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