ABSTRACT
Nearing the end of the second decade of the 21st century in the midst of a pandemic, one can survey our struggles to adhere to the normative in whatever form, carried by a social maelstrom, to see how the erstwhile stability promised by the binary in whatever form is possible, now recede. The mainstream media competes with unshackled voices of independent and nearly instant social networks, on the one hand normalizing heterosexual ritual institutionality with everything from exercise and dietary routines, to religious observance and weddings on virtual platforms, and, on the other, presenting the splintering into irrelevancy of these rites, glimpsed through social unrest, institutional challenge, reconstitution of social movements that have triumphed over racist oppression and historic violence against transgender communities but fail to break through to extreme right-wing threats against democracy.
