binarisms

[Diana York Blaine]

At the risk of being called a doo-doo brain:
The question of how to think our way out of binarisms preoccupies feminist
theorists as well.  Bill Burns asks whether to avoid binary thinking we
need to "key into some other more intuitive faculty."  Exactly. But
intuition has been the devalued purview of the feminine since the
Enlightenment and before (Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics would of course
be a primary source for binary thought in Western epistemology and one in
which women fare quite badly).  Since those qualities associated with the
feminine (dependence, vulnerability, emotion, connection, intuition) are
peddled as anathema to the normative masculine subject (he who would be a
REAL man, in other words), we face an impasse unless/until we redefine
gender construction itself.  I often ask my students to imagine telling a
professor in the "hard" sciences (now there's a term to ponder...) that
they arrived at their answer by "gut feeling" rather than calculation.
When scientists want to claim intuitive insight, they call it a
"hunch," thereby giving an approbative masculine spin to it. But anyone
who dares to question science finds herself the object of flaming far
beyond anything we've seen so far on this list--hence the culture wars 
raging in the academy today. For feminist critiques on binary thought:
Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which is Not One deconstructs binarisms (notice
how her title plays with the notion that man=One, Woman=Zero as well as
suggesing that woman is " many." The notion of man as presence and woman
as absence informs such diverse issues as the Great Man of History theory
and the name of Courtney Love's band). I've also found Julia Kristeva's 
semiotic (not semiotics) eerily reminiscent of the Tristero in CoL49
(yes,they all laughed when I suggested this in a seminar, too, until they
heard my argument...)  For feminist critiques of science see anything by
Sandra Harding or Donna Haraway.   Diana