I am *exhausted* and I don't know why. I feel like I'm going to fall asleep. Right here.

What am I trying to say about early humanism and subjectivity?

So maybe I need to drop the distinction about interiority. . . although, if helpful, I could substitute a distinction between public and private. That might be less crazy-making.

Damn, I want a dessert or something.

Okay. So the thing is. What.

That Butler is talking, not only about homosexuality and theories thereof, but also--even primarily--about gender and ideology. And these two general categories of thought, or stuff, are profoundly important within the Middle Ages, particularly as they pertain to women. More particularly, Butler's conception of performativity (gender performativity in particular) corresponds to, or is based on, Althusser's conception of ideology (as the individual's imaginative relation to the real).

All of this is relevant to the immense problem of women and Chaucer, and more specifically the question of Chaucer's feminist, antifeminist, or quasifeminist authorial perspective, in that it provides us with a manner of thinking about some of Chaucer's unsavory or un-ideal female characters--in particular the Wife of Bath--in a manner that recognizes both their stereotypical qualities (in particular those stereotypical qualities that they have invented themselves) and also their obvious contestation or subversion of male power structures. In other words, they are doing both things at once--establishing a place for themselves in male power structures and "acting out" misogynistic stereotypes (a.k.a. gender norms)--and this simultaneity is exactly what Butler's theory of gender performativity would lead us to expect.