Date of Award

Spring 5-10-2024

Degree Type

Honors Thesis

Major

Philosophy

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Geoffrey Ashton

Abstract

What does it mean to appear under a gender identity that fails to convey who you really are? Is it possible to truly be free from prevailing identities even as one contests them? Søren Kierkegaard’s knight of faith and Judith Butler’s allegorical usage of drag may offer clues to re-thinking how our self-conceptions undergo crisis even as they get reproduced. Instead of being entrapped within a particular identity category, the knight of faith and the drag performer show us ways to negotiate established ethical or gender categories through a “parodic attunement”. Is Kierkegaard attempting to bring us into harmony with established standards or is he pointing to a way of being beyond that? In this thesis, I contend that reading Kierkegaard’s knight of faith in conjunction with Butler’s allegorical usage of drag points us toward an engagement with the limits of given categories that allows us to see how imitation and repetition do not merely extend prevailing norms and power structures, but subvert their stability through a parodic play. Through this comparison of the knight of faith and the drag performer, I explore an intervention in the way we think of the deployment of gender identity categories.

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