Is gender really binary?Of course not! And it is unfortunate that our society is still uncapable of understanding the complex underlying history of sex and gender. I really wish that people could slowly try to accept the fact that the high ideal of two sexes only does not really match the reality in which we live in. Among the many important issues that Fausto addresses in the first chapter is the binary notion of nature vs nurture. It was the subject that caught my attention the most. Nature is basically an unscripted mind, what is inside us the moment we were born, before we interacted with the ¨outside¨. Nurture is exactly the opposite. It is the result of acculturation and the process of socialization. What happens when nature and nurture come together? Fausto argues that a whole spectrum or scheme of things can develop out of that. In her thesis statement on pg 5 she uses the phrase mutually ¨dependent¨ to describe this ¨binary opposition¨. Nature and nurture are not mutually independent. They can not be treated separately because they essence rely on each other’s qualities. Likewise, straight and gay cannot be divided into two distinct categories because the truth is, there exist no clear-cut. Rather, there is a wide scheme of variations between the two. For instance, the average height of people is 5-6 foot. Architects build houses for people with a standard height. Yet, deviations exist -- there are 7 feet tall people! So do we chop them short? No! We tolerate them and those people, in turn, learn to live their lives as extremely tall people who cannot fit through the usual doorway, etc. I guess the take home message is that trying to understand our world in binary oppositions that are mutually independent will not take us very far, because nothing is black and white only.
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