'Sex' and the Problem of the Body: Reconstructing Judith Butler's Theory of Sex/Gender

Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and the debates that her work has sparked over the question of 'the body', this essay seeks to clarify the politics of the body by way of a careful articulation of various understandings of the sex/gender relation. I first situate Butler's arguments in the context of other philosophical discourses concerning the body so that I may then focus on Butler's particular engagements with Beauvoir and Foucault. From this reading I argue that sex is gendered, in that sex always remains subject to gender norms. However, at the same time I contend that one cannot erase sex, nor collapse the difference between sex and gender. A sophisticated account of sex/gender must eschew the notion of sex as natural and must resist the tendency to reduce gender to sex. But such an account must simultaneously avoid the trap of reversing the causality by turning everything into gender. To gender sex is not to do away with sex. I articulate a theory of sex/gender that sees sex as gendered while simultaneously holding on to a concept of sex as a powerful discursive construct, one with important social and political effects. Such a theory illuminates the body as a site that both enables and constrains political agency. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd