Though Judith Butler and Rosemary Radford Ruether are not placed into dialogue often, these two opening quotes are an attempt to bring the work of Ruether into the post-discourses (especially queer theory) exemplified by works such as Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter. Whereas Butler focuses on the performativity and politics of identity (especially sex and gender identities), Ruether focuses on how theological, metaphysical, and ontological performances and narratives underwrite the dimorphic performance of gender and sexuality in the mythical place known as “the West.” Though sidestepping the language of French deconstructionists, psychoanalysts and post-structuralists in general, Ruether's work moves in some of the same directions when it comes to gender. She is not bound to identity essentials, nor does she fall into the false opposing choice of complete identity construction; rather, she understands identity as co-constructed between humans and humans and the rest of the natural world, concepts that underwrite both understandings of “nature” and what is “natural,” and understandings of God and the Divine.