Reading Questions for Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" and Lee Edelman, "Tearooms and Sympathy or, the Epistemology of the Water Closet"

1. How does Butler explain her discomfort with identity categories?

2. What is the "paradoxical situation" at the bottom of page 14?

3. What are the risks associated with coming out (15)? What is the "new and different ‘closet'" produced by coming out?

4. Why does the "I" produce a "certain radical concealment" (15)?

5. Why does Butler call lesbian sexuality a "process" (17)?

6. What is the difference between "strategic provisionality" and "strategic essentialism" (19)?

7. What is "reverse-discourse" (20)?

8. What is Butler's definition of drag (21)?

9. Why is heterosexuality "bound to fail" (21)?

10. Where does the "prior and volitional subject" come from (24)?

11. What is the "logic of inversion" (25)?

12. Why is homosexual invisibility dangerous according to the 1960s texts Edelman cites?

13. How does male homosexuality "shuttle between perceptual sameness and difference" (154)?

14. Male homosexuality is similar to what other Cold War category of identity? How?

15. How was America's national self-image affected by cold-war anxiety (157-58)?

16. How does Edelman revise Lacan's sign of sexual difference (160-61)?

17. What does "cloaca" mean, and why does it matter (161-62)?

18. How did Lyndon Johnson use translation? What does his translation mean for Edelman (165-66)?

19. What does homosexuality come to represent (168)? What is the "hallmark" of the homosexual person (169)? Why is it "inherently unstable" (169)?