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