Gender and Dichotomy

The entanglement of gender history’s foundational category—gender—in the heterosexual predicament and, consequently, binary systems of assigning difference has had many critics.  The problem of “pervasive heterosexism” in women’s and gender history formed a founding critique of lesbian and gay studies, queer theory, and continues to inform conversations in transgender and third genders studies.  The field of gender history itself has turned the gender category into a productive tool of feminist critique and, at the same time, articulated dissatisfaction with its reifying, that is, binary reproducing, qualities.  What has been left unexamined in this multifaceted critique is the poverty of the gender category to analyze those gendered identities that constitute heterosexual relations but do not fit the binary matrix.  In this paper, I join this critical conversation by asking: How does one go about building a theoretical and analytical framework to encompass heterosexual phenomena that exist outside the normative, that is, binary-bound, heterosexual paradigm—the framework that would not conceal but incorporate the history of alternative heterosexual gender systems? The work of defining and theorizing gender for the study of heterosexual gender systems, in other words, needs to undergo a radical expansion.  A binary way of thinking, I argue, does not exhaust the realm of possibilities of thinking about heterosexual (woman/man) subjectivity.  By examining concrete historical examples from early American and 19^th and 20^th century US history, medieval and early modern European history, modern Russian history, I undertake a theorization of the gender category as a non-binary dichotomy.