Défaire et refaire le sexe, le genre, la sexualité

The matrix sex/gender/sexuality structures everyday relations, but also knowledges, including at the university. Challenged, this matrix nonetheless reproduces “common sense”: the idea that there are two sexes, that only heterosexuality and some forms of homosexuality are possible, and that gender is distinct from sex but that both are stable from birth. This disciplining, normalizing matrix shapes our laws and our formal political institutions, the media and popular culture, our everyday lives and political struggles. But, it is contested by new political subjects—intersex, trans and queer persons. These subjects emergent from what were pathologizing medical diagnostic categories. Their existence as intellectuals, activists and no longer as abnormal, as crazy, as criminal, has been won with difficulty. Now, they offer us critical new social analyses of everyday human experiences, overdetermined, but never reducible to binary sex and gender norms. In an inevitably partial, fragmentary and often contradictory way, they help us to imagine social relations beyond the often narrow practices and norms of the present.