They make gendered language into a forbidden fruit makes discrimination reappear

Butler, Rhetoric Professor at Berkeley, '97 (Judith, "Excitable Speech") According to Freud the self-imposed imperatives that characterize

the circular route of conscience are pursued and applied precisely because they become the site of the very satisfaction they seek to prohibit. In other words, prohibition becomes the displaced site of satisfaction for the instinct or desire that is prohibited, an occasion for the reliving of the instinct under the rubric of the condemning law. This is of course the source of that form of comedy in which the bearer of the moral law turns out to be the most serious transgressor of its precepts. And precisely because this displaced satisfaction is experienced through the application of the law that application is reinvigorated and intensified with the emergence of every prohibited desire. The prohibition does not seek the obliteration of prohibited desire; on the contrary, prohibition pursues the reproduction of prohibited desire and becomes itself intensified through the renunciations it effects. The afterlife of prohibited desire takes place through the prohibition itself, where the prohibition not only sustains but is sustained by, the desire that it forces into renunciation. In this sense, then, renunciation takes place through the very desire that is renounced, which is to say that the desire is never renounced, but becomes preserved and reasserted in the very structure of renunciation.
The renunciation by which the military citizen is purged of his sin and reestablished in his or her place, then, becomes the act by which the prohibition at once denies and concedes homosexual desire; it is not, strictly speaking, unspeakable, but is, more generally, retained in the speaking of the prohibition. In the case of the homosexual who claims to be one, but insists that he or she will not act on his or her desire, the homosexuality persists in and as the application of that prohibition to oneself. This is, interestingly, how Paul Ricouer once described the psychic circuit of hell: a vicious circle of desire and interdiction. And it may be that the military regulation is an intensified cultural site for the continuing theological force of that interdiction.

The argument fails - gendered language has to be reappropriated to achieve linguistic equality
Butler, Rhetoric Professor at Berkeley, '97 (Judith, "Excitable Speech") The political possibility of reworking the force of the speech act against

the force of injury consists in misappropriating the force of the speech from those prior contexts. The language that counters the injuries of speech, however, must repeat those injuries without precisely reenacting them. Such a strategy affirms that hate speech does not destroy the agency required for a critical response. Those who argue that hate speech produces a victim class deny critical agency and tend to support
an intervention in which agency is fully assumed by the state. In the place of state-sponsored censorship, a social and cultural struggle of language takes place in which agency is derived from injury and injury countered through that very derivation. Misappropriating the force of injurious language to counter its injurious operations constitutes a strategy that resists the solution of state-sponsored censorship, on the one hand, and the return to an impossible notion of the sovereign freedom of the individual, on the other. The subject is constituted (interpellated) in language through a selective process in which the terms of legible and intelligible subjecthood are regulated. The subject is called a name, but who the subject is depends as much on the names that he or she is never called: the possibilities for linguistic life are both inaugurated and foreclosed through the name. Thus, language constitutes the subject in part through foreclosure, a kind of unofficial censorship or primary restriction in speech that constitutes the

possibility of agency in speech. The kind of speaking that takes place on the border of the unsayable promises to expose the facillating boundaries of legitimacy in speech. As a further
marking of the limit to sovereignty, this view suggests that agency is derived from limitations in language, and that limitation is not fully negative in its implications. Indeed, as we think about worlds that might one day become unthinkable, sayable, legible, the opening up of the foreclosed and the saying of the

unspeakable become part of the very offense that must be committed in order to expand the

domain of linguistic survival. The resignification of speech requires opening new contexts, speaking in ways that have never yet been legitimated, and hence producing legitimation in new and future forms.

A2: Gendered Language

They give offensive language too much power destroys effective resistance
Butler, Rhetoric Professor at Berkeley, '97 (Judith, "Excitable Speech") I wish to question for the moment the presumption that hate speech always works not to minimize the pain that is suffered as a consequence of hate speech but to leave open the possibility that its failure is

the condition of a critical response. If the account of the injury of hate speech forecloses the possibility of a critical response to that injury, the account confirms the totalizing effects of such an injury. Such arguments are often useful in legal contexts, but are counter-productive for the thinking of nonstate-centered forms of agency and resistance. Circulating offensive rhetoric in academic contexts is necessary for resignification
Butler, Rhetoric Professor at Berkeley, '97 (Judith, "Excitable Speech") We might regard this overdetermination of the performatives the linguistification of the political field (one for which discourse theory is hardly responsible, but which it might be said to register in some important ways.) Consider, then, the paradoxical emergence of a similar figure of the efficacious utterance in recent political contexts that would appear to be inimical to those just mentioned. One is the US military, to be considered in the following chapter, in which certain kinds of utterances, namely, I am a homosexual, are, within the recently contested policy, now considered to be offensive conduct Similarly but not identically certain kinds of sexually graphic aesthetic representations, such as those produced and performed by the rap groups, 2 Live Crew or Salt n Pepa, are debated in legal contexts on the question of whether they fall under the rubric of obscenity as defined by Miller v. California (1973). Is the

recirculation of injurious epithets in the context of the performance (where performance and recirculation are importantly equivocal) substantially different from the use of such epithets on campus, in the workplace, or in other spheres of public life? The question is not simply whether such works
participate in recognizable genres of literary or artistic value, as if that would suffice to guarantee their protected status. The controversy here, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has shown, is more complicated. Appropriating and

recirculating established African-American genres of folk art, signifying being one central genre, such artistic productions participate in genres that may not be recognizable to the court. Paradoxically and poignantly, when the courts become the ones who are invested with the power to regulate such expressions, new occasions for discrimination are produced in which the courts discount African-American cultural production as well as lesbian and gay self-representation as such through the arbitrary and tactical use of obscenity law.