Binary Blog Reflection

When I began this blog I wished to explore how the binaries shape our world and influence postmodern literature. The binaries that I focused on in this blog are the Male/Female binary and the White/Black binary as they manifested the overarching binary of Center/Periphery. During the course of the blog, I expanded the binaries outside of just literature and included how they can influence film such as the romantic comedy Two Can Play That Game. I wanted to take what I learned in the articles I read and compare it against what I originally thought and see if the works I used became an outlet for challenging the validity of traditional modes of thought created by these binaries or if they fell prey to the assumptions the binaries promote. I originally assumed that only one stance (challenging or accepting) of the binaries would be taken in the works. However, after reading the articles and comparing them to the two texts and the film, I noticed how the works incorporated some of the binary connotations yet challenged others. This has given me faith that people realize the incorrectness of the binaries and wish to push back against them. However, this also makes me see how ingrained certain facets of the binaries are to our ideas of gender and race dynamics. I hope that this blog has helped my readers have a greater understanding of the binaries and the power we give them in shaping our society. I also look forward to seeing how these binaries are represented in other mediums in the future. I hope to see more progress  made to challenge the binaries so that one day they will not define peoples’ identities and discredit those delegated to the periphery.

Word Count: 288

Works Cited

Cixous, Helene.  “From Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.  Ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy. New York:  W.W Norton, 1998. 583-584.

Everett, Percival. Erasure: A Novel. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Print.

IERGvideo. “Learning Tool: Binary Opposites.” YouTube, 5 Dec. 2007. Web. 6 Nov. 2012.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Mariner Books, 1990. Print.

Riggs, Damien W. and Jane M. Selby. “Setting the Seen:Whiteness as Unmarked Category in Psychologists’Writings on Race in Australia.” damienriggs.com. Damien Riggs, n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2012.

Russett, Margaret. “Race under Erasure: for Percival Everett, ‘a Piece of Fiction’.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 28.2 (2005): 358-68. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 Dec. 2012.

Smith, Lorrie N. “‘The Things Men Do’: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O’Brien’s Esquire Stories.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36.1 (1994): 16-40. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

Two Can Play That Game. Dir. Mark Brown. Perf. Vivica A. Fox, Morris Chestnut, Anthony Anderson, Wendy Raquel Robinson. Sony Pictures, 2001. DVD.

zhukaiww. “Two Can Play That Game (2001) trailer.” YouTube, 1 Jan. 2010. Web. 8 Dec. 2012.

Erasure – Article Analysis and Personal Response

In her article, Margaret Russett describes how the novel critiques the “noveau-racism” of the current literary market. She believes that by questioning the genre of African-American literature, the written assumptions of black life, and the authorial identity in the novel, Everett expresses his resistance to categorization and attempts to fights back against the constricting untruths of identity. Russett delineates how the success of My Pafology and the celebrity of Stagg R. Leigh, both fictional creations by Monk, reflect Everett’s attempt to show the boundaries placed on what is acceptable African-American literature and what are considered to be true black identities. The author describes how “Everett has been little known outside the circle of academic and avant-garde writers, allegedly because, like Monk’s, his work is not “black enough” (Russett 359). Russet gives an overview of the storyline and how Monk’s frustration with the stereotype of the “true, gritty real story of black life” as shown in the novel, We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, leads him to create a parody (Russet 359). Juanita Mae Jenkins’ book presents a false view of African American life and its use of “black” idioms is offensive to Monk. However, Monk is not merely a way for Everett to express his views. Russet believes that while there are times when Everett blurs the line between himself and Monk, “the point here may not be so much to identify Ellison and Everett as it is to question the boundaries of authorship per se; for one of the problems meditated in Erasure is the extent to which fictions create their authors, rather than vice-versa (Russet 360). She believes that questioning authorial identity is a way to contextualize the diversity of Everett’s collection of works. Russet compares Monk’s dislike of social realism with Everett’s implementation of it in many different works. Everett’s style of writing separates black subject matter from the stereotype of “black” style and challenges the understanding that there is only one African-American Experience. Everett shows in his works that in the literature market authenticity is determined by preconceived expectations. Russett discusses multiple stories written by Everett and how they portray their characters in “experimental” fashions rather than representative of the associations made with the term “African-American” (Russet 362). In this way, Everett pushes back against the white/black binary that restricts what is considered to be African-American literature and what are considered to be accurate depictions of black characters.

The Russett article made me think about the way that Everett challenges the white/black binary. My initial thought about how Everett pushes back against the binary was just in the incorporation of the novella, My Pafology. Although Russet and I are in agreement over the novella exemplifying the preconceptions of what black identity is, I assumed that Monk was simply Everett’s way to show the reader the falseness of the stereotypes. I believed that Everett used the story and all of the stereotypes in it to contrast to Monk’s story. I did not associate the role authenticity plays in the story with the supposed authenticity of the stereotypes. After reading her article, I started to consider the scenes where negative portrayals are assumed to be true. Many of the characters, including the publishers, the movie director, and the judges believe that My Pafology is a true to life portrayal of what it is like to be a young black man. They also believe that the persona of Stagg R. Leigh fits the ideal author to tell Van Go’s story. There are also instances in the novel where the smallest passages give meaning to the idea of authenticity. For example, right before a passage where Wiley Morgenstein contemplates the viable profitability of turning My Pafology into a movie, D.W. Griffith states that he likes Richard Wright’s book and Wright thanks him. Although this separate section may have felt disconnected at first, these two lines actually give the story more meaning especially for the next passage about the movie rights. D.W. Griffith is the director for the movie, Birth of Nation, that glorifies the KKK and Richard Wright’s novel Native Son portrays the stereotypes of African Americans. Griffith’s acceptance of the movie shows the binary underpinnings that put forth negative portrayals of African Americans (Everett 193). The truth of these negative portrayals is not questioned by anyone in the book besides Monk. By seeing Monk’s life and then comparing it to Van Go’s, the reader is able to see the vast differences in the “African American Experience.”

Word Count: 746

References

Everett, Percival. Erasure: A Novel. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Print.

Russett, Margaret. “Race under Erasure: for Percival Everett, ‘a Piece of Fiction’.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 28.2 (2005): 358-68. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 Dec. 2012.

Erasure’s Representation of the Binaries – Original Thoughts

When I first read Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure, I believed that Percival Everett was attempting to challenge the prevailing concepts of what black identity is based on the white/black binary. I believed this because of the story My Pafology. As a parody of Native Son, My Pafology puts forth the ideas that African Americans are impoverished, uneducated, and dangerous. Van Go Jenkins, the main character, is shown to personify each of these things and is unapologetic about any of his actions that harm others. He mistreats his family, kills a man, rapes the daughter of his employer, and is finally arrested by the police. The chapter numbers are all misspelled and the sentence structure is based on exaggerating African American dialect. I believed that the annoyance Monk feels over the success of his novel and of We Lives in da Ghetto reflected Everett’s true feelings about the presentation of African American identity in literature. After reading Margaret Russett’s article Margaret. “Race under ‘Erasure’ for Percival Everett, ‘A Piece of Fiction’,” my opinion about Everett challenging the binaries did not change but it did make me consider the importance of authenticity in the story and for the negative stereotypes of African Americans.

Word Counts: 200

References

Everett, Percival. Erasure: A Novel. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Print.

Erasure as Postmodern Text

The main character is scholarly writer named Thelonius Ellison. In the novel he goes by his nickname “Monk”. The story follows him as decides to write the novel, My Pafology, as a parody of the popular African American novels like We’s Lives in da Ghetto by reworking the Richard Wright novel, Native Son. Novels like this one reflect the negative stereotypes of African American such as being impoverished, uneducated, and dangerous. He does not expect it to be published but it is. The reception to the novel astounds him. Although he disapproves of the literature, he creates the rough persona of Stagg R. Leigh to generate authenticity for his novel. The novel follows him as he deals with the outcomes of publishing that story. The novel also presents how Monk handles his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, his brother’s transition from a married heterosexual male into a single gay man, and his sister’s death. The money Monk receives allows him to take care of his mother as she slowly begins to deteriorate from her condition. The novel reaches its peak when My Pafology (renamed Fuck) is nominated for an award of which Monk is on the panel. The other panelists see the work as a visionary and authentic portrayal of African American life and, as a result, the novel wins the award. At the award ceremony with everyone expects Stagg R. Leigh to appear, Monk goes up on stage. Reminiscent of the ending of My Pafology, the novel concludes with him saying, “Egads, I’m on television” (Everett 265).

Erasure is a postmodern text because it is a pastiche with some parody elements of other books. The author includes F/V, his response essay to S/Z by Roland Barthas, as well as his mini novel, My Pafology. The novel features a fractured narrative by splitting the story into sections that are loosely connected to one another even if they do not appears to. The white/black binary is deconstructed. The novel also reflects how ideas are recycled all the time such as how Monk redoes Native Son with his parody.

Word Count: 345

References

Everett, Percival. Erasure: A Novel. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Print.

The Things They Carried – Article Analysis and Personal Response

Lorrie Smith delineates many of the depictions of masculinity and femininity from the text and shows how objects associated with femininity, such as the enemy, are ridiculed or rejected in favor of preserving male bonds and the patriarchal social order. Her article,”‘The Things Men Do’: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O’Brien’s Esquire Stories,” reflects how, instead of challenging the associations made in the binary, The Things They Carried is highly representative of the center’s bias for itself (masculinity) and the devaluation of the periphery (feminity). Negative female identity or characteristics are ascribed to anything the soldiers oppose, such as the dead Vietnamese boy, and placed into the periphery along with women. The dead boy is depicted having features that are usually prescribed for women such as being “slim,” “poorly muscled, ”and “almost dainty” with “bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely fingers…[and] eyebrows thing and arched like a woman’s” (O’Brien 118-119).  The result for using these words to describe the enemy forms the idea for the reader that masculinity is associated with Alpha Company and those they oppose are inherently weaker than they are.

Smith describes the presence of the male/female binary in her statement, “The Things They Carried preserves a very traditional gender dichotomy, insistently representing abject femininity to reinforce dominant masculinity and to preserve the writing of war stories as a masculine privilege” (Smith 19). Smith’s discusses how masculine bonds and power are defined by the representations of women as inscrutable, uncomprehending, and dangerous “projections of narrator trying to resolve the trauma of war” (Smith 19). As the novel goes on, the masculinity of the soldiers is in opposition to femininity that becomes increasingly placed in the position of the other or the periphery. Three main examples of this are “the woman who must be rejected because she cannot understand the male experience of war in “The Things They Carried,” the woman rendered both pitiable and contemptible because she does not understand in “How to Tell a True War Story,” and the woman who understands war too well, hence threatening male hegemony and phallic power in “Sweetheart in the Song Tra Bong” (Smith 23). Martha is shown in the book to be inscrutable by her rejection of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross because he knows there are things he will never know about her. As you are never shown her side of the story, she becomes something of a mystery as to whether her she is repressed, afraid, dispassionate, or a lesbian. Women are presented as uncomprehending of war such as Kathleen, Tim’s daughter who does not understand the importance of why Tim brought them to the rice paddy and then mocks him by calling him weird. She takes no value from the experience as the war remains “as remote to her as cavemen and dinosaurs” (O’Brien 175). Women also are depicted as being dangerous to the male identity such as with the case of Mary Anne. Smith believes that Mary Ann’s story may appear to deconstruct gender difference while actually showing how women who more masculine than men become monstrous and unnatural. Mary Anne losing her humanity by taking up the male role of the soldier eventually results in her becoming dangerous to the social hierarchy and disconnected from civilization. She becomes a warning for other women “against disrupting the patriarchal order and assuming power assigned to men” (Smith 32).

Lorrie Smith concludes her article by describing how Linda, the only woman shown in a positive light by the novel, is only able to do so only because she will forever remain a memory of an innocent girl that will never grow up to challenge the gender status quo.

I think that the Lorrie Smith does a very good job of presenting her case that the novel recycles the negative portrayal of women associated with the binaries. However, I have to wonder if she has taken into account that, although Mary Anne, does become unnatural in the eyes of soldiers, is that truly a bad thing? She surpasses them in her abilities as a soldier and it is her decisions that decide her fate. When Fossie tries to dictate to her and force her back into her original characterization, she makes the decision to abandon him and their future life together. Her personal agency changes the outcome of her story from becoming a wife to becoming a soldier like the Greenies.

Similar to many of the soldiers in this novel, she is deeply affected by the harshness of war. However, I believe that her desensitizing to the grotesqueness of the body parts and to killing is not just a representation of women usurping masculinity and becoming animalistic. I believe that it is possible that she is just one of the many characters who are deeply influenced by being in the war and her way to handle it is to distance herself from it emotionally.

I also believe that it is possible she is an inverse reflection of Rat Kiley. I believe that this is a possibility because in the story, “Night Life,” Rat begins to have growing unease being a medic and dealing with the gore. In her story, Mary Anne, internalized all that she experiences, collected herself, and put forth her energy into killing the Viet Cong. Rat, on the other hand, begins to unravel during his stay in Vietnam. He begins to talk about mutant bugs that are coming to get him and begins describing the pictures he thinks of at night. He looks at the men around him and then pictures how they look dead. As his thoughts get more and more gruesome, Rat tells Mitchell Sanders, how scared he is and how he also starts to envision his own corpse. The night before he shoots himself he states, “This whole war…You know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs” (O’Brien 212). His statement, while alluding to how the war is just a place for men to die in, contrasts greatly to the last statement by Mary Anne. Her last words to the soldiers describe a hypersensitivity to her body and how she has come to a deeper understanding of herself by being in Vietnam:

“I get scared sometimes—a lot of times—but it’s not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I’m out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and I’m glowing in the dark—I’m on fire almost—I’m burning away to nothing—but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am. You can’t feel like that anywhere else” (O’Brien 106).

I believe that Mary Anne is a foil to Rat Kiley. After choosing to remain in Vietnam, she takes her experiences and transforms into soldier capable of annihilating many people. Rat, on the other hand, is unable to cope with the grotesqueness of the war and shoots himself in the foot so he can be sent home.

Word Count: 1,181

References

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Mariner Books, 1990. Print.

Smith, Lorrie N. “‘The Things Men Do’: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O’Brien’s Esquire Stories.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36.1 (1994): 16-40. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

The Things They Carried’s Representation of the Binaries – Original Thoughts

When I first read Tim O’Brien novel, The Things They Carried, I believed that O’Brien challenged the prevailing concepts of femininity associated with the male/female binary. I believed this because of the story “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” One of the novel’s characters, Rat, introduces a story about a girl named Mary Anne, who appears as if she were the epitome of youth, innocence, and femininity, who came to Vietnam to stay with her soldier boyfriend. However, as the story progresses she becomes consumed by the land around her and transforms into a hardened soldier. The more time she spends in Vietnam the more she takes on the characteristics of the male soldiers around her (especially the Green Berets). This in turn alienates her from her beau and forces her to come to terms with whether she can abide by his restrictive mandates or decide for herself how to live.

After Mary Anne decides to live her life the way she wants to, I assumed that Rat’s narration alluded to the presence of the male/female binary and then challenged the societal expectations on women’s traits, beliefs, and actions:
“I saw how she wasn’t even the same person no more. What’s so impossible about that? She was a girl, that’s all. I mean, if it was a guy, everybody’d say, Hey, no big deal, he got caught up in the Nam shit, he got seduced by the Greenies. See what I mean? You got these blinders on about women. How gentle and peaceful they are. All that crap about how if we had a pussy for president there wouldn’t be no more wars. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist attitude” (O’Brien 102).

I believed that this passage showed that popular male viewpoint of women being docile and passive when it comes to war is inaccurate. I believed that it also pointed out to the reader how unrealistic it is for Fossie to expect Mary Anne to return to being a dutiful fiancé blissfully naïve about the realities of war. At the end of the story, Mary Anne had become a soldier and her actions were only considered strange because she was female. I thought that Rat’s passage reflected the author’s intention to make his audience (both the soldiers and the reader) get rid of the “sexist attitude” that emphasizes the restrictions placed on women by the patriarchal society (O’Brien 102).

I thought that the way Mary Anne became a better soldier than those in Alpha Company and Rat’s statement about getting rid of the prevalent sexist attitudes that O’Brien was trying to make us think about women and how they are not inferior to men. However, after reading Lorrie N. Smith’s article, “‘The Things Men Do’: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O’Brien’s Esquire Stories,” I began to see the scenes in a different light.

Word Count: 500

References

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Mariner Books, 1990. Print.

The Things They Carried as a Postmodern Text

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a postmodern anthology of short stories. The stories come together to form a story cycle about a group of American soldiers during and after the Vietnam War. The novel’s main character is a writer named Tim O’Brien and the story revolves around his experiences in the war as well as those of his comrades. Some of the stories that are told are about the amount of weight put on soldiers by the equipment they carry, Tim’s attempt to flee to Canada to avoid going to Vietnam, Lietenant Jimmy Cross’s obsession with a woman named Martha, and Kiowa, the Native American soldier, dying in the rice paddy.

This text is postmodern because, although the novel is fictitious, it blurs the line between reality and fiction through its implementation of metafiction. The novel knows that it is a novel. As a result, the book talks to the reader and describes how stories can manipulate the truth. For example, when O’Brien talks about killing with his daughter, she asks him to tell the truth and he says he can honestly respond, “Of course not,” or “Yes” (O’Brien172). Tim can change his “stories” and make whatever version of reality he wants to and either claim would be true. These instances add to the imaginative process of the novel and the modern writing. The novel repeatedly tells how certain things shown to the reader were actually untrue (the killing of the baby elephant and the death of Kiowa). Tim states that in stories he “can look at things [he] never looked at. [He] can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. [He] can be brave” (O’Brien 172). Throughout the novel there is much ambiguity about what is fictional and what is “real.” Post-modern writing allows for variation in narrative styles, syntax, and other stylistic devices while also, in the case of The Things They Carried, making the reader think about what is a “story” and what is “real.”

Word Count: 332

References

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Mariner Books, 1990. Print.

Gender in the Movies – Article Analysis and Personal Response

In her postmodern essay Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays, Héléne Cixous argues that our world is made up of oppositional binaries that are related to the overarching binary of man/woman. The “subordination of the feminine to the masculine order” is shown to have become a natural and ingrained idea of the patriarchal society in which we reside (Cixous 9). The suppression of women has allowed men to become the origin of civilized society. This correlates to how present day literature conveys meaning, phallocentrism, and philosophy through emphasizing the male aspect of the binary. In patriarchal society, the male identity dominating over the female has led to the male identity being associated with the intellectual, rational, progressive, and logical facets of humanity and the more emotional, passionate, cyclical, and submissive facets of humanity being associated women. Cixous claims that, as philosophical discourse is used to order and reproduce all thought, philosophy is marked by the opposition of activity/passivity which orders values. In our world, women are associated with passivity and the importance of their role as a mother can be negated through the influence of the father. As a result, our society gives value to reason and strength over passion and weakness which are inherently polarized in gender even if specific individuals do not fit the mold they are placed in. Men are given the ability to decide for women how to be and the ability to enforce their authority on them. This inequity of power does not just devalue women but also makes it harder for women to challenge the infrastructure that has subjugated them. Cixous concludes her essay by stating that if humanity ever challenged the ways we think about our foundation of society and patriarchy then we would have the power to “transform the functioning of society” and retell differently all the stories that shape our thought and reality (Cixous 11-12).

The trailer shown above is for the movie Two Can Play That Game. This film is a romantic comedy that follows the complex and hilarious relationship of the main character, Shante Smith as she tries to manipulate her boyfriend into becoming a better one. She is known for giving relationship advice to all of her friends and believes she knows everything about men and their tricks. However, she discovers she needs to implement a ten day process on her own boyfriend, Keith, when he appears to be on the verge of cheating. While Shante attempts to control Keith with an established plan, Keith’s friend Anthony begins coaching him on how to regain power in the relationship. Over the ten days, a battle between the sexes takes place where both try and gain supremacy over the other. At the end of the movie, Shante and Keith get back together after she learns that you cannot control people with rules and that “when it comes to love there are no rules” (Two Can Play That Game).

This film is postmodern because of its incorporation of metafiction and nonlinearity of time and storyline. The movie is always breaking the fourth wall with Shante telling the viewer her thoughts and the stories of her friends. Shante appears to realize that she is in a movie because at one point she pushes away the cameras view with her hand. At another instance, Shante hears the gospel music playing in the scene prior to hers and tells the audience that she wishes someone would turn off the music. Time in the movie is subjective and when she decides to skip a day the movie does. Also, at one point Shante punches another character and chaos ensues so she has the movie rewind and play a different version where she does not hit her. All of these stylistic choices help progress the plot in entertaining ways as well as give the reader an experience outside of the standard romantic comedy formula.

As a result of reading Cixous article, I now have a greater understanding of the power dynamics involved with the current binary construction. I thought it would be interesting to compare what I have learned about the present binary structure in a movie storyline. I chose this movie because it is one of my favorites. I thought it would be exciting to consider its presentation of the binaries through the lens of her article. The majority of the film challenges the associations made by the male/female binary. For example, the focal point of the movie is placed on the female characters and their interpretation of the events around them. This moves the feminine identity to center and out of the periphery. Similar to what Cixous describes in her article, the movie shows the sexes pushing back against one another in an attempt to gain supremacy. In order to challenge the idea that men shape women, Shante’s desire to enact the ten day plan is only so that she can shape Keith into becoming the proper boyfriend. This contrasts to the idea that the male identity shapes the female. Another instance of challenging the binary is in how calculating and manipulative Shante is when she enacts each of the rules. While you, as the viewer, see her distraught emotional state, her logic and reasoning dictates which actions she takes rather than letting her emotions get the better of her. The only time she really expresses her emotions is when she punches Connie, her rival. However, she then thinks about the situation, rewinds it, changes her decision about hitting the woman, and then lets the story continue to play out.  I believe that the movie does a good job of addressing key ideas in Cixous’s argument. However, while attempting to challenge the binary, the movie allows some of the binary associations to remain intact. For example, Keith is shown to be very strong, logical, and active. Also, at the end of the movie, it is Keith not following her plan that makes Shante realize that she messed up and has to go make up with him. The ending has Shante go to Keith and ask for forgiveness leading them to become a couple again. As much as the movie tries to challenge the binary, in the end the female identity has to be forgiven by the male in order to achieve the happy ending for the characters. As a result of reading Cixous article, I can see how male/female binary is both accepted and challenged in the movie as well as how they shape the storyline and characterization.

Another binary that was also present in Two Can Play That Game was the white/black binary. The movie also seems to both challenge and accept different facets of this binary like it does the male/female one. One example of the binary being challenged is in the seen when four of the female characters are utilizing the word “ghetto” and Diedre takes ownership of the term and adds fabulous to describe herself, turning a potentially derogatory comment into something positive. An example of the binary being accepted is shown when Shante asks “Why must Mexican and black people cause so much ruckus in a white man’s apartment building? She then laughs and says “Now I hate that I had to say that but you have to admit minorities do seem to get a tad bit louder than white folks.” This plays to the preconceived notion that white people have greater sense of control over themselves (less primal) than those of different skin colors. Similar to the male/female binary, some characteristics of the two identities created by the white/black binary are presented as truth where as others are fought back against.

Word Count: 1,273

References

Cixous, Helene.  “From Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.  Ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy. New York:  W.W Norton, 1998. 583-584.

Two Can Play That Game. Dir. Mark Brown. Perf. Vivica A. Fox, Morris Chestnut, Anthony Anderson, Wendy Raquel Robinson. Sony Pictures, 2001. DVD.

zhukaiww. “Two Can Play That Game (2001) trailer.” YouTube, 1 Jan. 2010. Web. 8 Dec. 2012.

The Center’s Influence

The center influences the meanings given to both the facets of the binaries.  Many different binaries, including male/female and white/black, reflect the depreciation associated with being forced into the periphery. Truthfully, none of the individual identities within the binaries are bad or of lesser quality than the other. However, their representation for society is dependent on the center’s assessment of their worth. This means that the center forms the standard for societal norms. As a result of the disparity in influence, the center gives itself greater value to society than that of the periphery. With the cases of the male/female binary and the white/black binary, large groups of people are affected. This leads to people either following suit and repeating the connotations of the binaries or trying to fight against them.

Word Count: 131