Now that you’ve read Gender Trouble, you are fully convinced that gender is the effect rather than a cause of discourse; you are highly suspicious of the category of ‘the subject’, since you know that it is constructed on the basis of the violent exclusion of those ‘Others’ who in some way do not conform to the heterosexual matrix. Although you’re concerned by the intrinsically oppositional nature of identity, you derive some comfort from the possibilities of agency and subversion that open up when Hegelian dialectic (the subject constructed through opposition) is supplemented with a Foucauldian model of power (power as multiple, dispersed, spawning resistance). Fully aware of the difference between performativity and performance, you are now setting your mind to devising ways in which your gender, which you know is a discursively constituted series of acts, could be re-enacted against the grain of the heterosexual matrix. Perhaps you are also thinking about your melancholic gender identity and wondering how you could ‘do’ your gender differently in order to signal the desires you’ve had to reject in order to constitute yourself as a stable subject. It might not be entirely practical for you to turn up at work in drag tomorrow, but you’re sure there must be less dramatic performative acts that will effectively draw attention to gender’s constituted and constructed nature (Salih, 2002. p 73).