Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire, Judith Butler

In her Text ”Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire”, (published in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990, 6-16) Judith Butler expands the feminist distinction of sex and gender. She argues that not only gender is a binary social construct “whereby gender mirrors sex” but that sex itself is constructed by scientific discourse. For her there is no distinction between sex and gender as both are gendered categories, in which through gender the discursive praxis on a “natural sex” is produced.

Butler refers to two feminist philosophers and theoreticians Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. Beauvoir states that “one is not a woman but becomes one”, implying that gender is an active appropriation that come from a cultural compulsion and not from sex itself. The body is only a passive receiver of the cultural expression and gender thereby is a social construct. The discourse around gender is constraint by language itself, as it has the imaginable domains of gender built into it and thus produces its own limitations.

There are divergent opinions on the construction of the socially instituted gender asymmetry of masculine and feminine. Beauvoir argues that only the female is marked and identified, becoming the “Other” to the universal masculine. She sees the feminine as an existence in relation to an opposing signification – the male. On the other hand, Irigaray suggests that the female is not marked but on the contrary, is the unpresentable, unspeakable, as language itself is based on masculinity. They both agree that “men could not settle the question because they would be acting as both judge and party of the case”.

Butler further on asserts the idea that the dialectic of body and mind (that also Beauvoir refers to) supports a political and psychic subordination and hierarchy as the mind is associated with masculinity and he body with femininity and appeals to rethink this distinction in relation to the implicit gender hierarchy.

In reaction to the totalizing measures of many feminists, Judith Butler points out that they revert to the same systematization as their masculine opponents. Instead of trying to form a false unity of women and recreating an oppressive dialectic, they should embrace the multiplicity of cultural, social and political intersection and offer a different, non-dialectic view on gender. She questions the seemingly intrinsic idea of unity as a basis for political action, and asks for a coalition of women that is built on contradictions, fragmentation and incompleteness as a normative ideal.