Sara Salih. 2002: 78-79<\/p>\n
By \u2018sex\u2019 Butler is not referring to \u2018sexual intercourse\u2019, but to one\u2019s sexed identity. Whether you tick the \u2018male\u2019 or \u2018female\u2019 box on census forms or application forms usually depends on whether you possess recognizably male or female genitalia, and it is on this basis that your sexed identity is allocated to you when you are born.<\/p>\n
To talk in terms of the \u2018allocation\u2019 of sex is already to assume that it is not \u2018natural\u2019 or given, and in her brief description of the \u2018sexing\u2019 which takes place at the scene of birth, Butler relies on the notion of interpellation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n She writes: Consider the medical interpellation which (the recent emergence of the sonogram notwithstanding) shifts an infant from an \u2018it\u2019 to a \u2018she\u2019 or a \u2018he\u2019, and in that naming the girl is \u2018girled\u2019, brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender. But that \u2018girling\u2019 of the girl<\/strong> does not end there; on the contrary, that founding interpellation is reiterated by various authorities and throughout the various intervals of time to reinforce or contest this naturalized effect. The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm<\/strong>. (BTM: 7 \u2013 8)<\/p>\n Whether it takes place before birth through an ultrasound scan, or when the infant is born, the interpellation of sex and gender occurs as soon as a person\u2019s sex is announced \u2013 \u2018It\u2019s a girl\/boy!\u2019 (Salih 2002. p 77).<\/p>\n definition of the verb \u2018to interpellate\u2019 will tell you that it is the action of appealing to someone, a summons, citation or interruption, but Butler uses \u2018interpellation\u2019 in a specifically theoretical sense to describe how subject positions are conferred and assumed through the action of \u2018hailing\u2019. To adapt de Beauvoir\u2019s statement, cited earlier, we might say \u2018One is not born, but rather one is called, a woman\u2019.<\/p>\n Butler draws this idea from Althusser\u2019s essay, \u2018Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses\u2019, where he uses the term interpellation <\/strong>to describe the \u2018hailing\u2019 of a person into her or his social and ideological position by an authority figure. Althusser gives the example of a policeman calling out \u2018Hey, you there!\u2019 to a man [sic] in the street. By calling out, the policeman interpellates the man as a subject, and by turning around the man takes up his position as such. \u2018By this mere one-hundred-and eighty-degree physical conversion [i.e. turning around] he becomes a subject\u2019, Althusser writes. \u2018Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was \u201creally\u201d addressed to him, that \u201cit was really him who was hailed\u201d (and not someone else) . . . The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing\u2019 (Althusser 1969: 163).<\/p>\n There are all sorts of ways in which people are interpellated by ideology and you don\u2019t need a policeman in the street to shout out \u2018Hey, you there!\u2019 in order to be constituted as a subject. In fact, a (relatively benign) example of interpellation occurred in the first paragraph of this chapter when I addressed you, the reader, directly, writing as if I knew you and what you have read and what you think about what you have read. In doing so I was interpellating you, both literally by addressing you (as I am doing now) and in an Althusserian sense by implicitly slotting you into a preconceived \u2018readerly\u2019 and theoretical role (\u2018You have read Gender Trouble haven\u2019t you? And you understand it\/agree with it don\u2019t you?\u2019). In making these assumptions I am effectively constituting you as a subject \u2013 in this specific context, as a reading subject, who is not only familiar with Gender Trouble and all the arguments in it, but who also agrees with them. A literary example of interpellation occurs in Thomas Hardy\u2019s novel, Tess of the d\u2019Urbervilles (1891), which is subtitled \u2018A Pure Woman\u2019. In the novel, Angel Clare interpellates Tess as \u2018pure\u2019 in a moral sense by assuming that she is an innocent virgin who has no knowledge of men, and it could be argued that she in turn constructs herself according to his model of \u2018proper\u2019 femininity until this construction becomes unsustainable (Salih 2002. p 78).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sara Salih. 2002: 78-79 By \u2018sex\u2019 Butler is not referring to \u2018sexual intercourse\u2019, but to one\u2019s sexed identity. Whether you tick the \u2018male\u2019 or \u2018female\u2019 box on census forms or application forms usually depends on whether you possess recognizably male or female genitalia, and it is on this basis that your sexed identity is allocated … Continue reading “sex gender interpellation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-gender"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1760"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3326,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760\/revisions\/3326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}