Copjec, Joan., ed. Supposing the Subject. 1994. New York: Verso, 1996. Print.
… sexual difference is unlike racial, class or ethnic differences. While these differences are inscribed in the symbolic, sexual difference is not: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. Sexual difference, in other words is a real, not a symbolic difference. This distinction does not disparage the importance of race, class or ethnicity; it simply contests the current doxa that sexual difference offers the same kind of description of the subject as these others do. Nor should this distinction be used to isolate considerations of sex from considerations of other differences. It is always a sexed subject who assumes each racial, class or ethnic identity (emphasis original 21).
Why insist, then, on the distinction. The answer is that the very sovereignty of the subject depends on it, and it is only the conception of the subject’s sovereignty that stands any chance of protecting difference in general. It is only when we begin to define the subject as self-governing, as subject to its own laws, that we cease to consider her as calculable, as subject to laws already known, and thus manipulable. It is only when the sovereign incalculability of the subject is acknowledged that perceptions of difference will no longer nourish demands for the surrender of difference to processes of ‘homogenization’, ‘purification’ or any of the other crimes against otherness with which the rise of racism has begun to acquaint us (emphasis original 21).