Dissertation defence (Jurisprudence): MICL Juho Aalto
MICL Juho Aalto defends the dissertation in Jurisprudence titled “BinaryTech: On the Development of a New Materialist Method” at the University of Turku on 26 September 2026 at 12.00 (University of Turku, Calonia, CAL1, Caloniankuja 3, Turku).
Opponent: Associate Professor Matilda Arvidsson (University of Lund, Sweden)
Custos: Professor Emerita Johanna Niemi (University of Turku)
Summary of the Doctoral Dissertation:
Why Does Law Still Rely on Binary Thinking? New Doctoral Research Proposes a New Method
Questions concerning sex, gender, and legal recognition are currently the subject of public and legal debate in many countries. Debates concerning legal definitions of sex and gender, the rights of trans and intersex persons, equality legislation, and calls for sex-specific spaces have intensified in recent years. While research has increasingly challenged strict binary understandings of sex and gender, legal systems continue to rely heavily on them.
The dissertation provides a new tool for examining how binary categories such as male/female, heterosexual/non-heterosexual, and sex/gender are used in law and what consequences they have for people seeking legal recognition, protection, and equality.
My doctoral dissertation explores how binary categories continue to shape legal thinking and develops BinaryTech, a novel method for analysing the co-constitutive relationship between law, power, and legal subject formation. The dissertation offers a systematic approach to examining how legal systems produce and maintain binary dichotomies and how these dichotomies shape the formation of legal subjects. These distinctions are not merely descriptive categories but active mechanisms through which power operates. BinaryTech makes it possible to analyse these processes in a systematic and transparent manner and as such explores how legal categories shape rights, power and subjectivity. The analysis done with BinaryTech method reveals how legal reasoning relies on binary distinctions that often produce hierarchical relationships between individuals and groups. Through case studies of the Finnish personal identity code, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, and the legal treatment of intersex persons, the dissertation demonstrates that legal subjects are formed through material-discursive processes in which binary dichotomies play a central role.
I argue that legal reforms concerning gender recognition, anti-discrimination law, and the rights of trans and intersex persons would benefit from the more realistic understanding of sexgender developed and advanced in this dissertation. Lawmakers and courts should be aware of how legal categories are produced and maintained through legal practices and of the material consequences they have for those subject to them. BinaryTech offers courts and legal scholars a systematic method for identifying the binary assumptions embedded in law and legal reasoning, while opening up space to consider which categories matter, to whom, and whether they should continue to be reproduced.
