Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

teacher’s intervention. Her single ‘enough!’ deploys an equal rights discourse that
attempts to (impossibly) guard against the wounded subject that Mark’s remark
constitutes. Yet in its deployment, it inadvertently reinscribes the very wound that it aims
to protect against - the (real, imagined or otherwise) homosexual student must be
defended because in prevailing discourse a public assertion of his homosexuality is
necessarily an injurious performative.

Scott and Vici’s silent exchange suggests at least a partial understanding of the
performative force of Daniel’s injurious performative. Indeed, it may be taken as a
forerunner to/promise of future resistance and reinscription. On the other hand, Ian’s
adherence to Ohan’s exclusions and his coloured cheeks and bowed head are tacit, bodily
performatives that inscribe again the wounded identity - Ian’s body acts its/his place in
discourse (Butler 1997a).

-- EPISODE 2 HERE --

Scott’s practices in Scene 1 of Episode 2 can be understood as a hyperbolic masquerade
(Butler 1990) of the subjugated homosexual (the terms in which he was provisionally
constituted by Daniel) and as an intentional, potentially constituting, mimicry of a
particular gay identity. This is a moment in which the physicality of the skilled and
controlled (un)masculine ballet dancer troubles the bounds of the hetero-masculine body.
As such, these practices expose as discursively constituted this subjugated
homosexuality, have the potential to unsettle Daniel’s constitution, and reinscribe gay.

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