The dominant feminist thought tradition in the 60’s and 70’s lay on a clearly recognizable distinction between sex and gender, or nature and culture; that is to say the socially constructed roles and behaviors that heteronormative discourses assigns for each sex can be separated from the biology of the person in order to challenge the “biology-is-destiny” formulation. Butler tries to illustrate that this distinction per se is problematic because it ignores the existing binary of male and female. To do so she goes like this:
First; she problematises identity politics and feminist politics and how they represent groups and individuals. She identifies that it’s the dominant trend that in order to identify a group which suffers, one has to establish categories, so that the political action would be possible. But for her, there is an irony in making such categories. The traditional western epistemology of the subject tells us that subject is a priori to speech, action, thought, law, culture etc. so the subject constructs its identity, that is to say all claims are made by the subject (the existence of subject before the law is actually the foundation of the social contract as well). The problem with these juridical categories is that on the one hand they are believed to be the foundations and origins of the politics, but on the other hand, in the eyes of Butler, these categories are actually the effects of politics and juridical discourses. As she says, “juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent.”
Second; Butler argues that the sex/gender distinction has the capacity of challenging the biology and the coherent feminist subject at the same time. Although it’s believed that there are only two sexes, gender, as the culturally constructed roles and meanings that the sexed bodies assume, doesn’t necessarily fall into an essential binary of masculine/feminine. Butler argues that 1)there are many masculinities/femininities and 2)even female bodied persons can have masculine roles, or male bodied persons can have feminine roles. So the notion of a unified category of “women” has already been contested by the possibility of the variety of interpretations of sex, which are called genders.
Third; she then says that this distinction actually doesn’t attack biology, and this is where she actually tries to deconstruct this distinction in a remarkable way. The realm of culture is where the explosion of the binary of male/female is possible, but the realm of nature is where this binary is reinforced. But sex, like other categories, is constructed through discourses with specific aims. Like other categories which are the effects of juridical discourses, sex also cannot be “prediscursive”. So Butler indicates that if sex is socially or culturally constructed like gender then there would be no distinction between sex and gender at all.
Body is important for Butler in this deconstruction. She suggests that we need to come to the body itself and explode this binary rather than assuming it as something pre-given. Foucault talks about body as the material or the surface upon which the events or the history takes place, as if body is passive or silent. Thus Foucault doesn’t take this distinction between the body and the history as the object of interrogation, or in other words he assumes the-body-is-the-surface to be a given “fact”. But for Butler body is something that acts, is an agent, rather than something which is passive or acted upon. There is a constant interaction between history and the body. Butler’s argument about the body has this implication that even the body is denaturizable and it can be shifted to the domain of culture. Then the last step of deconstructing the sex/gender distinction would be to argue that gender is actually maintained through the acts done by this active denaturalized body, as if everything is gender then.
That’s it! :)
