Gender and Sexuality

Since the late 1980s, theories of Gender and Sexuality have redefined

how we think about culture and society. They have raised new questions

about the construction of the gendered and sexualized subject and put

forward radical new ideas about PERFORMANCE and PERFORMATIVITY as

the means by which the body becomes a SIGNIFYING SYSTEM within

SOCIAL FORMATIONS. At the foundation of most theories of Gender and

Sexuality is a thoroughgoing critique of the SUBJECT and SUBJECTIVITY.

As a social and political category, the subject cuts across all disciplinary

and theoretical boundaries. Being a subject can mean many things – a

citizen of a particular community, an AUTONOMOUS being in possession

of a sense of personal wholeness and unity, the subject of an oppressive

ruler or of a discourse. Being a subject and possessing subjectivity are

not the birthrights of all human beings, however; they are specialized

attributes, more or less unique to Western or Westernized cultures. This

notion of the modern subject begins in the Enlightenment, with the

reflections of John Locke, who regarded personal identity as unique,

sovereign, and autonomous. Subjectivity, the consciousness of one’s his-

torical and social agency, was the prerogative of the Western individual

who defined himself in opposition to the OTHER, to that which was not

a subject and did not possess subjectivity. The classic philosophical

expression of this relationship of the subject to what is not the subject is

Hegel’s dialectic of the master and slave. As is so often the case in

Enlightenment thought, the potential for subversion and AMBIVALENCE

is contained in what appears to be a universal concept. For Hegel’s dia-

lectic also suggests the possibility of the disenfranchised slave or non-

subject acquiring subjectivity by overpowering the master. By the end

of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche could speak of the “subject

as multiplicity,” and by the 1920s, Freud would call into question most

of our preconceived notions about of selfhood and sexual identity.

Closely linked to the concept of the subject is the concept of IDENTITY,

which is typically used to cover the process by which a subject becomes

a particular kind of subject. Rather than a fixed quality or ESSENCE, iden-

tity is understood by theorists of Gender and Sexuality as an ongoing

process of construction, performance, appropriation, or mimicry. This

perspective, strongly influenced by Michel Foucault’s theories of sexual-

103

ity, came be known as SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM, the idea that subjectiv-

ity and identity are not natural categories or essential features of human

existence, unique and indivisible aspects of one’s being; they are rather

the material effects of the discourses and images that surround us. The

crucial questions raised by theories of Gender and Sexuality have to do

with agency and determination: Who or what determines the construc-

tion of gender and sexuality? How is social AGENCY acquired and main-

tained by these constructions? Is one constructed solely by social

ideologies and institutions? Or do individuals have the freedom to

act reflexively, to engage in what Anthony Giddens calls “projects of

the self ”? For Foucault, sexuality has played a fundamental role in

developing modern modes of social organization and regulation. In his

landmark study, History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault argues that sexual-

ity, far from being proscribed or repressed in the nineteenth century,

became part of a discourse that sought to identify and regulate all forms

of sexual behavior. “Instead of a massive censorship,” he claimed, “what

was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to dis-

course” (34). Religious confession, Psychoanalysis, sexology, literature

– all were instrumental in this incitement, which simultaneously made

sexuality a public matter and a target of social administration. “Under

the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that

it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of, tracked

down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no

respite” (20).

Foucault’s critique of sexuality brilliantly exposed the ideological

mechanisms by which sexual identities are maintained and regulated by

institutional authorities. In this regard, his work paralleled that of Louis

Althusser whose theory of IDEOLOGY held that the subject is always

already “interpellated,” coercively recruited by ideological apparatuses

of the State. (On Althusser, see pp. 112–13.) Subjectivity, selfhood, and

citizenship are the products of socialization; agency, that quantum of

will that enables the subject to move within social spheres, is a product

of those very spheres. In another direction, Giddens argues that the

individual has many significant opportunities to intervene in the ideo-

logical construction of subjectivity; she is able to choose from an array

of available discursive strategies and write the narrative of herself. These

techniques of self-development guarantee freedom even in contexts of

overwhelming social power. In his later work, Foucault recognized that

104

the individual possessed a necessary freedom from POWER, which is

“exercised only over free subjects . . . and only insofar as they are free.

By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a

field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions

and diverse comportments may be realized” (“Subject” 221).

Judith Butler is perhaps the most influential theorist to explore the

idea of sexual and gender identity as a social PERFORMANCE, a site of

power and discourse. “To what extent,” she asks, “do regulatory practices

of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coher-

ence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person?”

(Gender Trouble 16). As an alternative to such naturalized regulatory