I felt a strong personal connection to Judith Butler's statements in the "Personal Mimesis" section of her article, in particular to her claim that "identification and desire can coexist, and that their formulation in terms of mutually exclusive oppositions serves a heterosexual matrix." This idea was reified for me with a friend's statement as we were getting ready to go to a CQA sponsored dance: I wondered whether I should wear a dress or a button down shirt and tie; she resonded by asking whether I wanted to "attract butches or femmes". I was (probably naively) taken aback that she should see self-presentation as so fundamentally opposed to the presentation of the object of desire, and the categories as so mutually exclusive. So my question now is rather personal, very strongly biased to my own gender-neutral feelings, and probably unanswerable. Do you think that people who present as extremely masculine or feminine actually feel a strong sense of embodying the characteristics of that gender? Are they playing it up because, as Butler says, the norm is "perpetually at risk [of] becoming undone" (23)? Is it because they feel the need to create a dichotomy with the extreme of the other sex? Or am I completely off the mark and inappropriate for asking this question?