Failing Gender, Failing the West

Abstract

Abstract Although nonbinary sex/gender has seen some attention in recent years in academia and popular culture, it is mostly seen through the lens of modernity, which views trans as a straight movement from one “gender identity” to another. This article aims to tell a story that is different from this narrative of modern trans identity. It is, therefore, written as an autoethnodrama rooted in the author's own embodied experience of (un)becoming genderqueer in a postsocialist borderland. The main theoretical threads are border epistemologies and the monstrous process of (un)becoming self/other, specified through the figuration of the genderqueer clown. The first scene of this drama is about orientation and clowning in a post-Soviet space in the 1990s. The second scene is about failing gender and failing the West/East divide in front of a public bathroom in 2019. The research-drama ends with drifting, drowning, and getting lost in a stream of body liquids. This opens up possibilities for affection and compassion in failing together with all the creatures who are filling that stream.

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