ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses intersectionality’ and ‘queer theory’ within the perspective of the ‘two,’ the social constructionist paradigm. The matrix of domination configures our various identities in unique and subtle ways, such that a universal and essential identity that expresses our shared experiences of suffering within the social environment can no longer be presumed. The essentialist paradigm begins with the assumption that there is something unchanging, natural, and necessary concerning our gender identity. Identity is more operative within the essentialist paradigm, but it is the social constructionist paradigm that claims responsibility for this discovery. The social constructionist paradigm produces a new situated knowledge precisely by discovering social and linguistic determinations within the preceding essentialist paradigm. Put psychoanalytically, these determinations are of the ‘big Other,’ since the big Other is responsible for installing our desires via the conduit of language and the social environment.
