Both examples of theory illustrate that theory involves speculative practice: accounts of desire, language, and so on. that challenge received ideas (that there is something natural. called 'sex: that signs represent prior realities). So doing, they incite you to rethink the categories with which you may be reflecting on literature. These examples display the main thrust of recent theory, which has been the critique of whatever is taken as natural, the demonstration that what has been thought or declared natural is in fact a historical, cultural product. What happens can be grasped through a different example: when Aretha Franklin sings You make me feel like a natural woman. she seems happy to be confirmed in a natural sexual identity, prior to culture, by a man's treatment of her. But her formulation. you make me feel like a natural woman, suggests that the supposedly natural or given identity is a cultural role, an effect that has been produced within culture: she isn't a natural woman but has to be made to feel like one. The natural woman is a cultural product.