The Music of Kings and Bio Queens

Abstract

Since its beginnings, conventional Western philosophy has placed crude limitations on the way we think about ourselves suggesting that who we are can be reduced to simple dichotomies based on differentiating bodies. Gender identity has suffered from bodily inscription allowing us to think of ourselves only as man or woman, and thus, behave accordingly. The social and political significance of being either man or woman becomes even more repressive when the two states of being become a binary dualism positioning the woman as a negative but necessary precondition for man. Binary dualisms are unrealistic ways of conceiving and naming human behaviour, yet they continue to pervade modern discussions of identity. This examination draws on a postmodern concept of identity which reconfigures the individual as an embodied subject that is part of and informed by the discursive conditions and practices of society, as opposed to one that is biologically determined. Identity is highly complex, ever shifting and multifariously informed and cannot be fixed to, or in many cases, adequately described by words such as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual.