So what?

Together, queer theory and deconstructive criticism work to reveal the unarticulated queer identity beneath an air of “normalcy,” an air which is rendered fragile and faulty by the language surrounding the self. Compulsory heterosexuality shapes the interior world of this poem and of its speaker and is made even more startling by the female pronouns that feel only like empty signifiers. The sense of hollowness throughout the language, particularly in such words as “dead” and “accomplishment,” reveals the instability of language itself and thus the instability of the self socially constructed and surrounded by language (specifically language referring to gender identity and the sort of motherhood that is embedded in heteropatriarchy).

Both the chain of signifiers and binary oppositions, concepts which are described at length by deconstructive criticism, are especially important in understanding the connection between the speaker’s suppression of gender identity and sexual desires and the rules imposed by “normal” marriage/family. Moreover, when binary oppositions, such as fertility and infertility, collapse, the notion of fluid identity becomes prominent. Ultimately, internal death results from both that failure to meet the standards of such female, feminine existence and that continual inability to explore, in reality, the continuum of sexual possibilities.