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In Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, I put forth a theory of gender identity that drew both on work by relational analytic feminists, such as Benjamin, Dimen, Harris, and Goldner as well as work by poststructuralist feminists, such as Butler. I argued that the hallmark of all of this work is the premise that dominant categories of gender, race, sexuality, and class are derived from processes of splitting that are mandated by culturally sanctioned sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism. For example, poststructuralists maintain that the category masculinity is in no way the mutually exclusive opposite of femininity; rather, masculinity exists as a category only by defining itself as what is not feminine. The two categories are meaningless except in relation to one another. Further, the relation between the categories is hierarchical, a differential power relation. The defining characteristics of masculinity have cultural value; what masculinity repudiates has less value.
As many cultural theorists have argued in the past ten or fifteen years (see, for example, Higginbotham; Connell), masculinity and femininity do not exist in isolation from other identity elements: black working-class heterosexual femininity, black middle-class heterosexual femininity, and black working or middle-class homosexual femininity are likely to be four different ways of experiencing gender. Thus, when speaking of dominant social categories, cultural theorists have taught us that it is more accurate to say that it is upper-class white heterosexual masculinity—rather than just masculinity—that holds the most clout. Indeed, the former is defined by repudiating all the other possible combinations of masculinity and femininity. On the cultural level, it is this repudiation that marks these categories as products of splitting. When we begin to look at all this on the level of psychic reality, on the level of how these categories are lived, we fin