ABSTRACT
The philosophical opposition between “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” like so many other conventional binaries, has always been constructed on the foundations of another related opposition: the couple “inside” and “outside.” 1 The metaphysics of identity that has governed discussions of sexual behavior and libidinal object choice has, until now, depended on the structural symmetry of these seemingly fundamental distinctions and the inevitability of a symbolic order based on a logic of limits, margins, borders, and boundaries. Many of the current efforts in lesbian and gay theory, which this volume seeks to showcase, have begun the difficult but urgent textual work necessary to call into question the stability and ineradicability of the hetero/homo hierarchy, suggesting that new (and old) sexual possibilities are no longer thinkable in terms of a simple inside/outside dialectic. But how, exactly, do we bring the hetero/homo opposition to the point of collapse? How can we work it to the point of critical exhaustion, and what effects—material, political, social—can such a sustained effort to erode and to reorganize the conceptual grounds of identity be expected to have on our sexual practices and politics?
