ABSTRACT
Citational practices are ways of effortlessly repeating paradigmatic assumptions about gender. When one interrogates one’s own citational practices, or when one interrogates the citational practices of the overarching social group or wider society, then one is effectively requesting to know more about one’s unconscious determinations. The social constructionist paradigm reflects upon the governing presuppositions of the essentialist paradigm, and yet nonetheless, it comes also with its own foundational paradigmatic assumptions. Judith Butler’s work is perhaps the most exemplary and penultimate within the social constructionist paradigm because it seems to embody all of its assumptions in a heightened and more obvious form. The social constructionist paradigm therefore begins with the presumption that gender is ideological, that it is a cultural or social configuration inherited from the social environment by the subject. Queer theory, in a different way, has also contributed to this heightened emphasis on the differential quality of identities.
