performative names as bearing equivocal meanings offers both possibilities and
limitations. As Butler has argued, it means that they are open to strategic reinscription,
they can take on non-ordinary meanings and they can function in contexts where that
have not belonged. This suggests that a given identity is not either wounded or
privileged, inert or capable of resistance. Rather, the possibility of both injury and
resistance is intrinsic to performative constitutions. Indeed, a discursive moment of injury
may simultaneously open up particular possibilities for resistance.
While Foucault and Butler have been taken up across a range of disciplines, the
possibilities offered by their work for the generation and analysis of empirical data have
not been fully developed. In the remainder of this paper I will examine the discursive
practices that students deploy in order to resist performatively constituted wounded
identities and (potentially) reinscribe themselves again differentlyii. That is, I will seek to
identify how the subject-hood inscribed through injurious performatives is taken up and
reinscribed. In doing this I will explore the possibilities and limits for a politics of
performative reinscription. I proceed from the understanding that school practices are
permeated by enduring hetero-normative discourses that inscribe a linear relationship
between sex, gender and (hetero-)sexuality within the heterosexual matrix (Butler 1990 &
1993). Indeed, the school is a key site for the proliferation, modification and incessant
inscription of these discourses (Youdell 2000). I also work with a provisional acceptance
of Butler’s (1999) assertion that the call to sever this gender-sexuality link, while
theoretically valid, is of limited usefulness in a discursive context that continues to tie
gender and sexuality together.
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