The pedantic version
Next up: an abstract from Sage Publications from December 2020:
Specificity without identity: Articulating post-gender sexuality through the “non-binary lesbian”
That’s actually really easy. Non-binary doesn’t mean anything. A lesbian who calls herself non-binary is just being a bit precious. (This raises further questions – are there non-binary butch lesbians and non-binary femme lesbians? Or do they have to pick one? Can we ever ever ever escape the dreaded binary? Answers from a napkin from the last lesbian bar on the planet, if you can find it.)
This paper uses the paradigmatic pairing of non-binary and lesbian as identity labels to investigate changes in conceptualizations of sexual specificity as gender becomes divorced from its founding binaries. Contrary to the belief that lesbian is threatened by movement away from binary gender, this analysis postulates that it is not individual identities that are becoming problematic as gender identity becomes less binary; rather, it is the fundamental structure of identity which, for decades, has sanctioned identities built on exclusions. This cultural shift has the potential to liberate structures of desire, giving way to a model in which sexuality without gender is more redemptive than contentious.
In what way is the pairing (what pairing?) of non-binary and lesbian “paradigmatic”? What’s it paradigmatic of? Nonsense? Why pair them at all when they make no sense as a pair?
The deepity about identity being “for decades” (what because before that it was all different?) “built on exclusions” is especially hilarious. You can’t have anything called “identity” without “exclusions” – you can’t have most things without “exclusions.” If you go to the farmers’ market for tomatoes you’re “excluding” all the other fruits and vegetables, and all other food items and objects and red things and one could go on forever.
Yeah let’s have totally inclusive definitions of everything, we will arrive at Utopia without even needing a passport!
“If you’ve got to use language like that about a thing, it’s 90-proof BULL and I ain’t buying any!”–Big Daddy
In my day job I work with information management and AI systems. A key goal we’re always striving for is improved information content within structured data sets. We only add new elements or classifiers to the language or lexicon structures if they are required to improve differentiation amongst a set of entities that are characterized by some combination of these classifiers. We meticulously avoid adding ambiguous classifiers as these do nothing but reduce the information content of data sets and reduce the precision of the operations that can be performed by the systems.
It seems to me this is similar to the gender/pronoun language problem. All these new categorizations reduce the actual information content of language. We know less about a person than before. And not just one person who makes an issue about it. By insisting on using these new gender classifiers we introduce ambiguity in all descriptions until we get these tortured monikers like people who menstruate rather than saying women. And that’s not even accurate since not all women (or females) menstruate. Should we expect in the future to have to further refine this to, ‘people who could menstruate if they were mature, but not too mature, and not on any medications but not everyday so they may not currently be menstruating’ in order to preserve the information content? Or maybe we can come up with a single term that contains all the same information – maybe something like ‘women’.
There are only two sexes, and any given individual is going to be attracted to either one , or both of them. That gives you lesbian, gay, and bisexual. That’s it that’s all that’s everything. “Problematizing” it won’t change that reality, however many “genders” one throws at it. Of course part of that problematization is the result of not being clear about the difference between sex and gender. One could dispose of gender altogether (please do!) and you’d still have lesbian, gay, and bisexual humans.
[…] a comment by Pliny the in Between on The pedantic […]
YNNB @3 I hate to point out the obvious, but you forgot to mention the most common sexual orientation. I feel left out. ;)
Ooops! I left myself out, too! I’d meant to have the three options straight, gay or Bi, and my brain got waylaid somewhere on the path to that description. Thank’s for catching that.
“a model in which sexuality without gender is more redemptive than contentious.”
What the hell does this even mean? If “gender” is separate from “sex” … So, like, if a transwoman was really good at the fluttering of the eyelashes and doing the slow, warm smile (or whatever the fuck they were talking about in that post from a few days ago), … that would be their “gender”? And the fact that I (a heterosexual male) would be more attracted to a butch lesbian than to a transwoman (because of “sexuality”), … is that “sexuality without gender”?? And how is that “more redemptive than contentious”?
Or does my confusion stem from the possibility that this is all a lot of hooey?
@6 I tend to marginalize myself too sometimes, but not that anyone notices. I couldn’t claim victimhood if I tried. ;)