Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

other. Ifs he is not actively condemned by others, she condemns herself (even calls herself a judge [106]), revealing that the juridical law in effect is much greater than the empirical law that effects her gender conversion. Indeed, Herculine can never embody that law precisely because she cannot provide the occasion by which that law naturalizes itself in the symbolic structures of anatomy. In other words, the law is not simply a cultural imposition on an otherwise natural heterogeneity the law requires conformity to its own notion of
“nature” and gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies in which the Phallus, though clearly not identical with the penis, nevertheless deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign.
Herculine’s pleasures and desires are in noway the bucolic innocence that thrives and proliferates prior to the imposition of a juridical law. Neither does she fully fall outside the signifying economy of masculinity. She is outside the law, but the law maintains this “outside”
within itself. In effects he embodies the law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted testimony to the law’s uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will—out of fidelity—defeat themselves and those subjects who, utterly subjected,
have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Within The History of Sexuality,Volume Ii Foucault appears to locate the quest for identity within the context of juridical forms of power that become fully articulate with the advent of the sexual sciences, including psychoanalysis, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Although
Foucault revised his historiography of sex at the outset of The Use of
Pleasure (L’Usage des plaisirs) and sought to discover the repressive/gen- erative rules of subject-formation in early Greek and Roman texts, his philosophical project to expose the regulatory production of identity- effects remained constant. A contemporary example of this quest for identity can be found in recent developments in cell biology, an exam-
Subversive Bodily Acts
135

ple that inadvertently confirms the continuing applicability of a
Foucaultian critique.
One place to interrogate the univocity of sex is the recent controversy over the master gene that researchers at MIT in late 1987 claim to have discovered as the secret and certain determinant of sex. With the use of highly sophisticated technological means, the master gene,
which constitutes a specific DNA sequence on the Y chromosome, was discovered by Dr. David Page and his colleagues and named “TDF” or testis-determining factor. In the publication of his findings in Cell (No.
51), Dr. Page claimed to have discovered the binary switch upon which hinges all sexually dimorphic characteristics.”
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Let us then consider the claims of this discovery and see why the unsettling questions regarding the decidability of sex continue to be asked.
According to Page’s article, The Sex-Determining Region of the
Human Y Chromosome Encodes a Finger Protein samples of DNA
were taken from a highly unusual group of people, some of whom had
XX chromosomes, but had been medically designated as males, and some of whom had XY chromosomal constitution, but had been medically designated as female. He does not tell us exactly on what basis they had been designated contrary to the chromosomal findings, but we are left to presume that obvious primary and secondary characteristics suggested that those were, indeed, the appropriate designations.
Page and his coworkers made the following hypothesis There must be some stretch of DNA, which cannot be seen under the usual microscopic conditions, that determines the male sex, and this stretch of
DNA must have been moved somehow from the Y chromosome, its usual location, to some other chromosome, where one would not expect to find it. Only if we could presume (a) this undetectable DNA
sequence and (b) prove its translocatability, could we understand why it is that an XX male had no detectable Y chromosome, but was, in fact,
still male. Similarly, we could explain the curious presence of the Y
chromosome on females precisely because that stretch of DNA had somehow been misplaced.

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