4.3 ‘Bodies that Matter’

The category of “sex” is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a “regulatory ideal.” In this sense, then, “sex” not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce – demarcate, circulate, differentiate – the bodies it controls. The concept of “sex” is itself troubled terrain, formed through a series of contestations over what ought to be decisive criterion for distinguishing between the several sexes; the concept of sex has a history that is covered over by the figure of the site or surface of inscription. The relation between culture and nature presupposed by some models of gender “construction” implies a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart.