4
“felt” experience of gender. Gender is “lived” because it is first “felt” and this feeling of oneself occurs
both socially and naturally. By social construction, gender develops as an individual conforms his or her
self image and gender identity to social desires, a concept Judith Butler calls performativity. By radical
fluidity, gender proves itself naturally fluid and unconstrained by the rigid sexual binaries of male and
female—gender fits a spectrum. These two elements unite as one “felt” experience, by which the body
is understood to be a belonging of the human person. Gender, then, considering the two elements, is
defined as similar to a mental image of oneself, a concept called body schema.
Social Construction
By what paradigm should people take seriously the concept of social construction? Anne Fausto-
Sterling and Elizabeth Grosz provide this paradigm by way of a physical or biological model—one that is
simple, uncomplicated, and obvious. In Sexing the Body, Anne Fausto-Sterling, reflecting on the insights
of Elizabeth Grosz, frames the popular understanding of gender as a dual, lived process of mind and
body. They use the analogy of a circular Mobius strip, whose inside and outside are shown to be the
same surface, envisioned as “a flat ribbon twisted once and then attached end to end to form a circular
twisted surface.” 4 In this image, the inside of the strip represents the physical body and the outside of
the strip represents social influences. As Grosz’ analogy implies, there is not a convenient and obvious
divide between these two. If we were to place ants on the strip, the ants would walk on an unending
surface weaving back and forth, inside and outside the strip, thus demonstrating that the physical body
and social influences act as an ensemble, a working together, as one’s gender develops. 5
4
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books,
2000), 24-25.
5
Ibid, 24.