Diagnosing and Transcending Sexual Difference

In Chapter 1, I presented the problem that has inspired this book, that of the persistence of compulsory, oppositional gender. In this chapter I will offer an account of the ontology of gender that explains this persistence even in the face of significant attempts to challenge it. This ‘explanatory-diagnostic analysis’ (Benhabib 1985: 405), that is, the attempt to determine what causes this persistence, has significant political and practical implications for the ‘anticipatory-utopian critique’ (Benhabib 1985: 405) that will make up the bulk of this book. I will argue that gender is so resilient because the sexual difference with which it is co-constituted has tended to remain bracketed off and unchecked, thus the problem shifts to this very sexual difference. I will offer an ontological account of bodies as developmental rather than fixed in their dimorphic characterisations, and argue that the sexual difference that appears so immutable is in fact intersubjectively constituted and maintained. This analysis allows for sexual difference to be denaturalised, and thus justifies the argument that it could be transcended. By then presenting the ways in which this oppositional sexual difference constitutes a symbolic violence in terms of identity, these ontological and normative accounts coalesce into the premise of the rest of the book: sexual difference need not be the mode through which we see ourselves and each other, and it is also not the best or most just way of seeing ourselves and each other.