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Contemporary Cultural Theory

pre-established foundation of sex’, she argued, ‘a cultural var-
iation of a more or less fixed and universal substratum’ (Grosz,
1994, p. 139). Butler’s mistake, for Grosz, lay in the failure to
acknowledge ‘the instabilities of sex itself, of bodies themselves
. . . [of what] the body is... capable of doing,... what anybody
is capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given
culture’ (p. 140). ‘Human subjects never simply have a body’, she
wrote: ‘rather, the body is always necessarily the object and
subject of attitudes and judgments’ (p. 81). For Grosz, bodies are
neither purely biological nor purely cultural; they act as a medi-
ating term, a zone of exchange, between the private and the
public, the psychological and the social. The object of feminist
critique cannot, then, be to liberate the ‘natural’ female body from
socially dominant misrepresentations, since all bodies are
unavoidably socially and culturally marked in some way. The
issue is, rather, which particular cultural stereotypes ‘are used and
with what effects’ (p. 143). It should be apparent that these radical
critiques of gender, sexual identity and the body are as applic-
able to the category ‘homosexual’ as to ‘lesbian’. Thus David
Halperin writes that: ‘“Homosexual”, like “woman”, is not a
name that refers to a “natural kind” of thing... It’s a discursive,
and homophobic, construction that has come to be misrecognised
as an object under the epistemological regime known as realism’
(Halperin, 1995, p. 45). Presumably, Grosz’ argument concerning
the sexed body is as applicable to the gay male body as to the
female.
Butler has claimed that ‘deconstruction of identity is not the
deconstruction of politics’ (Butler, 1990, p. 148). Elsewhere, she
has even argued that a viable radical politics requires ‘affiliation
with poststructuralism’, since only this ‘way of reading’ will allow
us to insist that ‘difference remain constitutive of any struggle’
(Butler, 1999, p. 44). There is, however, a strong sense in which
the relativising logic of feminist deconstruction threatens to
undermine the ground from which a specifically feminist or queer
critique of patriarchal culture could be mounted. What is so
important, after all, about a critique of institutional oppression,
if what are oppressed are merely fictional identities? As Lynne
Segal, Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University

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