The Neoliberal Engineering of Gender and Social Acceptance
The modification of gender from being a variable of sex to an independent cultural order of knowledge entailed a shift in the intelligibility and governability of sexual lives, bodies and selves. By defining it as explicitly separated from sex with its own series of data, [Robert J.] Stoller introduced gender as a phenomenon with its own constituent parts (gender, gender role, gender identity) and formative mechanisms that needed to be discovered, examined and exploited to cure, placate and normalize sexual deviancy.
