Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

4. See Sandra Harding, The Instability of the Analytical Categories of
Feminist Theory in Sex and Scientific Inquiry, eds. Sandra Harding and
Jean F. O’Barr (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. I am reminded of the ambiguity inherent in Nancy Cott’s title, The
Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven:Yale University Press, She argues that the early twentieth-century US. feminist movement sought to ground itself in a program that eventually grounded that movement. Her historical thesis implicitly raises the question of whether uncritically accepted foundations operate like the return of the repressed based on exclusionary practices, the stable political identities that found political movements may invariably become threatened by the very instability that the foundationalist move creates. I use the term heterosexual matrix throughout the text to designate that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized. I am drawing from Monique Wittig’s notion of the heterosexual contract and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne Rich’s notion of
“compulsory heterosexuality to characterize a hegemonic discursive/
epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female)
that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality. Fora discussion of the sex/gender distinction in structuralist anthropology and feminist appropriations and criticisms of that formulation, see chapter 2, section i, “Structuralism’s Critical Exchange. For an interesting study of the berdache and multiple-gender arrangements in Native American cultures, see Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the
Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press. See also, Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, eds, Sexual
Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (New York Cambridge
University Press, 1981). Fora politically sensitive and provocative analysis of the berdache, transsexuals, and the contingency of gender dichotomies,
see Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender:An Ethnomethodological
Approach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
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9. A great deal of feminist research has been conducted within the fields of biology and the history of science that assess the political interests inherent in the various discriminatory procedures that establish the scientific basis for sex. See Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe, eds, Genes and Gender,
vols. 1 and 2 (New York Gordian Press, 1978, 1979); the two issues on feminism and science of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. No. 3, Fall 1987, and Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1988, and especially The
Biology and Gender Study Group, The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology in this last issue (Spring 1988); Sandra
Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1986); Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New
Haven:Yale University Press, 1984); Donna Haraway, In the Beginning was the Word:The Genesis of Biological Theory Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, Vol. 6, No. 3, 1981; Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
(New York Routledge, 1989); Sandra Harding and Jean F. O’Barr, Sex

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