Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

Implications

This paper draws on empirical data generated in British and Australian schools,
demonstrating the capacity of the methodological and theoretical tools used to access and
analyse these processes across these two settings. In the contexts of globalisation and the
interlocking histories of the two nations, it is perhaps unsurprising that while significant
contextual specificities are evident, enduring hetero-masculinities and the oppositional
constitution of the denigrated, homosexual Other are common across the two settings.

The analysis offered in this paper demonstrates how identities are inscribed and
reinscribed in the day-to-day practice of students inside schools. It at once shows the
functioning of chains of enduring discourses and how students tacitly and knowingly
refuse the wounded and denigrated identities ascribed to them. These students can be
seen to read, remake, and exceed the limits of normative discourse - they are causing
sex-gender-sexuality trouble, they are practicing a politics of performative
resignification. Reinscribing identities that are constituted through the citation of
enduring discourses, themselves steeped in historicity, is not straight forward. With
multiple discourses in play within single moments of practice, the possibility for
performative reinscriptions exists alongside the threat of normative meanings being
restored and newly legitimised identities being rendered once again injured or
unintelligible.

Performative resignification, then, is a constitutive process through which students’
identities can be constituted again differently in the school context. Butler’s (1997a)

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