ABSTRACT
The resignification of the symbolic terms of kinship in Paris Is Burning and in the cultures of sexual minorities represented and occluded by the film raises the question of how precisely the apparently static workings of the symbolic order become vulnerable to subversive repetition and resignification. The force of repetition in language may be the paradoxical condition by which a certain agency not linked to a fiction of the ego as master of circumstanceis derived from the impossibility of choice. It is in this sense that Irigarays critical mime of Plato, the fiction of the lesbian phallus, and the rearticulation of kinship in Paris Is Burning might be understood as repetitions of hegemonic forms of power which fail to repeat loyally and, in that failure, open possibilities for resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims. In this framework, heterosexual desire is always true, and lesbian desire is always and only a mask and forever false.
