Choosing the question of gender and the body as an exemplification of the theme of identity is not to suggest that as an “individual” instance of identity the performative constitution of gender and the body is prior to and determinative of instances of collective identity. In other words, I am not claiming that the state is analogous to an individual with a settled identity. To the contrary, I want to suggest that the performative constitution of gender and the body is analogous to the performative constitution of the state. Specifically, I want to suggest that we can understand the state as having “on ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” ; that its status as the sovereign presence in world politics is produced by “a discourse of primary and stable identity” and that the identity of any particular state should be understood as “tenuously constituted in time…through a stylized repetition of acts,” and achieved, “not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition.”