sheaves of reality

I'm still stuck on Mrs. Ramsay. Why didn't she stand up againt her husband's "tyrannical" rationality? Why didn't she say something in her own defense? I don't buy that she's shy and docile by nature. Pshh.

I'm reading Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and while her sections on psychoanalysis are just mumble jumble to me, she's got quite a few powerful passages that make the book a worthwhile read for anyone as easily confused and bored by psychoanalysis as me.

This passage offers an explanation for Mrs. Ramsay's silence.

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body.

- Monique Wittig

Discourse becomes oppressive when it requires that the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that oppression - that is, take for granted the speaking subject's own impossibility or unintelligibility. This presumptive heterosexuality, she argues, functions within discourse to communicate a threat: "you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be." Women, lesbians, and gay men, she argues, cannot assume the position of the speaking subject within the linguistic system of compuslory heterosexuality. To speak within the system is to be deprived of the possibility of speech; hence, to speak at all in that context is a performative contradiction, the linguistic assertion of a self that cannot "be" within the language that asserts it.

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble