Binary opposition

Euripides’ Bacchae is built on creating and exploring binary oppositions. A central opposition, sanity and madness, forces the reader to evaluate each character’s actions and motivations to judge them as sane or insane. By making these judgments, the readers assign different values to each character based on beliefs that they have acquired and cultivated since their early development and are affected by society and surroundings throughout their lives. For example, “good” values correlate with…

Introduction In Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Beatriz Preciado uses their body and their body of work as a means of transing theory. Put another way, B.P. uses a genre bending approach to writing theory to attempt to articulate the lived experience of gender ambiguity. B.P. challenges normative conceptions and understandings of bodies, theory, and modes of production in an attempt to explain the queer body. To do so, B.P. employs the radical approach…

Literary theory consists of various principles, beliefs and underlying ideas that are used to understand and analyze different pieces of texts in literature. An interesting way to view literary theory is by considering theories as tools. Critics take these tool and apply it to a text in an attempt to look at it from a different perspective. It grants them the ability to examine a particular aspect of a text, which they regard of significant importance. When these theories are passed onto readers…

Modern musings about society heavily question the unquestioned. Heteronormativity is naturalization of hetero/homo binary thinking about sexual attraction that privileges an investment in ‘straightness’, or how gender normativity is understood in Western contexts. It’s important to distinguish that this investment in straightness is characterized by heterosexual culture rather than heterosexual physical activity (Ingraham 209). It also is perpetuated as a social order and institution in…

as possible from where they grew up. While the author is living somewhere else, she argues she cannot move on from her true home. So it shows there is a feeling of attachment possessed by the author. Cantwell, while making the title, puts a binary opposition within to make the reader think about the two opposites that appear. Cantwell refers her childhood house as not only her home but her fortress…

Nicholson, 1989). These two perspectives are evident and important in understanding Annie Sprinkle and her Post-Porn Modernist Show. Annie Sprinkle’s Post-Porn Modernist Shows explores the ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality while challenging the binary of art/pornography and women/men. Both postmodernism and feminism, mainly materialistic feminism, intertwine in Annie Sprinkle’s work, which helps voice out female issues and highlights the challenged role of women in contemporary…

necessary to produce a refreshing image of which one actually exists; Dali substitutes timeworn images with new visions: whether the person exists as a bulb breaking through an egg or a swan balancing atop of an elephant. The strand of madness and the binaries of power versus powerless and compliance versus revolt reveal Dali’s…

Finally, whereas Victorian definitions of progress implicitly rely on a binary opposition of success and failure, Morley and Stevenson use Fortune’s Wheel to replace it with a definition of human development where both fortune and misfortune can co-exist without contradicting each other. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Wheel of Fortune could easily have been used as a portent of the apocalypse, suggesting as it does that decline is inevitable. Many critics of the day were already talking about…

or rules must not be broken. However, there is nothing that exists as the right or wrong answer (Eaglestone, 2009). Using postmodern and feminism criticisms, this paper is going to examine the existence of hypereality, the deconstruction of binary oppositions, the concept of patriarchy and the queer…

same manner. Hermaphrodites are uniquely distinguished by their genitalia, most notably due to their possession of both male and female genitalia. Defining hermaphrodites proved to be difficult during Roman antiquity because they defied the gender binary. However, to the Romans it was unacceptable to struggle to explain what such an individual was and thus, the most important subject at hand regarding hermaphrodites was to “form a correct definition” (Corbeill 20). Ultimately, Romans may have…