In Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler underscores that performativity cannot be reduced to a single moment, a single act. It is never (to recall the example with which I opened this book) just one dance. Instead, it is a compulsory, reiterative practice: the forced citation, time and again, of dominant norms. When I perform my gender as I dance the Argentine tango, what I do is I cite (neither for the first time, nor for the last) social norms that I am required to cite. I am compelled to cite them if I am to be culturally intelligible: if, in Butler’s terms, I am to achieve the status of a recognized subject in a social system governed by normative heterosexuality.

It is my performance, then – over and over again, on the dance floor and off – together with yours, and together with everybody else’s, that produces and reproduces our shared sense of the fixity, the stability of gender. But crucially, for Butler, because identitarian norms rely on our performances for their reproduction, they never achieve complete and lasting stability. Instead, it is always possible that we will disrupt them. Every citation, every performance creates this possibility anew.