GENDER TROUBLE 73

Gender Trouble impossibility of its coherence As Rose points out very clearly, the construction of a coherent sexual identity along the disjunctive axis of the feminine/masculine is bound to fail;51 the disruptions of this coherence through the inadvertent reemergence of the repressed reveal not only that “identity” is constructed, but that the prohibition that constructs identity is inefficacious (the paternal law ought to be understood not as a deterministic divine will, but as a perpetual bumbler, preparing the ground for the insurrections against him) The differences between the materialist and Lacanian (and postLacanian) positions emerge in a normative quarrel over whether there is a retrievable sexuality either “before” or “outside” the law in the mode of the unconscious or “after” the law as a postgenital sexuality Paradoxically, the normative trope of polymorphous perversity is understood to characterize both views of alternative sexuality.There is no agreement, however, on the manner of delimiting that “law” or set of “laws.” The psychoanalytic critique succeeds in giving an account of the construction of “the subject”—and perhaps also the illusion of substance—within the matrix of normative gender relations In her existential-materialist mode,Wittig presumes the subject, the person, to have a presocial and pregendered integrity On the other hand, “the paternal Law” in Lacan, as well as the monologic mastery of phallogocentrism in Irigaray, bear the mark of a monotheistic singularity that is perhaps less unitary and culturally universal than the guiding structuralist assumptions of the account presume.52 But the quarrel seems also to turn on the articulation of a temporal trope of a subversive sexuality that flourishes prior to the imposition of a law, after its overthrow, or during its reign as a constant challenge to its authority Here it seems wise to reinvoke Foucault who, in claiming that sexuality and power are coextensive, implicitly refutes the postulation of a subversive or emancipatory sexuality which could be free of the law.We can press the argument further by pointing out that “the before” of the law and “the after” are discursively and performatively instituted modes of temporality that are invoked within the terms of a normative 38