Ironic Gender/Authentic Sex

Feminism and the postmodern turn have vaporized the commonsense materiality of gender and sexuality, both in theory and, for many, as lived experience. But where gender has moved to the ironic, sexuality still holds the space for the “authentic.” Gender now seems squarely positioned in a postmodern sensibility, but sexuality still veers between the modern and the postmodern. We can conceive and experience gender as being “made,” but sexuality retains the mark of something “found” and often, as Foucault demonstrated, of something “found out.”

In an attempt to account for these divergent trajectories, the author attempts to historicize and deconstruct the categories of gender and sexuality in order to reflect on their modes of psychic action and to consider how they work with, and against, each other in mind and culture.