the Female Body GOVERNING

12
Beyond X-X and X-Y
Living Genomic Sex
INGRID HOLME
University of Stirling
In this final chapter of Governing the Female Body, I refl ect on how
in a Foucauldian sense we are formed as sexed “agents with particular
capacities and possibilities of action” (Dean, 2004, p. 29). Feminist
theorists have been successful in problematizing the sex-gender and
social-natural binaries, with biological knowledge playing a critical
role in their discussions. For example, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) has challenged
the notion of the female and male bodies as fi xed and concrete
substances, while Judith Butler (1990, 1993) and Anne Fausto-Sterling
(2000) have problematized sex as a biological and hence natural category.
Building on Butler’s idea of gender performance, the perception
of genetic sex, as a fi xed and static entity, plays an important role in the
governmentality of sex-gender performance. Drawing on the new fi eld
of genomics, which is currently contained within the binary sex-gender
framework, this chapter demonstrates the potential to transform genetic
sex into a fl uid or “living” category.
The relation between genetic sex and gender is frequently conveyed
by the mantra “X-X is a girl, X-Y is a boy,” which is chanted in popular
magazines, birth clinics, and until recently at the Olympic Games.
This separation of the human population into the biological entities of
female and male plays an important part in current society, marking
the institutional structures of their birth, marriage, and passport. As
Dean (2004) notes, exploring the techne of government poses the
question, “by what means, mechanisms, procedures, instruments, tactics,
techniques, technologies and vocabularies is authority constituted and
rule accomplished?”(p. 31). Thus drawing on Foucault’s discussion of
government in terms of “the regulation of conduct by the more or less
rational application of the appropriate technical means” (Hindess, 1996,
271