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3. The term hypersimulation is borrowed from Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum rather than his one of seduction. It is useful here to raise the ante on terms like artifice and to suggest, as Baudrillard does, its relation to the order of reproduction and late capitalism.
References
Barnes, Djuna. 1961. Nightwood. New York: New Directions.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1979. De la seduction. Paris: Editions Galilee.
Blau, Herbert. 1983. "Disseminating Sodom." Salmagundi 58-59: 221-51.
Bronski, Michael. 1984. Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston: South End Press.
Davis, Madeline, and Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky. 1986. "Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960." Feminist Studies 12, no. 1: 7-26.
de Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
Doane, Mary Ann. 1982. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." Screen 23: 74-87.
Dolan, Jill. 1987. "The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance." Theatre Journal 39, no. 2: 156-74.
Echols, Alice. 1983. "The New Feminism of Yin and Yang." In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, 440-59. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Hollibaugh, Amber, and Moraga, Cherrie. 1983. "What We're Rollin' Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism." In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine" Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, 395-405. New York: Monthly Review Press.    .
Martin, Del, and Lyon, Phyllis. 1972. Lesbian /Woman. New York: Bantam.
Nestle, Joan. 1981. "Butch-Fem Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s." Heresies 12: 21-24. All pagination here is from that publication. Reprinted in Joan Nestle. 1987. A Restricted Country, 100-109. Ithaca: Firebrand Books.
Newton, Esther. 1972. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
"Postmodernism: Text, Politics, Instruction." 1987. International Association for Philosophy and Literature. Lawrence, Kansas, April 30-May 2.
Riviere, Joan. 1929. "Womanliness as a Masquerade." International f ournal of Psycho-Analysis 10: 303-13.
Russo, Mary. 1985. "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory." Working Paper no. 1. Center for Twentieth Century Studies, Milwaukee. Page citations for this text. Reprinted in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Sedgwick, Eve. 1987. "The Epistemology of the Closet." Manuscript. Revised and published in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. "Epistemology of the Closet," from Sedgwick 1990, is reprinted in this volume.
Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Wittig, Monique. 1975. The Lesbian Body. Trans. David LeVay. New York: William Morrow.
Imitation and Gender Insubordination
Judith Butler
Judith Butler, Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, is a philosopher, critic, and theorist. She is the author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990) and co~editor of Feminists Theorize the Political (Routledge, 1 992}. She has also written on a variety of topics in philosophy, pornography, film, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and the politics of sexuality and race. In "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," reprinted herefrom Inside/Out (ed. Diana Fuss, 1991), Butler explores the ways in which the assumption of a lesbian identity can serve not only to affirm hut also to constrain, legislate, determine, or specify one's identity in ways that support the categories of homophobic and heterosexist thought. Asserting that the only thing lesbians may have in common is their collective experiences of sexism and homophobia, Butler argues for subverting both gender and sexual identity by destabilizing the categories that make them up. Once you realize that gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original, that heterosexuality constantly tries and fails to reproduce its own ideal image of itself and that sex and gender achieve their supposed "naturalness" through social performance and psychic scripting alone, then (according to Butler) you can come out as lesbian or gay without trading one straitjacket for another—and the lesbian/gay community can practice a politics that not only emphasizes a shared sexual identity but embraces many kinds of sexual, social, racial, ethnic, economic, and gender difference.
So what is this divided being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible being, it is a being that does not exist, an ontological joke. (Monique Wittig2)
Beyond physical repetition and the psychical or metaphysical repetition, is there an ontological repetition? ... This ultimate repetition, this ultimate theater, gathers everything in a certain way; and in another way, it destroys everything; and in yet another way, it selects from everything. (Gilles Deleuze3)
To Theorize as a Lesbian?
At first I considered writing a different sort of essay, one with a philosophical tone: the "being" of being homosexual. The prospect of being anything, even for pay, has always produced in me a certain anxiety, for "to be" gay, "to be" lesbian seems to be more than a 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. To 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 response to a request, to come out or write in
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the name of an identity which, once produced, sometimes functions as a politically efficacious phantasm. I'm not at ease with "lesbian theories, gay theories," for as I've argued elsewhere,4 identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression. This is not to say that I will not appear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian, but that I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies. So it is unclear how it is that I can contribute to this book and appear under its title, for it announces a set of terms that I propose to contest. One risk I take is to be recolonized by the sign under which I write, and so it is this risk that I seek to thematize. To propose that the invocation of identity is always a risk does not imply that resistance to it is always or only symptomatic of a self-inflicted homophobia. Indeed, a Foucauldian perspective might argue that the affirmation of "homosexuality" is itself an extension of a homophobic discourse. And yet "discourse," he writes on the same page, "can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy."5
So I am skeptical about how the "I" is determined as it operates under the title of the lesbian sign, and I am no more comfortable with its homophobic determination than with those normative definitions offered by other members of the "gay or lesbian community." I'm permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote them, as sites of necessary trouble. In fact, if the category were to offer no trouble, it would cease to be interesting to me: it is precisely the pleasure produced by the instability of those categories which sustains the various erotic practices that make me a candidate for the category to begin with. To install myself within the terms of an identity category would be to turn against the sexuality that the category purports to describe; and this might be true for any identity category which seeks to control the very eroticism that it claims to describe and authorize, much less "liberate."
And what's worse, I do not understand the notion of "theory," and am hardly interested in being cast as its defender, much less in being signified as part of an elite gay/lesbian theory crowd that seeks to establish the legitimacy and domestication of gay/lesbian studies within the academy. Is there a pregiven distinction between theory, politics, culture, media? How do those divisions operate to quell a certain intertextual writing that might well generate wholly different epistemic maps? But I am writing here now: is it too late? Can this writing, can any writing, refuse the terms by which it is appropriated even as, to some extent, that very colonizing discourse enables or produces this stumbling block, this resistance? How do I relate the paradoxical situation of this dependency and refusal?
If the political task is to show that theory is never merely theoria, in the sense of disengaged contemplation, and to insist that it is fully political (phronesis or even praxis), then why not simply call this operation politics, or some necessary permutation of it?
I have begun with confessions of trepidation and a series of disclaimers, but perhaps it will become clear that disclaiming, which is no simple activity, will be what I have to offer as a form of affirmative resistance to a certain regulatory operation of homophobia. The discourse of "coming out" has clearly served its purposes, but what are its risks? And here I am not speaking of unemployment or public attack or violence, which art quite clearly and widely on the increase against those who are perceived as "out" whethe] or not of their own design. Is the "subject" who is "out" free of its subjection anc finally in the clear? Or could it be that the subjection that subjectivates the gay or lesbian subject in some ways continues to oppress, or oppresses most insidiously, once "outness'
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is claimed? "What or who is it that is "out," made manifest and fully disclosed, when and if I reveal myself as lesbian? What is it that is now known, anything? What remains permanently concealed by the very linguistic act that offers up the promise of a transparent revelation of sexuality? Can sexuality even remain sexuality once it submits to a criterion of transparency and disclosure, or does it perhaps cease to be sexuality precisely when the semblance of full explicitness is achieved?6 Is sexuality of any kind even possible without that opacity designated by the unconscious, which means simply that the conscious "I" who would reveal its sexuality is perhaps the last to know the meaning of what it says?
To claim that this is what I am is to suggest a provisional totalization of this "I." But if the I can so determine itself, then that which it excludes in order to make that determination remains constitutive of the determination itself. In other words, such a statement presupposes that the "I" exceeds its determination, and even produces that very excess in and by the act which seeks to exhaust the semantic field ofthat "I." In the act which would disclose the true and full content of that "I," a certain radical concealment is thereby produced. For it is always finally unclear what is meant by invoking the lesbian-signifier, since its signification is always to some degree out of one's control, but also because its specificity can only be demarcated by exclusions that return to disrupt its claim to coherence. What, if anything, can lesbians be said to share? And who will decide this question, and in the name of whom? If I claim to be a lesbian, I "come out" only to produce a new 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 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 empty, that it cannot be substituted for with a set of descriptions.7 And perhaps that is a situation to be valued. Conventionally, one comes out of the closet (and yet, how often is it the case that we are "outted" when we are young and without resources?); so we are out of the closet, but into what? what new unbounded spatiality? the room, the den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some new enclosure whose door, like Kafka's door, produces the expectation of a fresh air and a light of illumination that never arrives? Curiously, it is the figure of the closet that produces this expectation, and which guarantees its dissatisfaction. For being "out" always depends to some extent on being "in"; it gains its meaning only within that polarity. Hence, being "out" must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as "out." In this sense, outness can only produce a new opacity; and the closet produces the promise of a disclosure that can, by definition, never come. Is this infinite postponement of the disclosure of "gayness," produced by the very act of "coming out," to be lamented? Or is this very deferral of the signified to be valued, a site for the production of values, precisely because the term now takes on a life that cannot be, can never be, permanently controlled?
It is possible to argue that whereas no transparent or full revelation is afforded by "lesbian" and "gay," there remains a political imperative to use these necessary errors or category mistakes, as it were (what Gayatri Spivak might call "catachrestic" operations: to use a proper name improperly8), to rally and represent an oppressed political constituency. Clearly, I am not legislating against the use of the term. My question is simply: which use will be legislated, and what play will there be between legislation and use such that the instrumental uses of "identity" do not become regulatory imperatives? If it is already true that "lesbians" and "gay men" have been traditionally designated as impossible identities, errors of classification, unnatural disasters within juridico-medical discourses, or, what perhaps amounts to the same, the very paradigm of what calls to be classified, regulated, and controlled, then perhaps these sites of
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disruption, error, confusion, and trouble can be the very rallying points for a certain resistance to classification and to identity as such.
The question is not one of avowing or disavowing the category of lesbian or gay, but, rather, why it is that the category becomes the site of this "ethical" choice? What does it mean to avow a category that can only maintain its specificity and coherence by performing a prior set of disavowals? Does this make "coming out" into the avowal of disavowal, that is, a return to the closet under the guise of an escape? And it is not something like heterosexuality or bisexuality that is disavowed by the category, but a set of identificatory and practical crossings between these categories that renders the discreteness of each equally suspect. Is it not possible to maintain and pursue heterosexual identifications and aims within homosexual practice, and homosexual identifications and aims within heterosexual practices? If a sexuality is to be disclosed, what will be taken as the true determinant of its meaning: the phantasy structure, the act, the orifice, the gender, the anatomy? And if the practice engages a complex interplay of all of those, which one of this erotic dimensions will come to stand for the sexuality that requires them all? Is it the specificity of a lesbian experience or lesbian desire or lesbian sexuality that lesbian theory needs to elucidate? Those efforts have only and always produced a set of contests and refusals which should by now make it clear that there is no necessarily common element among lesbians, except perhaps that we all know something about how homophobia works against women—although, even then, the language and the analysis we use will differ.
To argue that there might be a specificity to lesbian sexuality has seemed a necessary counterpoint to the claim that lesbian sexuality is just heterosexuality once removed, or that it is derived, or that it does not exist. But perhaps the claim of specificity, on the one hand, and the claim of derivativeness or non-existence, on the other, are not as contradictory as they seem. Is it not possible that lesbian sexuality is a process that reinscribes the power domains that it resists, that it is constituted in part from the very heterosexual matrix that it seeks to displace, and that its specificity is to be established, not outside or beyond that reinscription or reiteration, but in the very modality and effects ofthat reinscription? In other words, the negative constructions of lesbianism as a fake or a bad copy can be occupied and reworked to call into question the claims of heterosexual priority. In a sense I hope to make clear in what follows, lesbian sexuality can be understood to redeploy its "derivativeness" in the service of displacing hegemonic 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 copy against the framework that privileges heterosexuality as origin, and so "derive" the former from the latter. This description requires a reconsideration of imitation, drag, and other forms of sexual crossing that affirm the internal complexity of a lesbian sexuality constituted in part within the very matrix of power that it is compelled both to reiterate and to oppose.
On the Being of Gayness as Necessary Drag
The professionalization of gayness requires a certain performance and production of a "self" which is the constituted effect of a discourse that nevertheless claims to "represent" that self as a prior truth. When I spoke at the conference on homosexuality in 1989,9 I found myself telling my friends beforehand that I was off to Yale to be a lesbian, which of course didn't mean that I wasn't one before, but that somehow then, as I spoke in that context, I was one in some more thorough and totalizing way, at least for the time being. So I am one, and my qualifications are even fairly unambiguous. Since I was
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sixteen, being a lesbian is what I've been. So what's the anxiety, the discomfort? Well, it has something to do with that redoubling, the way I can say, I'm going to Yale to be a lesbian; a lesbian is what I've been being for so long. How is it that I can both "be" one, and yet endeavor to be one at the same time? When and where does my being a lesbian come into play, when and where does this playing a lesbian constitute something like what I am? To say that I "play" at being one is not to say that I am not one "really"; rather, how and where í play at being one is the way in which that "being" gets established, instituted, circulated, and confirmed. This is not a performance from which I can take radical distance, for this is deep-seated play, psychically entrenched play, and this "1" does not play its lesbianism as a role. Rather, it is through the repeated play of this sexuality that the "I" is insistently reconstituted as a lesbian "I"; paradoxically, it is precisely the repetition of that play that establishes as well the instability of the very category that it constitutes. For if the "I" is a site of repetition, that is, if the "I" only achieves the semblance of identity through* a certain repetition of itself, then the I is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains it. In other words, does or can the "I" ever repeat itself, cite itself, faithfully, or is there always a displacement from its former moment that establishes the permanently non-self-identical status ofthat "I" or its "being lesbian"? What "performs" does not exhaust the "I"; it does not lay out in visible terms the comprehensive content ofthat "I," for if the performance is "repeated," there is always the question of what differentiates from each other the moments of identity that are repeated. And if the "I" is the effect of a certain repetition, one which produces the semblance of a continuity or coherence, then there is no "I" that precedes the gender that it is said to perform; the repetition, and the failure to repeat, produce a string of performances that constitute and contest the coherence of that "I."
But politically, we might argue, isn't it quite crucial to insist on lesbian and gay identities precisely because they are being threatened with erasure and obliteration from homophobic quarters? Isn't the above theory complkitous with those political forces that would obliterate the possibility of gay and lesbian identity? Isn't it "no accident" that such theoretical contestations of identity emerge within a political climate that is performing a set of similar obliterations of homosexual identities through legal and political means?
The question I want to raise in return is this: ought such threats of obliteration ..dictate the terms of the political resistance to them, and if they do, do such homophobic effortTtirthaf-extent win the battle from the start? There is no question that gays and lesbians are threatened by the violence of public erasure, but the decision to counter that violence must be careful not to reinstall another in its place. Which version of lesbian or gay ought to be rendered visible, and which internal exclusions will that rendering visible institute? Can the visibility of identity suffice as a political strategy, or can it only be the starting point for a strategic intervention which calls for a transformation of policy? Is it not a sign of despair over public politics when identity becomes its own policy, bringing with it those who would "police" it from various sides? And this is not a call to return to silence or invisibility, but, rather, to make use of a category that can be called into question, made to account for what it excludes. That any consolidation of identity requires some set of differentiations and exclusions seems clear. But which ones ought to be valorized? That the identity-sign I use now has its purposes seems right, but there is no way to predict or control the political uses to which that sign will be put in the future. And perhaps this is a kind of openness, regardless of its risks, that ought to be safeguarded for political reasons. If the rendering visible of lesbian/ gay identity now presupposes a set of exclusions, then perhaps part of what is necessarily excluded is thefiuture uses of the sign. There is a political necessity to use some sign now,
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and we do, but how to use it in such a way that its futural significations are not foreclosed? How to use the sign and avow its temporal contingency at once?
In avowing the sign's strategic provisionality (rather than its strategic essentialism), that identity can become a site of contest and revision, indeed, take on a future set of significations that those of us who use it now may not be able to foresee. It is in the safeguarding of the future of the political signifiers—preserving the signifier as a site of rearticulation—that Laclau and Mouffe discern its democratic promise.
Within contemporary U.S. politics, there are a vast number of ways 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 for sanctioning representations of "homo-eroticism" focuses various homophobic fantasies of what gay men are and do on the work of Robert Mapplethorpe.10 In a sense, for Helms, gay men exist as objects of prohibition; they are, in his twisted fantasy, sadomasochistic exploiters of children, the paradigmatic exemplars of "obscenity"; in a sense, the lesbian is not even produced within this discourse as a prohibited object. Here it becomes important to recognize that oppression works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable (un)subjects—abjects, we might call them—who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the law. Here oppression works through the production of a domain of unthinkability and unnameability. Lesbianism is not explicitly prohibited in part because it has not even made its way into the thinkable, the imaginable, that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates the real and the nameable. How, then, to "be" a lesbian in a political context in which the lesbian does not exist? That is, in a political discourse that wages its violence against lesbianism in part by excluding lesbianism from discourse itself? To be prohibited explicitly is to occupy a discursive site from which something like a reverse-discourse can be articulated; to be implicitly proscribed is not even to qualify as an object of prohibition.11 And though homosexualities of all kinds in this present climate are being erased, reduced, and (then) reconstituted as sites of radical homophobic fantasy, it is important to retrace the different routes by which the unthinkability of homosexuality is being constituted time and again.
It is one thing to be erased from discourse, and yet another to be present within discourse as an abiding falsehood. Hence, there is a political imperative to render lesbianism visible, but how is that to be done outside or through existing regulatory regimes? Can the exclusion from ontology itself become a rallying point for resistance?
Here is something like a confession which is meant merely to thematize the impossibility of confession: As a young person, I suffered for a long time, and I suspect many people have, from being told, explicitly or implicitly, that what I "am" is a copy, an imitation, a derivative example, a shadow of the real. Compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic; the norm that determines the real implies that "being" lesbian is always a kind of miming, a vain erFort to participate in the phantasmatic plenitude of naturalized heterosexuality which will always and only fail.12 And yet, I remember quite distinctly when I first read in Esther Newton's Mother Camp: Female 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 structure of impersonation by which any gender is assumed. Drag is not the putting on of a gender that belongs properly to some other group, i.e. an act of expropriation or appropriation that assumes that gender is the rightful property of sex, that "masculine" belongs to "male" and "feminine" belongs to "female." There is no "proper" gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some sense that sex's cultural property. Where
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that notion of the "proper" operates, it is always and only improperly installed as the effect of a compulsory system. Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, hut gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. In other words, the naturalistic effects of het-erosexualized genders are produced through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phantasmatic ideal of heterosexual identity, one that is produced by the imitation as its effect. In this sense, the "reality" of heterosexual identities is performatively constituted through an imitation that sets itself up as the origin and the ground of all imitations. In other words, heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself— and failing. Precisely because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself. Indeed, in its efforts to naturalize itself as the original, heterosexuality must be understood as a compulsive and compulsory repetition that can only produce the effect of its own originality; in other words, compulsory heterosexual identities, those ontologically consolidated phantasms of "man" and "woman," are theatrically produced effects that posture as grounds, origins, the normative measure of the real.14
Reconsider then the homophobic charge that queens and hutches and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real. Here "imitation" carries the meaning of "derivative" or "secondaryr^a copy of an origin which is itself the ground of all copies, but which is itselfa copy of nothing. Logically, this notion of an "origin" is suspect, for how can something operate as an origin if there are no secondary consequences which retrospectively confirm the originality of that origin? The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives. Hence, if it were not for the notion of the homosexual as copy, there would be no construct of heterosexuality as origin. Heterosexuality here presupposes homosexuality. And if the homosexual as copy precedes the heterosexual as origin, then it seems only fair to concede that the copy comes before the origin, and that homosexuality is thus the origin, and heterosexuality the copy.
But simple inversions are not really possible. For it is only as a copy that homosexuality can be argued to precede heterosexuality as the origin. In other words, the entire framework of copy and origin proves radically unstable as each position inverts into the other and confounds the possibility of any stable way to locate the temporal or logical priority of either term.
But let us then consider this problematic inversion from a psychic/political perspective. If the structure of gender imitation is such that the imitate? is to some degree produced—or, rather, reproduced—by imitation (see again Derrida's inversion and displacement of mimesis in "The Double Session"), then to claim that gay and lesbian identities are implicated in heterosexual norms or in hegemonic culture generally is not to derive gayness from straightness. On the contrary, imitation does not copy that which is prior, but produces and inverts the very terms of priority and derivativeness. Hence, if gay identities are implicated in heterosexuality, that is not the same as claiming that they are determined or derived from heterosexuality, and it is not the same as claiming that that heterosexuality is the only cultural network in which they are implicated. These are, quite literally, inverted imitations, ones which invert the order of imitated
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and imitation, and which, in the process, expose the fundamental dependency of "the origin" on that which it claims to produce as its secondary effect.
What follows if we concede from the start that gay identities as derivative inversions are in part defined in terms of the very heterosexual identities from which they are differentiated? If heterosexuality is an impossible imitation of itself, an imitation that performatively constitutes itself as the original, then the imitative parody of "heterosexuality"—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 no original. Put in yet a different way, the parodie or imitative effect of gay identities works neither to copy nor to emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that is, that it "knows" its own possibility of becoming undone: hence, its compulsion to repeat which is at once a foreclosure of that which threatens its coherence. That it can never eradicate that risk attests to its profound dependency upon the homosexuality that it seeks fully to eradicate and never can or that it seeks to make second, but which is always already there as a prior possibility.15 Although this failure of naturalized heterosexuality might constitute a source of pathos for heterosexuality itself—what its theorists often refer to as its constitutive malaise—it can become an occasion for a subversive and proliferating parody of gender norms in which the very claim to originality and to the real is shown to be the effect of a certain kind of naturalized gender mime.
It is important to recognize the ways in which heterosexual norms reappear within gay identities, to affirm that gay and lesbian identities are not only structured in part by dominant heterosexual frames, but that they are not for that reason determined by them. They are running commentaries on those naturalized positions as well, parodie replays and resignifications of precisely those heterosexual structures that would consign gay life to discursive domains of unreality and unthinkability. But to be constituted or structured in part by the very heterosexual norms by which gay people are oppressed is not, I repeat, to be claimed or determined by those structures. And it is not necessary to think of such heterosexual constructs as the pernicious intrusion of "the straight mind," one that must be rooted out in its entirety. In a way, the presence of heterosexual constructs and positionalities in whatever form in gay and lesbian identities presupposes that there is a gay and lesbian repetition of straightness, a recapitulation of straightness— which is itself a repetition and recapitulation of its own ideality—within its own terms, a site in which all sorts of resignifying and parodie repetitions become possible. The parodie replication and resignification of heterosexual constructs within non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called original, but it shows that heterosexuality only constitutes itself as the original through a convincing act of repetition. The more that "act" is expropriated, the more the heterosexual claim to originality is exposed as illusory.
Although I have concentrated in the above on the reality-effects of 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 will. There is no volitional subject behind the mime who decides, as it were, which gender it will be today. On the contrary, the very possibility of becoming a viable subject requires that a certain gender mime be already underway. The "being" of the subject is no more self-identical than the "being" or an) gender; in fact, coherent gender, achieved through an apparent repetition of úxe same. produces as its effect the illusion of a prior and volitional subject. In this sense, gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express. It is a compulsory
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performance in the sense that acting out, of line with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, and violence, not to mention the transgressive pleasures produced by those very prohibitions.              \
To claim that there is no performer prior to the performed, that the performance is performative, that the performance constitutes the appearance of a "subject" as its effect is difficult to accept. This difficulty is the result of a predisposition to think of sexuality and gender as "expressing" in some indirect or direct way a psychic reality that precedes 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 the psyche marks the psychic as that which exceeds the domain of the conscious subject. This psychic excess is precisely what is being systematically denied by the notion of a volitional "subject" who elects at will which gender and/or sexuality to be at any given time and place. It is this excess which erupts within the intervals of those repeated gestures and acts that construct the apparent uniformity of heterosexual positionalities, indeed which compels the repetition itself, and which guarantees its perpetual failure. In this sense, it is this excess which, within the heterosexual economy, implicitly includes homosexuality, that perpetual threat of a disruption which is quelled through a reenforced repetition of the same. And yet, if repetition is the way in which power works to construct the illusion of a seamless heterosexual identity, if heterosexuality is compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity, then this is an identity permanently at risk, for what if it fails to repeat, or if the very exercise of repetition is redeployed for a very different performative purpose? If there is, as it were, always a compulsion to repeat, repetition never fully accomplishes identity. That there is a need for a repetition at all is a sign that identity is not self-identical. It requires to be instituted again and again, which is to say that it runs the risk of becoming tie-instituted at every interval. So what is this psychic excess, and what will constitute a subversive or tie-instituting repetition? First, it is necessary to consider that sexuality always exceeds any given performance, presentation, or narrative which is why it is not possible to derive or read off a sexuality from any given gender presentation. And sexuality may be said to exceed any definitive narrativization. Sexuality is never fully "expressed" in a performance or practice; there will be passive and butchy femmes, femmy and aggressive butches, and both of those, and more, will turn out to describe more or less anatomically stable "males" and "females," There are no direct expressive or causal lines between sex, gender, gender presentation, sexual practice, fantasy and sexuality. None of those terms captures or determines the rest. Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely that which does not appear and that which, to some degree, can never appear. This is perhaps the most fundamental reason why sexuality is to some degree always closeted, especially to the one who would express it through acts of self-disclosure. That which is excluded for a given gender presentation to "succeed" may be precisely what is played out sexually, that is, an "inverted" relation, as it were, between gender and gender presentation, and gender presentation and sexuality. On the other hand, both gender presentation and sexual practices may corollate such that it appears that the former "expresses" the latter, and yet both are jointly constituted by the very sexual possibilities that they exclude.
This logic of inversion gets played out interestingly in versions of lesbian butch and femme gender stylization. For a butch can present herself as capable, forceful, and all-providing, and a stone butch may well seek to constitute her lover as the exclusive site of erotic attention and pleasure. And yet, this "providing" butch who seems at first to replicate a certain husband-like role, can find herself caught in a logic of inversion whereby that "providingness" turns to a self-sacrifice, which implicates her in the most ancient trap of feminine self-abnegation. She may well find herself in a situation of
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radical need, which is 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 specter of that inversion, or takes pleasure in it. On the other hand, the femme who, as Amber... Hollibaugh has argued, "orchestrates" sexual exchange,16 may well eroticize a certain i dependency only to learn that the very power to orchestrate that dependency exposes her own incontrovertible power, at which point she inverts into a butch or becomes caught up in the specter of that inversion, or perhaps delights in it.
Psychic Mimesis
What stylizes or forms an erotic style and/or a gender presentation—and that which
makes such categories inherently unstable—is a set of psychic identifications that are not
simple to describe. Some psychoanalytic theories tend to construe identification and
desire as two mutually exclusive relations to love objects that have been lost through
prohibition and/or separation. Any intense emotional attachment thus divides into either
wanting to have someone or wanting to be that someone, but never both at once. It is
important to consider that identification and desire can coexist, and that their formulation
in terms of mutually exclusive oppositions serves a heterosexual matrix. But I would.
like to focus attention on yet a different construal ofthat scenario, namely, that "wanting
to be" and "wanting to have" can operate to differentiate mutually exclusive position-
alities internal to lesbian erotic exchange. Consider that identifications are always made
in response to loss of some kind, and that they involve a certain mimetic practice that
seeks to incorporate the lost love within the very "identity" of the one who remains.
This was Freud's thesis in "Mourning and Melancholia" in 1917 and continues to inform
contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of identification.17
For psychoanalytic theorists Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Ruth Leys, however, identification and, in particular, identificatory mimetism, precedes "identity" and constitutes identity as that which is fundamentally "other to itself." The notion of this Other in the self, as it were, implies that the self/Other distinction is not primarily external (a powerful critique of ego psychology follows from this); the self is from the start radically implicated in the "Other." This theory of primary mimetism differs from Freud's account of melancholic incorporation. In Freud's view, which I continue to find useful, incorporation—a kind of psychic miming—is a response to, and refusal of, loss. Gender as the site of such psychic mimes is thus constituted by the variously gendered Others who have been loved and lost, where the loss is suspended through a melancholic and imaginary incorporation (and preservation) of those Others into the psyche. Over and against this account of psychic mimesis by way of incorporation and melancholy, the theory of primary mimetism argues an even stronger position in favor of the non-self-identity of the psychic subject. Mimetism is not motivated by a drama of loss and wishful recovery, but appears to precede and constitute desire (and motivation) itself; in this sense, mimetism would be prior to the possibility of loss and the disappointments of love.
Whether loss or mimetism is primary (perhaps an undecidable problem), the psychic subject is nevertheless constituted internally by differentially gendered Others and is, therefore, never, as a gender, self-identical.
In my view, the self only becomes a self on the condition that it has suffered a separation (grammar fails us here, for the "it" only becomes differentiated through that separation), a loss which is suspended and provisionally resolved through a melancholic incorporation of some "Other." That "Other" installed in the self thus establishes the permanent incapacity ofthat "self" to achieve self-identity; it is as it were always already
/
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i disrupted by that Other; the disruption of the O^her at the heart of the self is the very
condition of that self's possibility.18                    /
Such a consideration of psychic identification would vitiate the possibility of any stable set of typologies that explain or describe something like gay or lesbian identities. And any efforts to supply one—as evidenced in Kaja Silverman's recent inquiries into male homosexuality—suffer from simplification, and conform, with alarming ease, to the regulatory requirements of diagnostic epistemic regimes. If incorporation in Freud's sense in 1914 is an effort to preserve a lost and loved object and to refuse or postpone the recognition of loss, and, hence, of grief, then to become like one's mother or father or sibling or other early "lovers" may be an act of love and/or a hateful effort to replace or displace. How would we "typologize" the ambivalence at the heart of mimetic
incorporations such as these?19
How does this consideration of psychic identification return us to the question, what constitutes a subversive repetition? How are troublesome identifications apparent in cultural practices? Well, consider the way in which heterosexuality naturalizes itself through setting up certain illusions of continuity between sex, gender, and desire. When Aretha Franklin sings, "you make me feel like a natural woman," she seems at first to suggest that some natural potential of her biological sex is actualized by her participation in the cultural position of "woman" as object of heterosexual recognition. Something in her "sex" is thus expressed by her "gender" which is then fully known and consecrated within the heterosexual scene. There is no breakage, no discontinuity between "sex" as biological facticity and essence, or between gender and sexuality. Although Aretha appears to be all too glad to have her naturalness confirmed, she also seems fully and paradoxically mindful that that confirmation is never guaranteed, that the effect of naturalness is only achieved as a consequence ofthat moment of heterosexual recognition. After all, Aretha sings, you make me feel like a natural woman, suggesting that this is a kind of metaphorical substitution, an act of imposture, a kind of sublime and momentary participation in an ontological illusion produced by the mundane operation of heterosexual drag.
But what if Aretha were singing to me? Or what if she were singing to a drag
queen whose performance somehow confirmed her own?
How do we take account of these kinds of identifications? It's not that there is
some kind of sex that exists in hazy biological form that is somehow expressed in the
gait, the posture, the gesture; and that some sexuality then expresses both that apparent
gender or that more or less magical sex. If gender is drag, and if it is an imitation that
regularly produces the ideal it attempts to approximate, then gender is a performance
that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core; it produces
on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait (that array of corporeal theatrics
understood as gender presentation), the illusion of an inner depth. In effect, one way
that genders gets naturalized is through being constructed as an inner psychic or physical
necessity. And yet, it is always a surface sign, a signification on and with the public body
that produces this illusion of an inner depth, necessity, or essence that is somehow
magically, causally expressed.
To dispute the psyche as inner depth, however, is not to refuse the psyche altogether. On the contrary, the psyche calls to be rethought precisely as a compulsive repetition, as that which conditions and disables the repetitive performance of identity. If every performance repeats itself to institute the effect of identity, then every repetition requires an interval between the acts, as it were, in which risk and excess threaten to disrupt the identity being constituted. The unconscious is this excess that enables and contests every performance, and which never fully appears within the performance itself. The psyche
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is not "in" the body, but in the very signifying process through which that body comes to appear; it is the lapse in repetition as well as its compulsion, precisely what the performance seeks to deny, and that which compels it from the start.
To locate the psyche within this signifying chain as the instability of all iterability is not the same as claiming that it is inner core that is awaiting its full and liberatory expression. On the contrary, the psyche is the permanent failure of expression, a failure that has its values, for it impels repetition and so reinstates the possibility of disruption. What then does it mean to pursue disruptive repetition within compulsory heterosexuality?
Although compulsory heterosexuality often presumes that there is first a sex that is expressed through a gender and then through a sexuality, it may now be necessary fully to invert and displace that operation of thought. If a regime of sexuality mandates a compulsory performance of sex, then it may be only through that performance that the binary system of gender and the binary system of sex come to have intelligibility at all. It may be that the very categories of sex, of sexual identity, of gender are produced or maintained in the effects of this compulsory performance, effects which are disingenuously renamed as causes, origins, disingenuously lined up within a causal or expressive sequence that the heterosexual norm produces to legitimate itself as the origin of all
sex. How then to expose the causal lines as retrospectively and performatively produced   .....
fabrications, and to engage gender itself as an inevitable fabrication, to fabricate gender in terms which reveal every claim to the origin, the inner, the true, and the real as nothing other than the effects of drag, whose subversive possibilities ought to be played and replayed to make the "sex" of gender into a site of insistent political play? Perhaps this will be a matter of working sexuality against identity, even against gender, and of letting that which cannot fully appear in any performance persist in its disruptive promise.
Notes
1.  Parts of this essay were given as a presentation at the Conference on Homosexuality at Yale University in October, 1989.
2.  "The Mark of Gender," Feminist Issues 5, no. 2 (1985): 6.
3.  Difference et repetition (Paris: PUF, 1968), 374; my translation.
4.  Gender Trouble; Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. JohnHürley (New York: Random House, 1980), 101.                                                                       /
6.  Here I would doubtless differ from the very fine analysis of Hitchcock's Rope offered by D.A. Miller. See "Anal Rope," in Inside/Out: Lesbian TheoriesjGay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991).                                                        /
7.  For an example of "coming out" that is strictly uncpnfessional and which, finally, offers no content for the category of lesbian, see Barbara Johnson's deftly constructed "Sula Passing: No Passing" presentation at UCLA, May 1990.
8.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Displacement and the Discourse of Woman." In Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
9.  Let me take this occasion to apologize to the social worker at that conference who asked a question about how to deal with those clients with AIDS who turned to Bernie Segal and others for the purposes of psychic healing. At the time, I understood this questioner to be suggesting that such clients were full of self-hatred because they were trying to find the causes of AIDS m their own selves. The questioner and I appear to agree that any effort to locate the responsibility for AIDS in those who suffer from it is politically and ethically wrong. I thought the questioner, however, was prepared to tell his clients that they were self-hating, and I reacted strongly (too
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strongly) to the paternalistic prospect that this person Was going to pass judgment on someone who was clearly not only suffering, but already passing judgment on him or herself. To call another person self-hating is itself an act of power that calls for some kind of scrutiny, and I think in response to someone who is already dealing with AIDS, that is perhaps the last thing one needs to hear. I also happened to have a friend who sought out advice from Bernie Segal, not with the belief that there is an exclusive or even primary psychic cause or solution for AIDS, but that there might be a psychic contribution to be made to surviving with AIDS. Unfortunately, I reacted quickly to this questioner, and with some anger. And I regret now that I didn't have my wits about me to discuss the distinctions with him that I have just laid out.
Curiously, this incident was invoked at a CLAGS (Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies) meeting at CUNY sometime in December of 1989 and, according to those who told me about it, my angry denunciation of the social worker was taken to be symptomatic of the political insensitivity of a "theorist" in dealing with someone who is actively engaged in AIDS work. That attribution implies that I do not do AIDS work, that I am not politically engaged, and that the social worker in question does not read theory. Needless to say, I was reacting angrily on behalf of an absent friend with AIDS who sought out Bernie Segal and company. So as I offer this apology to the social worker, I wait expectantly that the CLAGS member who misunderstood me will offer me one in turn.
10.  See my "The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess," differences 2, no. 2 (Summer 1990). Since the writing of this essay, lesbian artists and representations have also come under attack.
11. It is this particular ruse of erasure which Foucault for the most part fails to take account of in his analysis of power. He almost always presumes that power takes place through discourse as its instrument, and that oppression is linked with subjection and subjectivation, that is, that it is installed as the formative principle of the identity of subjects.
12.  Although miming suggests that there is a prior model which is being copied, it can have the effect of exposing that prior model as purely phantasmatic. In Jacques Derrida's "The Double Session" in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), he considers the textual effect of the mime in Mallarmé's "Mimique." There Derrida argues that the mime does not imitate or copy some prior phenomenon, idea, or figure, but constitutes—some might say performatively—the phantasm of the original in and through the mime:
He represents nothing, imitates nothing, does not have to conform to any prior referent with the aim of achieving adequation or verisimilitude. One can here foresee an objection: since the mime imitates nothing, reproduces nothing, opens up in its origin the very thing he is tracing out, presenting, or producing, he must be the very movement of truth. Not, of course, truth in the form of adequation between the representation and the present of the thing itself, or between the imitator and the imitated, but truth as the present unveiling of the present. . . . But this is not the case. . . . We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing: faced, so to speak, with a double that couples no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference. ... This speculum reflects no reality: it produces mere "reality-effects".... In this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh ... (206)
13.  Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
14.  In a sense, one might offer a redescription of the above in Lacanian terms. The sexual "positions" of heterosexually differentiated "man" and "woman" are part of the Symbolic, that is, an ideal embodiment of the Law of sexual difference which constitutes the object of imaginary pursuits, but which is always thwarted by the "real." These symbolic positions for Lacan are by definition impossible to occupy even as they are impossible to resist as the structuring telos of desire. I accept the former point, and reject the latter one. The imputation of universal necessity to such positions simply encodes compulsory heterosexuality at the level of the Symbolic, and the "failure" to achieve it is implicitly lamented as a source of heterosexual pathos.
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15.  Of course, it is £ve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) which traces the subleties of this kind of panic in Western heterosexual epistemes.
16.  Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga, "What We're Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 394-405.
17. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); for citations of Ruth Leys's work, see the following two endnotes.
18.  For a very fine analysis of primary mimetism with direct implications for gender formation, see Ruth Leys, "The Real Miss Beauchamp: The History and Sexual Politics of the Multiple Personality Concept," in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). For Leys, a primary mimetism or suggestibility-requires that the "self" from the start is constituted by its incorporations; the effort to differentiate oneself from that by which one is constituted is, of course, impossible, but it does entail a certain "incorporative violence," to use her term. The violence of identification is in this way in the service of an effort at differentiation, to take the place of the Other who is, as it were, installed at the foundation of the self. That this replacement, which seeks to be a displacement, fails, and must repeat itself endlessly, becomes the trajectory of one's psychic career.
19.  Here again, I think it is the work of Ruth Leys which will clarify some of the complex questions of gender constitution that emerge from a close psychoanalytic consideration of imitation and identification. Her forthcoming book manuscript will doubtless galvanize this field: The Subject of Imitation.
Spare Parts:
The Surgical Construction of Gender
Marjorie Garber
Marjorie Garber, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University, is a Shakespearean scholar as well as a literary and cultural critic. In addition to a number of books on Elizabethan culture and its modern reception, she has recently published a major survey of the varieties of transvestism and their cultural significance, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Routledge, 1992). In the essay reprinted here, Garber examines the figure of the transsexual—of the person who acquires by means of surgery the anatomy and morphology of a different sex—in order to bring out the fundamental asymmetries that govern the social identities and definitions of "male" and "female." She notes that the blurring of sexual boundaries caused by the transsexual motivates a series of efforts to fix more precisely the meanings of both sex and gender—efforts which ultimately serve only to reveal, however, the instability and insubstantiality of each of those categories. Garber's approach to sex adds an unexpectedly literal dimension to the meaning and practice of what critical theorists call "deconstruction."
The Maserati I picked up in Modena was a reconditioned model. Previously owned, the car had been lovingly rebuilt by the craftsman who had originally made it. The guarantee was the same as if it had been new. My automobile seemed a perfect reflection of my personal state. I too was reconditioned or at least on the way to being so. (Renée Richards, Second Serve)
Although I originally wrote this essay for a special issue of differences concerned with male subjectivity, what I aim to do in it, at least initially, is to put the viability of such a concept in question. I suspect that "male subjectivity" is a recuperative cultural fantasy, a theoretical back formation from "female subjectivity," where the latter evolved as a politically necessary critique of the universal subject, "man." Does "male subjectivity," conceptualized, represent anything more than a wishful logic of equality, which springs from a feminist desire to make "man" part rather than whole? Is "male subjectivity" not, in fact, like "female fetishism," a theoretical tit-for-tat which finally demonstrates the limits of theorization when it comes to matters of gender construction?
Consider, for instance, the dissymmetry in the following rhetorical matter. Long before critics wrote so eloquently about the constructedness (rather than the innateness) of gender, writers and ordinary citizens spoke readily about experiences that would "make a man" of some (male) candidate: war, perhaps, or sexual initiation, or some
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