“Small and petite, androgynous, many houseplants”: The pressure to look nonbinary

Abstract

<div>Recent theorizations of nonbinary gender often highlight the radical queerness of the category. This article counters this trend by attending to the ways the nonbinary category is often felt as restrictive rather than liberatory. Drawing on interviews and media diaries with Finnish nonbinary people, it explores the pressures many nonbinary people feel to conform to a specific way of looking nonbinary. The article identifies the figure of an androgynous nonbinary person which functions as the yardstick for being intelligibly nonbinary. The features of this figure—characterized by masculine androgyny, thinness, and whiteness—allow those who embody them to be recognized as nonbinary in broader society, while simultaneously excluding others from such recognition. The article traces how this figure emerges on social media, but does not remain an online phenomenon. Building on the work of Judith Butler, the article argues that while norms around nonbinary gender have shifted, granting certain nonbinary people access to cultural intelligibility and recognition, others remain abject, outside the realm of recognizability<br></div>