Older ways of thinking about life are more humane. I exist, not as a process or as some immovable modern substance, but as a woman, as a mother, with a certain age and height and history, with a certain store of knowledge and emotional responses. All these qualities are accidents, metaphysically speaking, but that does not make them unimportant. In fact, they are the stuff of my life. The becoming of accidents that come to be in me and pass away, as I enter into new friendships, learn new things, lose loved ones\u2014all this is held in being by me as a personal substance. Accidents give me color and distinctiveness. I give them being.<\/p>\n
All of this makes me legible to other human beings and thereby vulnerable to \u201ccategorical \u00adviolence.\u201d By allowing accidents\u2014including my femininity\u2014to make me legible, I allow them to delimit me; but they also reveal me to the world, to the community of embodied persons, who know me as formed in certain ways. Through knowing accidents, \u00adAquinas writes, the intellect \u201cpenetrates to the interior\u201d of the substance. The postmodern world is deathly afraid of being so transparent and vulnerable to others. But it has opened itself to other risks. The loss of the \u201chome\u201d of the stable self perpetually undermines contemporary people, who exist in a permanent, fluid exile. No wonder we, and our culture, are imprisoned within our obsessions with security and safety.<\/p>\n
Butler\u2019s trouble with sexed identity arises from her fear that stability opposes the permanent exile that is human life. Rather than being a word read from her body, she prefers to be the unfinished sentence, the perpetual refugee from sexed legibility. Of course, she is right that the intellect sometimes penetrates in order to colonize. But it is also the case that love begins with a true word, spoken and understood. What causes the most \u00adtrouble\u2014the sexed body\u2014also initiates what is most dear.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n "Butler\u2019s trouble with sexed identity arises from her fear that stability opposes the permanent exile that is human life. Rather than being a word read from her body, she prefers to be the unfinished sentence, the perpetual refugee from sexed legibility." https:\/\/t.co\/LPh4B7PX8c<\/a><\/p>\n — Ryan Haecker (@RyanHaecker) April 24, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n