Chapter 13: The Experience of Maternal Participation in the Identity Dynamics of Intersexual Individuals: Conceptualizing a Semiotic Theory of Dynamic Gender Stability

Gender regulates both intrasubjective and intersubjective dynamics, affecting modes of feeling, thinking, and acting. Gender conceptions are constructed collectively and guide how people feel, express themselves, and interact.

From a critical perspective, some feminist theorists, guided by “queer theory” have focused on the discussion around characteristic patterns of normative gender. They consider these standards as regulators of corporeality and subjectivity (Butler, 1993,2007),. Butler (1993) regards gender as a social, historical, and contingent norm, where the hegemonic power of heterosexuality formats the “matter” of bodies, sex, and gender. Adherents to this perspective believe in the nonnaturalness of gender as well as in its performative capacity (Butler, 2007). Bento (2004) considers gender as existing only in praxis, in the experience: “The act of putting on an outfit, of choosing colors, accessories, hairstyle, the way you walk, in short, the aesthetic and stylistic body are acts that build gender, which evince and stabilize bodies in a dichotomized gender order” (p. 144).