Butler here is influenced by the postmodern tendency to see our very conception of reality as determined by language, so that it is ultimately impossible even to think or articulate sex without imposing linguistic norms: “there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body” (Bodies 10). (See the Introduction to Gender and Sex for Thomas Laqueur’s exploration of the different ways that science has determined our understanding of bodily sexuality since the ancient Greeks.) The very act of saying something about sex ends up imposing cultural or ideological norms, according to Butler. As she puts it, “‘sex’ becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access” (Bodies 5). Nonetheless, that fiction is central to the establishment of subjectivity and human society, which is to say that, even so, it has material effects: “the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves” (Bodies 7). That linguistic construction is also not stable, working as it does by always re-establishing boundaries (and a zone of abjection) through the endlessly repeated performative acts that mark us as one sex or another. “Sex” is thus unveiled not only as an artificial norm but also a norm that is subject to change. Butler’s project, then, is “to ‘cite’ the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power, to expose the heterosexual matrix and to displace the effect of its necessity” (Bodies 15).