Key terms: “the heterosexual contract” (Wittig); “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich); “lesbian continuum” (Rich, Wittig); “masquerade” (Lacan, Riviere); “fictive sex” (Wittig, Butler); “performative identities” (Butler).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”. In Diana Fuss, Inside/Out.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, 1985.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Signification of the Phallus”. Écrits.
Peri Rossi, Cristina. “Literatura y mujer”. Eco 237 (marzo, 1983).
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”. Blood, Bread, and Poetry. New York: Norton Paperback, 1994 (1980).
Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as Masquerade”. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1929 – reprinted many times and on the Internet.
Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. (The essay on “The Straight Mind” in this collection is from 1980.)
“I can only underline the oppressive character that the straight mind is clothed in in its tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true for all societies, all epochs, all individuals. Thus one speaks of the exchange of women, the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, the Unconscious, Desire, Jouissance, Culture, History, giving an absolute meaning to these concepts when they are only categories founded upon heterosexuality, or thought which produces the difference between the sexes, as a political and philosophical dogma.” Wittig, The Straight Mind, 27-28.
“it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women.” Wittig, The Straight Mind, 32.
“If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity. [...] In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency. [...G]ender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.” Butler, Gender Trouble, 136-38.
Information provided by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese,
University of Cambridge