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