Page 36 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

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BIOTECHNOLOGY

masculinity : femininity
outdoors : indoors
public : private
social : personal
production : consumption
men : women
First, masculinity and femininity are proposed as opposites which are
mutually exclusive. This immediately constructs an ambiguous or
‘scandalous’ category of overlap that will be tabooed (e.g. trans-gender
phenomena including transsexuality and transvestism). The binaries
can also be read downwards, as well as across, which proposes, for
instance, that men are to women as production is to consumption, or
men : women :: production : consumption. Each of the terms on
one side is invested with the qualities of the others on that side. As you
can see, this feature of binaries is highly productive of ideological
meanings – there is nothing natural about them, but the logic of the
binary is hard to escape.
The ideological productivity of binaries is enhanced further by the
assignation of positive : negative values to opposed terms. This is guilt
by association. For instance, Hartley and Lumby (2002) reported on a
number of instances where the events of September 11, 2001 were
used by conservative commentators to bring the idea of ‘absolute evil’
back into public discourse. They associated this with developments
within Western culture of which they disapproved, including
(strangely) postmodernism and relativism, on the grounds that these
had been undermining belief in (absolute) truth and reality. So they
invoked Osama bin Laden to damn the postmodernists:
good : evil
‘absolute’ : relativism
‘truth’ : postmodernism
positive : negative