Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

departure for discursive practices of homo-sex in the classroom underscores the ever-
present spectre of the Other within the Same.

When Josh calls Ian ‘Drama Queen’ and ‘Pricilla’ he cite simultaneously the denigrated,
camp, cross dressing, emotionally excessive (and therefore feminine) homosexual and a
globalised and commercialised (and therefore legitimate) gay culture and identity
epitomised by the film Pricilla Queen of the Desert. Josh does not call Ian ‘fag’ or ‘poof’,
rather, conversant with gay discourse he interpellates a legitimate (if particular)
homosexual - and Ian’s laughter recognises and acknowledges these discursive markers.

Josh’s namings of Ian, then, have the potential to both injure and legitimate - they
occupy two discursive frames simultaneously, at once features of a hetero-normative
discourse and a popular gay discourse. Likewise, they have the potential to constitute
Josh as both critical of homosexuality (and therefore as heterosexual and masculine) and
inside this legitimate gay culture (and therefore homosexual). It is the simultaneous
potential for injury and legitimation that creates the possibility for Josh and Ian to
constitute legitimate pop-gay identity in this context without sanction or censure. In this
sense, Josh and Ian are deploying a pop-gay discourse with a tacit or even explicit
knowledge that Ohan will understand this through/as hetero-normative discourse. Josh’s
discursive practices have produced a moment in which gay name-calling is
simultaneously injurious and takes on a non-ordinary meaning (Butler 1997a). And these
practices function in a context - a school classroom - where they have not previously
belonged. This is the discursive agency of Butler’s performative resignification. The

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