The problematic circularity of a feminist inquiry into gender is underscored by the presence of positions, which, on the one hand, presume that gender is a secondary characteristic of persons and those which, on the other hand, argue that the very notion of the person, positioned within language as a “subject”, is a masculinist construction and prerogative which effectively excludes the structural and semantic possibility of a feminine gender.

Femininity becomes a mask that dominates/resolves a masculine identification, for a masculine identification would, within the presumed heterosexual matrix of desire, produce a desire for a female object, the Phallus; hence, the donning of femininity as mask may reveal a refusal of female homosexuality and, at the same time, the hyperbolic incorporation of the female Other who is refused – an odd form of preserving and protecting that love within the circle of the melancholic and negative narcissism that results from the psychic inculcation of compulsory heterosexuality.

As "sex" fragments the body, so the lesbian overthrow of "sex" targets as models of domination those sexually differentiated norms of bodily integrity that dictates what "unifies" and renders coherent the body as a sexed body.