Gender without sex. The gender concept - history, function and change of function.

Originally, the introduction of the gender concept into the debate on the sexes and sexuality served to point up semantically what threatened to be submerged in the concept ''sex''. Gender is fueled by the force with which it divorces itself from sex. Today the force of this dissociation has been lost sight of. Sex-free gender is a buzzword, an all-purpose metaphor used freely in scientific and political debate. Reiche traces the development of the psychoanalytic and feministic gender debate with reference to the work of Judith Butler, which embodies a complete dissociation from all essentialist and material references and contents which the term ''sex'' necessarily implies. In Butler's work everything is a ''construction'' except the hetero, which is one with the ubiquity of societal power as posited by Foucault. Reiche insists that Freud's concept: of constitutional bisexuality is open-ended and flexible enough to both forswear deterministic biology and capture the constructed nature of sexual difference. The author interprets the triumph of gender over sex as a sign of the times, a materialization of the wish for conflict-free sexuality. The price to be paid for the consummation of that wish is the repression of sexuality.