John Gay`s Achilles(1733) fruitfully illustrates what Judith Butler terms `gender as performativity.` Textual evidence, and not merely circumstantial speculation regarding the author`s `gayness` or the age-old controversy regarding Achilles` homosexuality, strongly suggests that Gay questions normative gender and sexuality in Achilles. Borrowing from various classical texts that incorporate the Achilles-in-Scyros episode, Gay centers the plot on the `drag` Achilles, re-named Pyrhha and entrusted to King Lycomedes of Scyros by his mother Thetis, who fears his death in battle. Gay entirely subverts the original story by adding the episode of Lycomedes` infatuation with Pyrhha/Achilles alongside the relationship between Pyrhha/Achilles and Deidemia, Lycomedes` daughter. The mere act of putting on "woman`s habit" `genders` Pyrhha/Achilles as female object of male(-gendered) desire, and Pyrhha/Achilles` gender is in turn dependent on the object of her/his desire. The play implies that gender identity is not an a priori trait located within a person but rather an `inscription` on the body, and that sexual normativity, based on ideas of innate gender identity, must also be questioned. Even the celebrated finale undermines, not celebrates, Achilles` recovered manhood by surreptitiously gendering him as a female cat and thereby underscores the essential fictitiousness of gender.