 This account of identities as effects of power is obviously skeptical of our capacities for critical agency and rational reflection to which Marxists and other social critics have traditionally appealed for a purchase on relations of power and subordination. If the subject, as a woman or gay person for example, is an effect of power, the structure of oppression is already built into the identity. How can women or gay people be agents for the emancipation of, or equal justice for, women or gay people if their identity is itself an effect of unequal power relations? Indeed, if we become subjects at all only within everyday disciplinary practices, then subjects are always already effects of power. To emancipate ourselves from power would be to emancipate ourselves from ourselves. How then are we to address issues of freedom and autonomy? Butler looks to resignification. Power not only produces but reproduces itself and this constant production and reproduction serves as the opening for “resignification, redeployment, subversive citation from within, and interruption and inadvertent convergences with other [power/discourse] networks” (1995, 135). Yet other continental feminists find this approach unsatisfying. Nancy Fraser finds the positive connotations that Butler associates with resignification “puzzling.” “Why,” she asks, “is resignification good? Can’t there be bad (oppressive, reactionary) resignifications?”(1995, 67–8). If all subjectivity is a construction of power/discourse networks, why should we not simply be content with the subjects that our current disciplinary practices enforce? Or, if some resignifications are good, which ones? How do we determine which sort we should endorse?