Equality

While respecting the practical achievements resulting from attention to gender/equality, whether in the form of formal equality or sexual difference/disadvantage, some writers and activists claim neither approach goes far enough in identifying and combating the fatal flaws intrinsic to current constructions of gender and equality. Of central importance are the constructions of gender itself. Some writers argue that gender, sexual difference, and sexuality must be delinked and reconceived. Others stress the internal complexity of gender and its simultaneous constitution through social relations such as race, sexuality, class, and geographic location. Attention to these concerns raises further questions about the relevant measure by which equality ought to be gauged and also in whose name "equality" is claimed.

Judith Butler and others argue that sex difference should not be understood as a "natural" kind. Rather, gender relations produce sexual difference by organizing the body in particular ways and attributing social significance and meaning to certain of its features. There is no necessary relation between anatomy and gender; rather, each subject is engendered through mandatory social practices. These social practices, rather than biology, demand that individuals locate themselves and others on one or the other side of the binary male/female. Absent gender domination, there might be many genders, or none at all, and embodiment would not be read as and through "sexual difference." Similarly, there is no necessary relationship between anatomy and sexuality. Sexuality is about desire and pleasure, and practices expressing and gratifying these affects are highly variable. Hetero-and homosexuality are equally social constructs, ones that reinforce and naturalize gender and sexual difference. Appropriate objects of desire are specified and gender identities are stabilized by linking desire and "sexual difference"; I am a man because I desire a woman; I desire a woman because my penis makes it "natural" to do so.

In this view the goal is not equality between men and women, but an end to compulsory gender and heterosexuality. This would both produce and necessitate radically different notions and practices of subjectivity, family, and kinship. Rather than distribute labor more evenly among men and women within heterosexual families, the emphasis should be on multiplying the possibilities of affective ties and seeking their legal-social recognition and support. These ideas both undergird and reflect a move toward "queer" politics, in which the goal is to resist gender and to undermine male/female as mandatory subject positions. In pursuit of such goals, queer politics advocates policies including recognition of legal rights of homosexual partners and alternate kinship relations, nontraditional adoption, treating homophobic or violent acts toward those who resist traditional gendering as legally actionable wrongs, and extending the right of privacy beyond heterosexual practices.