Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender: Introduction

Many of the key debates and conceptual overhauls that have animated lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) studies over the last ten years or so might be broadly described in terms of their common interest in specifying the proper relations between gender and sexuality. If LGBTQ studies initially insisted on a clear distinction between gender and sexuality, that cleavage was subsequently contested by many who objected to the normalizing capacity of any neat quarantining of the cultural work of sexuality and gender.Ensuing discussions of what was at stake in adjudicating the relative independence or imbrication of gender and sexuality gave critical heft to a range of terms such as gender performativity, butch/femme gender, female masculinity, and transgender subjectivities, whose implications are still shaping the direction of sexuality studies.

In addition, attention paid to the shifting relations between gender and sexuality has enabled a number of projects that seem more prominently organized under other scholarly rubrics. An abbreviated list might include the historicizing of sexual identities and the concomitant untangling of genealogies of identification and desire, the critical engagements with and swearings off of psychoanalytic models of subjectivity, and the increasingly fine-tuned analyses of the articulations of race and ethnicity with local and global productions of sex/gender formations.

Of course, the correct relation between sexuality and gender can never be definitively specified. One of the enduring motivations of LGBTQ and feminist scholarship is precisely its inability to pin down that relation or—to put it otherwise—our ceaseless imagining of it in new ways. It therefore seems productive to ask scholars and activists for their thoughts on the place of gender in current understandings of sexuality. Where does gender fit into the study of sexuality nowadays? How do we conceive of sexuality, and the field of sexuality studies, in relation to the category of gender and what it represents? What are the implications of the interrelated histories of gender studies and sexuality studies? Has gender assumed a new salience in LGBTQ studies recently? Is it necessary to preserve a sense of the specificity of sexuality in relation to the study of gender, or a sense of the specificity of gender in relation to the study of sexuality? Addressing a persistent thematic in feminist and queer theorizing across a range of disciplinary and methodological differences, the following responses to our questions elucidate variously the complex and mobile relations between sexuality and gender that energize our everyday teaching and writing, reading and thinking.