The Artificial Binary Creates the Masculine Encore, written December 6, 2005, University of Vermont

The Artificial Binary Creates the Masculine Encore
The human body is used as a medium to inscribe identity on individuals in relation to one another. The “artificial binary” system, used in most modern social discourse, regulates individuals’ inscription as either man or woman (Foucault). According to Simone de Beavoir, “one is not born a woman, but, rather becomes one” under the cultural construction of describing their body as “not man” or the “negative”/ “invert” of man. The controversy over the construction of this discourse, as Judith Butler in “Gender Trouble” explains, is the polarity created between free will and determinism. The determination of one’s identity is found consequentially by societal norms, expectations and strict guidelines without regards towards individual attributes. Therefore, the dualistic ideology transcribes one as either the superior “male” or encore “female”. This determination is done with negligence towards possible conflicting characteristics (sexual ambiguities) of the individual.
Butler, through her research, analyzes the female body’s position as “marked” by masculine discourse. In contrast, the masculine body, as defined by the masculine discourse, is “unmarked” and therefore the female “sex” is merely the “masculine sex’s encore”. Even within the 18th century’s creation of the “two-sex model”, evolving from the “one-sex model”, the hegemonic ideology empowers the masculine, male. The social fact that the First Lady of the United States role is the (male) President’s encore, Mrs. Claus was created as Santa Claus’s encore, and Mrs. John Smith is Mr. John Smith’s encore illustrates woman’s symbolic positions in society’s public and private sphere. Merely a continuation or extension of the “greater”, “superior” and more powerful male figure, the female was first defined in the one-sex model as “incomplete”. Therefore, as Jane Adams would explain, individuals become symbolic characters through the social discourse in the shaping of their identity rather than any characteristics innate in them.
The human body viewed as anatomically binary is a cultural construction that has been scientifically legitimized through biology to support false societal pretenses of sexual dimorphism. Thus, biology’s false determination and dualistic approach appears to disregard sexually ambiguous/hermaphroditic people who contribute about 2% of the total population (Blackless and Fausto-Sterling). And to support the heterosexual binary matrix created within biology, sexual dimorphic ideals have been woven into socio-political discourse as well. With using this false binary system, biology extends this ideology to explain “nature” in such ways that are contrary to natural phenomenon. The notion of “man” and “woman” as the only “sexes” found in all living organisms and furthermore the only “genders” is essentially human’s self-constructed “nature”.
Coinciding with a constructed binary system; culture versus nature, man versus woman, feminine versus masculine, and the performative gender structure that is expected, the social production is tightly limited. Butler begins, “The law that prohibits, is the law that invites” in regards to the heterosexual matrix and forced gender binary. Furthermore, her theory conflicts with feminist ideology because of its challenge towards any binary discourse. Feminism theorists could be questioned for their cultural preconceptions which, inevitably, use the binary system of sex and gender edifice.
Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s cultural feminist critique of society observes women as a superior being who is innately peaceful. Her feminist activism and writing acknowledged the hegemonic binary system as problematic but structural. However, her acceptance of the “matrix of intelligibility and heterosexism” sought not to collapse the two-sex model, but rather to manipulate it as if it was pliable. In “Women and Economics”, Gillman illustrates the female’s position as the male’s encore. In contrast to Butler, her use of phrases such as “one sex to the other” and her animal references maintain the binary sex system’s sexual dimorphism ideology as a universal understanding. As Butler would explain, Gillman’s theories are “built from the law and therefore are part of the law” (Butler 75). The construct of “woman” as noun (used by feminism theorists) ratifies the binary system, according to Butler, and furthermore allows the female’s position as the “encore” to remain
The masculine hegemonic, heterosexual matrix supports the “matrix of intelligibility”. If “identity” is an affect of discursive practices, then the question of the relationship between sex, gender, and desire is inevitable (Butler 18). According to Witting, “sex would dissipate through the disruption and displacement of heterosexual hegemony” (Butler 19). The binary “sex” system, as Michele Foucault illustrates, produces regulatory practices that generate identities “through the matrix of norms”. This grammar of sex/gender and the language of social norms “conceals the fact that being a sex and gender is fundamentally impossible” (Butler 19).
Gender as the illusion of identity creates boundaries within the social realm and on an individual level that are maintained politically and socially are signified through identification placed on “the body” (Butler 30). Created by the masculine hegemony of power, the relationship of “the body” in all social systems legitimizes hierarchal inequality and stereotypical differences. The “body” has been manipulated to support a universal understanding of sexual dimorphism that doesn’t exist. Contradictions to the rule are easily dismissed to sustain hierarchy and inequality within the production: the man as the main show and the woman as his encore.