Undoing Gender Read Free Page B

one framework for understanding femininity and masculinity. It tends to forget that the risks of discrimination, loss of employment, public harassment, and violence are heightened for those who live openly as transgendered persons. The view that the desire to become a man or a transman or to live transgendered is motivated by a repudiation of femininity presumes that every person born with female anatomy is therefore in possession of a proper femininity (whether innate, symbolically assumed, or socially assigned), one that can either be owned or disowned, appropriated or expropriated.
    Indeed, the critique of male-to-female (MTF) transsexuality has centered on the “appropriation” of femininity, as if it belongs properly to a given sex, as if sex is discretely given, as if gender identity could and should be derived unequivocally from presumed anatomy. To understand gender as a historical category, however, is to accept that gender, understood as one way of culturally configuring a body, is open to a continual remaking, and that “anatomy” and “sex” are not without cultural framing (as the intersex movement has clearly shown). The very attribution of femininity to female bodies as if it were a natural or necessary property takes place within a normative framework in which the assignment of femininity to femaleness is one mechanism for the production of gender itself. Terms such as “masculine” and “feminine” are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose. That the terms recur is interesting enough, but the recurrence does not index a sameness, but rather the way in which the social articulation of the term depends upon its repetition, which constitutes one dimension of the performative structure of gender. Terms of gender designation are thus never settled once and for all but are constantly in the process of being remade.
    The concept of gender as historical and performative, however, stands in tension with some versions of sexual difference, and some of the essays included here try to broach that divide within feminist theory. The view that sexual difference is a primary difference has come under criticism from several quarters. There are those who rightly argue that sexual difference is no more primary than racial or ethnic difference and that one cannot apprehend sexual difference outside of the racial and ethnic frames by which it is articulated. Those who claim that being produced by a mother and a father is crucial to all humans may well have a point. But are sperm donors or one-night stands, or indeed, rapists, really “fathers” in a social sense? Even if in some sense or under certain circumstances they are, do they not put the category into crisis for those who would assume that children without discernible fathers at their origin are subject to psychosis? If a sperm and egg are necessary for reproduction (and remain so)—and in that sense sexual difference is an essential part of any account a human may come up with about his or her origin—does it follow that this difference shapes the individual more profoundly than other constituting social forces, such as the economic or racial conditions by which one comes into being, the conditions of one’s adoption, the sojourn at the orphanage? Is there very much that follows from the fact of an originating sexual difference?
    Feminist work on reproductive technology has generated a host of ethical and political perspectives that have not only galvanized feminist studies but have made clear the implications for thinking about gender in relation to biotechnology, global politics, and the status of the human and life itself. Feminists who criticize technologies for effectively replacing the maternal body with a patriarchal apparatus must nevertheless contend with the enhanced autonomy that