Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair: A Recognition of the Overlapping Space between Oppositions

A thread that runs through all of Patrick White's works is the refusal of the either/or, of the rigid division between oppositions. As Jacques Derrida has illustrated, dualisms such as mind/body operate by constructing one term as the negative of (but necessary pre-condition for) the other. In Western discourse, for example, body is constructed as the negative other of mind, though it is the condition of existence for mind. This inequitable valuation of the constituent terms of the dualism results in a discriminatory conception of the 'normal', ensuring the social dominance of positionings such as masculine, heterosexual. These hierarchized dualisms suppress ambiguous spaces between opposed categories so that any overlapping region between the pair, for example, between masculine and feminine, becomes impossible and a space of taboo in social experience. White's central concern in The Twyborn Affair is the sexually ambivalent person's struggle for identity; in other words, a recognition of the overlapping space between the masculine and the feminine.