Aesthetics

"The Aesthetic is anything that trains the imagination for epistemological performance." "The problem of knowledge is not what to know, but how to know them." She also focusses heavily on the distinction between globalization as instrumental knowledege systems and the one in the margins, the Subaltern, and goes further to say that established systems of knowledge, affected by globalization, can only exist in the abstract, in quantifiable data. That an experiencing being cannot sense this. She sees an aesthetic education as an embodied practice. "A deeper cultivation of the Imagination, reading, writing, understanding, dwelling in otherness, performing knowledge." And developing a capacity to deal with double-binds, tensions between ethical demands. > Gayatri Spivak

"The imaginary and the rational, the visionary and objective vision hover close together." "Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies." "The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable. The one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history." >

The visibility of queerness depended on it's positioning as derivative of straightness. That position subordinates the queer body since it can never exist separately from or independent of an imagining of straightness. Had an idea of straightness never be conceived in the first place, queerness would not have to exist as a separate category. Yet, since it has, it is a reality by the fact of this dynamic, presented as 'natural fact' being reproduced over and over again. 'Drag is what reveals all gender to be a copy of which there is no original.' Rather than being the imitation of a gender that supposedly properly belongs to some other group, it reveals that gender expressions were never fixed or 'naturally' belonging to a certain group in the first place. It's a sort of re-shuffling of the meanings of these categories that reveals the reproduction of that dominant story to be one copy among many. > Judith Butler

In his term"Le Partage du Sensible", or "the Distribution of the Sensible", he's arguing how regimes of power influence what is seeable and hearable to it's subjects, who gets to speak and be heard, and how this defines what we can know about the world, which informs how we move through it, act in it. > Jaques Ranciere