Qui donc peut se tenir au-dessus de la mêlée interprétative en un lieu lui permettant d’assigner à chaque énoncé une signification constante ? Et pourquoi considère-t-on que la menace que ferait peser une telle autorité est moins grave que celle que constitue l’interprétation équivoque ?…
Importantly, however, there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only, to repeat an earlier phrase, a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is less an “act,” singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power. Hence, the judge who authorizes and installs the situation he names invariably cites the law that he applies, and it is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or conferring power. And though it may appear that the binding power of his…
As much as it is necessary to assert political demands through recourse to identity categories, and to lay claim to the power to name oneself and determine the conditions under which that name is used, it is also impossible to sustain that kind of mastery over the trajectory of those categories within discourse. This is not an argument against using identity categories, but it is a reminder of the risk that attends every such use. The expectation of self-determination that self-naming arouses is paradoxically contested by the historicity of the name itself : by the history of the usages that one…
One might be tempted to say that identity categories are insufficient because every subject position is the site of converging relations of power that are not univocal. But such a formulation underestimates the radical challenge to the subject that such converging relations imply. For there is no self-identical subject who houses or bears these relations, no site at which such relations converge. This converging and interarticulation is the contemporary fate of the subject. In other words, the subject as a self-identical entity is no more. It is in this sense that the temporary totalization performed by identity categories is a necessary…
How, if at all, is the notion of discursive resignification linked to the notion of gender parody or impersonation ? First, what is meant by understanding gender as an impersonation ? Does this mean that one puts on a mask or persona, that there is a “one” who precedes that “putting on,” who is something other than its gender from the start ? Or does this miming, this impersonating precede and form the “one,” operating as its formative precondition rather than its dispensable artifice ? The construal of gender-as-drag according to the first model appears to be the effect of a number of circumstances.…
The critical potential of “drag” centrally concerns a critique of a prevailing truth-regime of “sex,” one that I take to be pervasively heterosexist : the distinction between the “inside” truth of femininity, considered as psychic disposition or ego-core, and the “outside” truth, considered as appearance or presentation, produces a contradictory formation of gender in which no fixed “truth” can be established. Gender is neither a purely psychic truth, conceived as “internal” and “hidden,” nor is it reducible to a surface appearance ; on the contrary, its undecidability is to be traced as the play between psyche and appearance (where the latter domain…
Is there perhaps a specific gender pain that provokes such fantasies of a sexual practice that would transcend gender difference altogether, in which the marks of masculinity and femininity would no longer be legible ? Would this not be a sexual practice paradigmatically fetishistic, trying not to know what it knows, but knowing it all the same ?…