Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

American society has many binaries, which it currently uses to subjugate people into standard categories like, for example, gender and sex. Even though, society might classify someone, as a man or woman, it does not necessarily mean that how that person’s appearance looks like on the outside, is the same as their inside genetic make-up.

Sex is the biological composition of either a male or female. For example, females have XX chromosomes in their DNA; their reproduction system consists of an egg and a vagina, and they also have functional breasts. Males, on the other hand, have XY chromosomes in their DNA; their reproductive system consists of sperm, testes, and a penis. Gender is the array of characteristics that distinguish a male from female and according to their attributes. However, there are some people whose sexual organs are imperfect, according to the roles of gender and sex, an example are hermaphrodites, because they have both a male and female’s sexual organs. Hermaphrodites tend to stay in the middle, grayish area between a male and a female. Society uses binaries to classify a male as men, with masculine traits, and a female as women who have feminine traits. Masculine traits are the roughness, muscles, broad shoulders, and deep voice men, or women, can possess. On the other hand, feminine traits include the long hair, soft skin, angelic glow and soft voice that either a women or men can own.

The Ozian society sees women as feminine beings and men as masculine figures. For example, the Land of Oz considers Glinda, Elphaba’s best friend, as the ideal feminine women in Ozian society because of “her perfect and brilliantly red lips and her green traveling gown” (Maguire 69). In Wicked, Ozian society sees Glinda as ...

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...imply sees her as the wicked witch of the west, who harms and kills people. Ozian society’s failure to misjudge and not value her attributes lead to Elphaba’s lonely and dreadful fate. Therefore, societies can ostracize a group of people who are merely different because of their appearance, maybe because those societies might not know how to treat people, who can fall into the grayish, middle area, between gender and sex.

Works Cited

Halberstam, Judith. "An Introduction to Female Masculinity: Masculinity without Men." Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.1-43. Print.

Maguire, Gregory. Wicked: the Life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West: a Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Print.

Ray, Robert B. "The Thematic Paradigm." Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. By Sonia Maasik. Boston: Bedford, 1997. 342-50. Print.