Specificity without identity: Articulating post-gender sexuality through the “non-binary lesbian”

Fraught histories of identity

Debates about the longevity and content of lesbian have been ongoing since the term first started being used, with many concerns about lesbian visibility and potential extinction at the hands of gender politics rising to the surface throughout the decades (Jeffreys, 2014; Morris, 2016). Most of these critiques have emerged from within various traditions of lesbian feminism. Lesbian feminisms, in the recent debates about gender identity, have consistently been reduced to some of their least compelling and most essentialist authors. While it is not my intention to perpetuate this reduction of lesbian feminism as a powerful collection of ideas, my argument responds to a specific line of thought within some lesbian feminist traditions that views the destabilization of gender as a threat to lesbian existence. These concerns have historically corresponded with a definition of lesbian as necessarily being woman in both identification and birth sex; this association can be seen in the work of writers like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Janice Raymond, for instance. It does not seem a coincidence that writers such as these are often invoked in rhetorical movements to reduce lesbian feminism to its elements of exclusion. The fact that “lesbian feminism” and “radical feminism” have become shorthands for exclusion both by those who reject and by those who perpetuate them in contemporary contexts, however, is crucially relevant to my argument. It is this persistent thread and association with exclusivity as the basis for identity that is being challenged by non-binary, which makes the histories of this idea relevant here, rather than richer and more nuanced histories of lesbian feminisms. It is the progression of the debate that takes exclusivity as its subject that I trace in brief.

Exclusive definitions of lesbian—as extensions of the idea that there is an essential core to “woman”—have produced many figures over the decades who seem to threaten lesbian visibility: the butch, the bisexual, the trans woman, the trans man, the queer, and, most recently, the non-binary person. In each iteration of this debate, lesbianism has been feared anachronistic and has been restated as essential in an attempt to stabilize group identity. However, critiques most commonly grouped as “queer” ¹ reveal that this anxiety over group essence has often had the unintended effect of demonstrating that lesbian, like any other, is a contingent and inherently unstable category (Farquhar, 2000: 232). Because most of these critiques are anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist (Halberstam, 1996; Wilton, 1995), lesbian is sometimes painted as regressive in comparison to other models of talking about desire that purport being able to “escape from gender” and its fixity entirely (Martin, 1994: 105).

These debates are prolific and heated because their interlocuters are, of course, attached to the identities they defend. Identity politics permeate all thought about identity, up to and including queer interventions that make a point of transcending them. Much scholarship on lesbian identity relies on ideas of generational conflict and progress narratives, as captured by Garber:

Contemporary theory adores a vacuum. […] One side argues that homosexuality is innate, an “essential” identity; the other counters that social and historical circumstances shape and define, or “construct” identity. A third discourse denounces the either/or nature of the argument. (2001: 2)

Most recently, many theorists have attempted to rescue lesbian not only from invisibility, but from the dichotomous battles that have been fought over its honor. Thinkers such as Shane Phelan (1994), Clare Hemmings (2011), Lynne Huffer (2013), and Kevin Henderson (2018) have brilliantly confronted the intellectual deadlock of a genealogy that so often positions lesbian as essentialist and queer as its teleological vanquisher. Each of them also takes issue with the reduction of lesbian feminism, acknowledging and confirming that this has become a cultural truism as well as a hallmark of scholarly debate. The broad consensus of these writers is that we should be suspicious of progress narratives that position lesbian and its histories as essentialist, and that there is something that we are categorically missing (even pointedly ignoring) in the radical thought of earlier lesbian writing.

Henderson positions the lesbian as a central figure in the imaginative and necessary project of joining queer, trans, and feminist politics, and looks back to Wittig’s lesbian materialism in order to begin thinking difference differently: thinking it, crucially, outside of the separations that feed back into identity politics. In fact, he joins a plethora of calls for the lesbian to be reconsidered as vital to the movement of bringing together disciplines (sexuality studies, feminism, transgender studies, queer theory) that have been pried apart (2018: 186). Henderson’s key argument is that continuing to cast the lesbian as the anachronistic subject of mistaken 1970s and 1980s radicalism that slipped into racism and exclusionary separatism is harmful for transgender politics. In the same way that critiquing radical lesbian thought as always-already-white leaves no room to consider the thought of Black lesbian feminists (Hemmings, 2011: 53), encoding lesbians as always already trans-exclusionary and gender-conforming is to make impossible the transgender lesbian (Henderson 2018: 190), and, I add, to render lesbian thought and specificity irredeemable in a moment of rapid reorganization of gender ideologies. “If the transgender subject is the subject of the present,” Henderson notes, “we must leave the lesbian subject behind for her exclusions” (190).

Henderson’s mission, one that this article extends, is to counter this reading by forwarding one based on Wittig’s distrust of ontological difference (explored in context below), positing a queer-trans-feminism in place of its disparate parts. He meaningfully extends this project to the point of asking academics and activists to be equally distrustful of a divide between “cis” and “trans” that suggests a natural difference rather than a vector of regulatory power, and risks “turning radical trans politics into a kind of interest-group liberalism” (2018: 200). This divide, he says, also naturalizes the lesbian as cisgender, rendering the lesbian potential of “disruptive, exciting, capacious, radicalizing, [and] erotic” to the “normative, dry, boring, exclusionary, essentialist, and old” (200) that has become a dominant image of regression.

Henderson’s framework leaves a gap, however. Though he is right to suggest that many queer and trans people scapegoat lesbians in contemporary political debates about gender identity, his idea that the rise of trans and non-binary politics/cultures unequivocally redoubles this sidelining of lesbian (2018: 190) suggests that there is some truth in the genealogical reading that he is arguing against. That is, despite his acknowledgment of trans women who are lesbians, he must proceed from the premise that the abandonment of lesbian by emerging trans communities is a stable cultural truism. The example of non-binary demonstrates that this, in fact, is not necessarily the case. Further, his solution of finding a complex shared genealogy stops short of finding an intertwined future that does not leave those terms—or the structures of identity politics that forged them—in place. And while he is correct to identify that these tired discourses are being repeated in contemporary discussions of the place of the lesbian as gender dissolves, he is leaving out a vital but unrecognized phenomenon of how the lesbian is already experiencing a rebirth—one that cleanses the term of anachronism and political incorrectness—through its increasingly frequent pairing with non-binary. Non-binary and its attendant ideology may be that which disrupts the system on which these identity politics are built.

Specificity or identity?

Throughout most of the history mentioned above, those speaking of lesbian specificity have translated specificity as essence or as boundary. However, approaches to the definitive specificity of any identity, community, or label are directly responsive to the cultural and political contexts in which they are stated. The histories of lesbian identity, therefore, are not necessarily the futures of lesbian specificity. In this section, I work with the notion of lesbian specificity as an alternative to lesbian identity, suggesting that there is a specificity to lesbian experience that can be lived but which resists being solidified.

Lesbian specificity has been used by many, most notably Phelan, to avoid essentialism while engaging the notion of a shared experience. While this is my goal, I am additionally drawing on Butler’s idea that claiming a sexual identity category (and the unavoidable baggage of its significations) means turning against the actual sexuality supposed to be contained in that category, as labels are always technologies of control (1993b: 308). That is, when the label “lesbian” is used, it is for the purposes of “control[ling] the very eroticism it claims to describe and authorize” (308). What one authorizes is not necessarily continuous with the actuality of lesbian sexuality: it is a politicized authorization encapsulating many other factors. The content of lesbian’s sexual specificity becomes an excess. In speaking of specificity here, I seek to say something about the content of lesbian experience, that thing which compels us to name and defend it, without defining in advance what that might be (Butler, 1993a).

Specificity is not something that we should stop defending or cultivating. Neither is specificity a reiteration of essentialism: as Shane Phelan says, “[t]he demand for specificity thus provides recognition of the individual, even as it refutes the supposition of a unitary subject” (1994: 11). Specificity can locate us within systems of power, allow for effective liberatory work to be done, and insist—depending on how we label it—“that there is more to us than the categories, that we have an integrity that cannot be captured in those terms” (Phelan, 1994: 8). Of course, specificity has never been an uncomplicated matter for lesbians, cast as that which sanctions the possibilities and realities of lesbian existence (Bolsø, 2008: 59) and that which must redeem the ultra-precarious subject position in the face of lesbian oppression (Farquhar, 2000: 220; Fuss, 1990: 98). It has, at different times, been described in various ways: as a continuum of care, a commitment of the body, a transcendent love between women-identified women, an anger toward male domination, a context-dependant essence, and a completely contingent historical construction either within or beyond “the problematics of sexual difference” (all cited in Fuss, 1990: 45). Other descriptions have focused on lesbianism as a structure of desire (Bolsø, 2008: 51), a collection of political beliefs centering egalitarianism and libertarian ideals (Jenness, 1998: 483), and a lived application of feminist politics (Rudy, 2001: 195).

The cultural and political contexts of the 1970s and 1980s, unlike today’s contexts, were an important catalyst for the translation of lesbian specificity as essentialism. Diana Fuss recalls that essence functions as a sign, and as such gains different political and personal investments depending on “shifting and determinative discursive relations” of the social field in which it is spoken (1990: 20). In reference to the fluid meanings of the terms used to claim identities, this suggests that there are no intrinsic values contained within the sign lesbian: no inherent conservatism or radicalism beyond the content of its many uses. Rather, lesbian is responsive to the needs of its time, and is particularly responsive due to its place in a feminist context that demands a causal relationship between identity and politics (Fuss, 1990: 100). This is true both of the lesbian feminist moment of the 1970s and of the contemporary moment of non-binary. Precisely what lesbian, and lesbian specificity, is responding to in present contexts is a guiding question of this paper. Though I do not offer any straightforward elaboration here on what lesbian specificity might mean, the explorations of its responsiveness in the past are, I contend, related to the fact that many still do feel compelled to name and defend it. In order to understand the potential of lesbian within non-binary frameworks, the needs that it has been called to meet in the past, and what accumulated meanings it therefore still carries, must first be understood.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the kind of lesbian identity which is currently associated with the biologically determinist arose through a nexus of feminist politics and a call to authenticity. Feminism that focused on women’s unity and emancipation became lesbianism’s obvious ideology: both were committed to letting women’s energies flow toward other women (Lorde, 1984). As a result, identification with the same sex through the field of lesbian politics became secondary to the particular desire for the same sex (Jenness, 1998: 480). The erotic parts of lesbian that could not be captured by its container were allowed less movement and thus less disruption of the framework of binary sex. Identity, and everything that it leaves out, became the operative part of lesbian life. ³ One of the reasons that the prioritization of identity over practice became central in this era was due to the influence of large civil rights movements (for lesbians, these were gay and lesbian organization post-Stonewall and the early 1970s women’s movement), putting a powerful emphasis on “personal authenticity – the unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity” (Escoffier, 1993: 10). In response, the lesbian became attached to a brand of authenticity that demanded personal politics be accessed only by the discovery of a “true” identity (Fuss, 1990: 100), which would inevitably lead to an authentic (and thus coherent) women’s culture (Escoffier, 1993: 16). This orientation toward authenticity was made stark by the concept of “false consciousness,” the insult lobbed at many bisexual women, transmasculine people, and others whose desire for or identification with non-women was treated as a removable barrier to lesbian authenticity (Weise, 1992).

What many contemporary thinkers, building off of queer theorists in the 1990s, reduce to 1970s “essentialism” was rooted in the practice of constructing and defending borders: its persistent “our” and its coherent “woman,” resting on the “‘the’ difference that all women shared vis-à-vis all men” (Phelan, 1994: 2). Though lesbian identity projects did not begin with the bulk of their roots in biological determinism, there was an eventual slippage among certain lesbian feminists from searching for a positive sense of women’s community and lesbian culture toward a lauding of sexual difference, as the need to justify that community arose (Stein, 1997: 15). In some—though not all—cases, a necessary and productive foundation of exclusion became linked to a purposeful act of reinforcing boundaries in order to define group identity against other types of people. This is one of the main reasons that lesbian feminism retains an often-damning signification in the present. This is despite many definitive texts, such as Gayle Rubin’s 1992 “Of catamites and kings,” which explicitly names this problem in some lesbian communities, and argues for the inclusion of transmasculine people within them based on the historical contingency and arbitrariness of boundaries. Clearly, the assumption of a widespread commitment to the kinds of damaging “essentialism,” that seems to culturally hang about discussions of lesbian feminism today, was not universal, totalizing, or consistently dominant. However, as Rubin’s nuanced objection to it signals, it was an association that had built up during the previous two decades: a transmutation, perhaps, of an initial exclusion into a practice of exclusion.

It is worth thinking about whether or not there would have been, in the 1970s, any possibility for lesbianism to be defined outside of gender, or outside of a relation to men. In the political and historical context of the time, and in the presence of a mode of feminist politics that already claimed to speak for all women, lesbian oppression was theorized within a system of differential domination, which meant that lesbian specificity most sensibly meant sameness. And despite attempts to relegate essentialism to the past, the “desire to judge” who fits into the bounds of lesbianism—whether the criteria be sexual practice, politics, or aesthetics—has remained constant (Farquhar, 2000: 227) and is carried forward into the present in hostile responses to non-binary lesbianism.

Exposing the exclusion model of identity

Instead of trying to redeem lesbian specificity from within the terms of these debates, it should become clear that the fundamental problem is not with the lesbian lives taking place under this sign, but with the structure of identity being sanctioned. The fact that identities are always based on sets of exclusions has hitherto determined the binary ways in which they are thought (i.e. I am this because I am not that). In her essay “Imitation and gender insubordination,” Butler describes how any totalization of the “I” (in the sense of proclaiming an identity, of attaching oneself to the ontological “to be”) is based on the sets of exclusions that we make in trying to define what is constitutive of that identity. To be a lesbian is dangerously contentless before one lays the groundwork of not being a man, of not being attracted to men. This, of course, is the reason that these debates seem endless: in this model “[lesbian] specificity,” Butler notes, “can only be demarcated by exclusions that return to disrupt its claim to coherence” (1993b: 309). The fact that the same process is active, for Butler, in the psychological formulation of gender identity and the structures of melancholia that compel us to manhood and womanhood, respectively, ⁴ doubles its strength in the determination of lesbian identity: it doubly relies on the gender binary, reinforcing the boundary that sits between woman and not-woman. This has resulted in an especially resilient identity politics: a specificity that got swallowed by a cult of difference, “as if ‘difference’ was something experienced only as women, or as lesbians” (Phelan, 1994: xiv). It has also impoverished the terms in which we think lesbian specificity in relation to gender identity, as it is not clear what the “true determinant” of sexuality should be (“the phantasy structure, the act, the orifice, the gender, the anatomy?” (Butler, 1993b: 310)). Regardless of what considerations may be opened through questions like Butler’s, the combined weight of the intertwined sets of exclusions that determine both gender and sexuality ensures that womanhood sits firmly at the center of lesbianism in many of the answers.

Both personally and epistemologically, this model of exclusions has its own thrall. It is also clear, and has been since Butler’s formulation, that what these exclusions refuse to capture is just as substantial as what they attempt to. Butler reminds us that the “I” in question in identity always exceeds determinations based on exclusions, always spills over the boundaries and in doing so produces “the very excess in and by the act which seeks to exhaust the semantic field of that ‘I’” (309). Returning to the figure of the lesbian, it is fair to ask whether this excess has ever been properly addressed in formulations of specificity. What is this excess, for the lesbian? Is it the opposite of lesbian specificity, or is it lesbian specificity itself? Another way of phrasing this question, and the beginning of a potential answer that I believe the non-binary lesbian reveals, is echoed in the assertion that begins this paper: If desire could liberate itself, it would have nothing to do with the preliminary markings of the sexes.

In light of the above, it is clear that it is not lesbian specificity as essentialism that has lost its relevance, but the structure of identification and naming sexual specificity that is no longer functional given an increase in a new non-binary ideology of gender. While the idea that liberated desire would have no relation to binary sex has an easily readable relation to non-binary and its rejection of those preliminary markings, non-binary has something to offer us structurally beyond a simple inversion of terms. The exclusions that we make when we claim an identity are both a product of their time and a reproduction of an ethical framework. The 1970s and 1980s required something like the exclusion model of identity in order to create livable lives for those seeking them under the sign lesbian. This illuminates something important: that it is not lesbian specificity in particular that is losing its place and purpose as times goes on: it is the exclusion model of identity itself. The recuperation of the term lesbian then, importantly, does not rest on the claim that all of radical lesbian feminism was somehow “wrong,” or something that lesbianism needs to be saved from, which has become one of many impassible barriers to present day discussion. Instead, lesbian is able to be recuperated in part because—as demonstrated above—it is responsive to its contexts. In the next section, I will explore what non-binary exposes about identities that are based on systems of exclusions, and what might be able to function in place of “identity” and yet remain sturdy enough to bear the weight of sexual specificity. As Leslie Feinberg once claimed, “[w]e all need help in creating new worlds and concepts that say who we are, not who we aren’t” (1998: 27).

Theorizing the rise of the non-binary lesbian can provide insight into how this call is being met in ways irreconcilable with the exclusion model of identity, but which allow its prized terms new life.

Non-binary as ideology

To begin my theorization of the non-binary lesbian—and thus my commentary on what happens to notions of specificity when subjects choose other than a model of identity that is based on binary exclusions—I will clarify what I mean by non-binary. I do not consider non-binary as having been shaped as an identity in the same way that lesbian has been shaped as one, as it does not share the basis of exclusion described above that all other identities do. Rather, I would like to consider non-binary as a subject position with a connected ideology about gender—a particular sort of space that one can occupy in what I have come to see as our current “non-binary moment.” ⁵

The concept of non-binary’s recent popularity as a gender label has not yet been satisfactorily addressed in scholarship, although its usage in relation to gender began to increase in 2010 and experienced spikes in usage through 2017 and 2018. ⁶ In existing academic attempts to define the term, non-binary gender has been related to readers in rather straightforward terms, masking much of its variability and potential. This is partially owing to its having not yet been unanimously defined, due to its frequent use as an umbrella term and the fact that it lacks a standard narrative. If one takes most recent academic writing on the topic at face value, non-binary can be summed up as any gender identity in which one identifies as neither male nor female, both male and female, as different genders at different times, or as having no gender (Richards et al., 2016). There is a tension between uses of non-binary as a label in itself, and as an umbrella term which functions as an anachronistic container for other labels with longer and different histories of rejecting gender dichotomies. ⁷ These applications, and perhaps even the term non-binary, are problematic in themselves, and reveal one reason why there is no consensus on non-binary—the suitable descriptors that hold easy meaning for others are ironically dichotomous. The fact that academic sources largely have not progressed beyond this point may signal the limits of even queer theory’s deconstructive project—relying, as it does, on anti-normativity in a persistently binary sense (a focus on the non of non-binary)—and alert us to the need for a new model of conceptualizing gender and sexuality. In this article, as an initial step to think outside of these limits, I use non-binary to refer precisely to the reality of its ambiguous and widespread use in the past 10 years. I use it to reference the posited subject position, and its connected ideologies of gender, that has arisen both within and in departure from “trans” and “queer” and which appears in its cultural usage ununified but for its rejection of the correlation between identity and assigned sex.

Public concern confirms that the demand for recognition of non-binary identity (in the form of increasing advocacy for gender-neutral washrooms, language awareness, etc.) has implications beyond the individual, asking as it does for the restructuring of a society organized around naturalized binaries. Likely because the idea of non-binary gender exists in such an obvious conflict with the ways in which our society takes binary gender as foundational, many non-binary perspectives demand new ideologies about gender. Non-binary experience does not just create a new subject position which functions within the logics of existing gender or identity schemas; rather, the non-binary subject position critiques the very terms through which we understand gender identity, and thus requires ideological padding—something that has not yet been explored in depth, and which I expect future terminology will illuminate beyond my capacities in the present. While it might seem that by naming the binary and signaling an opposition to it the label inherently reinvokes the founding binary’s strength, the non-binary narratives that we have access to (e.g. in Bornstein and Bergman, 2010; Rajunov and Duane, 2019; Spoon and Coyote, 2014) dismantle the exclusion model by stepping outside of traditional transgender narratives (i.e. a discomfort with or felt wrongness about assigned femininity necessarily resulting in a masculine identification, or vice versa) and by speaking about gender in distinctly idiosyncratic terms. ⁸ Non-binary is difficult to pin down precisely because it does not rest on established correspondences between sex, gender, and expression, nor does it rest on established narratives of their rejection.

I argue that non-binary is more a framing ideology than it is an identity. It has no prescriptive content, no prescriptive behaviors or aesthetics. It has been applied across cultural and racial lines, ⁹ and in tandem with countless other labels. Unlike lesbian, it does not attempt to index a particular relation to others, or a particular opposition to other configurations of sexuality or gender. This should begin to reveal what is unique about non-binary, as all indexes of relations are, of course, based on the act of exclusion through which we experience all relationality. The lack of prescriptiveness often causes people to read non-binary as an extension of queer frameworks, or as yet another branch on the proliferating tree of queer identities, quite seamlessly aligned with the queer values of non-normativity, ambiguity, and anti-structuralism. However, as Wiegman and Wilson (2015) and Sedgewick and Frank (2003) identify, queer perspectives often become caught up in oppositionality and negativity themselves in an attempt to work against posited norms. I see this project as an extension of their idea that we may be able to, through other means, imagine what broadly “queer” perspectives might become if they were less tied to direct opposition, if they were able to extend to spaces quite distinctly their own. While it is clear that there are connections between queer and non-binary ways of intervening in dominant frameworks, I maintain that this moment in which we are both individually and collectively forced to confront what might exist creatively around, without, within, or adjacent to our understanding of totalizing binaries is a unique opportunity. Non-binary challenges that inextricable link between identity, binaries, and processes of exclusion. At this moment, it has not and cannot be solidified as a certain type of identity: it is neither fully transgender nor fully cisgender, nor does it demand a particular or fixed type of transgression beyond its foundational ideology.

While it is based on the exclusion of the binary system itself, it does not foundationally exclude any other type of gender expression. What non-binary is exclusive to, then, is an existing ideology of gender: that which insists not only on linking biological sex and gender, but also precipitates the linking of gender and appearance, descriptions and existence. Exclusion of ideology is not the same kind of basis for identity as exclusion of a state of being or a set of actions. To demonstrate the difference with an example, someone assigned female at birth could choose to maintain a recognizably femme appearance while using the label non-binary to signal an awareness and intentional rejection of the system which ascribes and commands such femininity. Femininity—or any unavoidable content of gendered experience that this example could hold—is decoupled from sex, intentionally decoupled from prescribed womanhood, decoupled from essentialist identity, and yet persists as a non-exclusive vector. Its presence, under non-binary, does not signal “not man” any more than it signals “woman.” In excluding gendered determinations as a principle of meaning, non-binary excludes nothing else.

Non-binary does not contain queer’s prerogative to move toward the shattering of self, nor base itself solely on the limitations of possibilities: if one were both not man and not woman, expunging all that had been coded as masculine or feminine, and going against all “proper” behaviors assigned to these genders, there would be nothing left with which to populate an experience of gender. Rather, non-binary does not refuse these things, and does not make claims about itself on the basis of hard exclusions, but resignifies the meanings of behaviors, aesthetics, and words outside of their preexisting binary determination. While non-binary has no particular discontinuities with queer’s ethos, just as I argue it has none with lesbian, the reading of non-binary as an equivalent movement in a queer genealogy is a mistake largely because it limits the thought about and meanings of this phenomenon to the same old progress narratives and binary frameworks. Halberstam (2005) plays with this reading, tracing today’s “gender-ambiguous individual” as “futurity itself, a kind of heroic fulfillment of the postmodern promises of gender flexibility” (18). By suggesting that present uses of non-binary may more accurately represent a discontinuity than an imagined fulfillment of a specifically queer logic, I am not suggesting that non-binary represents a new conceptual frontier. Nor do I argue that it somehow escapes burdened histories or hierarchical power relations in its actual deployments. I do contend, however, that its lack of prescription and exclusion make it accessible to a much broader range of subjects than queer is and has been, especially given the differences in the political contexts in which each arose.

Thinking through the non-binary lesbian is an opportunity to examine what this new ideology does to the very concepts of identity and sexuality. A start to thinking of non-binary outside of this framework is to consider what purpose it meets in today’s context, just as lesbian met the context of previous decades in shifting ways. For instance, let us return to Henderson’s idea that transgender politics need to be diverted away from slipping back into a binary (cis/trans) that suggests that there is a natural divide that undermines many of the radical politics that trans could mount, and that posits a gender normative subject that appeals for tolerance must be directed to. Non-binary suggests (often contentiously) that we do not have to be one sort of subject in order to refuse a restricting dominant ideology. It escapes, as much as anything can, the “demand made by power” to be knowable, to be subject to, to “parse endlessly the particulars” of identity back into the power structures that define it (Menon, 2015: 2).

The rise of the non-binary lesbian

The non-binary lesbian has not yet been discussed in academic work. In many cases, as Clare Hemmings aptly identifies, there are parts of minority subcultures that do not fit into our dominant narratives of them, let alone the academic narratives that seek to make sense of their developing idiosyncrasies. Such has been the case with the term lesbian in much linguistic research on its recent use, which suggests the term falling out of use in favor of terms that refuse boundaries, fixity, and gender specificity. ¹⁰ The theory that grapples with this data explains the trends in the terms of the dichotomous, binary narratives of identity politics: lesbian feminist Bonnie Morris (2016), for instance, reads this shift as part of an attack on identities that do not center men, while Jack Halberstam (2005), from a queer theory perspective, suggests that younger people find labels increasingly oppressive and unable to capture their uniqueness in a “post-gender” neoliberal world (18). However, whether due to temporal context (the specific language around non-binary had not yet emerged at the time Halberstam was writing) or the seduction of a coherent statement such as Morris’s, neither of these accounts grapple with the growing number of subjects who are choosing to combine non-binary’s rejection of our current gender paradigm with the specificity of the lesbian who was forged within it, to constitute a growing body of non-binary lesbians.

Recent data on terminology use hints at the conjunction of lesbian and non-binary. In Oakley’s (2016) study of terminology use in online Tumblr bios (a space where contemporary non-binary, trans, and queer narratives flourish), the most frequently used gender identity terms were trans, genderfluid, and genderqueer and were most frequently used alongside the sexuality terms queer and bisexual, followed closely by lesbian. This suggested co-occurrence is confirmed in a large-scale analysis by White et al. (2018) of what sexuality and gender labels are being used in conjunction. While their general finding was that traditional gender labels (female, male) occurred mostly with traditional sexuality labels (straight, lesbian, bisexual) and open ones (different, other, genderfluid) occurred alongside the like (other, pansexual, queer), their data also show the co-occurrence of different gender with lesbian and genderfluid with lesbian as a significant portion of their top 30 co-occurring pairs (249). This co-occurrence—which goes against dominant assumptions that non-exclusionary gender labels must be paired with non-gendered sexuality labels (e.g. queer, pansexual)—demonstrates that some who are currently couched in a burgeoning non-binary ideology are approaching the use of sexuality labels differently, including the use of lesbian.

Additionally, cultural conversations are taking place surrounding the non-binary lesbian, with split and strong opinions confirming that the perceived conflict in this identity is already contentious. While the articles cited below are not academic sources, online editorials represent one of the only areas in which discussion around the non-binary lesbian has begun to emerge, and are worth acknowledging as indications of the ways in which people are living and thinking through the connections between the two terms.

Some of these contributions seek simply to explain how the two can co-exist using personal perspectives. A 2018 piece from PinkNews entitled “Can you be both non-binary and lesbian?” provides the anonymous personal testimonies:

I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive – lesbians have not always strictly identified as women, [there have] always been lots of gender non-conforming lesbians

However, a significant amount of the commentary on non-binary lesbians is not as positive, and harkens back to many of the exclusionary identity politics discussed above. Katie Herzog’s (2018) article “If the Future is Non-Binary, it’s a Bleak One for Women” claims that non-binary “erases a population” of both cis and trans women, as a deluded way of exempting oneself from the oppression that comes with womanhood. Noting an increase in non-binary identification, she says that some are “arguing that an ode to dyke culture should be supplanted by one that centers people who have rejected the concept of women” and that it is “hard to see what's so progressive about that.” Similarly, Black butch lesbian activist Pippa Fleming links the rise of non-binary to patriarchy and sex-based oppression, asserting that “the gender-identity movement’s attempt to rebrand the lesbian as queer, and the pronouncement that ‘anyone can be a lesbian’, are nothing short of erasure” (2018).

Clearly, non-binary lesbianism is a phenomenon gaining popularity, and it is also being folded back into dichotomous discourses before it has had the chance to be seen for what it may have the potential to challenge. In an attempt to demonstrate the potential of the non-binary lesbian to disrupt binary systems of identity in ways that the cultural discussions around it may currently be missing, I turn back to Monique Wittig’s rich theorizations of lesbian specificity outside of binary womanhood.

Monique Wittig’s non-binary lesbian

In order to understand how this growing non-binary ideology interacts with identities rich in specificity, it is necessary to consider the example of Wittig’s lesbian. Both Butler and Henderson have conducted in-depth analyses of Wittig’s work in the context of lesbian identity politics, but I extend their analyses to argue that Wittig’s lesbian is a non-binary figure who preserves the specificity of lesbianism outside of its overwrought exclusions. In fact, as I will demonstrate, lesbian specificity (in the sense of the content of that label, the palpable parts that are left in excess when we make exclusionary claims) thrives better here than in other models, giving us a sense of what may happen to a compelled sexual identity when removed from its exclusionary determinations.

What some see as taking away from lesbian specificity, the refusal of woman, Wittig posits as the root of lesbian specificity. Lesbians are not women because they destroy the naturalized coherence of the heterosexual paradigm in which woman only has meaning in subordinate relation to men (1993: 103). Thus, in her view, feminisms that celebrate the concept of woman recreate their own oppression by not fighting for the eradication of the class that subordinates them (which, she notes is also what leads to the cyclical and complacent development of “new” theories of lesbian specificity) (1993: 105). She also relates this problem to “straight society’s” basis on “the necessity of different/other at every level” (1992: 55), and it is this difference that she takes issue with as being a false ontology. On a political level she believes that it is the responsibility of lesbians and gay men to stop using the language of difference, the language of women and men, suggesting that the specificity of these sexual identities should have contained an anti-gender binary component from the start.

What does Wittig mean, then, for lesbian specificity? In keeping with her anti-essentialist viewpoint, she does not propose any content to fill the gap she leaves with the removal of woman (Henderson, 2018: 197). She also refuses the notion that lesbian specificity is a narrowly sexual specificity, saying that “[l]esbianism is much more than sexuality. Lesbianism opens onto another dimension of the human (insofar as its definition is not based on the 'difference' of the sexes). Today lesbians are discovering this dimension outside what is masculine and feminine” (Wittig, 1979: 117). This openness resonates with contemporary non-binary ideologies, and purposefully avoids the exclusion model of identity. More importantly, it demonstrates that Wittig is invested in maintaining a lesbian specificity outside of its founding system, and that articulations of this specificity transcend identity politics to link to both the richness of a “lesbian” experience and the emancipatory goals of “lesbian” politics.

Indeed, the self-assertions of non-binary lesbians today seem to echo many of Wittig’s premonitions. For instance, an anonymous person in the PinkNews article states that “[a]s a lesbian you defy probably one of the biggest gender roles that exists, which is for your life to revolve around a man, [which complements] how being non-binary also doesn’t conform to expectations of gender” (Ashenden, 2018). Another commentator shares that:

Being nonbinary is basically a way of understanding how my gender feels considering I no longer rely on the heterosexual and male-centered outlook I am expected to have. […] [W]hat is the social context of womanhood but a binary opposite to men in order to find a suitable male partner? We wouldn’t divide the two out without a purpose and when you know you’ll never be with a man, it’s all arbitrary and seems useless. So why does gender matter when you’re only interested in one? (Bouris, 2018)

Recalling this aspect of Wittig’s work reveals that non-binary, in constructing an ideology that works against the exclusion model instead of inverting existing power structures, is performing the same action of demonstrating that what may be seen as a minority subject position (or an identity) may be far more impactful when its developed specificity is allowed to thrive on its own terms rather than within the terms of its restrictions. Non-binary, because it refuses set content and because it resignifies away from pre-existing binary determination without repeating its restrictions, demonstrates that we do not need to be one type of subject in order to refuse a restricting ideology, to hold a resistant politics, or to participate in coalition. Wittig demonstrates that this is liberating for the lesbian whose life, desire, and culture—with a flick of the linguistic switch—can begin to figure for themselves, can begin to develop their own ontology (Butler, 2007: 525) and strong specificity outside of mandatory exclusions.

Pairing lesbian with non-binary similarly lets lesbian specificity flourish. There have been many arguments that the similar openness that accompanies queerness negatively elides womanhood (Humphrey, 1999: 226). Non-binary repeats this expansiveness with the entire system of gender difference, and even though it can reasonably be accused of performing the same erosion of womanhood, the example of the non-binary lesbian demonstrates the opposite: that non-binary is leaving space for the articulation of lesbian specificity, and all of its excesses and nuances, outside of its postulated opposite. As I have said above, non-binary performs the further step of universalizing outside of a framework of minority status. We do not have to leave behind some of the important aspects of lesbian specificity (like modes of care and eroticism and relationality we may call “feminine”) but resignify them away from their determination as feminine in a binary sense, which actually allows us to cast them as lesbian in a more meaningful way.