constitute subjects. These categorical names are central to the performative constitution
of the subject who is unintelligible, if not unimaginable, without these. To be called, for
example, „dyke’ is to be simultaneously interpellated as a subject and as a particular (but
equivocal) sort of subject. It is also to be simultaneously subjected to relations of power
circulating within the discursive matrices that frame a particular context. Such a naming
joins a citational chain that inevitably inscribes hierarchical binary relations (Derrida
1988). These citational chains not only act to constitute the identity named, they also
constitute the identity that is the silent partner in the dichotomy: the identity „dyke’
silently constitutes hetero-femininity. This paper does not seek to overcome these
performative chains by abandoning categorical identities. Rather, it recognises that the
interpellation of such identities constitutes the subject and that it is their simultaneous
constitutive force and equivocacy that opens up the possibility for the subject’s discursive
agency. Understanding these performative names as bearing equivocal meanings suggests
that they are open to strategic reinscription - they can take on non-ordinary meanings and
they can function in contexts where they have not belonged (Butler 1997a).
The work of Foucault and Butler has made significant contributions to Queer theory and
research into the production of social inequalities and exclusions in which sexual
identities/sexualities are pivotal markers. Some of this work has responded to Foucault’s
(1990) call to resist the incitement to discourse on sex-desire with a concern for bodies
and pleasures. Such responses have explored possibilities for thinking bodies and
pleasures separated from categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. For instance, the notion
of polymorphous perversity has been taken up as a potential site of such fragmented
bodily pleasure (see, for instance, Weeks 1991). Recently, however, Butler (1999) has
returned to Foucault’s injunction and questioned whether it is possible, in the
contemporary moment, to separate sex-desire and jettison categories of sex and sexuality.
According to Butler, sex and desire are so deeply entwined in prevailing discourses that
they remain fundamental to the constitution of intelligible subjects. As such, while a shift
to bodies and pleasure remains a theoretically useful, if problematic goal, the moment of
such a move is not imminent.
The analysis offered here, then, proceeds from the understanding that school practices are
permeated by enduring hetero-normative discourses that inscribe a linear relationship
between sex, gender and (hetero-)sexuality within the „heterosexual matrix’ (Butler 1990
& 1993). Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere (Youdell 2000; 2003), the school is a key
site for the proliferation, modification and incessant inscription of these discourses and,