Undoing Gender

Conflicts within modern feminism are important avenues toward progress within the movement. Butler seeks to investigate sexual difference as a framework for intelligibility or as a primary differentiation. Butler cites Luce Irigaray’s emphasis on modernity, adding that feminism is currently restricted by the need to defend itself. Language reinforces or challenges concepts, and Butler questions the fears people have about interrogating terms that are political or moral. Between feminist, gender, and queer theory, Butler notes varying degrees of comfort with the idea of “gender,” “sexual difference,” and “sexuality,” introducing the Vatican’s insistence that “gender” is code for “homosexuality.” Butler proposes that the intersection of these terms might be a “permanent difficulty” between “psychic, somatic, and social dimensions” (186). Butler uses the example of the Women’s Rights Center in Honduras, which opposed the Latin American Episcopal conference at the 1995 UN conference to dispute the idea that “gender” and “sexuality” are distinctly “Western” issues. The UN’s presentation of “lesbian” in brackets, later omitted altogether, displaced issues of sexuality onto ambiguous language. The “universality” of the UN’s decisions calls into question the reliability of “consensus” in determining the limits of the universal. Challenges to universality come from those who are excluded from it, continuing efforts to augment and broaden who is considered “human.