In the case of sexuality, this is particularly evident for two reasons. First, because sexual difference is premised upon the existence of two distinct and incommensurate categories and yet this distinction is built upon two interdependent and reciprocal terms; and second, because notions of the individual and subjectivity and the model of an 'inner' self have a conceptual association with private life and those intimate dimensions of the person that are associated with the feminine. This provides an instability of defmition - especially for masculinity - which ensures that difference is always in play in any representation of subjectivity or sexuality, and suggests that there is always the possibility of encountering the limits of coherence and stable subject positioning. The concept of 'categorial instability' signals the possibility that representations of subjectivity

The subject I will take for this exploration is the figure of 'Lawrence of Arabia', as an a~sembly of the cultural narratives that surround the historical character of T.E. Lawrence. Many accounts of colonial adventure epics suggest that they assert heroes of the British Empire just as its power contracts and that these stories shore up and bolster a myth of British greatness with an image of 'idealised masculinity' which is contrasted to 'other and subordinated, "non-white" masculinities' (Dawson 1991: I 19). Accounts such as these assume a causal interpretation, in which representations have a discernible function: the coalescence of images into stable forms which reassure or reassert, offering 'wish-fulfIlling fantasies' as a kind of ideological therapy for insecure subjects whose preoccupation is the coherence of identity and absolute power (Dawson 1991: 119). Graham Dawson argues that, even in its 'fascination with and fear of the colonised "other" " imperialist military adventure still offers an example of the 'exercise of imperial authority', as the encounter with 'peripheral and colonised others' is used to secure the 'idealised, omnipotent masculinity of the central hero' (Dawson 1991: 125-7). Dawson sees the 1920s 'heroic' biographies' evocations of a Lawrence who identifies with the Arabs as a way of 'repossessing' the other, producing a legendary 'new kind of ideal unity and coherence' (Dawson 1991: 136). And he argues that even the feminisation of descriptions of Lawrence offers a masculinity whose power is simply sustained by the dissolving of gender difference, as the 'imagined integration' of 'passive', contemplative and 'feminine' or 'effeminate' characteristics with traditional images of the military man of action 'suggests ... an alternative and superior mode of being a man' (Dawson 1991: 124, 137). Such an argument forecloses analysis of the effects of those fractures to masculinity which Lawrence's particular narrative may create, by giving greater weight to the generic characteristics of military adventure. If, instead, we move beyond the analysis of their narrative strategies, we may find that the 'dilemma of identity' which is foregrounded in all narratives of Lawrence poses greater difficulties for the representation of a triumphant colonial masculinity. The challenges his figure poses to conventions of masculinity become more intelligible if we examine how it is crossed by contemporary knowledges of sexuality - which, rather than replaying fantasies of coherence, foreground the ambivalence of sexual and colonial relations and their .fragmentations of the relations between national identity and masculinity. I This asks us to chart a more complex series of exchanges between masculine achievement, sexual ambivalence and subjective incoherence.