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Judith Butler How To Survive A Plague

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With the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) crisis starting in the early 1980s, there was in increase of publicity on the Lesbian and Gay (LGBTQ) community, which also raised thoughts of discrimination. This idea of discrimination was focused on greatly in the documentary film How to Survive a Plague. Judith Butler’s ideas presented in her essay Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy can also aid us in analyzing How to Survive a Plague because it deals with the same and similar issues. In her essay, two of the problems that Butler addresses, that are also present in How to Survive a Plague, are the means to which someone is grievable and why it is almost impossible to change the discrimination. At the start of the essay, Judith …show more content…

In order to grieve something, you must have had it. Because of this, it can be understandable that some people may not grieve every life that passes by them. If a person grieves for every person, grief would override them and shut them down. But, that does not mean that a person should exclude grief from someone just because of who they were. Also, in order to grieve, you had to have cared about what you lost in some way, even if it was never noticed. Because of the raised discrimination of the LGBTQ community, members of the community are usually only grieved by other members of the community and are further unrepresented by “normal” people. One of the other large problems brought up by Judith Butler is the reason discrimination had not changed. In her essay, she brings up the point that you cannot be who you are as a member of the Lesbian and Gay community because of the “sociality of norms that precede and exceed” the community (Butler 126). At the time, the essay was written and the film was produced, there were no additional equality measures in place for the LGBTQ community, but since then, Same-Sex Marriage has been made into law in the entire United

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