preserves the possibility for a contextual politics that intervenes in the meaning and
legitimacy of discourse:
‘the possibility for the speech act to take on a non-ordinary meaning, to function
in contexts where it has not belonged, is precisely the political promise of the
performative, one that positions the performative at the center of a politics of
hegemony, one that offers an unanticipated political future for deconstructive
thinking’ (Butler 1997a:161 my emphasis).
The theoretical framework that I am using, then, suggests identity categories, including
those of gender and sexuality, constitute subjects. These categorical names are central to
the performative interpellation of the subject who is unintelligible, if not unimaginable,
without these. To be called, for example, ‘fag’ is to be simultaneously interpellated as
subject and as a particular (but equivocal) type of subject. Such a naming joins a
citational chain that inevitably inscribes hierarchical binary relations (Derrida 1988).
These citational chains not only act to constitute the identity named, they also constitute
the identity that is the silent partner in the dichotomy: the identity ‘fag’ silently
constitutes hetero-masculinity.
That identity categories are at once subjectivating and equivocal does not imply that these
categories should be, or even could be, abandoned. It is these identities, performatively
interpellated, that constitute the subject. And it is their constitutive force and equivocacy
which open up the possibility for the subject’s discursive agency. Understanding these
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