1. Seminar Week 3 – Is Gender in
Trouble?
Biological Sex and Social Gender

2. What is sex? – Your Perspective
• What does sex mean to you?
• Discuss in your groups; can you come up with a
simple definition?

3. What is sex? – The Judith Butler
Perspective
• Traditional feminism accepted that sex was a biological category, while
gender was a historic category.
In other words, earlier feminists admitted there are biological differences
between men and women, but the main differences between the two
genders are socially constructed, having nothing to do with biology.
• The theories of Judith Butler challenge this idea, proposing sex to be not
an anatomical condition upon which gender is socially constructed, but ‘a
cultural norm which governs the materialisation of bodies’(Butler, 1993: 3)
• Sex is, therefore, ‘an ideal construct which is forcibly materialised through
time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process
whereby regulatory norms materialise sex and achieve this materialisation
through a forcible reiteration of those norms’ (Butler, 1993: 1)
• In an ideal world, ‘no longer believable as an interior “truth” of
dispositions and identity, sex will be shown to be a performatively enacted
signification’ (Butler, 1999: 33)

4. Language, Power and Sex
• Butler draws inspiration here from postmodern thought, which suggests
that the way we perceive reality is completely governed by language.
Language itself is a framework through which power circulates, and she
demonstrates how power has moulded the idea of a ‘biological sex’
through language.
• Performativity as an illustration: ‘illocutionary speech acts’ (John Searle) –
that do something rather than represent something. The classic example –
‘I pronounce you man and wife’ – the words, coming from a person of
authority, actively change the couple’s status, by doing what they say.
• A speech act can produce that which it names only through law (or the
accepted norm, code or contract) which is cited and repeated and thus
performed. Sex/gender come under social norms and codes and a ‘boy’
becomes a boy by being named so, he would not have a sex or gender
outside of social norms. By repeating these terms and ‘performing’
according to social norms, we make these artificial conventions seem
necessary and natural.

5. What is Gender? – Your perspective
• What is gender to you?
• Discuss in your groups; can you come up with
a simple definition?

6. What is gender? – The Judith Butler
Perspective
• ‘Gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of
repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame
that congeal over time to produce the appearance of
*...+ a natural sort of being’ (1999: 33)
• Gender, as ‘the act that one does, the act that one
performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on
long before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is
an act which has been rehearsed, much a script
survives the particular actors who make use of it, but
which requires individual actors in order to be
actualised and reproduced as a reality once again’
(1988: 526)

7. Why debate sex and gender?
• Judith Butler, as well as other social and
cultural theorists, argue that the continual
repetition of sex/gender, male/female acts is
needed to preserve the standards of
heteronormativity.
• In this oppressive environment, there is no
space for identities which transcend sex and
gender.
• Task: find out what heteronormativity is

8. Is gender in trouble?

9. Is gender in trouble?

10. Is gender in trouble?

11. Is gender in trouble?

12. Is gender in trouble?

13. Is gender in trouble?

14. Is gender in trouble?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag9uaEVh
Xe4

15. Further Reading
• On Judith Butler
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm
• Michel Foucault on sex and gender
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/gender
andsex/modules/foucaultgendersex.html
• Queer Theory
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-quee.htm
• Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/
de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/index.htm