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I HAD A DREAM that I was trying on clothes for dinner with Judith Butler. I had just agreed to contribute to this roundtable, and that night I dreamt that I was among the lucky few to accompany Butler to a small, Greenwich Village restaurant after a lecture they had given. The dinner turned out to be semi-formal—not too semi, not too formal, but sort of “Greenwich Village chic.” I ended up seated next to Butler, and the performance anxiety thrust me into a dressing room where a number of women were trying on outfits for the dinner—and not only this dinner but another, less formal one, and maybe another, and another. It was a quintessential anxiety dream: too many dinners, too many clothes on the racks, yet nothing to wear—nothing “right,” whatever that might mean. In a snap, the dressing room morphed into the girls’ bathroom where I attended public middle school, the bathroom across from Mr. G’s woodworking class, where we surreptitiously smoked and rimmed our eyes with blue eyeliner. This bathroom was much bigger: posh, and populated by women dressed and adorned in all manner of femininities. Some stretched supine on counters; others stood fixing their hair and tending to their makeup. I looked down and saw that I was wearing a huge, gray wool sweater—my father’s?—tucked into a skirt. One of the women caught my dismay in the mirror and, turning to help, pulled the sweater out so that it hung loose around my hips. However much we tried, we could not quite get the sweater to do what we wanted. I ran back to my closet looking for something else to wear—when, surrounded and almost suffocated by clothes, I awoke. I lay awake in bed for some time, still perseverating over which clothes to wear to dinner, before I realized it was all a dream.

Issue Section:
Roundtable on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity at Thirty?or Thirty-Five
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