Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects



As Scott leans over and talks to Vici, his practices cite and inscribe his gay identity - he
constitutes and displays publicly an identity that is disavowed by the discourse of
compulsory heterosexuality that permeates the school. In so doing, Scott potentially
reinscribes homosexuality as intelligible and legitimate. This potential reinscription of the
disavowed Other exposes the inextricable link between the Same and the Other of the
heterosexual/homosexual hierarchical binary. It also exposes the constitutedness of this
binary and its concomitant masculinities and femininities (Butler 1991). It is this
reinscription of the disavowed homosexual Other and the exposures which it effects that
inspires, or even compels, Daniel’s censure and attempted restoration of normative
meaning.

When Daniel announces ‘He’s getting ready’ he does not address Scott directly, nor does
his comment make any explicit reference to homosexuality. Indeed the comment does not
make explicit
what Scott might be getting ready for. I suggest that the comment is a
(verbally incomplete) citation of the insistence within (popular) homophobic discourse
that if a man or boy who is constituted as homosexual bends over, then he is preparing
for/inviting anal penetration. To complete Daniel’s colloquialism, ‘He’s getting ready’ ‘to
take it up the arse’. The oblique/incomplete nature of the comment does not negate its
potential to performatively constitute Scott as a particular wounded subject. Indeed, that
it is unnecessary to utter the entire assertion highlights the enduring historicity of a
wounded homosexuality within authorised (hetero-normative/homophobic) discourses.
The comment, then, cites the homosexual who receives anal penetration; inscribes

16



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