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You're listening to Partial Exam of Life.

Episode 235.

Part 2, we've been discussing Judith Butler's gender trouble.

So I think we were up to Part 1, Section 3.

Alright, so we were just talking about the idea that sex is a social construction,

and that there is no, as she puts it in this section, there's no ungendered,

prediscursive anatomical facticity that is then subjected to what she calls an inexorable cultural law.

And that's kind of a description of debover as a position.

This idea that you start out with this natural sex and then social construction is applied to that.

That that's a passive medium on which either culture can impress itself or maybe one's own agency and resisting culture,

right, and resisting those social constructions.

As she puts it, the body comes into being in and through the marks of gender,

and then she's going to go on to say, these marks are discursive.

The next section here gives us an interesting critique of Beauvoir by way of Irrigorite.

I was drawn to the paragraph just before the section on Irrigorite.

Maybe that's just sort of summative.

Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse,

which it will be suggested seeks to set certain limits to analysis or safeguard certain tenants of humanism

as presuppositional to any analysis of gender.

The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and pre-empt the possibilities of imaginable,

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