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10. Here Tracey alludes to Butler's argument that identity is a performance. All gender is an imitation, a kind of impersonation and approximation, so that "the imitative parody of 'heterosexuality' -- when and where it occurs in gay cultures -- is always and only an imitation of an imitation, a copy of a copy, for which there is no original," Judith Butler, Imitation and Gender Insubordination, (London: Routledge, 1991), 314. Butler also argues against the dominant construction of lesbian sexuality as imitative of or derivative from heterosexuality, but she also suggests that the opposite is not exactly true either -- that lesbianism is neither totally unique nor independent from heterosexuality. Instead, Butler introduces an alternative -- a third understanding of lesbian sexual roles, as at once both imitative and subversive. She asks: "Is it not possible that lesbian sexuality is a process that reinscribes the power domains that it resists, that it is constituted in part from the very heterosexual matrix that it seeks to displace, and that its specificity is to be established not outside or beyond that reinscription or reiteration, but in the very modality and effects of that reinscription? In other words, the negative constructions of lesbianism as a fake or bad copy can be occupied and reworked to call into question the claims of heterosexual priority. In a sense ... lesbian sexuality can be understood to redeploy its 'derivativeness' in the service of displacing hegemonic heterosexual norms," p. 310.
12. Fisher, "Caprice," These Waves of Girls. 13. Caitlyn Fisher, "Mr. Anderson," These Waves of Girls. 14. ibid. 15. Fisher qtd in Phol-Weary and Choi. Bibliography Abbas, Niran. "Virtuality, Identity and the Posthuman Condition: An Exploration of Virtual Culture." Frame. 16.1 (2002) 47-64. Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Bernstein, Mark. "Beyond Illustrations." Hypertext Now. Eastgate Systems. 2001, (15 May 2004). Boyd, John. The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ---. Patterns of Dissonance. Oxford: Polity Press, 2001. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge, 1993. de Lauretis, Teresa. Ed. Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Derwin, Susan. The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
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