Discomforting the Binary: Genealogical and Somaesthetic Critiques of Sex Designation

Abstract This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s genealogy and Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics to analyze and resist the resurgence of legally enforced sexual binarism in the U.S., U.K., and New Zealand. These laws reflect biopolitical mechanisms that normalize and exclude intersex, trans, and non-binary individuals. Framing “sex” as a regulatory fiction, the paper integrates Foucault’s critique of biopower with Shusterman’s pragmatic focus on embodied experience. I propose a somaesthetics of discomfort —a practice that views bodily misfitting not as pathology but as a prompt for critical inquiry. Through recent biological inquiry and memoir, the paper offers a pragmatist intervention that resists essentialism and affirms somatic experience as a site of knowledge and transformative resistance.