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