to consider the way in which that very law might well be the cause of the very desire it is said to repress" (90). Butler argues the notion of "maternity" as the long-lost haven for females is a social construction, and invokes Michel Foucault's arguments in The History of Sexuality (1976) to posit that the notion that maternity precedes or defines women is itself a product of discourse. Butler dismantles part of Foucault's critical introduction to the journals he published of Herculine Barbin, an intersex person who lived in France during the 19th century and eventually committed suicide when she was forced to live as a man by the authorities. In his introduction to the journals, Foucault writes of Barbin's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity" (94). Butler accuses Foucault of romanticism, claiming that his proclamation of a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work in The History of Sexuality, in which he posits that the idea of a "real" or "true" or "originary" sexual identity is an illusion, in other words that "sex" is not the solution to the repressive system of power but part of that system itself. Butler instead places Barbin's early days not in a "happy limbo" but along a larger trajectory, always part of a larger network of social control. They suggest finally that Foucault's surprising deviation from his ideas on repression in the introduction might be a sort of "confessional moment", or vindication of Foucault's own homosexuality of which he rarely spoke and on which he permitted himself only once to be interviewed. Butler traces the feminist theorist Monique Wittig's thinking about lesbianism as the one recourse to the constructed notion of sex. The notion of "sex" is always coded as female, according to Wittig, a way to designate the non-male through an absence. Women, thus reduced to "sex", cannot escape carrying sex as a burden. Wittig argues that even naming body parts as sexual creates a fictitious limitation of what body parts can be considered erogenous, socially constructing the features themselves and fragmenting what was really once "whole". Language, repeated over time, "produces reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as 'facts'" (115). Butler questions the notion that "the body" itself is a natural entity that "admits no genealogy", a usual given without explanation: "How are the