Judith Butler - Imitation and Gender Insubordination (Excerpt) lyrics

When I spoke at the conference on h*mos**uality in 1989, I found myself telling my friends beforehand that I was off to Yale to be a lesbian, which of course didn't mean that I wasn't one before, but that somehow then, as I spoke in that context, I was one in some more thorough and totalizing way, at least for the time being. So I am one, and my qualifications are even fairly unambiguous. Since I was sixteen, being a lesbian is what I've been. So what's the anxiety, the discomfort? Well, it has something to do with that redoubling, the way I can say, I'm going to Yale to be a lesbian; a lesbian is what I've been being for so long. How is it that I can both "be" one, and yet endeavor to be one at the same time? When and where does my being a lesbian come into play, when and where does this playing a lesbian constitute something like what I am? To say that I "play" at being one is not to say that I am not one "really"; rather, how and where I play at being one is the way in which that "being" gets established, instituted, circulated, and confirmed. This not a performance from which I can take radical distance, for this is deep-seated play, psychically entrenched play, and this "I" does not play its lesbianism as a role. Rather, it is through the repeated play of this s**uality that the "I" is insistently reconstituted as a lesbian "I"...