Fuzzy Gender: Between Female-embodiment and intersex

This paper raises the question of female-embodied subjectivity as impacting on transgendered and intersexed claims to subjectivity. Recent theoretical work, from Butler to ZÏizÏek,‘deconstructs’ sexual difference, and in the process repeats the familiar gesture of erasing the specifcitiesof female-embodied subjectivity. Recent feminist theory (especially Battersby, Grosz and Gatens, and central to Irigaray) attempts a delineation of female-embodied subjectivity, resisting the current anti-essentialist trend in gender theory. The foreclosing of debate around an ontology of female-embodiment performed by anti-essentialist dictums is answered by a ‘new essentialism’ in feminist theory. Between the concerns of the ‘autonomous’ female subject and claims to transgendered and intersexed subjectivity, female-embodiment remains suspended between reifcation (naive essentialism) and cultural erasure. ‘Fuzzy gender’ (fuzzy logic applied to gender theory) offers a model for mobilising female-embodied subjectivity as a political and theoretical figure resistant to institutional embodiment. Through ‘fuzzygender’ we comprehend binary sexual difference as an instance of the part mistaking itself for the whole, and negotiate the wake of the receding Aristotelian model of difference without collapsing into atomised relativity. In the end, ‘fuzzy gender’ argues for theoretical coalition between feminist, transgendered, and intersexed concerns, in the context of an unrepentantly masculine body-politic