Judith Butler Speech On Antigone

Me: Hello everyone and welcome to Your Morning Wake Up Call, with your host me, Melody Emm! Today we have a very special guest with us, praised American philosopher and gender theorist, Dr. Judith Butler everybody. So Ms. Butler, May I call you Judith? I’m so honored to have you on my show.
Butler: Of course you can, and the pleasure is mine really.
Me: So Judith why don’t you tell our audience a little about your career as a queer theorist?
Butler: I’d be happy to. My work in queer theory mostly focuses on feminism and gender institutions. My most notable books include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, in which I tried to challenge conventional notions of gender
Now continuing on, we’ve heard about your past, and now that our audience knows a bit more about you lets discuss the reason I have you on today. Antigone, I assume youre familiar?
Butler: Why yes I am, she and I go way back.
Me: And what is your view on Antigone as a whole.
Butler: I feel that Antigone is an unconventional character, especially for her time, she is truly queer in the fact of her birth, her love for her brother and her “betrayl” of her city.
Me: Judth those are some strong views. What do you mean Antigone is queer, shes obviouslt betrothed to Haimon, and what does that have to do with the love of her brother.
Butler: Antigone is essentially queer in her existence, her birth was a queer situation as was her life, and her actions of gender and gendering are more queer in themselves. Also betrothed she is indeed, but not in love with Haimon, but polynieces. Actions are everything and no one burries their brother twice and gives up their life when he dies.
Me: Could you elaborate
In thebes where this place is set, woman have very strict gender roles and rules on how they should enact their gender, but as I said once in my piece Undoing Gender “Moreover, one does not “do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary. What I call my “own” gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own. But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author." Antigone has the strict social constructs of thebes acting on her and the restraints of gender enforces on her by Kreon but still helps coauthor her gender through her own defiant actions, causing even Kreon himself to doubt his masculinity and gender performativity stating in lines 485-485 “It’s clear enough that I’m no man, but shes the man, if she can get away wih holding power like this.” He himself also views gender as defined by ones actions and when Antigone defies him he seeks to force her back into her gender roles by killing her to show her he is the true man in control. But onto the Haimon and Polynices ordeal. It can be said that Haimon is in love with Antigone but she is not in love with him. She being a child of incest also has incestuous feelings for her brother Polynices and shows these feelines in lines 72-75 “To me it’s fine to die performing such a deed. I’ll lie there, dear to him, with my dear friend, when I’ve