Mar 092010
Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.
Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a “doing” rather than a “being”.
It may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.