19
Foucault shows that it is an external signification of the internal. Gender, on the other hand, is thought
to be external. Thus it is an external signification of an internal essence, sex. Of course, this shows us
that if sex is itself a project of gender, then in stylizing gender we simultaneously perform sex. Sex,
which is thought be prior to gender, turns out to be its product. Sex is the prison of gender, and it is
sex itself that is written on the body. The analogy to Foucault’s “soul” must be “sex itself,” that
which is thought to be internal but turns out to be written on the body (in the case of sex, it is
written with gender).
This displacement, this undermining of the inner/outer (sex/gender) distinction cannot be
reduced to a subversion of gender, or even of sex. Butler refers to the surface politics of gender as a
“stylization of gender” and she asks after its conditions of possibility. Her answer: the “disciplinary
production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual
construction and regulation of sexuality with the reproductive domain” (172). In other words, the
heterosexual matrix produces the chain of equivalence that is sex/gender/desire. Heteronormativity
gives us gender as the outward expression of an internal essence, sex. The presumption of
heterosexuality, of opposite-sex desire, links the two together.
The matrix, then, might look something like this:
Gender appears at the top, in the form of men and women. Sex appears at the bottom, with male
and female as the foundation of gender. But opposite-sex desire lies in the middle and holds the
Convention