Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects



mundane and day-to-day is crucial to education scholarship concerned to explain why
social justice policies and programmes have not shifted radically, in the ways hoped for,
the inequalities with which they have been concerned. This underscores the importance
of understanding and making use of post-structural theories not as replacements for
structural theories and concerns, but as necessary supplements that offer additional tools
with which to approach a reconfigured, deconstructive politics of hegemony.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2001 meeting of the Australian
Association for Research in Education, with a revised version offered to a symposium
hosted by the Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, University of Sydney. I
am grateful for the reflections of colleagues who participated in these sessions. The
London research was undertaken as part of my PhD - my thanks to my supervisors David
Gillborn and Sally Power and examiners Stephen Ball and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill for
their comment and support. The Australian research was funded through a Macquarie
University New Staff research grant. My thanks to Sue North who assisted in aspects of
the data generation and analysis for that study.

Endnotes

i Butler variously describes this performative politics of resignification as operating
through appropriations, misappropriations, reappropriations and expropriations of
authorised performative interpellations. She also refers to practices of inscription and
reinscription. While these latter terms are often taken to refer specifically to writing, I
give preference to this Derridean terminology to avoid the inference of proper ownership.

26



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