The Entanglement of Being: Sexuality Inside and Outside the Binary

Abstract

ABSTRACT When we ask what sex is, we ask what it means to be human. It is a simple yet powerfully disruptive and generative question with far-reaching implications. Fortifying perennial dualisms, the study of sexuality and gender is historically reified or rendered immaterial across the social and natural sciences. While considering often polarized perspectives at once, this article argues for a necessary tension in which sexual embodiment is understood as a fundamental entanglement of being. This perceptual shift requires a reconceptualization of philosophy’s central dualism between biological and environmental determinism and an interrogation of the space between the normative and nonnormative. In exploring the bases for a richly textured embodied sexuality both inside and outside discursive binaries, this article employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon biological and evolutionary theories of sexuality and gender, philosophies of existence, deconstructionist critiques, and queering attention to the divergent otherized dimensions of sexuality.