Screen's Winter 1987 issue is entitled ‘Deconstructing “Difference”’. What would it mean to deconstruct ‘difference’? Given, that is, that deconstruction charts the operation of something called difference - which is already defined as deconstructed difference. Why does Screen need to do it all over again?

We soon discover, however, that neither ‘deconstructing’ nor ‘difference’ are being used in a technical deconstructive sense. In ‘Difference and Its Discontents’, the introduction to the issue, Mandy Merck makes it clear that by ‘difference’ is meant ‘the theory of sexual difference’. The theory of sexual difference, she suggests, requires deconstruction, in the name of sameness. But is there such a thing as ‘the theory of sexual difference’?

Apparently so, for the complaint against ‘the theory of sexual difference’ is precisely that it is a homogenous theory. But, paradoxically, what is wrong with this homogeneous theory is that it always promotes heterogeneity. It neglects sameness in its desire for otherness: otherness always defined as ‘the same difference’ of heterosexuality.

Merck argues that what she calls ‘the “difference” school’ is ‘largely unable to theorise homosexuality’ (p 6). As proof she cites the lack of lesbian representation in the Oxford Literary Review's ‘Sexual Difference’ conference, and the absence of homosexuality altogether in the exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality. While there is no doubt that homosexuality was under-represented in both cases, it does not necessarily follow that this was the result of a deficiency in theory. For it is not so much that the so-called difference school has been unable to theorise homosexuality as that its theorisation of homosexuality has produced certain theoretical problems. These in turn produce difficulties at the level of political strategy.