376 Chapter 16
as social actors. She uses the singular first-person pronoun “I,” to
speak as a militant follower of the Revolution, a member of the revo-
lutionary political/civic majority. In other moments, “they” refers to a
Revolution/the state (a collectivity that Barbara momentarily disiden-
tifies with) which limits the full participation of LBGT people in revo-
lutionary society by restricting their opportunities to participate in its
construction.
However, her use of collective and singular pronoun deictic mark-
ers (I, us, we, them, they) is not completely static: while in this portion
of the text “we” is generally understood to refer to a collectivity of
LGBT subjects, sometimes (as in line 18) the speaker uses the first
person plural “we” to refer to herself as a member of the national/
revolutionary society. By shifting the meaning of these deictic mark-
ers, the speaker enunciates her claim that these identities are not con-
tradictory or mutually exclusive. In the selection from the text below, I
have labeled the voices according to the multiple identities of the
speaker as “lesbian voice” and “revolutionary voice,” as well as signal-
ing moments in which the speaker chooses to distance herself from
the narrative to create the effect of objectivity to her statements with
the label “anonymous voice.”