Enacting New Worlds of Gender

Abstract

Abstract Nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people resist normative binary gender by identifying themselves and inhabiting their bodies in ways that are less rigid and less tied to social expectations than seen in dichotomous understandings of gender. This review of nonbinary language practices considers the ways that Black nonbinary speakers use language to resist the modern Western gender binary that emerged from colonialism and slavery. Their various ways of pushing back against binary views of gender complicate theories of language, gender, and sexuality. A sociophonetics study on the variables of pitch and /s/ among both Black and white nonbinary speakers in the United States demonstrates how Black nonbinary speakers challenge colonialist legacies of racialized binary gender to create new ways of expressing gender. The chapter calls for further investigation by scholars of language, gender, and sexuality into the gender binary and the influence of race on gender expression.

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