Date of Award

Spring 5-3-2024

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Open-Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Communication

Advisor

Nathan Stormer

Second Committee Member

Liliana Herakova

Third Committee Member

Haley Schneider

Abstract

The central question in my paper is how trans non-binary people produce their identities from a space of social death. This is important because much of the conversation around transgender identities in the field of Communication has been focused in media studies and health communication. These literatures take care in exposing the ways the transgender population has been systematically excluded and stereotyped. Research produced has great utility for understanding how society can be inclusive of the transgender community. However, I question the extent this literature includes non-binary identities in research, and if so, how non binarism is defined. I question this because the current understanding of gender in these fields is that gender is a discursive knowledge product, an interpretation of the body, founded on the presumption that non-binarism is essentially a variable, meaning it is a known condition. To explore my research question I cultivated a heuristic to collect appropriate data. The heuristic used is similar to Hesse (2016)’s colonial constitution of race thesis. Hesse (2016) asks why does race function the way it does in society instead of the more common question of how race affects the individual. Following Hesse (2016) I consider how the non-binary identity is being cultivated by individuals instead of focusing on the effects this identity has for the group. Adopting this heuristic, I am able to identify stories that stem from the desires of individuals about how they want to create their identity. Following how identity is crafted allows me to see what is important to non-binary people and what has been missed in the current understanding of non-binarism. I maintain an aesthetic orientation to my research because of my interest in the ways non-binary individuals are crafting their identities where societies say there are none. Aesthetic theory is crucial for explaining how and why a subject creates itself, so the concepts I discuss in my literature review have provided the language I need to accurately describe my data. Key concepts I use from aesthetic theory include Black abjection, improvisatory freedom, and queer futurity. My findings suggest that the community is so diverse that it is nearly impossible to continue researching this community from the standpoint that media studies and health communication take. My data suggests that the experiences a trans non-binary person has with abjection can vary depending on how close one is to whitened normative identities, meaning some individuals are able to escape social death through the use of white privilege and others cannot. My data suggests the creation of the trans non-binary identity is a project of futurity. I have seen many discussions on how to look more non-binary which presumes that there is a future for the non-binary community where they are acknowledged as their gender, there is discussions of gender abolition where they imagine a future without the gender binary, and discussions on how the relationship to abjection and futurity plays out in the social norms created around how to respond to oppression as a community member.

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