GENDER TROUBLE 135

Gender Trouble
what can and cannot be thought within the terms of cultural intelligibility. Mobilizing the distinction between what is “before” and what is
“during” culture is one way to foreclose cultural possibilities from the
start. The “order of appearances,” the founding temporality of the
account, as much as it contests narrative coherence by introducing the
split into the subject and the fêlure into desire, reinstitutes a coherence
at the level of temporal exposition. As a result, this narrative strategy,
revolving upon the distinction between an irrecoverable origin and a
perpetually displaced present, makes all effort at recovering that origin
in the name of subversion inevitably belated.

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