Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

male principle as active and monocausal, if not autogenetic.The desire to determine sex once and for all, and to determine it as one sex rather than the other, thus seems to issue from the social organization of sexual reproduction through the construction of the clear and unequivocal identities and positions of sexed bodies with respect to each other.
Because within the framework of reproductive sexuality the male body is usually figured as the active agent, the problem with Page’s inquiry is, in a sense, to reconcile the discourse of reproduction with the discourse of masculine activity, two discourses that usually work together culturally, but in this instance have come apart. Interesting,
then, is Page’s willingness to settle on the active DNA sequence as the last word, in effect giving the principle of masculine activity priority over the discourse of reproduction.
This priority, however, would constitute only an appearance,
according to the theory of Monique Wittig. The category of sex belongs to a system of compulsory heterosexuality that clearly operates through a system of compulsory sexual reproduction. In Wittig’s view,
to which we now turn, masculine and feminine male and “female”
exist only within the heterosexual matrix indeed, they are the naturalized terms that keep that matrix concealed and, hence, protected from a radical critique.
i ii. Monique Witt i g : Bodily Disintegration and F i ct iv e Sex iLanguage casts sheaves of reality upon the social body.
—Monique Wittig
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” The phrase is odd, even nonsensical,
for how can one become a woman if one wasn’t a woman all along?
And who is this one who does the becoming Is there some human who becomes its gender at some point in time Is it fair to assume that this human was not its gender before it became its gender How does one become a gender What is the moment or mechanism of gender
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construction And, perhaps most pertinently, when does this mechanism arrive on the cultural scene to transform the human subject into a gendered subject?
Are there ever humans who are not, as it were, always already gendered The mark of gender appears to qualify bodies as human bodies the moment in which an infant becomes humanized is when the question, is it a boy or girl is answered. Those bodily figures who do not fit into either gender fall outside the human, indeed, constitute the domain of the dehumanized and the abject against which the human itself is constituted. If gender is always there, delimiting in advance what qualifies as the human, how can we speak of a human who becomes its gender, as if gender were a postscript or a cultural afterthought?
Beauvoir, of course, meant merely to suggest that the category of women is a variable cultural accomplishment, a set of meanings that are taken on or taken up within a cultural field, and that no one is born with a gender—gender is always acquired. On the other hand, Beauvoir was willing to affirm that one is born with a sex, as a sex, sexed, and that being sexed and being human are coextensive and simultaneous sex is an analytic attribute of the human there is no human who is not sexed;
sex qualifies the human as a necessary attribute. But sex does not cause gender, and gender cannot be understood to reflector express sex;
indeed, for Beauvoir, sex is immutably factic, but gender acquired, and whereas sex cannot be changed—or so she thought—gender is the variable cultural construction of sex, the myriad and open possibilities of cultural meaning occasioned by a sexed body.
Beauvoir’s theory implied seemingly radical consequences, ones that she herself did not entertain. For instance, if sex and gender are radically distinct, then it does not follow that to be a given sex is to become a given gender in other words, woman need not be the cultural construction of the female body, and man need not interpret male bodies. This radical formulation of the sex/gender distinction suggests that sexed bodies can be the occasion fora number of differ-

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