"Gender trouble" is old. I mean, you know, in New York, it is old. I mean it's sweet. I mean people are really kind about it but it's like a former love affair you had and you're done.

One struggles always with these norms. So one doesn't construct oneself freely without respect to norm but one works with one's historical situation and sees where there might be some play. Where there might be some freedom to move.

There are doubtless all kinds of ways of explaining why people want security, but I do not think we can start with the psychological explanations. Even psychological states like fear or desire for safety are conditioned by social and political forms of intimidation and scare-mongering that intensify those emotions, and even work to persuade people that nothing less than their survival is at stake.

For instance, when "Gender trouble " is translated into Japanese, it produces a problem of vocabulary and a way of thinking about a quality for instance that is somewhat controversial in academic circles and also outside of the academy. In other places, "Gender trouble" is old.

A different kind of pleasure surfaced in the aftermath, the pleasure of seeing the towers fall time and again, the experience of being entranced by the visual spectacle, and then also the very graphic forms of public mourning for exemplary citizens (taking place at the same time as the refusal to mourn the undocumented, the foreign, gay and lesbian lives lost there, for example). I am not sure that the guilt over the pleasure re-installed the good citizen.

As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.

I do not follow closely anymore, since there is a limit to how much heartsickness one can bear.