Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

ent genders, and further, that gender itself need not be restricted to the usual two. If sex does not limit gender, then perhaps there are genders, ways of culturally interpreting the sexed body, that are in noway restricted by the apparent duality of sex. Consider the further consequence that if gender is something that one becomes—but can never be—then gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity, and that gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort. If gender is not tied to sex, either causally or expressively,
then gender is a kind of action that can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the apparent binary of sex. Indeed, gender would be a kind of cultural/corporeal action that requires anew vocabulary that institutes and proliferates present participles of various kinds, resignifiable and expansive categories that resist both the binary and substantializing grammatical restrictions on gender. But how would such a project become culturally conceivable and avoid the fate of an impossible and vain utopian project?
“One is not born a woman Monique Wittig echoed that phrase in an article by the same name, published in Feminist Issues (1:1). But what sort of echo and representation of Beauvoir does Monique Wittig offer Two of her claims both recall Beauvoir and set Wittig apart from her one, that the category of sex is neither invariant nor natural, but is a specifically political use of the category of nature that serves the purposes of reproductive sexuality. In other words, there is no reason to divide up human bodies into male and female sexes except that such a division suits the economic needs of heterosexuality and lends a naturalistic gloss to the institution of heterosexuality. Hence, for Wittig,
there is no distinction between sex and gender the category of sex is itself a gendered category, fully politically invested, naturalized but not natural.The second rather counter-intuitive claim that Wittig makes is the following a lesbian is not a woman. A woman, she argues, only exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and opposi- tional relation to a man that relation, she argues, is heterosexuality. A
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lesbian, she claims, in refusing heterosexuality is no longer defined in terms of that oppositional relation. Indeed, a lesbian, she maintains,
transcends the binary opposition between woman and man a lesbian is neither a woman nor a man. But further, a lesbian has no sex she is beyond the categories of sex.Through the lesbian refusal of those categories, the lesbian exposes (pronouns area problem here) the contingent cultural constitution of those categories and the tacit yet abiding presumption of the heterosexual matrix. Hence, for Wittig, we might say, one is not born a woman, one becomes one but further, one is not born female, one becomes female; but even more radically, one can, if one chooses, become neither female nor male, woman nor man.
Indeed, the lesbian appears to be a third gender or, as I shall show, a category that radically problematizes both sex and gender as stable political categories of description.
Wittig argues that the linguistic discrimination of sex secures the political and cultural operation of compulsory heterosexuality. This
relation of heterosexuality, she argues, is neither reciprocal nor binary in the usual sense sex is always already female, and there is only one sex, the feminine. To be male is not to be sexed to be sexed is always away of becoming particular and relative, and males within this system participate in the form of the universal person. For Wittig,
then, the female sex does not imply some other sex, as in a male sex the female sex implies only itself, enmeshed, as it were, in sex,
trapped in what Beauvoir called the circle of immanence. Because
“sex” is apolitical and cultural interpretation of the body, there is no sex/gender distinction along conventional lines gender is built into sex, and sex proves to have been gender from the start. Wittig argues that within this set of compulsory social relations, women become ontologically suffused with sex they are their sex, and, conversely, sex is necessarily feminine.
Wittig understands sex to be discursively produced and circulated by a system of significations oppressive to women, gays, and lesbians. She refuses to take part in this signifying system or to believe in

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