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'. The figure inside/outside cannot be easily or ever finally dispensed with; it can only be worked on and worked over – itself turned inside out to expose its critical operations and interior machinery. But the figure inside/outside, which encapsulates the structure of language, repression, and subjectivity, also designates the structure of exclusion, oppression, and repudiation. For heterosexuality to achieve the status of the 'compulsory,' it must present itself as a practice governed by some internal necessity. The difference between the hetero and the homo, however, is that the homo becomes identified with the very mechanism necessary to define and to defend any sexual border. In its own precarious position at/as the border, homosexuality seems capable of both subtending the dominance of the hetero and structurally subverting it.
