the Female Body GOVERNING

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ingrid holme
terms of “doing” gender. Her concept of the performative gender draws
on Foucault’s discussion of prisoners, in which he maintains that the law
is not internalized, but incorporated. As Butler notes, the body does not
express an inner sex/gender; rather it performs, both intentional and
performative. So, drawing on the earlier example of sex registration at
birth, one can see that the sexed body of a newborn infant incorporates
the imposed sex, to develop their gender identity. To explore the idea of
performativity of gender and sex, I draw on the fi eld of endocrinology
where sex is viewed as relatively fl uid and capable of being perceived
in terms of a body’s biological performance of sex. I then contrast this
with the current view of “genetic sex” as fi xed, which is based on the
idea that “sex” is an adult phenotype determined by an underlying genotype.
Drawing on Butler’s notion of performativity, I suggest placing the
concept of “genetic sex” within the performance of “doing sex,” to show
how genetic processes facilitate and enable the body in its “doing” of
gender.
Endocrinology and Genetic Sex: Fixed or Fluid?
Genetic sex—the apparent fundamental biological cause of the two
female and male human varieties—is a twentieth-century construct.
Looking down the microscope, the stained chromosomes are concrete
countable entities that lend themselves easily to genetic determinism.
Because the chromosomal composition of a person is generally fi xed
at the time of conception, when a Y- or X-bearing sperm is united with
the X-bearing egg, a person’s genetic sex is taken as permanent and
unchanging throughout their life.
Genetic sex, as a fi xed and static characteristic, contrasts with the
image of sex taken by endocrinology, where it seems more dynamic
and fl uid. In endocrinology, sex and sex hormones account for the
wide variation in gender and gender roles that humans exhibit. As
mentioned in the introduction, the distinction between the fi xed natural
sex and fl uid social gender is often associated with feminism. However,
in her study of sex hormones, Oudshoorn (1994) traces the origin
of this distinction back to the research dispute between genetics and
endocrinology over sexual development. She notes that during the 1910s
physiologists suggested that the determination of sexual characteristics
was affected by environmental and physiological conditions during
the embryo’s development. Geneticists suggested, however, that sex
was irrevocably fi xed at the conception by nuclear elements: the sex
chromosomes (p. 21). The two research fi elds resolved the dispute by
endocrinology limiting its study to sex differentiation (the biological