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Social power relationships often start with definitions. Creating the categories “man” and “woman” and defining them based on their relative difference allows for unbalanced power dynamics to occur, for one category (“man”) becomes the default, while the other (“woman”) can be subjugated for her not-defaultness. Judith Lorber in “Night to his Day: The Social Construction of Gender” quotes scholar Nancy Jay, saying, “That which is defined, separated out, isolated from all else is A and pure. Not-A is necessarily impure…’ whichever gender is A, the other is Not-A; gender boundaries tell the individual who is like him or her, and all the rest are unlike” (Lorber 7).

Subject A, pictured here, is the default. By successfully performing Western masculinity, he is comfortable, blank, normal, and natural. He is in the center. To the onlooker, nothing about him appears deviant. There is something quintessentially masculine about him that cannot be questioned. He is “Man,” and all other identities are deviations from the center, where he exists. In his naturalness and defaultness, he becomes superior, for his world is set up to serve the default and exclude the deviant.

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Here, Object Not-A is in the same expressionless, gothic stance as Subject A. She is on the same plane as him: their environments are washed in the same bleak filter, standing the same position, even wearing the same boots and overalls. However, they are not interpreted the same way. Lorber writes, “In the social construction of gender, it does not matter what men and women actually do; it doesn't even matter if they do exactly the same thing. The social institution of gender insists only that what they do is perceived as different.” (#) Object Not-A is a woman standing expressionless; Subject A is a man standing expressionless. Therefore, they are perceived differently.

Under patriarchy, woman is definitionally devalued relative to man. This is a social process that affects human interaction in many ways. For example, women are expected to behave in gendered ways. For example, Subject not-A is wearing a ‘girly’ dress with long hair.  But in addition, the viewer perceives her actions through a gendered lens, whether or not they are actively choosing to perform their gender. Her dress spills over the overalls, representing that even when she behaves the same way as A, her assigned binary gender status of ‘woman’ still dictates how she is perceived.

While A is natural and relaxed within the binary status, not-A is meant to seem out of place. She visually deviates from her viewer’s default. Her dress is an imposition on her comfort in the landscape; her body is exposed in a way the A’s is not. In her environment, she is disadvantaged by her binary assignment (represented by her dress) in a way that A is not. Lorber writes, “Gender inequality - the devaluation of ‘women’ and the social domination of ‘men’ - has social functions and a social history. It is not the result of sex, procreation, physiology, anatomy, hormones, or genetic predispositions. It is produced and maintained by indefinable social processes and built into the general social structure and individual identities deliberately and purposefully” (8).

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Lorber writes, “Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced” (1). By adding in accessories with non-masculine connotations, the binary that Subject A embodied becomes disrupted. Gender is fragile, and must be maintained; any appearance of deviance can rock its perceived certainty.

The suddenly oversaturated landscape represents the emotional reaction to non-normative gender expressions that heteropatriarchy trains. Before, the landscape was dull; there was nothing to note. Now that the performance of ‘man’ is disrupted, the scene reflects the sense that something is unnatural. Folks who conform to gender performance hardly ever have to explain their appearance choices. Conversely, “If we fail to do gender appropriately, we as individuals -- not the institutional arrangements-- may be called to account (for our characters, motives, and predispositions)” (Lorber 5, quoting West and Zimmerman 1987, 146). As the figure legend suggests, what was previously A--normative, natural, and expected--is now not-A- deviant, noteworthy, and noticeable.

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The act of disrupting gender norms by manipulating gender performance is widely explored in Queer studies. It is fundamentally “Queer” to reject the gender identity you have been given and exist outside of the oppressive gender binary. The power in rejecting

In fact, the meaning of the word “queer” describes the broader rebellious experience of “those who seek more to disturb, shatter, or undermine the heteronormative cultural order,” according to Chandan Reddy’s Keyword essay “Queer” (172). Expanding outward, the word “queer” can be used in “verb and noun forms--queering and queerness-- to “describe activity that upends or destabilizes a structure, order or practice from within, defamiliarizing previously stable objects and experiences” (Reddy 177). Thus, by challenging the gender performances that have been assigned to them, the two subjects are “queering”: disrupting the normative categories that reduced their existences to predefined categories.

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As explored previously, living in a world that centers men as the power default leaves women’s lives, perspectives, and experiences inherently secondary to men. What’s more, the most essential parts of women are devalued and discouraged. The female experience, independent of men, is squashed under a system of patriarchy.

Female pleasure, identity, and enjoyment are perceived through the male lens, shackling those essential life experiences to patriarchal frameworks.

So, what then? How do we fully “queer” our way out of the widespread oppressive gender binary?

Audre Lorde poses that when women center their erotic pleasure in every element of their life, they are able to live fully and deeply outside of the male-defined and dominated world. For all of the social processes that deny women’s fullness as secondary objects to men, “the erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (Lorde 87). The erotic puts the power back in the hands of the uncentered, allowing them to pursue lives that are powerful, unshackled, and fully satisfying on their own terms.

By harnessing the power of the erotic, the not-A subject leaves the inexpressive plane of the previous photos and exists in a realm of pleasure and fun. She does not exist to rigidly pose for an audience, to perform herself for others. She exists in fluid motion, in between expressions, with the exploration of joy directing what she does. She claims her body and the life force within it as her own to harness.

By meeting the eyes of the viewer and posing joyfully for the camera, she tells us that she is aware of the audience’s perception, but instead of being immobilized by it, she plays with it, claiming her space as her own.

I used saturation on the previous photos to represent the trained emotional reaction to gender binary performances; she has completely blocked that out, liberated in a world of black and white where others’ standards of normativity need not dictate her expressions.

The erotic philosophy allows non-normative subjects to reclaim the power lost under systems of gender binary, heteronormativity, patriarchy and other systems of oppression. It is the joyful act of “queering,” tapping into female erotic power instead of suffering under  the forced power of male domination.