The Biopolitics of Gender

Repo J. The Biopolitics of Gender. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Introduction: Gender, Genealogy, Biopolitics

Repo starts by highlighting Foucault’s History of Sexuality as identifying sexuality in the 19th century as a discursive biopolitical construction, to state that gender, in the 20th and 21st centuries, has become the major sexual discourse. Gender has only been an English concept for about half a century, but stems from the Greek word for genos: a type or sort. Before the 1950s, gender was primarily used in linguistics, to distinguish between masculine, feminine, and neutral nouns. She argues that within the 20th century, gender moved from a “nominator of types” to “bound to the sexual order of things.” Using Foucault’s genealogical methodology, she argues that gender, like sexuality, is a historically specific discourse of sex that has arisen in the 20th century. Gender Studies, feminist movements against biological gender determinism, usage of gender in law, all represent discursive events that shape gender into biopolitical discourse.

She attributes John Money with the advent of gender theory - against much of feminist and social theories claims to de Beauvoir and Stoller - for his introduction of the notion of biological sex as separate from psychological sex as something learn postnatally. Of course, Money did not challenge the order of things - his theories were used to justify surgical intervention on intersex children to make them fit such an order. “Gender was therefore invented as a mechanism for normalizing, disciplining, and governing sex.”

The main argument of the book is as follows: “gender is an apparatus of biopower that emerged sixty years ago in the clinic and was instrumental to sedimenting Western postwar capitalism through the management of sex.” Its design in upholding Western capitalist social and political order is socializing individuals into discrete sex categories for upholding different-sex relations of production.

An interesting argument to pull out of this piece: “Despite its polemical potential, such reasoning is in danger of assuming that gender has a conceptually pure form, that feminists are the custodians of its true meaning, and that it is now being stolen and corrupted by neoliberalism to serve capitalist economic policies. Although it is often mistakenly taken to be so, gender is in fact not the brainchild of feminism, but a biopolitical apparatus whose deployment precedes its use in feminist theory.”

Repo posits this book as two things: (1) a continuation of Foucault’s biopolitical genealogy of sexuality; and (2) a critical intervention into feminist gender theory as reifying a power-knowledge around gender-sex, even for emancipatory reasons.

Defining Gender Genealogy

Repo argues that gender is not the product of patriarchy, capitalism, the Oedipal family, a representation of sex, an effect of culture, or performativit a la Butler. Instead, gender is “a historically specific technology of biopower.” She argues that to genealogically examine gender, one must “suspend all theories of gender” and “examine the conditions of possibility that enabled its emergence.”

She focuses on what makes a proper genealogical analysis, in terms of analyzing historical knowledge-contents. She wields a critique against those theorists who have engaged gender only from a discursive angle, like Butler, while largely ignoring the crucial component of biopower in Foucault’s work: the management of life. Butler’s theory is instead a theory of the “genealogy of gender ontology,” but not the genealogy of gender itself. Repo feels that Butler’s notion of gender as a constructor of sex ahistoricizes sex as having no genealogy of its own. She also critiques Lacquer’s “Making Sex” for its use of gender as a lens for which to understand the emergence of binary sex in the 18th century, for she believes “applying the relatively recent ideas of biology and gender to the past is genealogically problematic.” Given biology is a discourse specific to modernity, she feels one cannot examine a science of life through biological discourse prior to its inception.

She also believes, much like Foucault on sexuality, that maintaining gender as a tool of analysis reifies its position as a tool of biopower. She feels that exposing the power relations that condition the concept of gender makes gender a difficult tool to employ for feminist theory. Yet gender as a lens has become so entrenched in critical work, she acknowledges some may find it difficult to critique truth claims around sex without it. She writes: “ The foundational assumption about the ontological status of gender as the construction of sexual difference diminishes the possibility of examining gender as an apparatus of biopower made possible through certain historical formations, and continues to conceal the entanglement of feminist theory with biopower.”

Biopower and Biopolitics

Biopower can be understood as “ a concept that can be used to analyze how a certain kind of force charged with regulating life operates to govern bodies and populations.” Biopolitics can be understood as “a set of strategies, techniques, knowledges, and regulatory discourses deployed to regulate life.” Through the lens of Foucault’s many works, she pinpoints the genealogy of two sexes as alongside the rise of sexuality; “the separation by species of man from woman, was accompanied by a corresponding split of public from private, domesticity from industry, market from family, man from woman.”

Moving from sexuality to gender, Repo writes: “The invention of gender in the mid-twentieth century split sex into the biological and the cultural, creating new theories of sexuality that completely reoriented the way in which biologists, psychiatrists, feminist activists and academics, demographers, sociologists, and public policymakers struggled over the domain of sex.” The book focuses on what, strategically, made the deployment of gender necessary and what functions of knowledge and power it exerts. Her research questions are:

“How was gender deployed to support power relations?
How did it challenge and alter the discourse of sexuality, through what reversals of discourse and mobilizations of biopower?”
“How did gender order and link together various elements supporting and supported by types of knowledge that, through the manipulation of forces, were developed in a particular direction?”
“How was gender deployed to enact the life-administering function of power through the urgent question of sex and life?”

She argues that the “decline” of the role of the family in production by the 1940s, replaced by industry and universities, etc., allowed the family to focus on the socialization of children into conform into gender roles that uphold a social order. The nuclear family became different from the bourgeois family described by Foucault in that it was explicitly defined as two parents and two children, one male, one female in each. The invention of gender in the 50s linked social control to the sexual apparatus. Money proposed intersex children as a threat to the familial socialization process of the nuclear family. Following that, Stoller, in the 60s, psychoanalyzed transgender adults. Repo argues he “developed the gender apparatus in three ways:” (1) It tied gender to the psychoanalytic discipline of desire, “intensifying the capitalization of the family by making it responsible for gender socialization.” (2) It refined gender as a technology in opposition to sex, “in correspondence with the biology/culture split.” (3) The concept of “gender identity” deepened the confessional and self-disciplinary act of gender.

Chapter 1: The Birth of Gender - Social Control, Hermaphroditism, and the New Postwar Sexual Apparatus

Repo argues gender was invented in the 1950s alongside the rise of structural functionalism, the belief that social acts, behaviors, and practices maintained social conformity. Social functionalism attempted to medicalize social control. Money and colleagues published a series of articles in 1955 on intersex children, supposing the “radical belief” that psychological sex was learned and were not tied to biological factors. Here, gender was deployed to uphold the sexual order through psychology and medical fields of knowledge production. “It produced individuals who possessed not only a sex but also learned a gender, expanding and multiplying the access points of power to the body, rendering it more elastic and malleable and hence, more governable.” The family began to serve a “panoptic function” by being tasks with observing and policing gender and sexuality in children. Repo states: “The ideas of behavioral conditioning, socialization, and social order were central to the biomedical invention of gender.”

She cites Foucault’s work on sex, specifically, how difficult “true” sex has been to pin down and the medical discourse dedicated to identifying points of true sex (genital morphology, chromosomes, etc). Specifically, she discusses his work on how modernity gave rise to the idea only one sex could inhabit a body - in contrast to the Middle Ages, in which the body held two sex. The “hermaphrodite” (intersex body) has always been the site of problematizing true sex. With the rise of gender, it also played this role; separating the psychological gender from the problem of identifying a true physical sex on an intersex body gave rise to correcting the physical body to align with gender and create a singular gender/sex being. For Money’s influential gender reassignment surgeries, “any "corrective" surgery must consider what gender role the child could be best socialized into in order to produce a more mentally stable sexed subject.” Changing sex was easy. The risk of “misprinting” a gender role that did not align was more dangerous, due to the belief that learned gender roles were permanent.

Sex construction aligned heavily with reproductive norms. The decisions about which gender role and which associated genitals to construct lied in the hands of a variety of experts (different doctors) and the panoptic parents. Parents were pressured by a discourse around insanity, bad parenting, and urgency - the need to decide immediately after birth. Children’s resistance to surgery was also pathologized, ensuring their cooperation. Their bodies were described as wrong, but fixable, to instill a desire to undergo surgery. Further, even though Money’s research showed intersex adults living happy lives without surgery, the fear of deviance - and worse, passing that deviance down through their children - fueled his position on intervention.

Money taught children heterosexual reproduction as well. “Money enforced these principles in his therapy sessions, where he, for example, showed young children photographs of adults engaging in sexual intercourse, and at least once had a pair of siblings rehearse the positions and movements of copulation to reinforce their gender roles.” This all relates to bio power in that “the sustained reproduction of human life was therefore the ultimate justification for the deployment of the gender apparatus.”

Chapter 2: The Sex/Gender Split, Transsexualism, and the Psychoanalytic Engineering of Capitalist Life

This chapter reviews the history of Robert Stoller in the 1960s. Where Money proposed gender as a new variable of sex, Stoller split gender from sex entirely - gender as cultural, sex as biological - coining the term “gender identity.” Repo writes: “The idea of gender identity, I argue, emerged in conjunction with the transsexual subject, which was entangled with other budding attempts to regulate the emotional economy of families to maintain a sexual order of things around the social, political, and economic ideal of the nuclear family.” Gender non-normativity became a psychoanalytic domain that required “self-pathologization, self-discipline, and self-affirmation.”

Repo argues there exists a postwar biology/culture split that embraced a nature versus nurture ideology. While before WW2 biology was fetishized as the source of intellect, morality, and other characteristics, Nazi eugenics delegitimized biology and in turn led to a focus on culture as the organizing principle of social, political, and economic life. So why care about biology in terms of sex? Repo illuminates: “It is important to note that for Stoller, intersexed subjects with "normal" gender identities were proof not that biology was insignificant but that a strong male or female core gender identity could develop even in the absence of "biological forces," hence the need to maintain the biological as a variable of sex.” Stoller believed that overly attentive mothers were the source of trans and homosexual identities. Mothers were seen as “ruining” their sons through an “unconscious” desire to destroy masculinity. Repo argues that gender identity was actually deployed to discover what a “normal” gender identity was in cis children, and to reveal patterns in the environment towards shaping a “normal” gender identity.

Stoller actually did not believe in “curing” trans patients, because the “damage” had been done. He was also against electro-shock and castration because he felt they were cruel and trans people posed no danger to others. Stoller quelled the threat of trans people against the cis white middle class by individualizing it, insisting that trans people had no desire to change the world, only themselves. He instead focused on “liberation,” easing the emotional pain of the patient, which actually included hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery. This seems to be the source of the pathologized model of trans identity: Stoller felt the need to ensure that the anguish experienced by his patients was real and genuine before operation. Gender became further entrenched into normalizing/liberating discourse in 1980 with Green’s entry into the DSM for gender identity disorder. Repo discusses the biopower associated with gender reassignment surgeries:

“The material consequences of sex reassignment surgery created a seemingly irreconcilable tension between biopower and disciplinary power, or between the need to maintain biological reproductive sexual capacities in the body and the new psychosocial imperative to align biological sex with psychocultural gender. On the one hand, the surgical correction of sex/gender discrepancies often diminished the reproductive capacities of the body. On the other hand, misaligned gender identity represented a danger to the population because it could undermine the socialization of individuals into binary, sexually reproductive identities and behaviors.”

Chapter 3: Feminist Deployments of Gender

The previous chapters traced the history of gender as a concept undefined by feminism. This chapter focuses on feminist theory’s adoption of gender and its “entanglement in the disciplinary biopolitics of gender.” Gender in feminist theory, however, is contested. It has been critiqued for being imprecise, embracing a mind/body dualism, biological foundationalism, heterosexism, and racial and cultural bias. She also illuminates how and why Anglo-Western feminism has perpetuated racial and class bias due to its root in the “race and classed biopolitics of sex in postwar America.” Repo does not argue for a rehabilitation of gender theory, but critiques it as limited by its role as an apparatus of power.

At the same time, she acknowledges her goal is not emphatic refusal. She views feminist theories of gender through the Foucauldian lens of power in that it is not a refusal of power, but a resistance operating within the confines of power. While employed to tackle issues of patriarchy and privilege, feminism has also “reproduced the sexual truths and knowable subjects of the sexological context from which they derived the idea.” Feminist theory rose in the 1970s with the adoption of feminism in academia as an epistemological approach, which has also been criticized for its distance from lived realities. Therefore, feminism has operated under both a refusal of power and an epistemic production of power/knowledge. Feminist scholars, trained in psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and other disciplines, redeployed psychoanalytic theories of sex and gender (a la Freud and Mead) as weapons of resistance, still further entrenching those critiqued theories in discourse. She argues that feminism reconfigured and redeployed the apparatus of sex and the sex/gender dichotomy with such success that it moved beyond academia, into the broader public.

Initial Appropriations of Gender: Kate Millet and Germaine Greer

Heinamaa argues that Anglo-Western feminists have largely misinterpreted de Beauvoir’s statement that “one is not born a woman but rather one becomes one” to be a theory about sex/gender. Western feminist theorists like Butler have come to the conclusion through viewing de Beauvoir’s work through an already established sex/gender lens. While de Beauvoir may have rejected biological determinism, she also rejected “psychoanalytical, existential, and historical materialist explanations for sexual difference.” Rather, Heinamaa states that de Beauvoir “is primarily concerned with "describing the plurality of actions and practices that constitute the meanings of 'woman,' 'female,' and 'feminine.’”’

The first explicit introduction of gender as a theory was Kate Millet in her 1970 book Sexual Politics. Millet argued that the socialization of the sexes upheld patriarchal violence, specifically within the confines of the patriarchal family. She relied directly on Money and Stoller to argue that gender was a social phenomenon. Given this, Repo argues: “It was impossible, therefore, to know the true differences between the sexes, if there were any, until men and women were treated equally and not socialized into separate gender roles. The cultural, rather than a biological substratum, was the site of a political battle that for Millett determined the sexual division of labor.” Repo argues that Millet wound up mimicking the discourse of sexology, despite their insistence on normalized patriarchal roles, and did not critique or address the underlying violence it had for intersex and trans people. Repo critiques how Millet employed the trans subject as “an object of knowledge that could be exploited for the purposes of feminist struggle.”

Greer, who critiqued the notion of scientific differentiations between the sexes to prove that women were weaker, also fell into the trap of reifying the binary. Though she argued against the exaggerated split between men and women, even at the chromosomal level, she still reified the concept of binary genitals even in discussion of intersex people, using language like “deformed” and “underdeveloped.” Repo writes: “Greer challenged the idea that sex was naturally biologically binary but at the same time fell back on a discourse of abnormality that upheld the dualistic sexual apparatus, even achieving this by surgery.” She similarly referred to trans identity as unnatural, ironically comparing its unnaturalness to sex roles.

Structuralist Accounts of Sex/Gender Feminist Sociology and Anthropology

Feminist anthropologists and sociologists of the 70s positioned sex as structual and gender as cultural, like Ann Oakley in her 1972 book Sex, Gender, and Society, which quickly spread sex/gender to North American feminists. Oakley proposed an examination of the “differences” between sexes to determine which were innate and which were cultural. Oakley’s stance positioned the cultural as “malleable and therefore contestable, [while] nature was reduced to an inconsequential and socio-politically neutral matter.” Biological difference was meaningless and only served the purpose of assigning and reinforcing social roles based on those differences. Even still, in arguing for both parents to be more involved in the socialization of children, she relied on the sexologists’ notions of deviance as a threat to the nuclear family, particularly the danger of only relying on the maternal. Trans and homosexual people were deviant threats tot he family, and the intersex body was a sign of “the primacy of cultural origins in the gender role formation process.”

Gayle Rubin, also drawing on anthropology, was the first, in 1975, to propose a sex/gender system as an alternative framework to patriarchy for understanding oppression. Taking a Marxist stance, she analyzed how women were viewed as raw materials to be domesticated as products. The sex/gender system allowed for examination of sexual biology and human activity, unlike patriarchy, which was a vague concept that did not differentiate between “different human sexual capacities and the oppressive organization of the sexual world.” Her purpose was to argue that sexual domination was not inherent but caused by social relations. Kinship, in particular, reproduced masculinity and femininity and upheld a compulsory heterosexuality contributing to sexual oppression. Once more, Rubin adopted the notion of sex as a biological, yet neutral, reality that gender, in the form of socialization, was placed onto. Her solution was also parenting: both parents should contribute equally so that the child had a “bisexual object choice” to overcome the Oedipal burden.

Gender, as in culture, was so crucial to feminist theory because it was used to argue against biology, as in sex, as a basis for women’s oppression. Oppressive gender, then, becomes “contingent,” not a necessary part of culture. It was the distorting corruption of socialization that needed to be undone so that the sexed body could exist in a natural, neutral state. For this reason, Repo names feminism a “biopolitical project” aimed at regaining control of sex from oppressive social forces.

Gender in Feminist Psychoanalysis and Psychology

Rubin’s work had profound influence on Nancy J. Chodorow’s psychoanalytic feminist theory in 1878’s The Reproduction of Mothering. She claimed that biology did not determine character, and that psychoanalytic theories on socialization should not be reliant on genital difference. Her argument was that the responsibility of parenting being solely on the mother caused an imbalance in the “social organization of gender.” Like Rubin, Chodorow believed men could be as nurturing as women. Chodorow relied on Money and Stoller to problematize the ambiguity of sex, questioning why alterations to the body did not change one’s view of sex (e.g., mastectomy). She believed mothering was seen as both the source and the solution to women’s problems, and that by involving fathers equally in childcare, we could end patriarchal norms.

Psychological feminists Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna also used gender to question sex in their works. They were also critical as biology as a source of truth and science’s tendency to focus on sexual dimorphism in all analyses. They argued that sex was virtually indistinct from gender, as sex was also viewed by society through a cultural lens. They only use the term sex to refer to physical characteristics and reproduction, otherwise focusing only on gender, even for terms that had been traditionally used to denote sex. For example, they used the term “gender hormones” rather than “sex hormones.” They did not view gender as constructed onto a biological base, but “how the idea of two genders was created as a pre-determined, external, objective, and physical fact, also in scientific discourse.” They contested biopolitical imperatives of reproduction that were linked with sex, criticizing that “male” was not the same as “sperm carrier,” for example. They interrupted biological imperatives by stating that “reproduction … is not a continuous fact of life” but rather a site of the production and maintenance of both gender and sexuality. Much like Butler later argues in her work, Kessler and McKenna argued that social gender role behavior was not simply internalized through norms, but as individuals referred to norms to account for their assigned gender, norms were produced and reinforced cyclically.

Repo argues that, while radically resisting the biopolitical imperative of reproduction, Kessler and McKenna still upheld Money and Stoller’s definitions of gender as purely cultural and learned, rather than biologically determined. Repo writes that “to argue how the idea of two genders is produced and maintained, they tied their concepts of "gender assignment" and "gender attribution" to an ethnomethodological and cognitive-developmental framework.” They believed that a child learned through social signals how genitals were associated with specific genders. They made this argument based on Money and Stoller’s studies of intersex and trans patients to argue that sex identification was naturalized or binary. However, Repo argues, they do not critique gender as a technology of pathologization for intersex and trans people: “The transsexual subject was a subject whose sex and gender did not match, and this was made into an intelligible problem only through the idea of gender itself.”

The Biopolitical Others of Feminist Gender Theory

Due to the reliance on Stoller and Money, founders of the gender concept as a biopolitical tool, Repo argues that “ the appropriation of gender also meant that feminism got caught in the webs of postwar biopolitics.” She also argues that the focus on gender, as focused on the postwar white, middle-class, housewife, ignored class and race realities. The theory of gender socialization focused on controlling the social order of gender and the family, and feminists participated in that control, although relocating it: “gender was deployed by middle class White women primarily to regulate, manage, and emancipate themselves.” In a critique of feminist engagement with intersex and trans people, Repo claims “feminist gender theorists did not recognize that the production of gender through the discipline of intersexed and transsexual subjects was also a part of the biopolitical project to consolidate the vital functions of the Fordist nuclear family.”

A summary on Repo’s views of sexology and feminism’s use of gender biopolitics: “Where sexologists hoped to normalize sexual deviation through gender ("how should this person's sex be managed/corrected in relation to his or her psychological gender identity?") feminists problematized sexual essentialism and determinism ("because gender is a universal cultural construct, who has the right to dictate how people should conduct their sex/sexuality and how might freedom from it be accomplished or administered?"). Thus, by appealing to cultural forces ("gender"), secondwave feminists sought to tactically undermine the essentialism of the apparatus of sex.”

Chapter 4: The Demographic Problematization of Gender

Brief overview:
Due to her interest in understanding how the apparatus of gender is specifically used as biopower, Repo has chosen to examine demographic science, both mainstream and feminist, which took up gender as a “point of intervention for optimizing the reproduction of human populations.” The key to population control became adjusting gender roles through role theory, focused on the centrality of the nuclear family.

Chapter 5: Gender Equality as Neoliberal Governmentality

Brief overview:
Repo questions the concept of gender in achieving the idealistic “gender equality” as having pitfalls for such a goal. This chapter specifically focuses on gender as a biopolitical apparatus in the EU in the 1990s and 200s, particularly the European Commission’s deployment of gender for optimizing gender equality. She argues that “gender equality was deployed in EU policy as a new modality for the reoptimization of population and productivity, especially in the context of the reconciliation of work and family life, which is at the core of EU gender equality policy.” This form of biopower is not about optimizing reproduction for the maximum production of life, but reoptimizing its operation for a neoliberal state. This imperative “expects women to replace the retiring male workforce by joining the labor market while at the same time reproducing and raising the next generation of wage earners.” Gender, as a term, is strategically articulated and employed so that restrictive gender roles are no longer a barrier to possible life choices, while the government has largely abandoned trying to govern the biological activities associated with sex.

Repo describes the logics behind this:
“The responsible woman is a self-managing economic subject actively engaged in making re/productive life decisions in the marketplace of choice. By dressing women's decisions in the language of free choice and self-interest, government also relinquishes responsibility for women's actions should the policy fail.”

Chapter 6: Feminism and Biopolitics - Complicities and Countermovements

Repo discusses the destabilizing contribution of Butler’s Gender Trouble on feminist engagements with women, replacing that engagement with “‘understand[ing] the discursive production of the plausibility of that binary relation’ of sexual difference.” Repo argues that the genealogy of this book and Butler made similar destabilizing contributions, but instead of destabilizing feminism, Repo has destabilized the concept of gender, an analytical tool of feminism. She writes: “The popularization of the term by the women's movement resulted in its rapid dissemination and deployment in different fields, including demography, from which scientists, organizations, and governments took up gender as a crucial variable for the management of populations.”

This final chapter uses the genealogy outlined prior to ask: “Is gender an indispensable discourse for feminist theory and politics?” Some feminists have criticized the vagueness of the gender term, or its Anglo-Western focus. Repo dedicates time, specifically, to the critique of its alignment with neoliberalism and feminism’s declining engagement with global capitalism. On one hand, some scholars, like Eisenstein, view feminism as unwittingly entangled with neoliberalism when it “permitted the disappearance of the critique of capitalism from feminist theory in favor of ‘postmodern analyses that focus on individual and private acts of resistance’ rather than structural analyses of global capitalism.” Others, like Fraser, question whether feminism is a victim of neoliberalism or something about it has developed an affinity with neoliberal goals. Repo aligns with Fraser in highlighting how feminism has always been entangled with liberal biopolitics, “legitimating certain liberal logics.”

Fraser critiques feminism’s focus on traditional authority, where the more resistance against traditional patriarchal authority figures (e.g., husbands, fathers), the more feminism contributed to the neoliberal project of gender role equality in the workforce and the market. Fraser felt the move away from Marxism, the struggle for recognition over redistribution, played directly into neoliberal practice. Given the neoliberal project is classist and racist, Western feminism’s “success” has tended to directly benefit white, middle-class, cisgender women at the expense of others.

While Repo does not attribute the engagement with gender as the sole reason for feminism’s lack of critical engagement with neoliberal politics, she is arguing that the adoption of gender in neoliberalism is tied to the adoption and dissemination of gender in feminism. She writes: “What this genealogy suggests on the broader level is that feminist liaisons with the forces it seeks to resist are not limited to neoliberal governmentality but also include psychiatric power, racism, and class politics. Feminism has a long and complicated history of entanglement with liberal governmentality that, given the ubiquitous and ambiguous nature of power, can be neither overcome nor escaped, only strategically undermined and manipulated. Gender is merely one of the most recent and intense nodal points of that play of power.”

Useful Summarizing Quotes

A nice overview of the entire genealogical argument in this work: “As documented in this book, "gender" emerged as an apparatus of power that could be used to discipline deviant bodies and minds at one moment, liberate women the next, and then increase and reproduce labor power, connecting enfleshed bodies to surgical and psychiatric clinical practices, sexual politics and liberation struggles, demographic change and political economy.”

On gender as unecessary for feminist discourse: “Gender is not and has never been an essential concept for feminism. For better or for worse, gender has always been a politically ambiguous discourse. It cannot be taken as progressive at face value because it is always a strategic assemblage, constituted by tactical elements invested with the potentiality of politics, that is, the possibility to turn on itself and speak back to the apparatuses of discipline and biopower, even the ones that underpin its emergence. The sexual order can be critiqued and challenged without the discourse of gender, and considering the widespread normalization and biopoliticization of the gender discourse, it is imperative to ask whether gender is sufficiently tactically equipped to renew feminist critique in the face of the unrelenting appropriative powers of neoliberal governmentality.”