What does it mean for me to be nonbinary?

I recently read Kadji Amin’s article “We Are All Nonbinary: A History of Accidents,” published in Representations in 2022. I liked many parts of it. I liked that it brought Judith Butler into conversation with contemporary trans identity, which is something I am also interested in doing in my writing. I enjoyed in particular the questioning of normative oppositional categories that define sexuality and gender through exclusion. Amin pays strong attention to the reality that identity labels often do not constitute truths about lived experiences with regards to what they describe; he references Jane Ward’s work in this vein. I think this is true, and I have engaged the young people I work with in this type of thinking in workshop settings: for example, an “agree/disagree line” activity where participants debate statements like “There should be a label for every identity,” or “Finding the right words for my identity is my goal to feel comfortable with myself.”

Indeed, I am interested in similar topics to Amin, such as on the inscription of identity to an inside upon which the body is made to passively either align or not align (language of one’s gender identity “matching” one’s sex assigned at birth) as opposed to actively materializing through the very inscription of gender (what I think of as “materialism,” though I assume Amin is using the term differently in his monograph). Amin doesn’t use Bodies that Matter here, which was disappointing, simply because that’s the Butler text I think best explicates this very paradox.

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When I started this blog, I knew I’d never keep up with it. My whole life I’ve been terrible at forming consistent, disciplined habits. This weakness has made my goal of becoming a professional academic—a job that requires a huge amount of discipline to structure otherwise unstructured and even mystical requirements—a bit silly. Well, I’ll give it another shot.

Blog posts I planned in my head and never sat down to write include topics on:

• Descartes’ obsession with dissection of the heart and the brain, searching for the materiality of essence
• Cavendish and Spinoza: the Crossover, in which I argue that his Ethics and her Observations, written contemporaneously, and shit on Descartes with equal verve, dialogue in important ways
• A post simply vibing with some of the best passages from Marx’s Grundrisse, thinking about Marx as a natural philosopher in continuity with Spinoza and earlier materialists, as a change from the usual post-Hegelian reading impulse (which is important, of course, but has been done!)
• Losing my mind reading Althusser on representation and ideology because it made me understand the thing I never understood and always found frustratingly concealed: how we got from Marx to Foucault. And I refuse a psychoanalytic genealogy! I logged my time in the Freud mines in undergrad! Though this blog post could never have been written because it’s missing Stuart Hall, whom I need to spend more careful time reading before I overascribe impact to Alt.
• The one I got closest to writing: extreme vibing with Deleuze & Guattari, whose work I found 1) not difficult at all to read this time around and 2) ethical, energetic, and friendly to a trans studies framework.
• After reading Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus in the same week, I decided to put a cherry on top and reread the first chapter of Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, which blew my mind. I’ve read that chapter many times and never once thought of “bodies” through the term’s lineage in materialist philosophy (body as opposed to substance as opposed to existence; see Aquinas). Descartes’ obsession with the anatomical body haunts us!

So, um, I hope to write some of these some day. I have my notes in a paper notebook, so it’s not all lost. Anyway, List 1 was really fun.

I’m now a couple weeks into List 2, which is a deep dive into the history of the field of early modern gender/sexuality studies (and specifically not trans studies, which comprises my third list). Rereading Foucault’s first volume of History of Sexuality was an important exercise that reminded me of where so much of our language around topics of gender come from (and, perhaps, helps trace where they’ve migrated or even been misread). I then read the fascinating textual and citational scholarly debates between David Halperin and Eve Sedgwick (Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, followed by Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, followed by Halperin’s How to do the History of Homosexuality). I’m now onto Valerie Traub, Gregory Bredbeck, John Dollimore, and Bruce Smith. Much more to come.

Anyway, I have a blogpost in mind to write tomorrow—about none of these topics. But if you see a topic you want to hear more about…let me know, I guess!

When I was in ninth grade, I stole a book from the bookshelf in the room of the LGBT support group I attended. It was a short story collection published in 1994. Its title is Am I Blue?: Coming Out From the Silence. This copy was obviously once in a library; its cover is protected below a laminate and it is stamped for a high school in Illinois. I wondered how it got from there to the little office space my group would meet in every week. I took it home and only began reading it on the school bus the next morning.

The opening story, the eponymous “Am I Blue?,” was written by Bruce Coville (you know, the My Teacher is an Alien guy). In the story, Vince, a teenage boy routinely subject to bullying and gaybashing, meets Melvin, who describes himself as Vince’s “fairy godfather.” (“Like in Cinderella?” is Vince’s skeptic reply, but Melvin later states he is more similar to a “guardian angel” but preferred this nickname). They go to a coffee shop, where Melvin explains that he was himself a victim of gaybashing and has returned to earth to help Vince out.

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In 2011, Lady Gaga made her entrance onto the red carpet of the Grammys…in a giant egg. The egg was carried by various shirtless models on a palanquin. She stayed in the egg up until her performance of her new single, “Born this Way,” off her upcoming eponymous album, which was the first chart-topping pop song to include the word “transgender.”

As a kid, I loved “Born this Way,” but, as I entered college, I became skeptical of the usefulness of its message (not just the song but the slogan more broadly). I’m not the only one. In fact, trans people in particular are vulnerable to targeted hate through language of birth, and “born this way” has since become associated (with good reason!) with gender essentialism and the assimilationist goals of the liberal gay rights movement as opposed to more revolutionary projects of gender and sexual liberation. Such movements have turned to more performative or even material and practical explanations of gender and sexual embodiment.

But let’s put a pin in that. This is a post about my orals readings, after all. This week, I read Presocratic philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, and the Stoics.

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