Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005.
‘There is a Person Here” Interview with JB, first appeared in International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies (Winter 2000) reprinted in Butler Matters (9-25).
The notion that sexual difference is fundamental to culture, for instance, which became something like a structuralist truth that survives in Lacanian discourse today, has a way of making sure we consider as unintelligible forms of sexual differentiation that do not conform to the ‘sexual difference’ at hand. Thus, I wonder whether we can even begin to think transgender and intersex within such a restrictive framework.
The point is not to argue that there are more than two sexes, but that we do not know that cultural variations differences may take. There are not only important overlaps between the sexes, but people don’t always stay with the sex to they have been assigned. Moreover, if we take sexual difference to be a foundation of culture, we can not ask how the assignment of sex — which is such a volatile political issue — takes place as a cultural practice. My view is that it is crucial to understand sex as assigned rather than assumed, and to recognize that these are systematically obscured by the presumption that sexual difference is a condition of every and all culture (13).