A pair of terms that although opposed to one another are necessarily bound together as each other’s condition of possibility. Common examples of binary oppositions include: male/female, nature/culture, hot/cold, gay/straight, signifier/signified and so on. structuralism is predicated on binary oppositions to the extent that its basic account of meaning is that something means what it does by virtue of what it does not mean. post-structuralism, and more especially, deconstruction, arose as a challenge to the absolute nature of these oppositions.