ABSTRACT
The production of theory led to exclusive forms of collective action and goals incompatible with the social, political, and psychological needs of other women. Intersectionalist theory and postcolonial feminism and queer theory arose in part as responses to these exclusions. The body is the practical medium that situates and orients the gender and sexual practices. It is the materiality of the meanings produced in the social world and is therefore a site of communication, interpretation, and contestation. Gender and sexuality are forms of practical relations and cultural meanings, rather than the expression of a biologically determined or ahistorical transcendental self. Through an act of self-negation, women's praxis is reduced to reproductive and affective labor, which is done for the benefit of hetero-masculine desires. The violence associated with masculinity and heterosexuality is physical, but it emanates from an anxiety associated with its own precariousness as a social relation.
