| dc.description.abstract | In many strains of contemporary feminist theory, the sex/gender distinction is an elementary conception. Across its decades of paradigmatic prevalence within the discipline, the distinction consistently contextualizes the category of gender as segregating by a dynamic of psychology/culture and the category of sex as segregating by a dynamic of biology. The sex/gender distinction, however, is ultimately untenable a conceptual structure. While other scholars have previously asserted this claim, this particular project puts forth an original critique incorporative of French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida’s notion of dissemination. In a general sense, dissemination prevents the meaning of signifiers from being restrained to an insular context. Accordingly, dissemination disrupts any conceptual schema that operationally requires contextual stabilization. The sex/gender distinction, being such a schema, falls into disarray as effected by disseminative disruptions. Disruption occurs in two ways. First, dissemination causes segregative conflation between the dynamics of both gender and sex, resulting in these categories coming to divide indistinguishably from each other. Second, dissemination conflates the individuated positions of gender and sex (e.g. man, woman, male, female) into a dual occupancy under both categories, resulting in an indistinguishability of categorized positional specificity. By the factor of both of these disruptions, the sex/gender distinction collapses. | en |
