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Engendering debate: how to formulate a political account of the divide between genetic bodies and discursive gender?

In her article on ‘the Sign Woman’ on gender studies and feminist theory, Robyn Weigman identified the most profound challenges for contemporary feminist theory as twofold: ‘not simply to address the divide between genetic bodies and d\scursive gender but to offer a political analysis of the socially constructed afflictions between the two’. This article seeks to engage these challenges. It attempts to chart the terrain of dilemmas for gender theory from which analyses of gender as performed distinct from ‘sexed’ bodies has emerged, and which these analyses offer to resolve. It then seeks to interrogate the conception of identification and analysis of gender as distinct from the sexed body for application in empirical work, teasing out both benefits and limitations of this theoretical position for empirical (and theoretical) practice. In the final sections of the article, theoretical pathways that may lend fruitful analytical tools for the empirical study of gender productions, incorporating recognition of the impact of the material on productions and on power, are explored. It is argued that concepts of heteroglossia and interpretive communities may offer understanding of the ways in which gender operates as discursive production, and the ways in which gender is identified and analysed.