From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler
The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural." Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.[5]
A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.[6]
^^^^ CB: Sure it is partly culturally ( socially) constructed. But is she really claiming that there is no biological determination, no heterosexual instinct whatsoever in any humans, or even most humans? That seems implausible to me. Seems to me that heterosexual instinct would have existed in prehuman ancestors, and would have existed in early humans, and would persist in humans of today; for the obvious reason that the trait of heterosexual instinct has a qualitatively greater selective advantage over any other trait there is; because it directly causes more fertile matings, like no other trait does. What would have obliterated or selected against heterosexual instinct ? What would make it go away altogether from all humans or even most humans ? It is completely illogical , in fact the opposite of logical ,that it would have been selected against in the course of human history. Note: homosexual instinct or neutral sexual instinct might arise among a minority ,but I don't see it arising in the majority of the population of a species that reproduces by sex.
Here's an argument for Butler's thesis; _Culturally_ constructed heterosexuality was so strong for so long at some time in the past, that mutations arose for sexually neutral instincts. These instincts accumulated and were passed on because of the strong cumpulsory heterosexual cultural institutions ( resulting in fertile matings). Eventually, sexually neutral instincts predominated and heterosexual instincts were obliterated from the human populations. It is incument on Butler to make some kind of biological argument like this to support her thesis.
^^^^^^
The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact
^^^ CB: The obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact is not exactly "supposed". It follows from the most fundamental principles of Darwinian natural history. Since differential fertility is _the_ prize in selective advantage, and therefore fertile sexual acts are the sine qua non of passing on an individual animals' genes ( human or any species that reproduces sexually) , Butler or anybody who wants to challenge the fundamentality of heterosex as a natural or instinctive fact and act has to mount some kind of biological argument like I pose above. Only biology , not philosophy or culturology/sociology/discourse studies , will do here.
^^^^^
The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,”
^^^ CB: It's not "unquestioned." or an "alibi". It follows from the most fundamental idea of a sexually reproducing species.
^^^^ is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.[7] ^^^ CB: It _is_ a fundamental biological principle that for species that reproduce by sex, socalled heterosexual sex is instinctive. The burden of proof is on those like Butler to posit a basis by which a sexually reproducing species like humans would lose its heterosexual instinct. Heterosexuality _is_ compulsory for species that reproduce sexually ( i..e not by cloning , like the original forms of life on earth), upon the pain of extinction if its members don't have heterosexual sex. That's how cumpulsory it is. If humans had not been having heterosex for hundreds of generations, we would be gone.
" The birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees...."
^^^^
In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.[8]
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