Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

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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