Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

-- EPISODE 1 HERE --

The two scenes of Episode 1 can be understood as instances of injurious performatives.
With such an understanding, these scenes can be examined to identify how injurious
performatives provisionally constitute particular, denigrated, wounded identities through
momentary and apparently insignificant discursive practices within the classroom.
Through this analysis I suggest that Daniel’s incomplete assertion that Scott is ‘getting
ready’, and Ohan’s refusal of proximity to and exclusion of Ian, are, respectively,
linguistic and bodily performatives. These provisionally constitute Scott and Ian as
denigrated, Other homosexual and, in so doing, simultaneously and implicitly constitute
the hetero-masculinities of Daniel and Ohan.

Scott’s bodily practices might be understood, in part, as the dispositions of a particular
bodily habitus. I am not suggesting here that these are the dispositions of a habitus
inculcated primarily within the home during early childhood as Bourdieu’s (1990 &
1991) work might suggest. Rather, I am suggesting that the dispositions of this
performative habitus are constituted and constituting on an ongoing basis (Butler 1997a).
Such dispositions might be unknowingly inculcated through the images and
representations of popular gay icons, the discourses of gay sub-culture(s), and the
practices of the ballet school. The constituting and constitutive dispositions of such a
performative habitus might be deployed as an unintentional (tacit) citation and an
intentional mimicry of a particular and popularly recognised modality of gayness and/or
the dancer.

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