Over the past two years, “sex” has become a legal term with a very precise definition. A federal executive order now defines a female as a person “belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” and states like Texas and Tennessee have written similar definitions into their own laws. Meanwhile, the biologists who study sex most closely keep reporting that bodies do not sort so neatly. Philosophy has been having its own version of this argument for decades, between those who hold that sexual difference is real and irreducible and those who hold that it is produced by the very norms that name it.
This week, we’re joined by Matt Lovett, Associate Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh and a candidate analyst with the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis. His new book, Deleuze, Lacan, and the Becoming of Sexuation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2027) brings together Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two thinkers widely considered to be incommensurable, in order to reconcile two positions also often considered to be incommensurable: sexual difference theory and gender theory.
If sexual difference is real, does that lock any of us into what we were assigned at birth? What would it mean to say that we become sexed, and keep becoming sexed, over the course of a whole life? Can an account of sex take bodies seriously without telling anyone who they are allowed to be? And what does a psychoanalyst hear in the consulting room that a philosopher reading Lacan might miss?
If sexual difference is real, does that lock any of us into what we were assigned at birth? What would it mean to say that we become sexed, and keep becoming sexed, over the course of a whole life? Can an account of sex take bodies seriously without telling anyone who they are allowed to be? And what does a psychoanalyst hear in the consulting room that a philosopher reading Lacan might miss?
Grab a drink and join us as we ask whether sexual difference is something we are born with or something we never stop becoming.
In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc.:
- Ancient Aliens
- Emily Shiffer, “Grocery workers’ breakroom recreation of The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ video is comedy gold” (2026)
- Karen Hopkin, “21-Second Rule Governs Mammal Micturition” (2014)
- Matt Lovett, Deleuze, Lacan, and the Becoming of Sexuation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Sexual Difference (2026)
- Essentialism and constructivism about sex and gender
- Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974); This Sex Which Is Not One (1977); An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984)
- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (1993); “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988)
- Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” (2025)
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
- Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (1985)
- Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992)
- Christine Delphy, “The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move” (2000)
- Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (1975); The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII (2005)
- Jacques Derrida, “Choreographies” (1982); “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference” (1983); Of Grammatology (1967)
- Martin Heidegger
- Différance
- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968); The Logic of Sense (1969); “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” (1972), in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (2002)
- John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe (1988)
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (1844)
- Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida” (1977), in The Critical Difference (1980)
- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916)
- Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937)
- Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell, “The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell” (1998)
- J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962)
- Louis Althusser
- Aristotle, On the Soul (c. 350 BCE)
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
- Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality” (1980)
- Matt Lovett, “Lacanian Anxieties: Trans Surgeries, Countertransference, and the Fantasy of the Whole” (2024)
- Slavoj Žižek, “The Sexual Is Political” (2016)
- Jacques-Alain Miller
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972)
- “With therapy hard to get, people lean on AI for mental health. What are the risks?” (2025)
- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
- Karl Marx
- Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
- Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (1994)
- Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body (2000); Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World (2012)
- Joan Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason” (1994), in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (1994)
- Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography (2019)
- Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (2010)
- Edmund Husserl
- George Berkeley
- Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak? (2020); Countersexual Manifesto (2000); Testo Junkie (2008)
- Patricia Gherovici, “The Unconscious Is the Last Activist” (2016)