le troglodyte moderne

The pro-sexuality movement within feminist theory and practice has effectively argued that sexuality is always constructed with the terms of discourse and power, where power is partially understood in terms of heterosexual and phallic cultural conventions. The mergence of a sexuality constructed (not determined) in these terms within lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual contexts is, therefore, not a sign of masculine identification in some reductive sense. It is not the failed project of criticizing phallogocentrism or heterosexual hegemony… If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is ‘before,’ ‘outside,’ or ‘beyond’ power is a cultural impossibility and a politically impracticable dream, one that postpones the concrete task of rethinking subversive possiblities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself. This critical task presumes, of course, that to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its conslidation, but its displacement.