the binary contract
essay i wrote 4 philosophy class abt the gender binary & how it is inherently shrouded in misogyny & otherness
from the moment we are born, it seems as though our physical anatomy and the ways we are expected to live our lives are almost inextricably linked. we have parties and celebrations revealing the sexes of children before they are even born. babies with vaginal genitalia are given dolls and play kitchen sets. those that possess penile genitalia are given toy trucks and trains and shirts that say things like “chick magnet” or “ladies love me”. sex and gender have always been considered one and the same for the majority of history; the physical form is considered to be indicative of who a person is or will turn out to be. but on the contrary, philosopher Judith Butler theorizes in their 1990 book gender trouble that gender is not something people are, but rather it is something people do, a sort of performance that everyone puts on through the way they express themselves. the concept of gender has lived as long as civil society has; social concepts labeling people into certain groups based on expression, appearance, or otherwise are all as old as the institution which upholds them.
many theorists establish that society was instituted when men (in this case referring to those possessing penile genitalia) made the transition into civilized life through the crafting of a hypothetical “social contract”—an outline of the way people ought to live amongst one another. carol pateman, political theorist and author of the sexual contract (1983) argues that ingrained within the social contract is subjugation; those possessing non-penile anatomy (which pateman refers to as women) are officially established as sexual objects and property, being stripped of their own agency. pateman’s theory was prolific at the time, indicating that as long as civil society as we know it continues to exist, those with non-penile genitalia (again, described as women by pateman) will always be pushed to the margin. following in the footsteps of both pateman and judith butler, i propose that the concept of gender is also ingrained within the social contract. within the labeling of the “male” and the “female” or the “man” and the “woman”, therein lies the inextricable link between physicality and the definition of the self. within the labeling of the “male” and the “female” there lies the binary contract.
first and foremost, it is important to understand that the institution of gender and how it relates to the physical body is upheld by those who crafted the initial social contract. in the first societies that were completely governed underneath those assigned “male” at birth exclusively; there was no “other” present. therefore, otherness constituted labeling, and this labeling led to role creation. Thus, they were labeled and named as “women”. in other words, the role of “female” or “woman” is completely and entirely made by cisgendered men. in gender trouble, judith butler quotes monique wittig, a french author, by saying that “only men are ‘persons’, and there is no gender but the feminine…for masculine is not masculine, but the general” (butler 19-20). therefore, the concept of gender stems from the concept of othering. those who are deemed “female” are only distinguished as such because of their difference from the people deemed men: they only exist within a lack of relation to the “male”—or the “general, universalized subject”—that established itself as the sole controller and creator of society as it is known.
civilized society, though, was created through the crafting of the social contract. in the transition from the natural world to the civilized one therein lies the institutionalizing of “otherness”. according to carol pateman’s The Sexual Contract, “[t]he new civil society created through the original contract is a patriarchal social order” (pateman 2). patriarchy, or the jurisdiction that cisgendered men maintain over civilized society, is inherently embedded into the social contract because said contract was solely, totally, and completely written with cisgendered men in mind. the “others” that are only defined by their differences from the cisgendered male cohort are marginalized within the crafting of that contract. pateman says that “civil freedom is a masculine attribute”, in this case referring to the fact that freedom given by the creation of the social contract only applies to those who wrote it (Pateman 2). In creating the social contract, cisgendered men establish their own roles in society and outline the adverse role of those deemed “other” from them because of their anatomical difference. the “woman”, the “female” and the “feminine” are tied ultimately to the physical forms of those within the group, tying the label to the anatomy. here, the bond between gender, its male-centered roles, and the body that it binds itself to is formed.
for the majority of history, gender has existed as and presumed to be a facet of identity; one of the key defining traits that is supposed to encompass the entirety of our person. gender, historically, is a deciding factor in how people are supposed to look, how they are socialized, how they express themselves, and the roles that they hold within society. something that was created and founded on otherness continues to play a pivotal role within who we are. again, butler refers to wittig in gender trouble by saying, “[a]ccording to wittig, gender not only designates persons…but constitutes a conceptual episteme by which binary gender is universalized” (butler 20). according to the male generalized voice, a person can only be of “manhood” or “womanhood”, and the ways in which each respective label can be expressed and performed is extremely limited. because of this notion, anatomy is bonded to identity in such a way that they are made one and the same by patriarchy.
when people don’t immediately adhere to the notions of “male” or “female” within their performance of outward identity, they invoke dissonance into a people that has been shaped and molded into thinking that gender and the way it is displayed to the world necessitates being of one thing or another. as Butler writes, “...because certain kinds of ‘gender identities’ fail to conform to…norms of cultural intelligibility, they appear only as developmental failures or logical impossibilities” (butler 17). one example they (meaning butler) cite as an example of this is drag performance. “in imitating gender,” butler explains, “drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency”. since the anatomical physicality of the performer does not matter within the context of their performance, therein lies a “dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance” (butler 137). hence, identity and its dependency on gender solely hinges upon the influences of the patriarchy; male-derived roles of gender and the binary that is incorporated into it.
in the minds of those who believe in the strict, static nature of the gender binary, failure within others to conform to said binary sows discomfort, confusion, and oftentimes anger and hatred. transgenderism and all of the terms that are encompassed underneath its umbrella are seen as “other” by the universal cisgendered male voice, just as those who do not possess penile genitalia are: it is deemed wrong to defy the masculine, binary narrative that was written into the social contract that modern society functions upon. within the writing of the original social contract not only lies the subjugation of those with non-penile genitalia, but also the ingrained oppression of all those not conforming to the anatomically-bound principle of the “male” or “masculine”. those who claim opposition to individuals who breach the concept of anatomy as gender do so as a means of clinging to their own binary-ness. in obeying the concept of identity as gender and gender as anatomy, therein lies comfort and security. for those who transcend these principles, there lies marginalization. this marginalization stems only from the fear of freedom; freedom from the binding concepts of “maleness” and “femaleness” as functions of binary society. people should be allowed to exist freely, whether they identify with the notion of the male, the female, or otherwise.
coming to grips with the binary written into the skeleton of the modern world allows one to realize that there are as many ways to be a person as there are people in the world. like other socially constructed labels such as race or sexual orientation, gender is still inseparably bound to the ways people live within our world, therefore making it important to understand and comprehend as a facet of the patriarchy in which we live. understanding how gender and its binary have come to be viewed as static within our world is as important to the individual person as it is to the future of society.
in learning and understanding the binary contract, one allows for both the betterment of the world and for the liberation of the self.