Gender and Sex

This chapter refutes mainstream understandings that gender is biological, fixed in hormones, genes, and genetilia (sex), or a deep essence of personhood and identity like the soul, psyche, or consciousness. Instead, it shows gender as residing not in the body but rather between the body, its social environment, language, and other bodies. It interprets gender as alienated, a symbolic structure that always fails to represent our needs even as it violently acts on us and imposes restraints. Nevertheless, even as gender is a language of identity imposed on us, it is also a space of experimentation. If what seems on the surface to be foundational and fixed – our biology, our bodies – is actually very much open to play and interpretation, re-stylization and re-invention, then feminist theory tells us that we can reshape its dynamics, its outcomes, its norms, and its symbolic through re-examining the way social meaning enters into and communicates within our self-knowledge. Some of the writers highlighted in this chapter are Gayle Rubin, Monique Wittig, Joan Scott, Paul Preciado, Hortense Spillers, Talia Mae Bettcher, C. Riley Snorton, and Judith Butler.