GENDER TROUBLE 135

Gender Trouble what can and cannot be thought within the terms of cultural intelligibility Mobilizing the distinction between what is “before” and what is “during” culture is one way to foreclose cultural possibilities from the start The “order of appearances,” the founding temporality of the account, as much as it contests narrative coherence by introducing the split into the subject and the fêlure into desire, reinstitutes a coherence at the level of temporal exposition As a result, this narrative strategy, revolving upon the distinction between an irrecoverable origin and a perpetually displaced present, makes all effort at recovering that origin in the name of subversion inevitably belated 100