Patrick Austin R. Manalo POS 180.

26 A Gender and Sex as Political Matters

15 November 2010 Bobby Benedicto

While Gayle S. Rubin tries to outline the various social injustices experienced by different sexualities and how they might be fought, Judith Butler investigates how gender is a unique constitution of experience. By saying that gender is historical, Butler argues that gender is not a fact, but is a construction and a performance. Like Michel Foucault, she sees the body as a field of possibilitiesthe body as every individuals tool for self-expression and self-assertion. Part of the bodys goal is to not be circumscribed by hegemonic bourgeois structures, especially those pertaining to gender and sexuality. Being a post-structuralist herself, Butler firmly believes that gender is personal and therefore subjectively created; this means that gender is not categorical, because naming it as such presupposes some commonalities in people that enable them to be identified and enclosed in their niches. The mantra that despite heterogeneities, there are still similarities one can find is what post-structuralists like Butler and Foucault are trying to challenge, and gender is part of it. Quite similarly, Rubin is averse on the idea of a hubristic and bourgeois heterosexual society that seeks to dichotomize what is good and bad behavior. She describes that the modern society is characterized by a certain elitismoutside heterosexuality and sex for procreation in the bedroom, there is no salvation; there is only graver and graver oppression by the state, the church, the medical society, the family, the legal structure, the society in general. The homosexual man, the sodomite, the prostitute, the sadomasochist, the pedophile, the incestuous, the lesbian, the transvestite are not only scapegoats and targets for cruelty, but are also in the process stigmatized. This does not mean, however, that nothing can be learned from them. Sex then becomes a political matter, for it is enmeshed in the web of power relations in the society.