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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