Essay Purity And Pollution Analysis

‘Others’ are in a way shunned and alienated because they do not fit into the dominant categories depicted in our culture. This is illustrated in the essay “Purity and Pollution” by Nancy Fischer when she explained that as time has gone on not necessarily the act but the identity of the person performing the act determined the morality of it. This is why minorities can be shamed because the dominant group will claim superiority over them. Fischer writes, “people may use what we call ‘informal social control’ – gossip, shunning, giving people nasty looks, calling them names – to communicate that they are not following the norms of their social milieu and that they had better step in line and conform if they want others’ acceptance and friendship”

Transgender people challenge the binary and refuse to conform to the norms. Kimberly Tauches writes in her essay “Transgendering” that “transgender is an umbrella term that is used to describe a diverse group of people who intentionally ‘mismatch’ their sex and their gender identity or behavior” (Tauches 173). This calls into account the previous argument on what difference should it make to feminism whether gender differences are natural or socially constructed. Everything in our culture has been gendered, from clothing, films, furniture, and even cars, this is due to the binary categories. “A person is seen as fitting into one and only one gender, masculine or feminine, but never both masculine and feminine. This is because they are seen as mutually exclusive” (Tauches 174). Mutually exclusive in this context means that one can be only male or female. Transgender people challenge the binary because “their gender does not match the sex category they were placed into at birth” (Tauches 176). Therefore, these people are defying the restrictive boxes society puts in place. Transgender individuals create a category that is almost outside the binary in which both genders are