Essay Sample on Gender Binary

Gender binary is explained as the gender of two different, opposite forms of masculine (male) and feminine (female) characteristics. When examining the assigned readings of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Butler’s Gender Trouble, both authors had a different take on why binary gender has seemed mandatory. Foucault mentions the discourse of sexuality and how it became a dislike against a suppressive system of the mind. To later be made a bigger spectacle of political suppression instead of a logical one. Foucault doesn’t understand why sexuality is a topic of discussion in the first place; his main point of interest is how discursive people have been when it comes to sex and sexuality. “An important area of contention around which innumerable institutional devices and discursive strategies have been deployed. It may well be true that adults and children themselves were deprived of a certain way of speaking about sex, a mode that was disallowed as being too direct, crude, or coarse” (Foucault, p.30). According to Foucault, understanding and communication are connected to authority because what is being said is important but not as important as who is saying it and the power that they hold. 

Take, for instance, how much power the media has in today’s society; when a powerful source can dictate what is heard and learned, then that source can control what is known. They, in turn, control how we think, speak and understand, giving the people in power the political control they need to reign supreme. The term binary has been given all the power, especially over the institution of marriage and the outcome of how sexuality is seen and accepted.  Foucault also speaks about the “repression emblematic” bourgeois societies as the ones who made it difficult to call “sex” by its name. “As if in order to gain mastery over it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present” (Foucault, p.17). Taking us back to what was said before, how the people in power feel the need to control what is said, thought, and understood. 

Foucault also speaks about binary as it connects to power, “power is essentially what dictates its law to sex. Which means first of all that sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden” (Foucault, p.83). Judith Butler, on the other hand, saw binary as a prolonging of gender stereotypes. To say that because a baby is born with a penis, it will grow to act and label itself as a male, who will be only attracted to a vagina. Butler speaks to the connection between gender and sex as being non-existent, “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (Butler, p. 9). Today we have the term non-binary, in which people whose gender identity doesn’t fit within the category of ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Butler merely states that gender is not a key element, just because one is born male or female. But that gender is what is constantly drilled into us, starting as children and then later supported by what society calls normal.

“From the start, however, the binary restriction on sexuality shows clearly that culture in no way postdates the bisexuality that it purports to repress” (Butler, p.74). Butler speaks about the people in the positions of power who have tried to hide the known fact that there are individuals who do not identify as “binary”. How keeping it to the two groups helps bring order and control for the law. That the sexual division caused by repression helpful to the deception of identity.  

So, to answer why the binary gender system has seemed mandatory is because the people in control of the “bourgeois societies” have been able to dictate what is seen, heard, and learned. They have been able to control the narrative for some time and have refused anything other than binary genders to be open in society. If they let the non-binary identity be learned, it would dismantle the “family” agenda they have been pushing for years.  People who identify as non-binary would be able to showcase there is more than just being a male or female, that labels only box an individual in to conform with what society feels makes a man or woman. “With the consequence that the excluded term of the binary continually haunts and disrupts the coherent posturing of anyone. The excluded term is an excluded sexuality that contests the self-grounding pretensions of the subject as well as its claims to know the source and object of its desire” (Butler, p.89).