This was originally a response to Ben's note on Facebook about why gender-choice matters. Because my response got rather long, and arrives rather late in an ongoing conversation, I've decided to post it here on my blog rather than as a further comment.
Why is identity interpreted, reiterated and perpetuated through sex and gender?
It's a combination of factors. Identity as a social construct must rely on the historical influences that have shaped society to where it is today. If as Foucault postulates our current views (and here I feel I must express that I mean the predominant Western views in America or risk assuming that fact as a Eurocentric norm) of sexuality and gender identity are formed through eighteenth/nineteenth century psychoanalytical and psychological exploration of the sexologies that cropped up as an empirical response to primarily religious discourses naming, limiting, and persecuting people based on their sexual acts, then it is because of the focus put on sex and gender at that time that we still focus on identity through these lenses.
I agree with Jeff that Foucault did very little other than regurgitate history, but disagree that he didn't say anything new (for his time). The biggest argument that he made is that attempts to repress sexuality by empirically exploring each tangential "deviance" actually multiplied the tools (language/discourse) available. From these discourses stem identities. That's why Foucault is important to queer theory.
The short version of what I'm trying to say is that our culture focuses on those aspects because somewhere in the causal network of history, someone latched onto gender as a relationary model through which to explore sexual identity and it stuck.
In this respect though I also very much agree with what was implied in Jeff's initial assertion regarding identities as signifiers of personal pride in a shared heritage that this interpretation of identity is not static but must even now be looked at in current cultural contexts. In doing so, we see that contemporary sexual identities are not exclusively tied to gender and sexual acts anymore. To think of them as such is a limiting conceptualization of not only sexuality, but identity as well, which is I think why Ben seems to disagree with the idea so much.
The queer community as it currently stands is a spectrum of identity, as it has been from the start, but the expression and use of those identities is where we reach this critical mass of proliferation and differentiation away from sexuality as identities exclusively regarding sex. I would argue though that as it is perceived from outside the queer community, this may not be the case, and it is from this distinction that we see current political tension.
In the Weekly Night Series event I attended last night, "Twinks, Flamers and Bears, OH MY!" we discussed sub-identities within the overarching queer community: things like lipstick lesbian, twink, gaymer, et cetera. What these identities so beautifully illustrate is the intersections of the communities we (inter)act within and the formation of identities around these interactions.
Identity is not mutually exclusive. Identities are socio-cultural constructions around the intersections of a variety of political, historical, social (which I'm using here to include class, religion, and race), and geographical sources.
I don't feel like this adequately answers Ben's original question, but it's what I've got.
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