The Resilience of Bigenderism

Abstract

This chapter will illustrate how resilient and compulsory dualistic gender is and how much it continues to be conceptually tied to and co-constitutive with notions of material sexual difference. I will present empirical examples of the personal and social difficulty of trans and intersex selfhood and how they offer evidence for the notion of bigendersm (Gilbert 2009). The ongoing omnirelevance of bigenderism in the virtual contexts of the internet — where assumptions about sex and gender and their relationship between each other continue to shape our sense of self and the ways that we interact, even though these contexts are ‘disembodied’ — helps to diagnose the problem of gender. I also demonstrate how ostensible challenges to binary sex/gender are persistently recuperated, for example in gender deconstructive theories and activism. I will go on to argue that these examples are demonstrative of the limits of attempting to challenge the persistence of gender without challenging oppositional modes of thought more widely, especially dualistic understandings of bodies.