During her tenure as a Wolf Humanities fellow, Dr. Brilmyer plans to complete and revise a chapter of her book-in-progress Queer Rigidity. This chapter, entitled “Habit and the Limits of the Performativity Thesis,” asks what the concept of habit, particularly as it was theorized in nineteenth-century philosophy, might have to offer contemporary queer theory. The concept of habit directs our attention to the practice of sexuality, encouraging reflection on the relationship between sexual acts (what one does) and sexual identities (who one is), a topic of longstanding interest to queer studies. Foundational queer theorists such as Judith Butler have argued that everyday actions, insofar as they are repeated, produce the illusion of a stable sexual “nature.” Nineteenth-century philosophers of habit such as William James and Félix Ravaisson differently insist on the power of habit to engender nature, conceptualizing habit as a “natured nature.” Greater attention to these earlier philosophers’ work, the chapter argues, can help us to better understand something that has gone undertheorized in queer studies: the tendency of desire to return to known objects and follow well-worn paths—and thus give rise to stable sexual forms. This chapter is a part of a larger project that seeks to understand the limits of desire’s flexibility without approaching desire as an ahistorical or biologically predetermined drive. The concept of practice informs this work in two distinct ways: first, it grounds the approach to the field of queer theory as a practice of interpretation with its own disciplinary norms and protocols; and second, it stands at the heart of Dr. Brilmyer's book’s theorization of desire as habitual tendency.