Enby in the Time of COVID-19: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Performing Non-Binary Identity During Lockdown

ABSTRACT

This article explores the author's discovery and performance of their non-binary identity during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when, somewhat paradoxically, the various national lockdowns allowed individuals the necessary introspection to confront important parts of themselves, such as their gender identity. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the essay investigates how the author's gender-fluid identity was performed and affirmed at a time of social isolation. The essay begins by exploring the creation and sharing of a gender-non-conforming identity via the deployment of clothes, makeup, and perfume in private and then in the porous private/public realm of digital videoconferencing. It goes on to examine how the creation of queer communities in a queer and trans online conference blurring the boundaries between private and public spaces helped them reconsider their gender identity. The article finally investigates the ability of the countryside to enable moments of private epiphany that can be publicly shared through social media. The essay ultimately illustrates how these three biopsychosocial apparatuses enabled the author to formulate and share who they were during an unprecedented period of social isolation, intimating that there is hope in the use of personal introspection and digital communication to incept queer resistance to cisheteronormative ideologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-binary
• COVID-19
• queer
• community
• countryside
• digital

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the UK alone, mainstream media, such as the BBC, and major broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, such as The Times and The Daily Mail, have been regularly publishing opinion pieces and articles aligning themselves with ‘Gender Critical’ ideologies, since at least the late 2010s, which coincided with a period of public consultation about proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act of 2004. While cis writers have been given a big platform to air their panic about the importance of ‘sex-based rights’, very little space for counter-argument has been granted to the trans people whose lives these pieces have the most power to disrupt.

2 Indeed, there is such a thing as being ‘agender’. The popular website Them. explains: ‘According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “agender” refers to people who don't identify themselves with any particular gender. This can mean being genderless, lacking gender, or having a null gender. However, people also use “agender” to mean identifying as gender-neutral or having an undefinable gender.’ (Them, para. 6) An example of an agender person within my area of research expertise is Akwaeke Emezi, the Nigerian author of the novels Freshwater, The Death of Vivek Oji, and the memoir Dear Senthuran, among many others (Emezi 2018, 2020, 2021). A prolific writer, Emezi is open in their social media accounts about their gender identity and preferred pronouns. In an Instagram post announcing the publication of one of their latest books, they explain: ‘as a reminder — pronouns are they/them + akwaeke does not have a gender. spiritfirst language is preferred, i.e. ogbanje, but if you absolutely *must* use flesh terms ([eyeroll emoji]), please use “agender” instead of “non-binary”. thanks!’ (Emezi 2022) While ‘agender’ has been typically linked to trans and non-binary identities, it signifies a rejection of gender altogether. It is also important to note that Emezi also forfeits Eurocentric body-first identities and terminologies, preferring instead an Africanist spirit-first approach to defining themselves, in a gesture that can be interpreted as explicitly decolonial.

3 Tony E. Adams, Stacy Linn Holman and Carolyn Ellis observe: ‘Autoethnographic stories are artistic and analytic demonstrations of how we come to know, name, and interpret personal and cultural experience. With autoethnography, we use our experience to engage ourselves, others, culture(s), politics, and social research.’ (2015: 1) In other words, autoethnography uses evidence from one's life to engage not just ourselves but also others, in a hermeneutical and epistemological project that bridges the gap between the self and the world, opening up new avenues for collective thinking about the confluences of identity, politics, and society.

4 The concept of the ‘bodymind’ allows us to see the body and the mind as connected and interdependent, rather than as discrete dimensions of the self, which is amenable to the anti-dualistic workings of non-binary thinking. For one of the most seminal explorations of this interweaving of mind and body, please see Ken Dychtwald's Bodymind (1986).

5 Judith Butler's formulation of gender performance in her classic Gender Trouble, originally published in 1990, is one of queer theory's most enduring concepts. Famously examining the subversions of drag, Butler writes: ‘we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. […] [T]he performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance. (1999: 187) The material triangulation of gender, sex and performance starts showing the cracks of a strictly binary and ‘biological’ understandings of both gender and sex: what drag shows us is the arbitrariness and relativity of a fixed configuration of gender identity as being exclusively aligned with anatomical characteristics. Gender performativity can help non-binary people challenge the gender/sex binary, as well as the traditional sociocultural dichotomy of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’: our anatomical sex, our gender identity, and our performance can be wilfully misaligned, as a challenge to cisheteropatriarchal ideologies.

6 The ‘dandy’ is one of the most recognisable figures of western queer culture yet also one of the most polarising ones, particularly in its pitting of surface against substance. Elisa Glick observes that a traditional reading of ‘dandyism as a preoccupation with surface tends to conceive of gay identity solely or primarily in terms of artifice, aesthetics, commodity fetishism, and style. Associated with the “feminisation” of modern culture, the dandy comes to represent a retreat from politics and history into art and/or commodity culture.’ (2009: 16) The dandy's aesthetic decadence allegedly prizes aesthetics over politics. I would argue that aesthetics have their place in queer politics, and that the aesthetic deployment of queerness, such as through clothing, can be read as an inherent resistance to the aesthetics of heteronormativity paving the way towards a more fluid understanding of gender.

7 As Riki Wilchins states in the preface to the anthology GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, ‘[t]he word “genderqueer” has had an interesting life. I first started using it in the 1990s, just as the old anti-gay slur queer was being resuscitated. I needed a name for those of us who were “visibly queer,” whose queerness flowed not from our sexual orientation, but from our gender’. (2020: 1) ‘Genderqueer’, a term which proliferated in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries to describe a queering of cisnormative gender identities, has gradually been superseded by the now more popular term ‘non-binary’. Despite their inception in different historical moments, there is significant overlap between both terms in their shared challenges to binary understandings of gender identity. Some contemporary queers may see ‘genderqueer’ as old-fashioned, preferring the currently more widespread term ‘non-binary’, whereas people who still define themselves as ‘genderqueer’ may be invested in the political context where they first discovered their gender non-conformity.

8 For the conference website, including the programme and speakers’ bio notes, please see On Transversality in Practice and Research (2020).

9 For a critique of neoliberalism in English academia, please see Alpesh Maisuria and Mike Cole (2017).

10 While the parliamentary elections have lately been consistently won by the Conservative candidate, council elections help us appreciate the complexity of the political makeup of the region. For a map of the latest local election results, please see Calderdale Council (2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alberto Fernández Carbajal

Alberto Fernández Carbajal (they/he) is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, where they are programme convener of the BAs in English Literature and Creative and Professional Writing. Their research is placed in colonial, postcolonial, queer and diaspora literary and cultural studies, with a focus on the intersection of gender and gender identity, sexual orientation and migration with issues of faith. They are Article Editor of the open-access journal Postcolonial Text and a member of The Postcolonial Studies Association and the European Association of Commonwealth Literary and Language Studies. They are also a fiction writer and a poet invested in queerness and non-binary identities.