This article is a write-up of an electronic colloquium which took place in November and December of 1993 under the auspices of Interscripta. As moderator of the discussion and author of the article, I take full responsibility for the structure of the material that appears in this essay. Such a willful and instrumental subject, one who decides on its gender, is clearly not its gender from the start and fails to realize that its existence is already decided by gender.
Agency exists in gender construction, but in a vexed and friction-filled relationship.
Butler's Bodies That Matter , especially in the introduction and chapter eight, is the best and most influential recent statement of the problem.