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thinker, Judith Butler. Butler’s notion of performativity, elaborated with reference to the practices of drag, enables one to think of gender identity as discursively construed and iterative in nature. She argues, “There is no gender identity beyond the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Gender Trouble 25). Gender is a form of doing and gender norms the effect of processes of normalization. Just as gender can be undone, sexuality too can never be fully regulated. Sexuality, Butler writes, “is never fully reducible to the “effect” of this or that operation of regulatory power. This is not the same as saying that sexuality is, by nature, free and wild. On the contrary, it emerges precisely as an improvisational possibility within a field of constraints” (Undoing Gender 15).
The possibilities of sexuality and how sexuality has been restricted to particular manifestations in Western society are also the central problematics taken up by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her elaboration of queer theory in relation specifically to literature. Although it is frequently analyzed alongside gender, sexuality has in effect so many dimensions (it may be figured in terms of sexual acts, erotic locations, other kinds of object choice, sexual performance, etc.) as to be irreducible to the gender of one’s erotic object-choice (Epistemology 35). Yet, that sexuality is often solely equated with sexual orientation serves only to underscore, Sedgwick argues, how the homosexual and heterosexual binary has been fundamental to twentieth-century and contemporary-Western culture, to its ways of knowing and thinking. In her first book, Between Men, she offers paradigms for reading which tease out repressed homosocial and homoerotic desire in literary texts, the most well-known figuration of which is probably the “erotic triangle” where two ostensible male rivals vying for the same female object is the only culturally available arrangement through which the men’s same-sex desire for each other can be rendered intelligible. Sedgwick’s next book, Epistemology of the Closet, applies a similar critical lens to cover more literary ground while sharpening the sexuality focus over that of gender, and privileging, by her own account, an antihomophobic inquiry over a feminist one (15–16).