Homi K. Bhabha

All of this Foucault takes to be in the nature of historical observation.

For Butler, on the other hand, As you can tell from her style, I'm sure that as in the case of reading Bhabha, you recognized a lot of Derrida in Butler's style.

In Butler, it's a question of taking these same issues and orienting them more in the direction of philosophy.

I've already suggested the way in which she understands this particular essay as a contribution to that branch of philosophy called ontology, the philosophy of being, and in general she takes a particular and acute interest in that.

So it plays that role, and the relationship between identity and performance is just the same.

This notion of performing identity should recall for you, signifying in the thinking of Henry Louis Gates, the way in which the identity of another is appropriated through parity, through derision, self-distancing, through a sense of the way in which one is something precisely insofar as one is not simply inhabiting the subject position of another.

It should also recall for you the sly civility of the subaltern in Homi Bhabha's thinking, the way in which double consciousness is partly in the subject position of another, partly in one's own, in such a way that one liberates oneself from the sense that it's the other person who's authentic and that one is oneself somehow derivative, subordinate, dependent.

So all of these relations ought to gel in your minds as belonging very much to the same sphere of thought, the way in which the You can't have the raw without the cooked is the way in which, generally speaking, categories of self and other, of identity per se, simply can't be thought in stable terms in and for themselves, but only relationally.