
-Judith Butler

Judith Butler is a well-known feminist philosopher who contends that gender (masculine/feminine) has traditionally been based on sex (male/female). The result of this binaristic determinant is a set of rigid and unrealistic social norms concerning sexuality and sexual desire. Her work focuses on the disconnecting of sexuality from gender so that sexual desires and the ways people define themselves with regard to gender can be more flexible and dynamic.

Personally, I think of sexuality as a continuum; while I’m attracted to certain feminine qualities, I don’t deny myself the appreciation of someone of my own sex if they exhibit those qualities. But what happens if one finds a transsexual person to be attractive and then, after acknowledging the attraction, finds out or realizes that the person is a transsexual? Is the transsexual to be regarded as a male or female? Judith butler says that, if one would opt for the latter, then the transsexual would be dismantling the hegemonic idea of masculinity.

The following are notes from my first reading of her essay, Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion, from Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985.