“…Our theoretical framework draws on discourse analysis and poststructuralist theories (Britzman, ; Butler, ; Foucault, [1976]) and implies a conception of the subject as constituted by discourses which define what we can or cannot be — a woman, a man, a lesbian, a gay, a worker, a mother, a father — and what those who speak through those discourses consider truth, knowledge, value, intelligible speech and normal behaviour (MacLure, ). Poststructural perspectives understand coming out as a performative act, at one and the same time locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary (Austin, ; Butler, ; Chirrey, , ), which in consequence produces certain effects. Through this speech act the subject constructs the homosexual identity ‘performatively enacted through the subject position made available to us in language or cultural code’ (Ford, , p. 80).…”