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.

because vagabonds sonterlong long

Back to my writing for me and for you and for no one. My time was taken for so long. 20 years exactly, minus one I have been spending my days at school, for learning, for "education". of certain things. Always I ache for the days of my own educating.
myself on the brances that curve their way into my window and decorate themselves with green outlined precision. I want to know what they call themselves.
on the home that I can find in an empty field with purple petals at my feet. I want to find myself there.
on the song of the breeze that will wash my face while I roll down an unfamiliar fated street.
on the colors and words that can come from ones hands and present themself on one's paper. dancing literation.
to my feet moving, and writing, invisibly as I walk on the sidewalk that I pass to leave behind me in gleeful expression.
and with blooming pinks and greens and purples and yellows and budding beauty. there now is this time to sit and walk and peacefully partner with my surroundings.
transitory trajectories muddle my clear water of revival!
as in sleeping hours the only pacification I see to be clear....
swim with the current that picks you up and takes you off.
dear ivy. this is for you and what you taught me today.

The positive pelican push

moments of aloneness, some filled with opportunistic moment.
a van full of strangers returning home from trips around the world. a couple, newly engaged, returning from Disney World, glowing with settled, filled, visions of a home, fenced in, a dog, a new baby, a family to view their life as completed. myself, alone returning from a weekend with half my family. newly divided. feeling divided.
and a man sitting across an aisle of division. his smile big, his eyes pleased and genuine. the driver says, Mr. Thomas, we are please to have you with us. he says he tried to be a nobody, but he accepts her attention and appreciates her friendliness. I find I am sitting now, without an isle any longer, closed from conversation, a local celebrity, a news reporter for Detroit. he speaks about his love for his life, his job and the couple beams behind me. I beam for all their happinesss, everyone's. and he tells me to watch him on the television, I look him up on the internet. I find he is more than a happy, gifted and privileged news reporter. he is a struggling man. I learn about his story. Born an African American, now a disease, turning him white, slowly. Once an attractive man only noticeable for his smile and confidence, now noticeable for his atypical skin and fame. Watch, be inspired as I was, and learn of the privilege most of us have. solid skin color, solid to our existence.

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/about_us/personalities/Lee_Thomas_Bio

vagabonding blogging

so without a voice, as it is lost to overuse or anger or a tightened throat from unbearable stress to the body
and without an extension of this natural life into the life of others so far, or maybe just across town, as the obsession with plugging and charging and attaching electronics to your pant pockets is forgotten
and without the companion that calls you to check in every day, or to give you a hug every morning, or make you tuna fish for lunch
and without a home where others know your face on a passing by of the street, and smile into your solitude feeding your for hours
and without knowing your own face, or your own hands, or your own loveliness.

to exist in this world, substantiated by these expectations, of what a day is filled with. In the vagabonding there are strangers who tell you who they think you are, and there are alone moments were memories seep in from a past life, a song comes on, and you are in your first apartment, lying on the floor, with someone you know loves you, for a moment.

I listened

I listened to a man speaking on the radio about forgetting who he was. Standing in a train station in an unrecognizable city, not knowing how he got there or where he intended to go, looking at other strange faces. All he understood was that he didn't understand. Searching for a mirror a reflective. Piece of his identity. He spoke about looking down at his hands wondering how many years of his life he had lived, seeking some remnants of what that life was to him, he sifted through his pockets. When and where did he put these pants on, how many days had he been living this empty way. The extreme notion of losing one's identity, by losing consciousness of our actions, missing the signs of our moment to moment existence. And perhaps the fog this man spoke of could possibly replace our conscious mind, the identity we hold so dear as it is ours and ours alone. Or perhaps it already has. The forgetting of yesternight's dream, the distant memory of dancing with a friend on that one night that felt so special at the time, that pivitol conversation that seperated you and another, and the flight of excitement that ran through your body when you chased the purple butterfly in your 5 year old heart. It is the smells and songs and touch of our present days, if we are mindful enough that can take us back to this joy. Not so much in the memory, but the feeling, as without our identity, without our history, we are feeling and feeling alone.

A new Post of an old Writing

I told you that in my throat I felt a thickness
In my throat, our lives
sharp roof tops and honeysuckled honey and cream and sugar of salt and whiskey that they drink
They drink separately miles apart
They live with imaginary friends
Ships sailing opposing grounds without the breeze of this evening
No more music of them or music of their colors of red and snowfalling white and lanolium floor coating
Of kisses on the hand
And punches to the jaw I sewed back in my nursed vicariously fanstasized mind
Because we can’t swallow
Sourness disinigrates our teeth and we don’t call those people that wait for our voices they pretend they
Recognize
Because the numbers are stuck in the condensation and the heaviness of these days and hours in the fog and dark fog that they put you in
And I’m getting older too
And now I should understand and they should too and
What the dictator of passing time allows is only this
Grudge
Grudging teeth of grit and ore and wafered bread and half touched wine
Driving north to a place of escape with como estas bonita senorita
And capes and watered streets of enlightened empty encounters
To complimate the radiant side of finding people who you must replace with imaginary friendships when they are gone.
Finding a place of placement in every place you go you go to find these new
Families
We find we make we consolidate and protect and neglect and reject
In embracement of the souls between, the space between we find heavenly and sweet heavenly space to swallow.
We can swallow around the lumps and folds of fear of losing of regretting

Burlington, VT 2006

a year of new

the new of the year in hours, or more, a year of new words, new seeings, new touches, new bellow laughs and new sunsets. a new finding of the simple days of waking when dreams are over and the belly aches for nourishment, wakings where the day meets you and sleeps when the stretch of the day swadles you in sheets.

to begin the new year.
yes.
things of new:
1.) a cradle for sorror
2.) a kite of reveling
3.) a sheet of soaking
4.) a beat for dancing
5.) a tree for carving mind's melt
6.)______________________