Having little patience for lollygagging and thumb-twiddling today, I want to get right to a quote by Judith Butler in her text Undoing Gender.
"What might it mean to learn to live in the anxiety of [the challenge of difference], to feel the surety of one's epistemological and ontological anchor go, but to be willing, in the name of the human, to allow the human to become something other than what it is traditionally assumed to be?"
I took this to essentially ask what it would be like to ditch preconceived notions of humanity and embrace the discomfort associated with it. In our class discussion on this quote, one student said that "being uncomfortable is being productive." I started to take a mental jog through uncomfortable moments in my life and rated their productivity. I thought of dental cleanings, sitting for too long while writing an essay, working out, even my mental jog was being productive, but enough metacognition, this is supposed to be about discomfort.
I'm a firm believer in the human need to label what we don't understand. Once we achieve that, we can rest in the comfort of knowing. But often times those labels can be misleading, which is why we need to let our "epistemological and ontological anchor go." For example, take the phrase "the frumious Bandersnatch." The average human English speaker not well read in Carroll might not know what a frumious Bandersnatch is, so there is a lack of understanding. The likely response is to label it as nonsense. While the label enables the user to talk about the unfamiliar subject, it is a false of understanding and a false feeling of comfort. Much in the same way, labeling who is human and who is not may seem comforting, but only to those with the label maker in hand. The last thing we need is to use labels to possess and comfort us like Dexter and Deedee. Instead, we should reconstruct the assumptions of humanity for the sake of humanity . Sure, reconstructions may be uncomfortable (especially those of the facial variety), but they are productive.
I love your assertion that "Labeling who is human and who is not may seem comforting, but only to those with the label maker in hand". However, I don't think that labels are completely unproductive. I agree that many of our conceptions, definitions, and labels should be reconstructed to perhaps be more inclusive and open, and that this reconstruction should/will be a source of discomfort for many. As discussed in class with concerns to the Mohanty reading, labels (or borders) can be both a limitation and a source of power. A world completely devoid of labels would be difficult to navigate. Take stereotypes for example. Although many of us try not to engage in stereotypical thinking, we find it difficult not to because it is a cognitive tool for organizing and understanding our world; we observe patterns, make associations, and store them to increase cognitive efficiency. While these stereotypes often lead us to make inappropriate judgements and marginalize the importance of individual differences, they serve an important cognitive function that is difficult to repress.
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