A brilliant sociological critique of Foucault and Butler (or at least the way they are commonly taken up), from Stevi Jackson's 2005 Piece, "Sexuality, Heterosexuality, and Gender Hierarchy" (from the collection, Thinking Straight: New Work in Critical Heterosexuality Studies):

It is sometimes assumed that the more radically antiessentialist positions, those that hold that there is no essential pre-given basis for either gender or sexuality, derive from postmodern theorizing. This misconception results in the erasure of earlier sociological accounts of the construction of sexuality" and the first feminist critiques of sex-gender distinction." Newer forms of social constructionism, which take such writers as Foucault and Butler as originators, are often not very social at all. Indeed, they are often emptied of the social and are better characterized as cultural constructionism. Of course the social world includes the cultural, it includes the realms of discourse and symbolic representation, but the cultural is not all there is to the social. The distinctively social has to do with questions of social structure but also situated social practices. It is concerned with meaning, both at the level of our wider culture and as meanings emerge from or are deployed within everyday social interaction. It includes subjectivity since our sense of who we are in relation to others constantly guides our actions and interactions and, conversely, who we are is a consequence of our location within gendered, class, racial and other divisions, and the immediate social and cultural milieux we inhabit.

In my recent work I have, in keeping with this picture of the social, identified four intersecting levelsor facets of social construction:14 (1) the structural, in which gender is constructed as a hierarchical social division and heterosexuality is institutionalized, for example, by marriage, the law, and the state; (2) the level of meaning, encompassing the discursive construction of gender and sexuality and the meanings negotiated in everyday social interaction; (3) the level of routine, everyday social practices through which gender and sexuality are constantly constituted and reconstituted within localized contexts and relationships; and (4) at the level of subjectivity through which we experience desires and emotions and make sense of ourselves as embodied gendered and sexual beings.

What cultural-as opposed to social-constructionism does is to exclude the first level, that of structure, altogether. It then deals with meaning primarily at the level of culture and discourse, but ignores the meanings emergent from and deployed within everyday social interaction. Sometimes practices are included - as in Butler's (1990) discussion of performativity - but rarely are these practices located in their interactional or wider social setting. Finally, subjectivity is usually theorized through psychoanalysis, which completely abstracts it from its social context; alternative perspectives linking the self and the social are rarely even considered.

What I am suggesting is that an understanding of gender and sexuality as fully social, as contingent upon the material conditions of our existence, must take account of all these processes through which they are constructed. I am not proposing here some total theory of social construction wherein all these levels are welded together as a seamless whole. Such an endeavor would be ill advised and likely to produce another form of reductionism. Moreover, it is difficult, if not impossible, to focus on all these levels
at once. We do, however, need to be aware that when we concentrate on one facet of social construction, we have only a partial view of a multifaceted
process.

Glorious.