Chapter 3, Subversive Bodily Acts, Section III, Monique Wittig, Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex Summary and Analysis

Butler asks whether there can be humans that are pre-gendered. She wants to affirm that gender is always acquired and is an achievement, but whither the pre-gendered individual? Wittig emphasized, however, that individuals aren't born as men or women. The linguistic distinction between the sexes just imposes cultural heterosexuality and invents the ideas of men and women in relation to the repression of homosexuality.

Wittig sees the idea of sex as oppressive to women, gays and lesbians and sees the idea of sex as an abstraction imposed on society. Physical features are not determinative of sex; it is language that creates social reality. Women must become authoritative, speaking subjects and attain the pursuit of presence, meaning existing...