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The recognition of the mutually constitutive character of multiple differences in the processes by which people acquire their gendered selves is equally central to theories of gender moving beyond the equality versus difference debate and that can be situated within the paradigm of social constructionism, a more general trend of critical thought that became significant in the course of the 1980s. Social constructionist theorists of gender do not regard difference as something that is an intrinsic part or essential aspect of identity/subjectivity, but, instead, the product of power relations. Adopting a view on power inspired by the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984), they see power as both an oppressive and limiting structure, and as the generating force of meaning and knowledge. Criticizing any notion of identity as fixed or authentic, social constructionists deny the existence of a preexisting core to the self and, instead, assert that identities are made (differently) by the structuring operations of power and knowledge systems, a process in which discursive power is seen to play a preeminent role. Their equivocal position in relation to human essence entails that such theorists reject the emphasis on or highlighting of group identities, be they defined in terms of gender, sexuality, or any other aspect of differentiation. They do not, however, go so far as to reject identity categories as a whole. Acknowledging the potential sedimentation and stability of such categories over time, social constructionist thinkers continue to pay attention to the concrete operations and functions of multiple identity categories in historically and culturally specific material realities.

The most radical theories of gender have come out of postmodern schools of thought that came to predominate both feminist and critical sexuality studies in the 1990s and 2000s. With an overall focus on the multiplicity and instability of differences, postmodern theorists of gender resist any notion of firm or fixed identity categories. On the contrary their major aim is to fundamentally destabilize and denaturalize the notion of identity itself, whether conceived in group or individual terms. Generally, but by no means exclusively, inspired by such queer thinkers as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, postmodernists propound a largely discursive account of gender construction, emphasizing differences among and within all human beings. The central issue, however, is not the multiple nature or mutually constitutive aspects of categories of difference but, rather, the questioning of the status of differences as such.

Conceiving of human beings as the products of both material and discursive power, postmodernist thinkers reject the idea of a self lying behind the expressions and performance of differentiated identities, regarding gender as no more and no less than an obligatory masquerade. Following Friedrich Nietzsche's adage that '''the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed'' (1995), they deny the possibility and existence of a prior, true, or authentic self underneath the embodied practices of gender. Seeing power as a multiple, constitutive force that operates in a variety of ways to produce what subsequently comes to be seen as an interior core or preexisting identity, postmodernists conceive of gender as no more than the effect of power and, as such, as a performative act that ostensibly calls into being what it is supposed to express. Formulated in thoroughly anti-essentialist terms, postmodern notions of gender not only deny any ulterior truth behind identity, they also implicitly reject the supposition of subjective agency on which the initial distinction between biological sex and cultural gender was founded.

Indeed, the widespread acceptance in feminist discourse from the 1980s onward of the concept of gender as a technical term for the socially constructed aspects of femininity and masculinity--as distinct from biologically determined differences between men and women--has, paradoxically, led to a more general adoption of gender as a simple synonym for that from which it was supposed to mark itself off. This is partly the result of the fact that it has proved difficult to maintain such a distinction, especially in situations in which processes of gender appeared to involve an interaction between biology and culture. Another reason the conceptual distinction between the two terms has become increasingly blurred might be that, given the relative semantic indeterminacy of gender, scholars who were not so familiar with the divergent emphases in feminist debates about its meanings ''interpreted gender as a simple synonym for sex and adopted it as such in their own writings'' (Haig 2004, p. 94). In postmodern theories of gender, the deconstruction of the sex/gender distinction is not, however, so much the result of explanatory inadequacy or simple confusion but a deliberate attempt to call into question the presumed naturalness of not only the categories of gender and sexuality but also those of sex and the sexed body.

Following Butler's cautionary observation that '''being' a sex or a gender is fundamentally impossible'' (Butler 1990, p. 19), postmodernist thinkers understand gender not as a noun or a set of attributes of a previously sexed, presocial body but, instead, as a series of acts, repeated over time, that constitutes the corporeal identity that it purports to be. Instead of seeing the sexed body as a text upon which culture inscribes its gendered meanings, Butler defines gender as the process that constructs the internal coherence of sex, (hetero)sexual desire, and (hetero)sexual practice in the subject: ''Gender is the discursive/cultural means by which 'sexed nature' or 'natural sex' is produced and established as 'prediscursive,' prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts'' (Butler 1990, p. 7). The stylized repetition of gender-inflected actions, words, and gestures through time gradually gives the actor the feeling of naturalness of the body and of heterosexuality that is required in modern societies.

Functioning as a regulatory regime, gender in Butler's work becomes the causal force of (what is presumed to be natural) sex, so that what was believed to be sex in earlier modes of gender theory, in postmodern discourses is established as the product of the operations of gender. Within this framework gender itself is conceived as the effect of power structures, organized in institutions, practices, and discourses that regulate and establish its various shapes and meanings. The most important sites at which gender itself is produced, according to Butler, are the mutually reinforcing systems of, on the one hand, phallogocentrism, a neologism coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida referring to the perceived tendency of European and North American thought to locate the center of any text or discourse within the logos--Greek for word, reason, or spirit--and the phallus, a representation of the male genitalia, and, on the other hand, compulsory heterosexuality. The taboo against homosexuality thus ultimately comes to account for the naturalization of the body in gendered terms, whereas gender, as the repetition of a series of stylized acts, simultaneously becomes the cultural force that generates the belief in the naturalness of heterosexuality. As the central organizing principle of gender, heterosexuality in Butler's thought constitutes the epistemic regime that drives the division of humans into male and female, and that structures our understanding of the body as biological.

Although Butler has acquired a central position in contemporary gender theory, her work has neither been unquestionably adopted nor remained unchallenged. Especially with regard to the political efficacy of her model--which leaves little, if any, room for the contestation of existing gender regimes--as well as the place of the body in her work, this extreme form of anti-essentialist and anti-humanist theorizing has urged other thinkers to point up the need to ''supplement her account with insights from psychoanalytic and materialist theorists'' of gender, and to ''attempt to weave these strands together in . . . discussions of sexuality, the body, transgendering, and the politics of identity'' (Alsop et al. 2002, p.7). Nonetheless, the influence of Butler's performative model of gender supplemented with the destabilization of the links between sex and gender by queer theorists has opened up possibilities for such multiple and indeterminate sex/gender/sexual positionings that subsequent theories of gender cannot but result in the further deconstruction of what were for a long time believed to be stable, universal facts of nature.

Bibliography:

Alsop, Rachel; Annette Fitzsimons; and Kathleen Lennon. 2002. Theorizing Gender. Cambridge: Polity.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ''Sex.'' New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.

Haig, David. 2004. ''The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex: Social Change in Academic Titles, 1945-2001.'' Archives of Sexual Behavior 33(2): 87-96.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1995. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemical Tract, First Essay, Section 13, trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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