Redeployment house

At the end of "Critically Queer," her account of the often unsubversive possibilities of drag as a result of their being framed within the limiting citationality of gender norms, Butler asks whether the drag documentary Paris is Burning might have a role to play in redeploying or reforming gender norms. In doing so, Butler veers (as is her habit) from the film's central topic--drag shows--and instead focuses on the alternate forms of domesticity depicted in the film "it is in the reformulation of  kinship, in particular, the redefining of the 'house' and its forms of collectivity, mothering, mopping, reading, and becoming of legendary, that the appropriation and redeployment of the categories of dominant culture enable the formation of kinship relations that function quite supportively as oppositional discourse" (622). In so doing, she imagines that the house might genuinely rework gender and sexual norms by acknowledging its "[implication] in the very relations of power it seeks to rival" while remaining "[irreducible] to those dominant forms" (623). I'm intrigued by the way Butler here imagines a refigured domesticity as a site of resistance, but also by the implication that domesticity operates itself by citing norms. This has implications, for the refigured domesticity of the small room and its alternates, as depicted by Lee in Native Speaker; the small room in the father's house is, in some sense, queered, and as such denatures the authorized small room of power.