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In a very short time, the academic gender project has settled into a comfortable middle age: the bold revisionism that characterized 1990 -- exemplified by Eve Sedgwick's mapping of the epistemological reaches of homosexual panic within heteronormative sexualities, and Judith Butler's demonstration that the ontologies of gender are grounded not in essence but on citational performatives -- has moved towards a repletion, and perhaps an exhaustion, of the by now familiar. However, Elspeth Probyn, Elizabeth Grosz, and their contributors go far in refusing the prevailing ennui of the gender-studies contract. Their most energetic work unfolds in the interstices between feminism and queer theory and proceeds to complicate disciplinary boundaries, to dispense with ossified cliches, to approach identification and sexuality as fractious, pleasurable processes rather than monumental 'things.'
Probyn begins Outside Belongings in Montreal's lesbian spaces, traversing languages and cultures; her writing charts the 'interstitial moments ... where one sees an ongoing inbetweenness," the transversality of our times' where she discerns the 'longing in belonging on the outside.' Refusing the validity of cultural centre or historical depth, Probyn reconfigures la vie montrealaise as identificatory desires that are invariably marginal, inescapably matters of surface. Most refreshing in Probyn's interrogation is her thorough repudiation of inside/outside dialectics; approaching (be)longing as a 'movement of desiring' rather than a static 'positing of identity' enables her to grasp the tyranny of possessive claims that exclusionary identities deploy. For there is only outsideness and its attendant anxieties.
Quebec for Probyn is an ironic project in which l'identitaire turns on the exigencies of ontology, the contingent and slippery deployment of the signs of margin and centre: if Quebecois specificity is constructed as peripheral to the Canadian centre, identity is nonetheless 'an institutional project, projected on the longing for an absolute origin, predicated on the common knowledge ... that it will fail.' Like Butler's view of gender performatives, which compulsively repeat in order to defer the failure of their approximation of an authentic ideal, the rhetoric of Quebecois nationalism couples historicism with territorial specificity to frame identity as a 'set of possessions belonging to one group at the expense of others.' If centredness in Quebec turns paradoxically on a nostalgic attachment to marginality, then its discursive operators in the field of popular culture...