ABSTRACT
It is an impossible exercise to separate the performance itself from the cultural circumstances and social indignations that chart its meaning. Performance is always already outside itself, in the world; and as such, replaying both the social constructions it hopes to engage with and demystify. For example, performance, like sexuality and gender, is as stable and fickle as the desire that sustains it. And sexuality and gender, like performance, are panicked imitations and inversions of themselves in which everything becomes a phantom image, and everyone learns to wear a phantom limb. Biological sex, gender presentation, sexual identity, sexual practice, sexual desire do not necessarily follow one another; in fact, their specific temporal and spatial enactments force one to consider the following: what exactly is the original? Wherein lies the imitation? Who is the reproduction? How does the copy carry its own ontological weight? These very questions are at the heart of studies of difference and performance, making us unable to search for gender without reading for sexuality. If gender is the base of sexuality, the very thing that gives sexuality its electrical field, then performance produces the circuit wires that continue to illuminate it.
