María Paula Suárez 

Student Number: S3990605

 
Summary
 
1. Chapter 1. Subjects of Sex, Gender/Desire
 
In the present text, the author wants to reflect on how the category "woman" is configured. It is
important to reflect on this matter since this category is the subject of feminism, and this implies
its representation in the political arena.
 
It has been assumed that the category "woman" implies unity and identity common to all women,
but this assumption does not account for the complexity of the configuration of what has been
understood as "woman". For this reason, it is necessary to make a deep critique of the
understanding and emergence of said category, distancing itself from a vision in which it is
postulated that it is a universal and invadable category.
 
To carry out this criticism, the author begins with the distinction between sex and gender, in
which sex is what is usually given, that is, being male or female, and the genre is culturally
constructed, that is, to configure oneself as a man or a woman. In this sense, the gender being
something culturally constructed leaves room for the configuration of other genders beyond man-
woman binarism. However, the author wants to take criticism even further and question the
distinction between gender and sex, since there is still a remnant of something naturally given,
namely sex. For the author, sex is also something culturally constructed and therefore the
distinction between this and the gender would not make any sense, moreover, sex would be the
same as gender. “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called
“sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with
the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”
(Butler, 2002). At this point, an important question arises. Why would it be important to
maintain this position? or what is the purpose of keeping it for several other feminist theories?
 
In the same sense if gender or even sex is something culturally constructed, how is it
constructed? It is a completely social construction in which the individual is only a passive entity
on which these changes occur. Or, on the contrary, is it the individual and his free will that
generates that construction in itself? It seems that neither option is the answer that the author
wants to give. It is not an absolute determinism, nor a completely free will. What Butler wants to
show is that in both cases the body is being assumed as a simple medium in which meanings are
deposited externally, either by an individual will or by a social will.
 
At this point, the author introduces the criticism of what is called "metaphysics of the substance"
in the text, a position from which it is assumed that there is an invariable and universal identity, a
"substance" that configures what is called the person. Here I wonder if this criticism only applies
the vision of free will (because it seems to be a deeper elaboration of this criticism) or if it also
applies to complete determinism, and if not, what is the distance taken from this perspective.
 
Within this metaphysics of the substance, it would seem that there is something given, men and
women (sex) and that the construction of gender is how the subjects reaffirm or move away from
this given. Now it seems that gender is configured from certain discursive practices that take
place in the world and that seem to be related to obligatory and hegemonic heterosexuality. It is
not that there is a substance with a unitary identity that also has agency, but that the subjects are
crossed and also act within a framework of complex power relations. It is assumed that there is a
will and an individual agency because if there wasn’t it would be very difficult to understand the
possibility of social transformation. However, what the author wants to argue is that
transformation is possible even within this framework of power relations. No longer as a will and
individual agency, but as a sort of subversive repetition. The question of how such a thing is
carried out is still unclear.