The norms producing gender require repeating — reciting — in order to have effect. They are, in this sense, the condition of possibility for gendered subjectivity. Without their repetition, gendered subjects would not exist. It is also the fact that they must be repeated, however, that creates the space from them to be repeated differently and thus is also the condition of possibility for action. The need to repeat thus allows for citations that contort or impair the very norms they are intended to fortify. As such, gender is constitutively unstable and it is, as Butler puts it, ‘this instability [that] is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition’ (BTM: 10).
Agency thus inheres in the regulatory repetition of the very norms that sustain the system —heteronormativity— that is being resisted and amended. It is because such norms are not always efficacious, that is, they do not always succeed, that they can be exploited. Such exploitation creates the possibility for, though it cannot assure the success of, subversion (65).
The merit of Butler’s revised account is that it explains more clearly why subversion is immanent and why performativity entails neither voluntarism nor determinism. In both cases, this is because of the citational structure of performativity, which means that subversion is always a form of ‘reinscription of existing contexts’.
Gender subversion involves … recontextualizing and reciting the elements constitutive of sex and gender so as to alter their meaning and significance.
Butler thus folds into her (Foucauldian) account of the regulatory effect of norms an explanation of how gender works both as a mechanism of constraint and as the locus of productive (agential) activity. In so doing, she is able to steer a course between free will and determinism, between acts and norms, and thus belatedly to refute some of the criticisms levelled at her. Moreover, this blending of Foucauldian and Derridean elements also allows her to lay the groundwork for the account of linguistic agency that she develops most fully in Excitable Speech … (Lloyd, 2007: 66).