Binaries Schminaries...

Helene Cixous and Judith Butler are two smart ladies with gender on the brain. They fight for feminism with their tools belts heavily guarded with language and discourse originating from the poststructuralist point of view of Jacques Derrida.

Helene Cixous takes a (misread) Lacanian stance when reviewing her theory in Sorties. She explores the use of binaries in order to show the amount of unequal power that is used when discussing hierarchized oppositions. By doing this, language is coupled with one another in a given order: presence/absence, light/dark, speech/writing, and finally we are brought to the sexualized couple of man/woman. She takes man/woman and compares it particularly with active/passive. This is to say that men are active beings and women are passive beings. Now, although Cixous does not believe binaries to be a natural part of life, she does believe that the moment they are paired with one another a natural war begins between the positioning couples. To quotes her, she says, “Death is always at work”. What she means by this, is to point out the immediate inequality set out involving these hierarchies.

She further elaborates on the man/woman binary by explaining how the family construct works. When a mother and a father exists with children, the mother is either passive or she does not exist at all. Cixous calls this “unthinkable” however, it remains true within the phallocentric theory and a binary is then created between the father/son with no place for woman at all.

In Bodies that Matter Judith Butler discusses the roles gender performance without the deliberate use of binaries as Cixous does. Instead, Butler used a more fluid approach by explaining the concept of norms. The concept (or sign) of a girl, for example, is no more an “assignment” than it is a “command” and because of this command, it will forever be haunted by its own inability fully define itself. She also uses the example of drag as a way to highlight how these norms can be manipulated. Drag is not a lifestyle that is meant to bring down the heterosexual regime, however, it performs the very details of heterosexuality that are displayed.

Through the failing in able maintain the consistency in two main gender norms comes the iterative and predictable motions of homophobia. Homophobia is the discrimination of those males and females who do not fit in adequately under the gender norms of masculine and feminine. Therefore, a man under the pressure of homophobic judgment may be acting too feminine. If this is the case, he has also failed in correctly displaying his heterosexuality.