Beyond The Binary
In Chapter 2 of Beyond the Binary, we look at how ideas about sex, gender, and power have been shaped by the way people talk about them, what the author calls discursive practices. One big influence here is Michel Foucault, who studied how society creates rules through language, habits, and unspoken expectations. The chapter shows that these rules aren’t random, they reflect deeper systems of power.
One example is how people used to try to explain same sex desire. A man who liked other men was often said to have some hidden “female” part inside him. That’s what Ulrichs believed—he thought same-sex attraction came from a kind of invisible opposite-sex quality. That may sound strange now, but at the time, it was a way to say that being gay was natural, not wrong. It was a step forward in some ways, even if the science behind it was flawed.
Should we link sex and desire. My answer is no, not today. Back then, people assumed your body determined who you’d be attracted to. But now we know that gender and sexual orientation are separate. A person can be male and still be attracted to any gender, or none at all. Desire doesn’t always follow traditional ideas about sex.
The chapter also explains that power doesn’t always show up as punishment or control. Sometimes, it works through permission. In other words, society gives us “safe” ways to express ourselves, but only within certain limits. That’s why we still see pressure to fit in, even when people aren’t being directly told what to do.
Later in the chapter, we read about intersectionality, which is the idea that people experience discrimination in different ways based on things like race, gender, class, or disability. For example, a Black trans woman faces different challenges than a white cis woman. This helps show why we can’t use one-size-fits-all rules for identity.
I liked how the chapter pointed out that trying to fix inequality can sometimes reinforce the same power systems. The example of same-sex marriage shows this. Some activists worked hard to win the same marriage rights for queer couples, but others worried that it still put the focus on one kind of family—married, two-parent, often white and middle-class.
This chapter made me think differently about how we talk about identity, desire, and fairness. It reminded me that the way we talk about something can be just as powerful as the rules we follow, and that we always need to ask who gets to make the rules in the first place.
