The Next Night Sous Rature: Wrestling With Derrida’s Mimesis

This “layered account” of the author’s night dancing and wrestling with Kitty’s All Girl Review, for the purposes of gaining access to her male and female striptease dancers, is and is not Part 2 of an article that appeared in the September 1998 issue of Qualitative Inquiry. Making use of the metaphor of drawing, the author invokes Derrida’s nonconcepts of “mimesis” and “sous rature” as a lens through which to view her lived experiences with the troupe, identity, and writing. As each layer is superimposed on prior layers, new meanings emerge. All images and impressions are subject to erasure at any time given the absence of a one-to-one correspondence of representation to reality and the changing nature of relationships between performers over time and from differing perspectives. Ultimately, lived experience, identity, and writing can be seen as simultaneous processes of destruction and creation.