inside/out LESBIAN THEORIES, GAY THEORIES EDITED BY DIANA FUSS 配UTLE卫GE
1625 Published in 1991 by 29 West: 35: Streer ew York, NY 10001: 32 i Published in: Great Britain by ontents R 11 New Fetter: Lai c99单2Hl,i Inside/Out Printed in the United States of, Amenca ii I Decking Out: Performing Identities invented,todlidingphotocopzing and recording, or in any Judith butler 2 Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag ISBN0415-90236-3 Carole-Anne Tyler lSBN0-415-90237-1 3 Who Are"We"? Gay"Identity"as Politica Library of Congress and British Library cataloging in publication information E)motion (A Theoretical Rumination Representation, the Scene of nd the Spectacle of Gay male Sex I Cutting Up: Specters, Spectators, authors 5 Anal Rope D. A. Miller 6 Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting 7 A Parallax View of Lesbian Authorship DEvU 9 992 Judith Mayne 8. Believing in Fairies: The Author and The Homosexual Richard dyer overly
itation and gender Insubordi Judith Butler It is tion, is there an of e psychical or metaphy ical repetition?. . This ultimate repetition, this ultimate theatre, gathers everything in a certain way; and in another way, it desti erything; and in yet another way, it selects from everything. Gilles deleuze a At first I considered writing a different sort of essay, one with a osophical tone: the"being"of being homosexual. The prospect of eing anything, even for pay, has always produced in me a certain anxiety, for"to be"gay, "to be" lesbian seems to be more tha simple injunction to become who or what I already am. And in no way does it settle the anxiety for me to say that this is"part"of what I am. o write or speak as a lesbian appears a paradoxical appearance of this"I, "one which feels neither true nor false. For it is a production, usually in lse to a request, to come out or write in the an identity which, once produced, sometimes functions as a politically fficacious phantasm. Pm not at ease with"lesbian theories, gay theo ries,"for as Ive argued elsewhere, identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing catego- ries of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberator
14/ Decking Out: Performing Identities Judith Butler /15 ontestation of that very oppression ppear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian, but that I would the sense of disengaged contemplation, and to insist that it is full like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies. political (phronesis or even praxis), then why not simply call this So it is unclear how it is that I can contribute to this book and appear peration politics, or some necessary permutation of it? under its title, for it announces a set of terms that I propose to contest. I have begun with confessions of trepidation and a series of disclaim One risk i take is to be recolonized e sign under which I writ ers, but perhaps it will become clear that disclaiming, which is no and so it is this risk that I seck to thematize. To propose that the invocation of identity is always a risk does not imply that resistance to resistance to a certain regulatory operation of homophobia. The dis it is always or only symptomaticof a self-inflicted homophobia. Indeed course of"coming out has clearly served its purposes, but what al a Foucaultian perspective might argue that the affirmation of"homo- its risks? And here I am not speaking of unemployment or public attack sexuality"is itself an extension of a homophobic discourse. And yet or violence, which are quite clearly and widely on the increase against discourse, " he writes on the same pag those who are perceived as"out"whether or not of their own design point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy9 and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block Is thesubject "who is"out" free of its subjection and finally in th clear? Or could it be that the subjection that subjectivates the gay or So i am skeptical about how the"I"is determined as it operates lesbian subject in some ways continues to oppress, or oppresses most under the title of the lesbian sign, and I am no more comfortable with insidiously;once“ outness" is claimed? What or who is it that is“out” s homophobic determination than with those normative definitions made manifest and fully disclosed, when and if I reveal myself a thing? What remains perma- manently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable nently concealed by the very linguistic act that offers up the promise stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote them, as sites of Can sexuality even remain necessary trouble. In fact, if the category were to offer no trouble, it sexuality once it submits to a criterion of transparency and disclosure, ould cease to be interesting to me: it is precisely the pleasure produced or does it perhaps cease to be sexuality precisely when the semblance by the instability of those categories which sustains the various erotic of full explicitness is achieved? Is sexuality of any kind even possible practices that make me a candidate for the category to begin with.To without that opacity designated by the unconscious, which means simply that the conscious install myself within the terms of an identity category would be to turn the last to know the meaning of what it o would reveal its sexuality is perhaps To claim that this is what I am is to suggest a provisional totalization eroticism that it claims to describe and authorize much less"liberate. of this"I " But if the I can so determine itself, then that which it And what's worse, I do not understand the notion of"theory,"and in order to make that determination remains constitutive of am hardly interested in being cast as its defender, much less in being ermination itself. In other words such a statement presupposes ified as part of an elite gay/lesbian theory crowd that seeks to uI"exceeds its determination, and even produces that very tablish the legitimacy and domestication of gay/lesbian studies within xcess in and by the act which seeks to exhaust the semantic field of the academy. Is there a pregiven distinction between theory, politics that"1 "In the act which would disclose the true and full content of ulture, media? How do those divisions operate to quell a certain that"I, "a certain radical concealment is thereby produced. For it is tertextual writing that might well generate wholly different epistemic by invoking the lesbian-signifier, maps? But I am writing here now: is it too late? Can this writing, can since its signification is always to some degree out of one's control, but any writing, refuse the terms by which it is appropriated even as, to also because its specificity can only be demarcated by exclusions that some extent, that very colonizing discourse enables or produces thi return to disrupt its claim to coherence. What, if anything, can lesbians esistance? How do i relate the paradoxical be said to share? And who will decide this question, and in the name situation of this dependency and refusa of whom? if I claim to be a lesbian, I"come out"only to produce a If the political task is to show that theory is never merely theoria, in ew and different"closet. "The"you"to whom I come out now has access to a different region of opacity. Indeed the locus of opacity has
16/ Decking Out: Performing Identitie Judith Butler/17 simply shifted: before, you did not know whether I"am, but now you do not know what that means, which is to say that the copula is disavowal, that is, a return to the closet under the guise of an escape empty, that it cannot be substituted for with a set of descriptions. And And it is not something like heterosexuality or bisexuality that is haps that is a situation to be valued. Conventionally one comes disavowed by the category, but a set of identificatory and practical out of the closet(and yet, how often is it the case that we are"outted crossings between these categories that renders the discreteness of each ve are out of the ible to maintain and pursue heterosexual closet, but into what? what new unbounded spatiality? the room, the identifications and aims within homosexual practice, and homosexual den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some identifications and aims within heterosexual practices If a sexuality is new enclosure whose door, like Kafka's door, produces the expectation to be disclosed, what will be taken as the true determinant of its of a fresh air and a light of illumination that never arrives? curiously meaning:the phantasy structure, the act, the orifice, the gender,the it is the figure of the closet that produces this expectation, and which anatomy? And if the practice engages a complex interplay of all of guarantees its dissatisfaction For being"out"always depends to some ose, which one of this erotic dimensions will come to stand for the extent on being"in"; it gains its meaning only within that polarity. oduce the closet again and ence or lesbian desire or lesbian e s it the specificity of a lesbian experi- order sexuality that lesbian theory needs to to maintain itself as"out. In this sense, outness can only produce a elucidate? Those efforts have only and always produced a set of con- new opacity; and the closet produces the promise of a disclosure that tests and refusals which should by now make it clear that there is no can, by definition, never come. Is this infinite postponement of the ecessarily common element among lesbians, except perhaps that we disclosure of"gayness, "produced by the very act of coming out, "to all know something about how homophobia works against women- be lamented? Or is this very deferral of the signified to be valued, a site although, even then, the language and the analysis we use will diffe for the production of values, precisely because the term now takes o argue that there might be a specificity to lesbian sexuality has a life that cannot be, can never be, permanently controlled ry counterpoint to the claim that lesbian sexua It is possible to argue that whereas no transparent or full revelation is afforded by"lesbian"and"gay, "thereremains a political imperative not exist. But perhaps the claim of specificity, on the one hand, and to use these necessary errors or category mistakes, as it were(what the claim of derivativeness or non-existence on the other, are not as Gayatri Spivak might callcatachrestic operations: to use a proper contradictory as they seem. Is it not possible that lesbian sexuality is name improperly"), to rally and represent an oppressed political a process that reinscribe the power domains that it resists, that it stituency. Clearly, I am not legislating against the use of the term. My constituted in part from the very heterosexual matrix that it seeks to question is simply which use will be legislated, and what play will displace, and that its specificity is to be established, not outside tion and use such that the instrumental uses of beyond that reinscription or reiteration, but in the very modality and dentity"do not become regulatory imperatives? If it true effects of that reinscription. In other words, the negative constructions that"lesbians"and"gay men"have been traditionally designated of lesbianism as a fake or a bad copy can be occupied and reworked to call into questic on the mpossible identities, errors of classification, unnatural disasters within uridico-medical discourses, or, what perhaps amounts to the same hope to make clear in what follows, lesbian sexuality can be understood the very paradigm of what calls to be classified, regulated, and con- to redeploy its'derivativeness'in the service of displacing hegemonic trolled, then perhaps these sites of disruption, error, confusion, and heterosexual norms. Understood in this way, the political problem is not to establish the specificity of lesbian sexuality over and against its derivativeness, but to turn the homophobic construction of the bad The question is not one of avowing or disavowing the category of copy against the framework that privileges heterosexuality as origin lesbian mes the site and so derive, the former from the latter. This description requires a of thi rather, why it is that the category becom choice? What does it mean to awow a category that reconsideration of imitation, drag, and other forms of sexual crossing its specificity and coherence by performing a prior chat affirm the internal complexity of a lesbian sexuality constituted in set of disavowals? Does this make"coming out"into the avowal of art within the very matrix of power that it is compelled both to reiterate and to oppose
18/Decking Out: Performing Identities Judith Butler /19 On the Being of Gayness as Necessary Drag But politically, we might argue, isn't it quite crucial to insist on lesbian and gay identities precisely because they are being threatend The professionalization of gayness requires a certain performance with erasure and obliteration from homophobic quarters? Isn't the and production of a"self which is the constituted effect of a discourse above theory complicitous with those political forces that would obit- erate the possibility of gay and lesbian identity? Isn't it"no accident that such theoretical contestations of identity emerge within a political telling my friends beforehand that I was off to Yale to be a lesbian, climate that is performing a set of similar obliterations of homosexual which of course dida't mean thatlwasn't one before, but that somehow identities through legal and political means? then, as l spoke in that context, I was one in some more thorough and The question I want to raise in return is this: ought such threats of totalizing way, at least for the time being. So I am one, and my obliteration dictate the terms of the political resistance qualifications are even fairly unambiguous. Since I was sixteen, being they do, do such homophobic efforts to that extent win the battle from a lesbian is what P've been. So what,s the anxiety, the discomfort? Well the start? There is no question that gays and lesbians are threatened has something to do with that redoubling, the way I can say, Im by the violence of public erasure, but the decision to counter that oing to yale to be a lesbian; a lesbian is what I've been being for so violence must be careful not to reinstall another in its place. Which long. How is it that I can both be"one, and yet endeavor to be one version of lesbian or gay ought to be rendered visible, and which t the same time? When and where does lesbian come into internal exclusions will that rendering visible institute? Can the visibil play, when and where does this playing a lesbian constitute something it only be the starting like what I am? To say that I"play"at being one is not to say that I point for a strategic intervention which calls for a transformation of am not one"really"; rather, how and where I play at being one is the policy? Is it not a sign of despair over public politics when identity way in which that"being"gets established, instituted, circulated, and becomes its own policy bringing with it those who would"police'it confirmed. This is not a performance from which i can take radical from various sides? and this is not a call to return to silence or invis- distance, for this is deep-seated play, psychically entrenched play, and ibility, but, rather, to make use of a category that can be called into this "I"does not play its lesbianism as a role. Rather, it is through the question, made to account for what it excludes. That any consolidation of identity requires some set of differentiations and exclusions seem s a lesbian"I"; paradoxically, it is precisely the repetition of that play es ought to be valorized? That the ider hat establishes as well the instability of the very category that it e now has its purposes seems right, but there is no way to predict or constitutes. For if the"P" is a site of repetition, that is, if the "I"only control the political uses to which that sign will be put in the future. achieves the semblance of identity through a certain repetition of itself, And perhaps this is a kind of openness, regardless of its risks, that then the I is always displaced by the very repetition at sustains it. In ought to be safeguarded for political reasons. If the rendering visible other words, does or can the"I" ever repeat itself, cite itself, faithfully of lesbian/gay identity now presupposes a set of exclusions, then per- or is there always a displacement from its former moment that estab haps part of what is necessarily excluded is the future uses of the sign lishes the permanently non self-identical status of that"I " or its"being and we do, but he lesbian”?Whar“ performs"does not exhaust the“"; it does not lay to use it in such a way that its futural significations are not foreclosed? out in visible terms the comprehensive content of that "1 " for if How to use the sign and avow its temporal contingency at once? the performance is"repeated "there is always the question of what In avowing the signs strategic provisionality (rather than its strategic differentiates from each other the moments of identity that are re- essentialism), that identity can become a site of contest and revision, peated. And if the"I"is the effect of a certain repetition, one which indeed, take on a future set of significations that those of us who use roduces the semblance of a continuity or coherence, then there is no it now may not be able to foresee. It is in the safeguarding of the p"that precedes the gender that it is said to perform; the repetition, future of the political signifiers-preserving the signifier as a site of and the failure to repeat, produce a string of performances that consti- rearticulation-that laclau and Mouffe discern its democratic promise. tute and contest the coherence of that"L. Within contemporary U.S. politics, there are a vast number of ways
0/ Decking Out: Performing Identities in which lesbianism in particular is understood as precisely that which cannot or dare not be. in a sense, Jesse Helms's attack on the Nea to participate in the phantasmatic plenitude of naturalized heterosex for sanctioning representations of"homoeroticism"focuses various ality which will always and only fail, And yet, I remember qu mophobic fantasies of what stinctly when i first read in Esther Newton,s Mother Camp: Female on the work Robert Mapplethorpe. In a sense, for Helms, gay men exist as objects Impersonators in America"that drag is not an imitation or a copy of some prior and true gender; according to Newton, drag enacts the very ers of children, the paradigmatic exemplars of obscenity"; in a sense, tructure of personation the lesbian is not even produced within this discourse as a prohibited not the putting on of a gender that belongs properly to some other object. Here it becomes important to recognize that oppression work group,ie an act of expropriation or appropriation that assumes that not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through the gender is the rightful property of sex, that "masculine"belongs to onstitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution “male"and" feminine" belongs to" female” There is no“ proper e sex rather than another which is in who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the some sense that sex's cultural property. Where that notion of the unthinkability and ,on works through the production of a domain of w. Here o proper"operates, it is always and only improperly installed as the unnameability. Lesbianism is not explicitly prohib ited in part because it has not even made its way into the thinkable, which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done; it ble, that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates the real and the nameable, How, then, to " be"a lesbian in a political implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approxima- tion. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that context in which the lesbian does not exist? That is, in a political of imitation for which there is discourse that wages its violence againstlesbianism in part by excluding lesbianism fro original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion om discourse itself? To be prohibited explicitly is to oc- of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. In py a discursive site from which something like a reverse-discourse other words, the naturalistic effects of heterosexualized genders are can be articulated; to be implicitly proscribed is not even to qualify as produced through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phan- an object of prohibition. And though homosexualities of all kinds in asmatic ideal of heterosexual identity one that is produced by the oresent climate are being erased, reduced, and (then)reconstituted imitation as its effect. In this sense, the"reality"of heterosexual identi- as sites of radical homophobic fantasy, it is important to retrace the ties is performatively constituted through an imitation that sets itself different routes by which the unthinkability of homosexuality is being gin an constituted time and again. heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating It is one thing to be erased from disco nother to be its own phantasmatic idealization of itself-and failing. Precisely be-y resent within discourse-as an abiding falsehood. Hence there is cause it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of litical imperative to render lesbianism visible, but how is that to be heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself one ou side or through existing regulatory regimes? Can theexclusion Indeed, in its efforts to naturalize itself as the from ontology itself become a rallying point for resistar lust be understood as a compulsive and compulsory repetition that an o of its own originality; in other words Here is something like a confession which is meant merely to thematize ompulsory heterosexual identities, those ontologically consolidated the impossibility of confession: As a young person, I suffered for a long phantasms of"man"and"woman, "are theatrically produced effects time,and I suspect many people have, from being told, explicitly or that posture as grounds, origins, the normative measure of the real licity, that what I"am"is a: copy, an imitation, a derivative exam le, a shadow of the real. Compulsory heterosexuality sets, itselEup e original, the true, the authentic; the norm that determines th Reconsider then the homophobic charge that queens and butches implies that"being" lesbian is always a kind of miming, a vain effort and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real. Here"imitation" carries the meaning of“ derivative”or“ secondary" a copy of an origin
22/Decking Out: Performing Identities Judith Butler/2 which is itself the ground of all copies, but which is itself a copy of nothing. Logically, this notion of an"origin"is suspect, for how can of gay identities works neither to copy nor to emulate heterosexuality, mething operate as an origin if there are no secondary consequences which retrospectively confirm the originality of that origin? The origin imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is equires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that at risk, that is, that it"knows"its own possibility of becoming undone which they produce as derivatives. Hence, if it were not for the notion hence, its compulsion to repeat which is at once a foreclosure of that of the homosexual as copy, there would be no construct of heterosex which threatens its coherence. That it can never eradicate that risk attests to its profound dependency upon the homosexuality that it ality as origin. Heterosexuality here presupposes homosexuality. And if the homosexual as copy precedes the heterosexual as origin, then it eeks fully to eradicate and never can or that it seeks to make second seems only fair to concede that the copy comes before the origin, and but which is always already there as a prior possibility. Although that homosexuality is thus the origin, and heterosexuality the copy this failure of naturalized heterosexuality might constitute a source of thos for heterosexuality itself--what its theorists often refer to as its ly possible, For it is only as a cop that homosexuality can be argued to precede heterosexuality as the onstitutive malaise-it can become an occasion for a subversive and origin. In other words, the entire framework of copy and origin proves oliferating parody of gender norms in which the very claim to origi- adically unstable as each position inverts into the other and confounds ality and to the real is shown to be the effect of a certain kind of he possibility of any stable way to locate the temporal or logical ority of either term. It is important to recognize the ways in which heterosexual norms But let us then consider this problematic inversion from a psychic/ reappear within gay identities, to affirm that gay and lesbian identities political ective. If the structure of gender imitation is such that are not only structured in part by dominant heterosexual frames, but the imitated is to some degree produced-or, rather, reproduced-by that they are not for that reason determined by them. They are running commentaries on those naturalized positions as well, parodic replay Imitaton (see agai nd displacement of mimesis in"The Double Session"), then to claim that gay and lesbian identities andresignifications ofprecisely thoseheterosexual structures thatwould are implicated in heterosexual norms or in hegemonic culture generally onsign gay life to discursive domains of unreality and unthinkability is not to derive gayness from straightness. On the contrary, imitation But to be constitutedorstructuredin part by the very heterosexualnorms oes not copy which is prior, but produces and inverts the very by which gay people are oppressedis not, Repeat, to be claimed or deter s of priority and derivativeness. Hence, if mined by those structures. Anditis not necessary to think ofsuchhetero- es are impli- cated in heterosexuality, that is not the same as claiming that they are sexual constructs as the pernicious intrusion of "the straight mind, "one determined or derived from heterosexuality, and it is not the same as that must be rootedoutin itsentirety, In a way, thepresenceofheterosex- claiming thatthat heterosexuality is the only cultural network in which ual constructs and positionalities in whatever form in gay and lesbian they are implicated. These are, quite literally, inverted imitations, ones identities presupposes that there is a gay and lesbian repetition of which invert the order of imitated and imitation, and which, in the process,expose the fundamental dependency of"the origin"on that and recapitulation of its own ideality-within its own terms, a site in which it claims to produce as its secondary effect. which all sorts of resignifying and parodic repetitions become possible. What follows if we concede from the start that gay identities The parodic replication and resinification of heterosexual constructs derivative inversions are in part defined-in terms of the very heterosex within non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed identities from which status of the so-called original, but it shows that heterosexuality only formatively inal through incing act of constitutes itself as the original, then the imitative parody of hetero- The more that"act"is expropriated, the more theheterosexualclaim to sexuality"when and where: it exists in gay. cultures--is always and only an imitation of an imitation, a copy of a Copy; for which there is Although I have concentrated in the above on the reality-effects of no original. Put in yet a different way, the parodic or imitative effect gender practices, performances, repetitions, and mimes, I do not mean to suggest that drag is a" role"that can be taken on or taken off at
24/Decking Out: Performing Identities Judith butler /25 rill. There is no volitional subject behind the mime who decides, as it were, which gender it will be today. On the contrary, the very possibil- So what is this psychic excess, and what will constitute a subversive of becoming a viable subject requires that a certain gender mime be or de-instituting repetition? First, it is necessary to consider thatsexu self-identical ty always exceeds any given performance, presentation, or narrative chan the"being"of any gender; in fact, coherent gender, achieved which is why it is not possible to derive or read off a sexuality from through an apparent repetition of the same, produces as its effect the any given gender presentation. And sexuality may be said to exceed a prior and ve ional subject. In this sense, gender is not a any definitive narrativization Sexuality is never fully"expressed"in a berformance that a prior subject elects to do but gender is performative performance or practice; there will be passive and butchy femmes in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears ches, and both of thos to express. It is a compulsory performance in the sense that acting out turn out to describe more or less anatomically stable"males"and of line with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, 'females. "There are no direct expressive or causal lines between sex, and violence, not to mention the transgressive pleasures produced by None of those terms captures or determines the rest. Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely that which does not appear and that prior the performance is performative, that the performance constitutes the hich, to This is perhaps th appearance of a"subject "as its effect is difficult to accept. This diff- fundamental reason why sexuality is to some degrec always closeted culty is the result of a predisposition to think of sexuality and gender especially to the one who would express it through acts of self-disclo expressing in some indirect or direct way a psychic reality tha sure. That which is excluded for a given gender presentation to"suc- recedes it. The denial of the priority of the subject, however, is not the denial of the subject; in fact, the refusal to conflate the subject with verted"relation, as it were between gender and gende the psyche marks the psychic as that which exceeds the and gender presentation and sexuality. On the other hand, both gender e conscious subject. This psychic excess is precis presentation and sexual practices may corollae such that it appears systematically denied by the notion of a volitional"subject"who elects that the former"expresses"the latter, and yet both are jointly consti tuted at will which gender and/or sexuality to be at any given time and place ery sexu It is this excess which erupts within the intervals of those repeated gestures and acts that construct the apparent uniformity of heterosex L This logic of inversion gets played out interestingly in versions of ual positionalities, indeed which compels the repetition itself, and herself as capable, forceful, and all-providing, and a stone burttesent which guarantees its perpetual failure. In this sense, it is this exc well seek to constitute her lover as the exclusive site of erotic attention which, within the heterosexual economy, implicitly includes hon and pleasure. And yet, this "providing"butch who seems at first at perpetual threat of a disruption which is quelled through plicate a certain husband-like role, can find herself caught in albe o a reenforced repetition of the same. and yet, if rep petition is the inversion whereby that "providingness"turns to a self-sacrifice, which power works to construct the illusion of a seamless heterosexual which implicates her in the most ancient trap of feminine self-abnega identity, if heterosexuality is compelled to repeat itself in order to tion. She may well find herself in a situation of radical need, which is establish theillusion of its own wbat if it fails to repeat, or if the very precisely what she sought to locate, find, and fulfill in her femme lover In effect, the butch inverts into the femme or remains caught up in the exercise of repetition is redeployed for a very different performative specter of that inversion, or takes pleasure in it. On the other hand eat, repetition the femme who, as Amber Hollibaugh has argued, "orchestrates never: fully accomplishes identity. That there is a need for a repetition sexual exchange, may well eroticize a certain dependency only to at all is a sign that identity is not: self-identical It requires: to be learn that the very power to orchestrate that dependency exposes her instituted again and again, which is to say that it runs the risk of m incontrovertible power, at which point she inverts into a butch becoming de-instituted at every interva or becomes caught up in the specter of that inversion, or perhaps
26/ Decking Out: Performing Identities Judith Butler/27 Psychic Mimesis Whether loss or mimetism is primary(perhaps an undecidable prob- What stylizes or forms an erotic style andor a gender presentation- lem), the psychic subject is nevertheless constituted internally by differ- nd that which makes such categories inherently unstable--is a set of entially gendered Others and is, therefore, never, as a gender, self- ntical psychic identifications that are not simple to describe Some psychoana In my view, the self only becomes a self on the condition that it has lytic theories tend to construe identification and desire as two mutually suttered a separation exclusive relations to love objects that have been lost through prohibi mar fails us here, for the“it” only becomes tion and/or separation. Any intense emotional attachment thus divides ifferentiated through that separation), a loss which is suspended and into either wanting to have someone or wanting to be that someone provisionally resolved through a melancholic incorporation of some but never both at once. It is important to consider that identification Other. " ThatOther"installed in the self thus establishes the perm nent incapaci and desire can coexist, and that their formulation in terms of mutually exclusive oppositions serves a heterosexual matrix. But I would like to the heart of the self is the very condition of that selfs possibility. s focus attention on yet a different construal of that scenario, namely that"wanting to be"and"wanting to have"can operate to differenti- Such a consideration of psychicidentification would vitiate the possi- ate mutually exclusive positionalities internal to lesbian erotic ex- bility of any stable set of typologies that explain or describe something change. Consider that identifications are always made in response to lesbian identities. And any effort to supply loss of some kind, and that they involve a certain mimetic practice that denced in Kaja Silvermans recent inquiries into male homosexuality seeks to incorporate the lost love within the very "identity"of the suffer from simplification, and conform, with alarming ease, to the who remains. This was Freud s thesis in"Mourning and Melancholia regulatory requirements of diagnostic epistemic regimes. If incorpor in 1917 and continues to inform contemporary psychoanalytic discus- tion in Freud's sense in 1914 is an effort to preserve a lost and loved sions of identification, 7 ject and to refuse or postpone the recognition of loss and, hence, of For psychoanalytic theorists Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Ruth Ley ef, then to become like one' s mother or father or sibl however, identification and, in particular, identificatory mimetism early"lovers "may be an act of love andor a hateful effort to replace or displace. How would we"typologize"the ambivalence at the heart tally other to itself. " The notion of this Other in the self, as it were of mimetic incorporations such as these? 9 implies that the self/Other distinction is not primarily external (a pow- How does this consideration of psychic identification return us to erful critique of ego psychology follows from this); the self is from the question, what constitutes a subversive repetition? How are trou- the start radically implicated in theOther. "This theory of primary blesome identifications apparent in cultural practices? Well, consider mimetism differs from Freud's account of melancholic incorporation. the way in which heterosexuality naturalizes itself through setting up In Freud's view, which I continue to find useful, incorporation-akind certain illusions of continuity between sex, gender, and desire. When of psychic miming-is. a response to, and refusal of, loss. Gender as Aretha Franklin sings, "you make me feel like a natural woman, "she hes is thus constituted by the variously seems at suggest that some natural potential of her biological gendered Others who have been loved and lost, where the loss is is actualized by her participation in the cultural position of"woman"as suspended through a melancholic and imaginary incorporation(and account of psychic mimesis by way ofi syche, Over and against this xpressed by her "gender"which is then fully known and consecrate the theory of primary mimetism argues an even stronger position in between"sex"as biological facticity and essence, or between gender favor of the non-self-identity of the psychic subject. Mimetism is not and sexuality. Although Aretha appears to be all too glad to have her natur motivated by a drama of loss and wishful recovery,. but ully and paradoxically mindful precede and constitute desire(and motivation)- itself; in this sense chat that confirmation is never guaranteed that the effect of naturalness mimetism would be prior to the possibility of loss and the disappoint- is only achieved as a consequence of that moment of heterosexual ments of love recognition, After all, Aretha sings, you make me feel like a natural woman, suggesting that this is a kind of metaphorical substitution, ar
