NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary

Abstract

NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary Marquis Bey (bio) The aim here is not to give an incessantly clear definition of nonbinariness, such that we would then have an “accurate” or “correct” definition. Indeed, this impulse—to clarify pristinely, to excavate etymological roots in order for a term to be illuminated once and for all, obviating misuse—is one I have long had, and I feel its tugs now. But that will not save nonbinariness from misuse or misunderstanding. There is in fact something in nonbinariness that refuses this impulse, it seems—something that has long asserted that even if this or that meant X (or shall we say “Q” or whatever other non-X/Y letter so as not to imply gender- and sex-laden allusions) in its supposed origins, in its etymological DNA, as it were, it does not mean that it must be that now, true-bluely. Because what is nonbinariness if not to say, to demand, that yeah, maybe I was Q when I was young, and even when I started to get older, but I am not that now. And do not have to be. And do not wish to be. Like Beans Velocci, who I have met briefly, on a brisk evening in Philadelphia (my hometown) in a heated restaurant tent enjoying food and company and intellectuality, I was made trans. Not, as with Velocci, by Foucault—although he is a supplemental culprit, just not the primary actor—but by other things. In my case, by suggestions and experiences and drives and, too, cartoons. I speak to this in my book Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, where I detail across multiple essays the ways that Dragonball Z or The Powerpuff Girls were sites of imaginative inhabitation, where what was extant in my world did not have to be all of the possibilities for myself; the ways this movement of a hand or rejection of a space or unfitness within a community were sites of exquisite rebellion and testament to how we could move differently, think differently, en- and ungender differently in proximity to unsanctioned imaginaries. I came to my nonbinariness [End Page 313] by way of a double refusal: I was refused entry into this or that space, this or that modality, expected as it was and predicated on criteria far less attractive to me than most; but, too, I refused those spaces in tiny, muted ways. They did not want me, at least as I wished to be and become, and I did not want them—there was, in short, “a throwing up of hands and an embrace of the refusal that was the term nonbinary” (Velocci 2022, 476). I love this refusal, a term I have returned to over and over, to the point of exhaustion now, it feels to me, but a term that continues to emerge for its utility, its depth, its feeling of Yes, that’s it. Because it is in that refusal, or whatever one wishes to call it—I hope it is clear that I am not too hung up on the words one uses, as long as they allow you, us, to do and be and reach for the thing we are working toward—that something is going on. That is, very often it seems that much of the scholarship or the activism out there tries to explain the extant categorizations, making them seem softer, more natural, more workable, kinder, but nevertheless, still there. Always such an equalizing of “men” and “women,” or making more palatable masculinity (“Men are allowed to cry! That will solve everything,” or some such quip), or if only we found instances of homosexuality “in nature” then all the homophobes would realize they were wrong, or just be comfortable with your gender expression. The list elaborates ad infinitum. In all of this, “The focus . . . [i]s not, for the most part, liberation from sex and gender so much as an effort to explain these categories’ construction,” Velocci goes on to say (477). This is frustrating, not so much because of the violence an insistence on the gender binary might cause, though that is nothing at which to...