Sexuality and Gender

Social theory has recently been engaged in a wide-ranging discussion concerning the relationships between “sexuality” and “gender“. One of the most influential texts in this debate is Judith Butler Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, a book that also circulates within Foucauldian, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist debates concerning the constitution of the subject and the category of identity.

Butler’s investment in the Foucauldian paradigm has more to do with the relation of discourse to the construction of subjectivity (she argues that there is no subject “before” discourse or outside the law) than with epistemic shifts or the emergence of new subjectivities within discursive formations. In other words, Butler is interested in the philosophical and linguistic significance of Foucault’s claims concerning the circulation of juridical power and the idea of the subject as enabled into being by that power. She does not seem to be as interested in the “historical Foucault.” (Butler, 1990)

We can write a Custom Essay on Sexuality for you!

Thomas Laqueur evinces precisely the opposite tendency in his book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, as he traces historical shifts in perception of “sex” from a one-sex model of the body (an ancient and early modern view) to a two-sex model (a post-Enlightenment conception), arguing that political exigencies motivated this change in scientific perception (rather than any specific scientific discovery concerning the anatomy or physiology of sex). (Laqueur, 1990)

For Laqueur, “sex” (anatomical or physiological sexual difference) is always an effect of a society’s gender arrangements. Gender, as the social structure designating the proper place of subjects along an axis of differentiation, determines perceptions of the body as sexed — determines, indeed, what counts as “sex.” (Laqueur, 1990)

While Laqueur makes this argument through an analysis of the history of the one-sex model...