Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

the viability of taking up a reformist or subversive position within the system to invoke apart of it is to invoke and confirm the entirety of it.
As a result, the political task she formulates is to overthrow the entire discourse on sex, indeed, to overthrow the very grammar that institutes “gender”—or fictive sex”—as an essential attribute of humans and objects alike (especially pronounced in French).
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Through her theory and fiction she calls fora radical reorganization of the description of bodies and sexualities without recourse to sex and, consequently, without recourse to the pronomial differentiations that regulate and distribute rights of speech within the matrix of gender.
Wittig understands discursive categories like sex as abstractions forcibly imposed upon the social field, ones that produce a second- order or reified reality Although it appears that individuals have a
“direct perception of sex, taken as an objective datum of experience,
Wittig argues that such an object has been violently shaped into such a datum and that the history and mechanism of that violent shaping no longer appears with that object.
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Hence, sex is the reality-effect of a violent process that is concealed by that very effect. All that appears is
“sex,” and so sex is perceived to be the totality of what is, uncaused,
but only because the cause is nowhere to be seen. Wittig realizes that her position is counterintuitive, but the political cultivation of intuition is precisely what she wants to elucidate, expose, and challenge:
Sex is taken as an immediate given a sensible given physical features belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an imaginary formation which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as others but marked by asocial system, through the network of relationships in which they are perceived.
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“Physical features appear to be in some sense there on the far side of language, unmarked by asocial system. It is unclear, however, that these features could be named in away that would not reproduce the
Subversive Bodily Acts
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reductive operation of the categories of sex. These numerous features gain social meaning and unification through their articulation within the category of sex. In other words, sex imposes an artificial unity on an otherwise discontinuous set of attributes. As both discursive and per-
ceptual, “sex” denotes an historically contingent epistemic regime, a language that forms perception by forcibly shaping the interrelationships through which physical bodies are perceived.
Is there a physical body prior to the perceptually perceived body?
An impossible question to decide. Not only is the gathering of attributes under the category of sex suspect, but so is the very discrimination of the features themselves. That penis, vagina, breasts, and so forth, are named sexual parts is both a restriction of the erogenous body to those parts and a fragmentation of the body as a whole.
Indeed, the unity imposed upon the body by the category of sex is a
“disunity,” a fragmentation and compartmentalization, and a reduction of erotogeneity. No wonder, then, that Wittig textually enacts the
“overthrow” of the category of sex through a destruction and fragmentation of the sexed body in The Lesbian Body. As sex fragments the body, so the lesbian overthrow of sex targets as models of domination those sexually differentiated norms of bodily integrity that dictate what unifies and renders coherent the body as a sexed body. In her theory and fiction, Wittig shows that the integrity and unity of the body, often thought to be positive ideals, serve the purposes of fragmentation, restriction, and domination.
Language gains the power to create the socially real through the locutionary acts of speaking subjects. There appear to be two levels of reality, two orders of ontology, in Wittig’s theory. Socially constituted ontology emerges from a more fundamental ontology that appears to be pre-social and pre-discursive.Whereas sex belongs to a discursively constituted reality (second-order), there is a pre-social ontology that accounts for the constitution of the discursive itself. She clearly refuses the structuralist assumption of a set of universal signifying structures prior to the speaking subject that orchestrate the formation

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