Binaries in Sex Experience - Essay Example

Binaries in Sex Sex contains unlimited source of inspiration and creativity of realization. But sex and unlimited areprobable not used together within the culture frame usually. Customary sex is attached to variety of binary perspectives – including masculine/feminine, active/passive, top/bottom, domination/submission, power/powerlessness, penetration/reception. These refer to the traditional views: dominant male is active on the top; submissive female is passive. This pattern is widely played through the society – not only in sex issues. This point returns to the determining power of sex patterns that imprint deeply to shape consciousness. Liberation reveals some hidden aspects. This paper will observe the binary patterns through the culture. In his article “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” Michel Foucault says: “you would have to say that sexuality, as we now know it, has become one of the most creative sources of our society and our being. My view is that we should understand it in the reverse way: the world regards sexuality as the secret of the creative cultural life; it is, rather, a process of our having to create a new cultural life underneath the ground of our sexual choices” (Foucault, "Sex, power, and the politics of identity," 163-164). Here choice definitely is connected with the absence of strict boundaries and binaries. The whole article is full of domination and submission binary. If the art would consist of only mentioned customary patterns, it would be rather flat. Art does not grow under restrictions. Art usually ruins and goes beyond borders. There are many homosexuals within the variety of arts – especially music. Revealing own freedom of choice is a part of both sexuality and artistic expression. Foucault observes diverse sexual preferences with not merely eroticization of the body but with the art of discovery and creation; new ways of exploring opportunities and pleasure. Even more, he finds some activities like S&M as those that lead to desexualization of the pleasures: “The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure as the root of all our possible pleasure - I think thats something quite wrong” (Foucault, "Sex, power, and the politics of identity," 165). Such desexualization may lead to enhancing creativity. Foucault finds it necessary to experience proper and profound pleasure. As far as liberation movements call for setting free the desire, Foucault claims people have to liberate own pleasure rather. I like the way Foucault says identity is only a game. Real relationships consist of not the interaction of identities or patterns of feminine and masculine or dominant and recessive all the time; “they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation ” (Foucault, "Sex, power, and the politics of identity," 166). Identity does not have to become overwhelming suppressive ethical rule and the only role available. To be alive people have to change and uncover new – otherwise they get old soon. Foucault even claims that resistance is not a negation yet it is creation process. Power relations reveal new aspects. Resistance is primary; without it domination would be only a matter of obedience. S&M is created by dynamics and interaction. There is S&M not only presented in sexual interaction but in the society as well. Some groups suppress others; this tendency may be traced widely from the very roots of the history. Females have been, for quite a long time and hundreds of years, separated in the public eye, baffled, scorned from various perspectives, etc, has given them the genuine probability of constituting a general public, of making a sort of social connection between themselves, outside the social world that was ruled by men. S&M is observed as the erotization of power. It is usually about power and strategic relationships. Society, the state establishes strategic relationships – through the court, the law, various institutions. But their language is rigid. Power in S&M is fluid. Even there are roles, they can change and even switch. With society it is hardly possible. Foucault’s another article, “We “Other Victorians,”” traces the roots of the aspects of sex shifted from being open to become silent and seemingly absent. Sexual practices had minimal need of mystery; words were said without undue hesitance, and things were done without an excessive amount of covering; one had a tolerant recognition with the unlawful. Codes directing the coarse, the disgusting, and the obscene were truly careless contrasted with those of the nineteenth century. It was a period of direct signals, indecent talk, and open transgressions, when life structures were demonstrated and mixed freely (Foucault, "We Other Victorians," 3). Sexuality was precisely restricted; it moved into the bedroom. The marital family took guardianship of it and consumed it into the genuine capacity of reproduction. On the subject of sex, quiet got to be the tenet. The honest to goodness and procreative couple laid down the law. The couple forced itself as model, authorized the standard, shielded reality, and maintained all authority to talk while holding the guideline of mystery. A solitary locus of sexuality was recognized in social space and also at the heart of each family, yet it was an utilitarian and reproductive one: the parents’ room. The rest had just to remain unclear; fitting attitude evaded contact with other bodies, and verbal tolerability disinfected ones discourse. Everybody knew that kids had no sex, which was the reason they were illegal to discuss it, why one shut ones eyes and halted ones ears at whatever point they came to show proof to the opposite, and why a general and considered quiet was forced. These are the trademark elements credited to suppression, which serve to recognize it from the denials kept up by reformatory law: suppression worked as a sentence to vanish, additionally as an order to hush, an confirmation of nonexistence, and, by suggestion, an affirmation that there was nothing to say in regards to such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know. Such was the lip service of our common social orders with its stopping rationale. The article is full also of the repression submission issue. Yet, there may be another reason that makes it so satisfying for us to characterize the relationship in the middle of sex and force as far as suppression: something that one may call the speakers advantage. On the off chance that sex is quelled, that is, sentenced to denial, nonexistence, and quiet, then the negligible truth that one is talking about it has the presence of an intentional transgression. Ann Cvetkovich’s article “Recasting Receptivity: Femme Sexualities” reflect the binary of penetration/reception, power/powerlessness, masculine/feminine and active/passive. Cvetkovich took lesbian sex for her consideration for it fluidity regarding aspects of “to fuck” and “being fucked.”As far as women are more inclined to have possibility to act variably, “butch,” masculine type avoids to be penetrated by her lover to avoid this type of vulnerability and power issue of “being fucked.” Butch/femme binary is exactly masculine/feminine as well. As butch decides to be a man, femme seeks for masculine traits – but within women. The same concepts exactly are traced through the film “Boys Don’t Cry.” Actually Teena is a butch basically. But she totally reverses into a man. She avoids being penetrated. Yet it concern more her gender identity. Boys Don’t Cry is a recompense winning biopic that recounts the account of Brandon Teena who was lamentably raped and killed outside of Falls City, Nebraska on December 31, 1993. Boys Don’t Cry was coordinated by Kimberly Pierce who got to be occupied with many, many perusing about his homicide while she was a graduate understudy at Columbia University. Pierce did broad research on Brandons life and put in very nearly five years composing the screenplay for the film (PopMatters). This film serves to highlight the relationship between learning, force, and viciousness. I feel that Pierce made this film not just to raise open mindfulness about trans fear and viciousness against trans individuals, additionally as a stage to test predominant and harsh developments of sexual orientation and sexuality. Pierce needs viewers to ponder the courses in which learning is made, who develops this learning, and the routes in which information impacts social relations of domination and resistance. As opposed to building Brandons demise as an unavoidable result of his "misdirection" and "twofold life", the film positions the danger of violence confronted by trans individuals as a result of the ideological limits of sex binaries. These binaries are based upon the presumption that sexual orientation is naturally connected to organic sex. In this manner individuals who transgress these binaries turn into a danger to the common request of things. Brandon was a danger both to the law and to the manliness of Lotter and Nissan. I saw the savagery executed by Lotter and Nissan as a remedial rape serving to reify the sex binaries and strengthen the sex progressive system where hegemonic manliness rules incomparable. “As Brandon’s assailants would have it, the girl ‘Teena’was beaten, raped, and murdered because she passed as a man” (Dittmar 146). Brandon is compelled to pay for his sexual orientation transgressions first through his rape and remedial assault by Lotter and Nissan and after that through his typical re-assault by the law-an organ of the government which has no insurances set up for individuals like Brandon. The investigation performed by Sheriff Laux after Brandons strike and assault showcases the way that the sexual orientation paired can have critical lawful results. The investigation was obtrusive and hostile, as well as be seen as a re-rape. There is a documentary called “We Exist,” which depicts the picture of life beyond sex binaries. It is created by Lauren Lubin. It investigates the private regular life of a man living outside of the sexual orientation parallel including the greater part of the enthusiastic, physical and otherworldly moves one is confronted with while living in a binary world. The sex parallel is a totally obsolete social build a coupling strategy for naming a wide range of sex as either female or male. Gender identity falls onto a range simply like sexuality, and neuroscience demonstrates it. The latest examination was driven by the Medical University of Vienna, and Huffington Post reported their discoveries this past January, demonstrating the cerebrum holds a wide mixed bag of sex contrasts from individual to individual, not only divvied out by organic sex (Huffington Post). Living outside of the sexual orientation twofold is a quite undeniable and applicable piece of reality that can never again be disregarded just grasped. A shift in the present ideal model is important in light of the fact that who we are and how we exist is and ought to be hallowed we every have a privilege to seek after our own particular joy, our wholeness. Wendy Hsus paper “Reading and Queering Plato in Hedwig and the Angry Inch” is the first story of how Hansels messed up sex-change operation changed him into Hedwig and secured him with such a variety of layers of sexual orientation personality (Hsu). The musical has a queering impact as truly a couple of the characters in it challenge the standard that forces a twofold character in sex (male or female), sexuality (hetero or gay person) and sex (man or lady) and forgets the likelihood of falling in the middle of the two; Hedwig, specifically, embodies this "halfway" state more than some other character, by having all the earmarks of being neither male nor female, neither gay or straight, and neither a man nor a lady. Summing up, sex binaries impose strict rules over the matters of how to act, be and live. What Foucault refers to setting free may be attached here as well. The creativity concerns widening borders and finding a new meaning. It does not mean to urge all the people to challenge own sex binary patterns but to observe the world more widely. There are usually traditional patterns created by the society – regarding control over domination and submission, femininity and masculinity and other. Even staying within the binaries, challenging them means innovative experience to broaden and transform own personality. Challenge keeps people feeling alive. Works cited Cvetkovich, Ann. "Recasting receptivity: femme sexualities." Lesbian erotics(1995): 125-46. Dittmar, Linda. “Performing Gender in Boys Don’t Cry,” in Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood, eds. Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 145-62. Foucault, Michel. "Sex, power, and the politics of identity." Ethics: Subjectivity and truth (1997): 163-73. Foucault, Michel. "We Other Victorians." The Foucault Reader 292 (1984). Hoffman, Kim. "“We Exist” Documentary Shows Life Beyond Gender Binary." AfterEllen. March 24. (2015): n. page. Web. 28 May. 2015. . "Interview with Kim Peirce: Boys Dont Cry." PopMatters. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014. . "Networks of the brain reflect the individual gender identity." Medical University of Vienna. ScienceDaily, 7 January 2015. . Neuroscience Proves What Weve Known All Along: Gender Exists On A Spectrum. The Huffington Post. N.p., 2015. Web. 28 May 2015. . Read More