The distinction between sex and gender has become widely accepted in society and it is a basic assumption in many feminist theories. But in the 90s, this distinction has been severly criticised. Many thinkers have felt that gender has been emphasised at the expense of sex and that the body's significance for what it means to be a woman or a man socially has been lost. Also, it has been felt that sex and body have to be described in a new way, a way that suits feminist purposes without resulting in sex being seen as the passive material, or worse, the physical cause of what we have come to name gender.

My question is therefore whether there exists any motive - apart from strategic, political ones - that nevertheless justifies a division between sex and gender, but also how one such new, poststructuralist description of the body can be understood. The description that I engage with suggests that the body is materialized. The theory of the body as materialized is meant to substitute the idea that we are beings with a non-constructed or given sex and a constructed gender. In my investigation I reach the conclusion that given and constructed provide no better ground for the sex/gender distinction than the fuzzy distinction between biological and social. I find that the theory of materialization constitutes a more nuanced and therefore more correct ontological understanding than a simple division between a given sex and a constructed gender. Even a complex concept of construction is problematic: it demands the problematic division into causal and intentional relations, a division the theory of the materialized body avoids. Instead it gets the problem to explain why the body doesn't seem to materialize in just any direction.