Gender and Reproduction

Abstract

The debate over the identity category of women that emerged in 1970s feminist theory has recently morphed into a new debate over the best way to understand sex identity in relationship both to gender identity and to sexuality. Both the meanings and the relationships between the categories of sex, gender and sexuality are under contestation in these debates, as is indeed the ability to separate these terms. The transgender movement has disrupted whatever slight consensus there was over how to understand any of these concepts. Almost no one seems to want binary formulations of sex, gender or sexuality — binaries like male/female, masculine/feminine, and gay/straight — and the continuum models that try to conceptualise the fluidity of identity types are similarly criticised for maintaining binary poles between which a continuum can be strung. Even Derrida’s dream of an open set of endless sexes, put forward as the alternative to Irigaray’s two-term sexual difference, has been effectively critiqued from within the camp of feminist Derrideans (see Irigaray 1985; Grosz 1995: 77). So where do we go from here?