“Too Many Genders?”: Ambiguity as Resistance in the Biographical Work of Gender-Diverse People

Abstract

Gender-diverse people experience unique cultural and interpersonal stigma in mainstream society and sometimes within their own communities; they face allegations of inauthenticity based on their nonconformity to either cisnormative or transnormative gender regimes. Based on 21 in-depth life history interviews, we unveil the intricate interactional process of negotiating identity and authenticity in the biographical work of gender-diverse individuals. In this study, gender-diverse people engaged in a “gender audit” with their gender-diverse interviewer. Gender audits yield verbal performances of gender with oneself and others. Ambiguity was “accounted for” or “embraced and created” in their biographical work to organize their life stories and undermine binary essentialism – a discourse that was “discursively constraining.” Gender audits took place in participants' day-to-day lives, either through self-audits, questioning from others, or both. In the final analysis, we assert that we all engage in gender auditing. Gender audits are intersubjective sites of domination, subordination, resistance, and social change. Gender diversity, then, can be viewed as a product of gender in flux.

Citation

Green, L. and Rambo, C. (2024), "“Too Many Genders?”: Ambiguity as Resistance in the Biographical Work of Gender-Diverse People", Denzin, N.K. and Chen, S.-L.S. (Ed.) Symbolic Interaction and Inequality (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 58), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 29-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620240000058003