The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

or empirical truth—is an important project for the studies of both gender and physical difference. The interdisciplinary theorization of gender and sexuality in the last half-century has advanced the idea that categories of bodily identity are generally accepted as physical states, when in fact these categories are culturally constructed and ideologically charged. The writings of Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Susan Bordo will serve as examples of trends within the prodigious body of work on gender's connection to the body within human culture. Though they have different approaches, their works all challenge binary oppositions (male/female, mind/body) that shape so many tenets of Western thought and thus call for greater attention to both the individual variability of human form and the complex relationship between body and culture.

Feminist criticism's import to disability studies lies in its effort to distinguish between real physical bodies and the more rigid cultural categories we use to try to explain them. The work of Judith Butler, particularly her concept of gender performativity, has inspired a range of analyses of the disjunction between a body and the cultural assumptions that shape our perception of it. In her groundbreaking 1990 study Gender Trouble, Butler undermines the connection between physical sex and gender. She claims that “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender” and thus that “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (25). Gender is enacted rather than innate: rather than being a reflection or outcome of physical sex, gendered traits are in fact performances of cultural expectations that ultimately produce gender. Butler argues for the cultural construction of gender, suggesting that gender is produced by culturally determined expressions like clothing, body positioning, and language that one uses to enact the social role assigned to one's body through normative ideology. Butler's writing elevated the notion of cultural construction within critical theory and invited similar interrogation for other naturalized identity categories and social practices, including those associated with disability and physical difference.

The concrete reality of physical difference justifies such distinctions between sex and gender, and thus body and culture. Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling examines the scientific understanding of gender and