Introduction:BiologizingCulture/CulturingBiology 37
clear-cut divide between sex and gender, biological "fact" and socio-
cultural "construct," has, at least in recent years, turned out to be much
less stable and clear-cut as second-wave feminists have long tended to
assume. For them, insisting on the sex-gender divide was above all the
condition of possibility for uncoupling women's inferior social and
cultural status from its supposedly biological "foundation." This
uncouplingmadeitpossibleto theorizethegenderedbiologyofwomen
as materializing itself in cultural and more narrowly discursive
constructions. Today, the view that women's en-gendered bodies are
first and foremosttextualbodiescan with reasonable fairness be said to
reflect a disciplinary consensus, if not even an established orthodoxy.
Judith Butler's reflections on the gendered body in particular (for
example inGender Trouble,1990 andBodies that Matter, 1993) are
routinely credited with establishing and bringing into focus an all-out
constructivistviewofwomen'sbiology.Butlersays,"thereisneitheran
'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to
which gender aspires... Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly
concealsitsgenesis"("PerformativeActs"273).Butlerevengoessofar
as to question the sex (biological) vs. gender (culturally constructed)
binarymentionedabove.Sheinterrogatesthisdistinctionbyarguingthat
"gender acts" affect women in such material ways that even the
perception of corporeal sexual differences gets shaped by them: "'sex'
becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, retroactively
installed at a pre-linguistic site to which there is no direct access"
(Bodies5). If the immutable character of sex is contested, the construct
by that name can then be regarded as culturally constructed, as gender;
indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, while the "pre-linguistic
site to which there is no direct access" has clear resemblances with the
unconscious in post-Freudian, especially late Lacanian
conceptualizations. Butler's argument here works in such a way that the
distinction between sex and gender comes to be no distinction at all,
since both depend on cultural forms and norms for their actualization.
These forms and norms are "the very apparatus of production whereby
sexesthemselvesareestablished"(Bodies11).^28
(^28) Here, Butler's thinking intersects with the first generation of second-wave
feminists. Kate Millett, for example, argues that gender differences have