The Art of Not Being Sexed Quite So Much: A Feminist Reading of Roland Barthes

Abstract

This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone.

Introduction

Neutrality is quite an unpopular concept among critical, and especially feminist, theorists. The idea that social practices, political institutions, and scientific knowledge can be neutral—or, to use their respective corollaries, universal, impartial, and objective—has aroused ongoing skepticism. The story is well known. The production of knowledge is always situated and therefore determined by specific, contingent social standpoints. Dominant discourses and practices are underpinned by cultural biases. And political institutions, as the very products of social conflicts, can never be neutral toward competing social groups. Neutrality as a desirable value and potential practice has hence been relegated to the defunct concepts of political modernity and the ideological toolbox of hegemonical social arrangements.

In 1977, however, already aware of such a reputation, the French thinker Barthes (2005) added a dissonant chord to the intellectual progression of the notion, dedicating his lectures at the Collège de France to what he called the Neutral (“le Neutre”). The Neutral, Barthes admits, “has bad press” among his contemporaries, including among critical progressive thinkers (69). Yet, also indebted to Blanchot’s (1992) thoughts on the neutral, Barthes argues that the concept contains an underrated intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical interest. Against prevailing conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, Barthes highlights a different idea of the Neutral, one that constitutes an active and transformative gesture that fundamentally alters common systems of meaning, categorization, and power—including, among others, the gender binary.

This article aims to offer a queer and feminist reading of Barthes’s work on the Neutral, revealing the underexplored path to gender critique and emancipation that his propositions open. This path offers two main contributions to feminist and queer theory.

First, it reshapes our understanding of what it means to be gender-neutral. The conception of the Neutral theorized here, based on Barthes’s account, does not refer to a call for an androgynous identity, inviting one to relinquish one’s own embodiment or self-identifications. Instead, it targets and suspends the ethical, social, and political practices that categorize embodied subjects and asks them to take and keep their place in the gender binary. Those practices include, for instance, gender markers on administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, and the implicit gender expectations we impose on others. Such assigning practices contribute to the (re)production of the social world based on hierarchical binary patterns. They encourage normative gender habitus; clog our symbolic imaginaries with rigid and hierarchical conceptions of difference; and marginalize queer, trans, and intersex persons. By contrast, a gender-neutral arrangement refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories.

Second, this reconstruction of the Neutral outlines an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms that I put in dialogue with constructivist feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference. The ethics and practice of gender suspension derived from the Neutral has two main transformative effects. It opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects and forms of life. And it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone. And those effects converse with and contribute to two influential feminist narratives on the future of gender: the subversion and deconstruction narrative of queer and poststructuralist theorists and the abolition of gender wanted by radical and materialist feminists.

My reading of Barthes is indebted to the long tradition of feminist accounts of theories crafted by men. It implies, quite often, reading those authors against themselves and being in some sense “disloyal” to them, as suggested by Young (1994), following Singer (1992). Singer has suggested considering the feminist philosopher a “bandita, an intellectual outlaw who raids the texts of male philosophers and steals from them what she finds pretty or useful, leaving the rest behind” (Young 1994, 723). It is this type of pirate reading that I undertake here. After all, in many ways, a queer and feminist reading is not the only possible reading of Barthes’s work. Barthes (2005) himself writes that he “display[s] Neutrals” rather than “construct[s] the concept of Neutral” (11). This article, however, does construct a concept of gender suspension based on the various Neutrals displayed by Barthes.

About his favored method, centered on fragment collection, Barthes (2002) states that he “follows a kind of pirate law that does not really recognize the property of origins” (379). Likely, the Neutral I offer here is not identical to Barthes’s, nor is it completely estranged from it. It results from the bringing together of Barthes’s contribution and other texts in feminist and queer scholarship—other fragments, to use a Barthesian vocabulary. Those fragments include two pieces in which Judith Butler and Linda Zerilli consider an echoing attitude toward gender categories. This attitude is not directly theirs, but one found, again, in fragments written by others, respectively David Reimer and Hannah Arendt. Yet, all these readings, mine of Barthes, Butler’s account of Reimer, and Zerilli’s interpretation of Arendt, tend in a common direction. They highlight a way of relating to the world and to others characterized by a neutral principle—that is, by the experience, in the context of gender, of being a bit less gendered and, reciprocally, by the ethical and political gesture of abstaining from demanding others to situate themselves correctly within sexual difference.

Reading Barthes with a feminist and political theorist’s eye opens new avenues of interpretation for his work. Barthes’s late work, including his lectures on the Neutral, has been recently revisited, highlighting its underrated interests in the domains of literary theory and textual analysis (Zhuo 2020), cultural critique (Badmington 2020; Feng 2020), and arts (Burgin 2020), sometimes with a gender and sexuality perspective (Gallop 2012; Proulx 2016; Zhuo 2017). Yet, Barthes’s insights for ethical and political theory have not been fully explored. ¹ This article highlights how Barthes’s Neutral and his ideas on gender and sexuality not only contribute to questions on literature and culture but also to theoretical discussions on politics, social critique, and the transformation of our collective and relational arrangements from the perspective of social justice.

Suspending Gender

In a series of lectures given between 1977 and 1978 at the Collège de France, Barthes (2005) told an unusual story. Going against the common disdain for neutrality, he pictures a desire for what he calls “the Neutral” and reconstructs the notion as an active suspension of traditional binaries. The Neutral, Barthes writes, is a “temptation to lift, foil, escape the paradigm, its exhortations, arrogances, to exempt meaning” (32).

The paradigm, here, refers to the linguistic and symbolic frames through which we understand the world and which, structured in a series of oppositions and antagonisms, are used to make sense of experiences, phenomena, people, and objects, among others (7). The paradigm of gender, therefore, is what defines feminine norms, values, and identities in opposition to masculine ones. It is what pushes us to identify other people’s gender at any cost and what troubles us when this identification attempt stumbles upon the ambiguity of a body, a voice, or a form of life. But the paradigm of gender is also what gives meaning and social significance to the concept of sexual difference itself and to the idea that there exist two sexes recognizable at birth and distinct ways of being, as well as separate social spheres. ² The paradigm of gender, therefore, is also inextricably bound up with the “heterosexual matrix” (Butler 1990) and with the assumption of a hierarchical and exclusionary complementarity between genders. Finally, the paradigm of gender goes along with a cisgender (Serano 2007) assumption positing a necessary correspondence between the sex one has been assigned at birth and the gender with which one identifies.

The Neutral for Barthes is therefore what undoes the common system of meaning based on conflictual oppositions of terms (positive-negative, cold-hot, black-white, male-female, etc.). More precisely, it constitutes a “suspension (épochè) of orders, laws, summons, arrogances, terrorisms, putting on notice, the will-to-[seize]” based on paradigms (Barthes 2005, 12). In the case of gender, those orders and the “will-to-seize” ³ can be interpreted as the various social practices that reproduce gender and sexual norms by placing subjects within their categories. What the Neutral thwarts is the will to situate someone or something with respect to categorical differences. In that sense, the term “will-to-seize” designates those moments where the gender norm literally seizes the subject by way of a demand or a summons. It is a social, intersubjective, spatial, legal, or administrative gesture that sorts subjects into the list of genders so that they can declare, “Yes, it’s me, here is my spot in this typology.” The “pure expression of the anti-Neutral,” for Barthes, lies in “the obligation to choose, no matter what side” (183)—that is, in the pressure to take and maintain one’s position within a specific difference. As Comment (1991, 220) remarks, Barthes’s political proposition is to “attack language as it is imposed, as it forces to tell.” The Neutral, thus, challenges and aims to interrupt the dimension of social experience in which one is “pigeonholed, assigned to an (intellectual) site, to residence in a caste (if not in a class)” (Barthes 1994, 49). In the context of gender, those assigning obligations can come from two different sources, which signpost two distinct understandings of the Neutral and its suspending effects.

First, the tyrannizing instance can be seen as radically undetermined. In that case, it refers to the assigning principle that emanates from the social world without being precisely located. The will-to-seize then designates the reflex internalized by subjects and the self-classifying impulse to abide by the norm. And the Neutral, by opposition, constitutes an individual or collective refusal of this self-inflicted will-to-seize. Understood as such, the Neutral would head toward queer ways of being or self-identifying that contest the binary. Barthes’s Neutral indeed can be—and has been (De Villiers 2012; Garnier 2017; Proulx 2016; Sedgwick 1990, Zhuo 2017)—viewed as a longing for nonconforming gender and sexual experiences that do not “cancel the genders” but that “[combine] them, [keep] them both present in the subject, at the same time, after each other” (Barthes 2005, 90). The Neutral would then resonate, for instance, with queer gestures of “disidentification” (Muñoz 1999) from categorical gender and sexual identities and with a self-relation to gender that favors “nuances, contraries, oscillations” (Barthes 2005, 90).

But the will-to-seize that the Neutral suspends can also emanate from a precise instance external to the subject. The gender tyranny and its demands are not only the internalized voice of the norm. Those “summonses” and “orders” are embodied in concrete social practices, in others’ attitudes toward us expressed through gestures, words, or questions or through institutions, things, and objects. The Neutral therefore might not only be another name for queer, then, or for the dissolution of sexual paradigms through those oscillations, displacements, or hybridizations displayed by embodied subjects. It might also seek to suspend “the tyranny of the paradigm” itself as it comes from outside subjects (Barthes 2005, 183). And this second meaning offers an underexplored perspective on gender norms and on ways in which to alleviate their burden in social life.

For Barthes, indeed, the will-to-seize can refer to the classifying gestures that we force onto others in everyday interactions but which is also metaphorized in social practices that invite subjects to position themselves in a common typology.

Invasion by the world, by relational life, under the cover of the myth of “communication,” by means of “questions,” questionnaires, inquiries, etc.: not so much asking for opinions as summoning one to state one’s identity in public . . . commination, precisely of the yes/no, of the paradigm. (Barthes 2005, 203)

And if we look more precisely at gender, it seems that the invasion is even more acute now than it was when Barthes gave his lectures at the Collège de France in 1977–1978. How many times, indeed, are we summoned each week to check the box “male,” the box “female,” or the box “other/nonbinary” to register for an e-commerce service, undertake an administrative procedure, or answer any kind of survey? Sometimes, now, the form offers us a fourth option—that is, the possibility to choose “prefer not to say.” Is this option neutral enough, since, for Barthes (2005, 23), the Neutral “postulates a right to be silent, a possibility of keeping silent”? “Prefer not to say” is still a box to be chosen from a list of gender identifications. Barthes’s suspending Neutral would imply, rather, that this question disappears completely from the form, that we are not only given the right to keep silent, but also that we are not asked about gender in the first place. Of course, gender boxes do not always fulfill the same goal. Sometimes, they aim at collecting information for commercial or surveillance purposes. Other times, they are used to identify disadvantaged groups for the purposes of social justice and affirmative action. But, even in those cases, wouldn’t it be more relevant for people to identify themselves freely in their recognized identities rather than to ask them to tick a box within a range of options set for them in advance?

Barthes’s perspective allows us to recognize the various places where norms come from and the external requests they impose on us. The demands can be either explicit, as in the case of injunctions to choose the correct box or to walk into the correct bathroom, or implicit, as in the expectations we grow on others depending on the social identities we assign them. Here, therefore, the Neutral has less to do with a singular nonconforming or queer experience of the gender binary and more with a foiling of the urge that gender experiences are persistently reinscribed in this binary. The practice of the Neutral, then, takes the form of a will-to-interrupt, or at least a will-to-reduce, the enforcement of gender categories that pervade contemporary forms of life.

In Undoing Gender, Butler (2004) recalls the story of David Reimer, a child who, identified at birth as a boy, was reassigned as a girl at the age of two after a medical mistake that had atrophied his male genitalia. After the accident, the doctor and gender specialist John Money convinced Reimer’s parents that a different socialization and the surgical recreation of a vagina could artificially produce a female identity (see also Colapinto 2000). At that point, David became Brenda in the eyes of the world. During his childhood and youth, David suffered medical harassment as attempts were made to confirm that the intended transformation had occurred. Money’s team kept asking him/her about his/her feelings, forcing him/her to perform mock coitus with his/her brother, to play with toys meant for little girls, and to embrace appropriate norms of femininity. After discovering the truth about his story, David finally decided to retrieve his masculine identity with the help of another doctor. Beyond the different conceptions of gender identity supported by the two medical experts and the violence with which they tried to force them on a young person, what is striking in Butler’s account of this story is the continuous pressure put on Reimer to situate himself within gender norms and to coherently answer the question “Who are you?”—a question necessarily involving a gender component.

For Butler, Reimer’s story illustrates the institution of the gender binary imposed by medical and psychiatric practices. The stake here is not only the binary or hierarchical character of gender norms but also the fact that those norms force subjects to disclose fixed identities. The tyranny of gender vocalized by medical experts prompted Reimer to develop a gender discourse, to cultivate a transparent relation to himself, to find what kind of gendered being he was, and to stick to it. Reimer’s experience has the effect of a magnifying glass on the work of norms. The medical mistreatment he suffered when he became illegible within gender “frames of recognition” (Butler 2009, 5) brings to light the tyranny of legibility of sexual difference, “the obligation to choose, no matter what side” (Barthes 2005, 183), and the various social practices carrying out this obligation.

Butler, in fact, quotes David’s own stupefaction in the face of this long and frenetic search for gender truth:

And I thought to myself . . . these people gotta be pretty shallow if that’s the only thing they think I’ve got going for me; that the only reason why people get married, and have children and a productive life is because of what they have between their legs. . . . If that’s all they think of me that they justify my worth by what I have between my legs, then I gotta be a complete loser. (Butler 2004, 71)

Here, even though Reimer has asked for another reassignment surgery, “he refuses to be reduced to the body part that he has acquired” (72). He expresses an unwillingness to see his gender truth determine important aspects of his life. He questions the will-to-seize of the medical institution and refuses to have his gender singularity play a key role in his relations with others. In this sense, Reimer discreetly questions the gender tyranny, even though he identifies as a man. He might have wished that he didn’t have a particular treatment imposed on him because of his gender indetermination—an indetermination that did not result from his own subjective discourse but from a body that had become medically unrecognizable. What Reimer asks is to be able to love, to work, and to be valued for something other than what he has “between his legs,” because his worth lies elsewhere than in the gender he is or isn’t, in the identity that he claims or rejects.

The critical relation that Reimer formulates regarding the categorical will-to-seize that doctors have forced upon him echoes Barthes’s view of the Neutral. This relation does not rely directly on deliberate gender trouble or subversion—doesn’t Reimer, finally, wish to be recognized as a man? The resistance here addresses the normative operations of gender. Of course, there is, as Butler (2004, 71) argues, a critique of the phallus as the only determinant of masculinity, since it is the initial alteration of David’s genitalia that generated medical mistreatment. But there is also, in David’s discourse, a critique of the structuring and crucial role of gender in the love one gets and the life to which one can aspire.

For Butler (2004), because David refuses to be reduced to his genitalia, he alters the norm by enacting a partly ungendered subjective discourse, which is almost ineffable and which Butler names “the human in its anonymity, as that which we do not yet know how to name or that which sets a limit on all naming” (74). It is surprising however that Butler maintains here an ontological perspective on Reimer’s discourse. Butler also continues to question the subjective position from which Reimer speaks and the gendered, nongendered, or less gendered aspect of his being. Yet the interest of Reimer’s critical gesture lies not in the position from which he speaks but rather in the request that he formulates indirectly to the rest of the world, a request that he be given a break from the obligations to take and keep his place in the gender order, a request of the decentering of gender truth in social interactions and institutions. Reimer’s desire here is not a desire for an absence of gender or an absence of fixity but rather a desire for a social life in which gender counts a bit less. Reimer’s puzzle here is not what gender he can be in relation to the norm—he seems to have his own idea on this—but it concerns the demands made on him that this gender be vocally stated, as often as necessary and in a manner explicit enough so that the rest of the world and people around him, as well as the medical institution, can know and recognize him without trouble.

There is hence a distinction from queer development on gender trouble and nonconforming experience. This distinction moves us from the question of who we are and what our bodily practices can be to the question of how to transform our social, material, institutional, and relational arrangements in ways that reduce the tyrannical aspect of gender. Gender suspension, in a way, adds a chapter to emancipation narratives that focus on gender resignification, proliferation, or subversion. While those political projects tend to concentrate on the performativity of gendered embodiments and representations, the perspective of the Neutral calls our attention to other ways through which gender is done and can therefore be undone. Although we all do and perform our own genders in more or less normative ways, we are also required to do so by others and by institutions. We are asked to walk in sex-segregated spaces, to tick a box on administrative forms, to wear certain clothes and play with the appropriate toys as kids. And we are policed, disciplined, and regulated by peers, parents, administrative agents, or strangers if we do not choose the right bathroom, the right clothes, or the right boxes. The Neutral paves the way for alleviating the role of gender norms in social life, not only by looking at how people can do less (of their own) gender but by addressing how we can collectively and individually impose less gender on the world and on others. ⁴

Opening Spaces of Freedom

Yet, the experience of the Neutral does not result in the advent of a longed-for genderless subject existing beneath the norm or of a life disposed of sexual difference. It does not seek an experience that is liberated from the entire constraint of the norm. The Neutral is rather a gesture that seeks to suspend, for a moment, the call of the norm, even though we accept that there might not be anything beyond it. Barthes (2005), himself, warns that meaning cannot be suspended for long, that qualifying a neutral experience, putting it into words, is an aporetic enterprise (28–29, 36, 68–69, 81, 185). Words will be needed, and using words cannot help but produce new meanings and new norms.

Gender suspension corresponds rather to the degree of leeway from the norm brought about by the suspension of one of the norm’s interpellations. In that sense, neutral gestures generate only temporary experiences. They interrupt one or several gendered wills-to-seize, without suppressing them all. The Neutral is therefore always both relational and local. It operates within a singular relation between an assigning instance and an assigned subject: a questionnaire from which gender boxes have been removed, an address that uses gender-neutral language, a desegregated changing room, and so on. The Neutral, therefore, designates the punctual alleviation of gender norms. Its effects lie mainly in the momentary possibility to do or to be otherwise, a possibility given to an embodied subject who has not been assigned or categorized.

Suspending gender thus carves a degree of latitude for subjects by reducing the costs of developing nonnormative relations to the binary. For Comment (1991, 221), the Neutral is an attempt “to put the symbolic into crisis” through the “disruption of the grids that it uses to divide reality and make sense of it.” More importantly, Barthes’s theoretical project results from the idea that any such divisions imply “a shortfall of vision or of thinking.” Therefore, by interrupting social practices through which the symbolic, taken here as another word for the norm, compels us, the Neutral generates a rehabilitation of those forms of life, ways of being and inhabiting the world, and styles of building relations and collectives that have been obscured or inhibited by “lines of division and opposition” (Comment 1991, 221).

Neutral practices do not produce a suppression or an abolition of the gender norm once and for all but rather work toward eroding its structuring force. In other words, the Neutral effects a reversal of the balance of normative forces in the place where it occurs. Norms, as Macherey (2014) argues, produce an inclination toward this behavior or that identity. They never force us but always invite us to comply with a preestablished program exposing those of us who refuse or cannot enlist in their programs to vulnerability and violence—so much so that individuals seem to perform gender of their own will and out of their own character, as a “second nature.” Yet those norms are not merely internalized through ungraspable social processes of normalization. Some social practices speak for them. And they might speak for them differently than bodily performances of gender do. Thus, by suspending those assigning practices or “gender regulations” (Butler 2004), the Neutral gesture leaves open the possibility to put aside, at the time of this suspension, this second nature that the gender norm imposes on us.

Sex-segregated bathrooms constitute gender will-to-seize or regulations by asking people to choose the correct door. Yet, they marginalize gender-nonconforming bodies while explicitly excluding nonbinary identities. They also expose “recognizably trans” persons to the risk of physical and verbal harassment by making them, as Cavanagh (2010) puts it, “out of place” (13). ⁵ But sex-segregated bathrooms also have a normative impact on cisgender and gender-conforming users. They reproduce the symbolic weight of sexual difference and establish a necessary connection between intimacy, hygiene, and gender.

Susan Stryker, Joel Sanders, and Terry Kogan imagined a neutral bathroom design named Stalled (Sanders and Stryker 2016). The project seeks to address the current debate on equal access to bathrooms for transgender persons by offering a design inclusive to all types of embodied subjects regardless of gender, race, religion, and disability. What makes the Stalled! bathrooms different from other existing all-gender bathrooms is that all types of gender markers and norms have disappeared from the organization of the space while the intimacy and safety of all users are ensured. Gender markers have even vacated the bathroom signs indicating their presence. Stalled generates a user experience in which the belt of the binary has been loosened. In that sense, the project is a concrete embodied practice of the Neutral.

This space becomes hospitable to gender-nonconforming users without reifying their identities by creating specifically dedicated places for them. ⁶ But the design of Stalled! is also meant to transform bathroom experiences of gender-conforming individuals by “[creating] a relatively barrier free open precinct that encourages all embodied subjects to freely and safely engage with one another in public space” (Sanders and Stryker 2016, 786). Disconnecting the experience of public bathrooms from gender divisions therefore also opens the way for developing alternative relations between one’s and other’s genders and feelings of safety, security, and promiscuity.

Confronted with a neutralized place instead of yet another assertion of sexual difference, subjects find themselves facing a slightly clearer coast. But this clearer coast does not imply that they will necessarily follow the path of an inventive conduct troubling the norm. Gender norms orientate and invite more than they coerce us to follow their programs. The Neutral, therefore, frees us from one of the various burdens of gender norms. It orients and invites by leaving us the possibility to act differently, to choose another path. Where there was once a structural normative division, the enforcement of a “grid of legibility,” to borrow Butler’s (2004) term (42), something is suddenly, imperceptibly missing. The practice of the Neutral hence operates on the underside of the norm, attempting to defeat the calls for its reproduction with its own tools silently, not by channeling specific gender performances but by giving the fewest directions possible. What if Reimer’s doctors had suspended their continuous demand that he take and keep a specific place in the gender order? Reimer, certainly, would not have lived a life outside of gender. He might have nonetheless lived a life in which his gender identity and bodily form would have not exposed him to alienating medical interventions, a life in which his gendered subjectivity and body would have been more intelligible to others and to himself and, thus, also more livable.

Barthes’s work on the Neutral can also cast new light on the Foucauldian call to “not [be] governed quite so much” (Foucault 1997, 45). Foucault describes the critical gesture of enlightenment philosophy in those terms. Critique appears as a means to escape, at least partly, the different forms of governmentalization, with the aim of “desubjugation of the subject in the context of . . . the politics of truth” (47). Gender norms are but another name for expressing the way in which bodies are made to comply with socially constructed, gendered truths. As with gender regulations or the Barthesian “will-to-seize,” they are part of the process of naturalization and normalization through which individuals are subjectivized. The Neutral, in that sense, constitutes one of the ways of not being gendered quite so much. It does not cancel all forms of government but makes the governing—and governing based on gender differences—less burdensome.

The possibility of the Neutral invites us to shift our attention from the subjects and bodies that have been gendered and can embrace or instead resist the call of the norm to the gendering agent. Foucault’s text, like many queer and feminist critical responses to gender norms, is centered on governed subjects reacting critically to their governmentalization. But such focus favors a narrative in which almost everything, but also nothing in particular, governs and genders us. ⁷ Yet, we are all governed and gendered in one way or another and with different degrees of normative violence. Thinking the Neutral allows us to question first and foremost those different normalizing practices and to seek to interrupt them. It implies that we cannot indeed suppress the demands of the norm always and everywhere but that it is possible to identify and suspend some of them. Surely, norms and the obligation to situate oneself within them exist outside explicit categorical practices, but the latter represent footholds, salient nodes in the “mesh of power” (Foucault 2001, 1020). And it might be easier to develop a less constraining relation to norms when those footholds are a bit more scattered.

The Silence of the Neutral, or Making Differences Insignificant

Of course, governing or gendering as little as possible is still governing and still gendering. It is also expressing another norm. Barthes (2005, 27) reminds us that even silence cannot escape interpretation and often “congeals itself into a sign.” Barthes argues that choosing the Neutral does not systematically mean choosing silence over speech but, on the contrary, ensures that while “oppos[ing] dogmatic speech, one [does] not produce an equally dogmatic silence” (28). The Neutral therefore fails when it becomes the normative banner of a genderless existence, or an imperative of nonidentification with either a gender or, for that matter, a sexual orientation. Genders and sexual orientations are not annulled or banned from the social field over which the Neutral operates. They can persist as identifications open to critical reflection from subjects themselves and not as fixed identities determined by the social arrangements where they act and live.

Hence, the silence of the Neutral is very different from a silencing silence. The Neutral does not suggest suppressing categorical identifications, permanently erasing the words “woman,” “man,” “nonbinary,” “gay,” “straight,” “bi,” “trans,” and “cis” from our lives. It maintains the same relation with those appellations that Barthes suggests the Neutral has with adjectives:

Suppress the adjective? First of all, this is not “easy” (to say the least!), and then, in the end, it would suppose an ethics of “purity” ( “truth”/ “absoluteness”) to which should be opposed a more dialectic ethics of language. . . . Of course, an adjective always imprisons (the other, myself), that’s even the definition of the adjective: to predicate is to affirm, thus to confine [affirmer, donc enfermer]. But at the same time to evacuate adjectives from language would be to pasteurize to the point of destruction, it’s funereal. . . . Don’t bleach language, savor it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it. We can prefer lure to mourning, or at least we can recognize that there is a time for the lure, a time for the adjective. Perhaps the Neutral is that: to accept the predicate as nothing more than a moment: a time. (Barthes 2005, 60–61)

The input of the Neutral, rather than purifying our lives and language of any kind of gender markers, suggests that, in certain moments and times, categories should be set aside, especially when they take the form of an assigning demand.

Sedgwick (1990) and Brown (1996) have shown, like Barthes, the ambiguity of silence in the context of sexual and gender norms. Refusing to ask and to know about people’s sexual identifications and practices can become as alienating as requesting them to disclose them, especially when this refusal operates in a situation where only some are allowed to speak. Silence can be both empowering and oppressive, as Sedgwick notes:

To alienate conclusively, definitionally, from anyone on any theoretical ground the authority to describe and name their own sexual desire is a terribly consequential seizure. In this century, in which sexuality has been made expressive of the essence of both identity and knowledge, it may represent the most intimate violence possible. It is also an act replete with the most disempowering mundane institutional effects and potentials. It is, of course, central to the modern history of homophobic oppression. (Sedgwick 1990, 26)

The Neutral therefore attempts to “outplay silence (as sign, as system)” (Barthes 2005, 27), to undo silence when it becomes a line of demarcation between some acceptable and speakable practices and others that are condemned to shame and shadows. The absence of regulation is not an interdiction to tell or to disclose oneself or one’s truth, desires, or identities. The neutral gesture has nothing to do with the silence of a “don’t ask” that implies also a “don’t tell.” It is directed not toward a gendered subject that it neutralizes but toward the normative practices gendering this subject. Sedgwick (1990, 26) evokes the advantages and limits of two different strategies to gender and sexual binaries—one that would seek to attenuate the weight of those categories and another that invests them with a fiercely political dimension—concluding that “the safer proceeding would seem to be to give as much credence as one finds it conceivable to give to self-reports of sexual difference.” The objective is not to silence the other but to leave as much place as possible for the other’s “self-perception, self-knowledge, or self-report” and “impose the lightest possible burden of platonic definitional stress” on them (Sedgwick 1990, 27).

Likewise, and paradoxically, the Neutral gesture can never be passive. It implies an active commitment to identify the places where gender regulations are manifest. Normative sexual difference is more structuring than we tend to think; it speaks relentlessly where we do not expect it, when we do not think of it. The Neutral can therefore be practiced only through the active search for and suspension of gender regulations, however they may manifest themselves. In that sense, the Neutral is a strategy and a gesture that does not “refer to ‘impressions’ of grayness, of ‘neutrality,’ of indifference” (Barthes 2005, 28). “The Neutral—my Neutral—,” writes Barthes, “can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states. To outplay the paradigm is an ardent, burning activity.” In fact, suspensions of wills-to-seize, because of their situated, localized, and ephemerous dimension, cannot last. They require, as Zhuo (2017) also notes, an “indefatigable effort” (120). Femininity, masculinity, and their avatars will take back their place and weight. The Neutral, therefore, is also always backed by a certain humility as we admit that gender norms structure our lives and that easing their weight is an ever-unfinished project.

Of course, without becoming the normalizing flagship of an androgynous form of life, the Neutral does encourage a certain relation to categories and binaries, which is a more distant one. Not only does the suspension of normative regulations leave room for the possibility of gender-nonconforming forms of life, but it also lessens the symbolic weight of gender and therefore suggests an alternative place in social life for it. This place has to do with what I would call a becoming-incidental of sexual difference. I use the term becoming here not only to pay tribute to the concept of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) but also to highlight a process of transformation that consists in the gradual and imperceptible loss of gender’s importance. In the moment and space where the Neutral unfolds, it shakes off the weight of the norm and therefore also its yoke on bodies and subjectivities. Yet this suspension also drains the binary of its power.

With the Neutral, variations on the norm can proliferate without being turned into new categories, since gender divisions have lost their structuring principle. The absence of any demarcating lines might in fact be a privileged way to give differences their full singularities back. “The vagueness of difference” is, even for Barthes (1994), “the only fashion of respecting its subtlety, its infinite repercussion” (166). As instances of gender suspension multiply, difference goes from being a structuring binary to being an ancillary set of displacements.

[The Neutral] substitutes for the idea of opposition that of the slight difference, of the onset, of the effort toward difference, in other words, of nuance: nuance becomes a principle of allover organization (which covers the totality of the surface, as in the landscape of the triptych) that in a way skips the paradigm: this integrally and almost exhaustively nuanced space is the shimmer. (Barthes 2005, 51)

Sexual difference partially stops signifying; it loses its importance and its fixed meaning, without leading to a point of homogeneity with an exact mix of masculinity and femininity. On the contrary, the dissolution of the norm can leave space for unexpected plays on sexual and gender variations beyond the man/woman, hetero/homo, trans/cis oppositions.

In that sense, the Neutral, just like Stalled!, is a concrete practice of what trans critical studies scholar Currah (2003) calls “gender pluralism.” Currah describes gender pluralism as “the constitutive political tenets of transgender activists” (719) in the United States and as a way to compromise between conflicting conceptions of gender and sex within transgender movements. ⁸ Gender pluralism is a kind of suspension, an “agnosticism about gender” that prevents from dictating one particular narrative of trans experience. It is therefore also a way “to let many flowers bloom” and allows “for many narratives of transgender identity that now appear in social and legal arenas [to] continue to circulate and even proliferate” (720). Yet, for Currah, gender agnosticism constitutes a discursive imaginary and a long-term goal rather than a political project to be incorporated in current avenues of social transformation.

Barthes himself notes that he “resorts to a kind of philosophy vaguely labeled pluralism” in which “the opposition of the sexes” ceases to be a “a law of nature.” And this enables “the meanings and the sexes” to be “pluralized” (Barthes 1994, 72). For Barthes (1994), it is clear that the suspension of normative will-to-seize, rather than their resignification, opens the way for “flows, leaks, skids, shifts, slips” (72) in understanding, embodiments, and experience of gender and sexuality. In that sense, neutral practices might create a moment where “sex will be taken into no typology (there will be, for example, only homosexualities, whose plural will baffle any constituted, centered discourse, to the point where it seems . . . virtually pointless to talk about it)” (Barthes 1994, 69). ⁹

The Neutral gesture, like the queer gesture, troubles and undoes the gender order. But neutral practices also render gender unimportant. “If not annulled” outright, sexual difference may at least be “rendered irretrievable,” generating “delectable insignificance” (Barthes 1994, 132). By alleviating the symbolic weight of gender divisions and therefore concomitantly altering the structures of intelligibility that organize perceptions according to gender lines, the Neutral renders slowly irrelevant the distinction between what is queer and what is not. This unqueering of queer, however, does not correspond to a normalization of the kind that Warner (2000) and other queer theorists have criticized.

The Neutral that I am trying to theorize here seeks a similar normative goal that Butler identifies for her own work—that is, to “let the lives of gender and sexual minorities become more possible and more livable, for bodies that are gender nonconforming as well as those who conform too well (and at a high cost) to be able to breath and move more freely in public and private spaces, as well as those zones that cross and confound those two” (Butler 2015, 32). Yet, by making the lives of minorities more livable, the Neutral also contains the risk that those minorities stop being viewed as such. The Neutral is as “antiseparatist” and as “antiassimilationist” as the queer politics foregrounded by Sedgwick (1993, viii) and Warner (2000). Practices of gender suspension work toward a world where nonconforming embodied subjects cease to signpost trouble or strangeness. The Neutral in that sense might constitute another tactic to realize a queer politics in which “the dominant culture assimilates queer culture” and not “the other way around” (Warner 2000, 75). The object of assimilation in this case is the queer possibility to engage in nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality beyond binaries and categories. Hence, the Neutral offers a resistance strategy to gender norms targeting the collective relational and institutional structures that reproduce and impose those norms on embodied subjects. In that sense, it contributes to queer and trans ethical and political reflections on the gender binary without confining the discussion to the question of what a body can do and be in relation to the norms. The tactic of gender suspension equips us to imagine more precisely how to build a shared world that would be truly hospitable for all kind of gender embodiments and identifications.

Of course, the possibility of the Neutral also implies recognizing the cost of such a becoming-incidental of gender and sexual differences and therefore also of subversive queer practices. “What is difficult,” Barthes (1994, 133) remarks about gay politics, “is not to liberate sexuality according to a more or less libertarian project but to release it from meaning, including from transgression as meaning.” The same goes about gender embodiments and identities. But the cost of this release is granted to the promise of a world more livable for all of us, as well as more horizontal. Indeed, loosening the social significance of gender and its cisgender and heteronormative demand also shares in building deeper equality between bodies and subjects normatively hierarchized by norms of femininity and masculinity.

Erasing the Feminine or Alleviating the Binary?

Barthes’s work has sometimes been related to queer theoretical insights, yet it has rarely been deemed relevant for feminist thought. On the contrary, Barthes’s concept of the Neutral and his praise of indifference toward categories have been conceived as a reaffirmation of the masculine standpoint and yet another erasure of femininity. Schor (2014, 49) argues, for instance, that “denied sexual difference shades into sexual indifference and, following the same slippery path, into a paradoxical reinscription of the very differences the strategy was designed to denaturalize.” Schor formulates here a classic critique of sexual indifference or gender neutrality in which refusing the binary equates to refusing differences and, therefore, relegating to the margins feminine forms of life that have been taken as chief symbols of difference. This critique, if often well-founded, takes Barthes as an advocate of a kind of gender neutrality that is biased toward masculinity. However, another interpretation of Barthes’s Neutral is possible.

Sexual difference, and hence indifference, have, in fact, two modes of expression in gendered and hierarchized societies. On the one hand, sexual difference can refer to the sexual division of masculine and feminine bodies, values, interests, and spheres in the gender binary. On the other hand, sexual difference has also been associated solely with women. In sexist ideologies, as Beauvoir famously noted, the category “woman” alone embodies sexual difference: “she is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other” (1953, 16). Yet, Beauvoir herself also noted the other meaning of sexual difference. She remarks, indeed, without fully engaging with the implications of such an intuition that “to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests and occupations are manifestly different” (14). And this double meaning of the term also sheds a different light on the call for sexual indifference.

In Schor’s critique of Barthes, indeed, sexual difference appears as the specific mark of women, and indifference therefore becomes shaped by masculine traits, rendering feminine experiences and bodies invisible. It is also what Jane Gallop claims about Barthes’s work when she writes that “the wish to escape sexual difference might be but another mode of denying women” (Schor 2014, 49). But Schor and Gallop seem to elide the distinction between sexual difference as the mark of woman and sexual difference as a structuring division of the social world. Barthes, in fact, is interested primarily in categorical binaries, their tyrannizing social and ethical manifestations. And blaming him for denying the existence of gender differences and sexualities is surprising, as is clear from the vivacity with which he calls them into question, through his critique of the will-to-seize and of the fixity and exclusivity that saturate gender and sexual experiences. Barthes’s gesture has less to do with a denial of difference and the weight they inflict upon us than on an attempt to identify a tactic to alleviate this weight. What Gallop and Schor seem to refuse, however, is the interest that there might be for women also to live in a less gendered world.

Linda Zerilli explores such interest in an analysis she makes of Hannah Arendt’s attitude toward categorical identities. Arendt, just like Barthes, has been the object of numerous feminist criticisms exposing her indifference to gender dynamics and power relations (for an overview, see Dietz and Honig 1995). Feminist readers have challenged, for instance, the Arendtian distinctions among the private, the social, and the political, as well as her conception of the body detached from gender consideration. Zerilli, however, suggests an alternative analysis of Arendt’s work, where her perspectives contribute to our understanding of gender-oppressive dynamics and of ways to escape them. She argues that “the irresistible need to correct Arendt’s gender blindness” identified in feminist readers might contribute to the “reinscription of sexual difference” (Zerilli 1995, 188). Although for Schor the Neutral risks reinscribing sexual difference by marginalizing the feminine, Zerilli underlines an opposite risk. By insisting on the existence of those differences and the need to politicize them to make women visible, Arendt’s feminist readers—and, we could add, Barthes’s ones—also participate in the repetition of this difference. In other words, feminist critiques seem to face an insoluble dilemma: if they start from the existing situation of women and seek emancipation from a place of difference, bringing to light marginalized qualities and forms of life associated with the feminine, then the masculine/feminine distinction remains, and so does the exclusionary binary. But if they seek to act on the binary itself, calling it into question and seeking strategies to alleviate its weight, they risk falling back into a kind of indifference that erases what has been marked as different.

The dilemma, however, might not be as unescapable as it seems. In fact, targeting the expressions of sexual difference, the reenactment of the gender binary is not incompatible with questioning the othering of feminine forms of life. But this requires consistently unmasking the masculine, as well as a certain socially and racially situated masculine, that is disguised as the neutral, the general, or the universal. In other words, marking sexual difference as something that is solely and essentially feminine is as much an expression of gender norms as enforcing the distinction between male and female bodies. And therefore, to denounce what is generally deemed neutral as being colored by masculine traits is a way to denounce, also, the binary. It is part of the journey toward a moment or a space where the Neutral does not present itself behind some traits instead of others but leaves open the possibility for a combination, superposition, or coexistence of those traits previously associated with one term or the other. Gender indifference, therefore, has not to do with the search for a homogeneity or generality that could describe all beings and all sexes but rather to do with the priority it gives to singularity over types or classifications.

In fact, why not, as Zerilli (1995) suggests, take seriously Arendt’s deliberate refusal to consider the gendered elements of identity as relevant categories for thinking subjectivity and action? Zerilli analyses this refusal in a letter Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem, a friend of hers who blamed her for not rooting her political theory in the affirmation of her Jewish identity. Scholem more specifically criticized Arendt’s (1963) arguments in Eichmann in Jerusalem for not being sufficiently aligned with, or worthy of, her belonging to the Jewish community. In her response, Arendt explicitly distances herself from those identity categories that Scholem wants her to embrace. She starts by agreeing in part with him.

I found it puzzling that you should write “I regard you wholly as a daughter of our people, and in no other way.” The truth is I have never pretended to be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never even felt tempted in that direction. It would have been like saying that I was a man and not a woman—that is to say, kind of insane. I know, of course, that there is a “Jewish problem” even on this level, but it has never been my problem—not even in my childhood. I have always regarded my Jewishness as one of the indisputable factual data of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. (Arendt and Scholem 2017, 246)

Here, Arendt admits that she cannot deny her Jewish identity, just as she cannot deny being a woman. Those two elements constitute the factual givens of her existence. Arendt cannot deny that she has Jewish parents and a feminine body, or that in society those two elements take a significance that pushes others to assign these attributes to her. However, she never writes to Scholem, “I am a Jew” or “I am a woman.” As noted by Zerilli (1995), she refuses to affirm her Jewishness or her womanhood as a key dimension of her subjectivity and her writing. As Zerilli argues, along with Arendt, “one cannot deny one’s socially ascribed membership in either group without denying one’s very existence” (189). Yet, by refusing to embrace it explicitly, Arendt “can resist the closure of socially ascribed subjectivities, keeping them undecidable.”

Arendt challenges, in a sense, the idea that those elements are determinant or that they must generate significative conclusions on what she is; what she wants; or what she does, thinks, or writes. It’s because such an attitude is equivalent to, as Arendt writes to Scholem, a “basic gratitude for everything that is as it is, for what has been given and was not, could not be made, for things that are physei and not [nomos]” (Arendt and Scholem 2017, 246). Not only is such an attitude fundamentally “prepolitical,” but an excessive attention to what has been given also precludes what one can do or say by “[making] certain types of behavior impossible.” In the context of Arendt and Scholem’s debate, ideas that Arendt expressed in her latest book are not merely inappropriate for a Jewish woman, according to Scholem, but become “impossible” when submitted to this attitude. Arendt then concludes, “It is incomprehensible to me why you should wish to stick a label on me which never fitted in the past and does not fit now” (248). She expresses here a quite Barthesian surprise when faced with the will-to-seize of her interlocutor, who wishes to force her into religious categories that she considers limiting.

What confuses you is that my arguments and my approach are different from what you are used to; in other words, the trouble is that I am independent. By this I mean, on the one hand, that I do not belong to any organization and always speak only for myself. . . . Whatever objections you may have to the results, you won’t understand them unless you realize that they are really my own and nobody else’s. (250)

Arendt reminds Scholem that it is her thoughts and arguments he needs to examine before he relates them to the social facts of their author. Of course, astute readers could read Arendt’s resistance toward being assigned as a refusal to acknowledge her social position and to situate her work politically and socially. But should we really read into her skepticism as an early critique of situated knowledge and standpoint theories?

Indeed, Arendt’s discreet refusal to make her Jewishness or womanhood paramount, as others, such as Scholem and present-day feminist scholars, would like is not tantamount to the liberal move of doing away with all categories of identity in order to enter the abstract world of the political or rational subject. Such a move would reenact the opposition between dominant and marginalized subjects of knowledge. Arendt’s attitude offers, I think, something else. In a context where it is demanded of her to situate herself (as Jewish or non-Jewish), and in which she writes and thinks according to what is expected of minority groups, Arendt expresses resistance to the consistent demand of the social world that she keeps within existing categories of identity and discloses a coherent account of who she is based on those categories.

Sedgwick offers a similar insight into the relations between social positions and theoretical work. In the introduction to the Epistemology of the Closet, she questions what it could mean for a white heterosexual woman to write a book on a set of Western literary figures of masculine homosexuality. While she admits that those social positions play a role in her thinking, she also expresses caution: “Realistically, what brings me to this work can hardly be that I am a woman; or a feminist, but that I am this particular one” (Sedgwick 1990, 59). For Sedgwick, as for Arendt, there is a kind of irreducibility of those categories that cannot exhaust the reasons, conscious or unconscious, that lead one to write this or that argument. Without denying her own social position, she claims, again, just like Arendt, that the best assessment of her work relates to “what contribution the work does make, and to whom” (Sedgwick 1990, 59). Here the question is not about knowing precisely, categorically, who writes a piece, but of whom and to whom this piece speaks, and what its political effects can be. This is what Arendt had wished to discuss with Scholem, not whether it was appropriate for a Jewish writer to write the book that she did.

Rereading Arendt in this way, Zerilli (1995,188) argues, discloses, and pushes us to refuse “the cultural imperative to take a position in the symbolic order as either a man or a woman.” This refusal echoes Barthes’s desire for the Neutral; he will not be assigned, categorized, classified. What has been interpreted as Arendt’s blindness to gender inequalities in the public sphere is viewed by Zerilli as a quiet yet active attempt to undo the gender paradigm and not “(be forced to) choose the correct door all the better to maintain the illusion of a natural correspondence between anatomy and destiny” (188). In Zerilli’s account of Arendt’s skepticism toward gender categories, the “what” of identity is not only relegated to the private sphere but also neutralized by this detachment.

If we follow Zerilli, then, putting identity categories in suspense can not only contribute to the shaping of a more livable world for nonconforming bodies and lives. Practicing the Neutral can also advance the discussion and analysis of the oppression and emancipation of those of us who are currently identified, recognized, and assigned as women—those who, because of such identification, are exposed to violence, marginalization, and discrimination in the current nets of gender norms. When designing a neutral space, Stalled! creators have not only sought to attend for the interests of trans and gender nonconforming users. They also made sure that the space was safe and hospitable for all women, despite the presence of men. ¹⁰ To do this, the design combines private, fully closed (from floor to ceiling) cubicles with a set of shared facilities (sinks, mirrors, changing tables, etc.) that is open and visible from the broader public space in which the bathrooms are integrated. ¹¹

Interrupting the repeated course of normative regulations, neutral practices work toward reconfiguring our singular and collective experiences of gender. Experience, as de Lauretis (1987) reminds us, is “a complex of meaning effects, habits, dispositions, associations, and perceptions resulting from the semiotic interaction between oneself and outer world” (18). This experience “designates the process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed.” And therefore, alleviating gender regulations, which are an integral part of this “complex of meaning effects,” might also transform subjects’ experiences and the construction of their subjectivities, even if this occurs in an undetermined, changing, or very quiet way. Opening gender modes of being, the Neutral offers women of various social groups the possibility to take another place in the gender order than the one expected of them, and it creates a margin for men to escape the virile and oppressive forms of life demanded by hegemonic masculinity.

In this way, the practice of gender suspension sheds new light, not only on the queer narrative of gender trouble but also on the feminist utopia of gender abolition. The end of sexual difference has constituted a recurring political motive in materialist and radical feminist thought (e.g., Delphy 2016 [1984]; Haslanger 2012; Wittig 1992). It rests on the idea that the gender binary is intrinsically linked to the oppression of women for which it fulfills an ideological and reinforcing function. And so, in a perfectly equal society, “after the revolution,” as Haslanger (2012, 245) puts it, the gender binary will have lost its social significance—that is, would have ceased to generate any meaningful cultural, political, or economic distinctions between persons. Yet, and in the terms of French feminist thinker Delphy (2013, 81), gender abolition constitutes mainly a radical “utopia”—“a point of arrival requiring many social transformations” out of our current political reach. The narrative of gender suspension however suggests a slightly different relation with time as it allows for gender to become incidental not within the brighter and remote tomorrows of feminist revolution but in the here and now of social practice. It is approached as an ongoing process of gender undoing through local and temporary acts of norm suspension.

Conclusion

Zerilli’s interpretation of Arendt and Butler’s reading of David Reimer’s story seems to express a common suspicion toward the saliency of gender identities. In light of this echoing skepticism, Barthes’s understanding of the Neutral can, I have argued, inform the debate on queer and feminist politics. Indeed, Barthes’s insights might open the way for an inclusive ethics and politics attuned to the interests of different groups impacted by gender norms and able to realize, at least partly, one of the goals Zerilli (1995) identifies for feminism—that is, “to loosen the hold that gender has on both our interpretive frameworks and cultural imaginary” (188).

The engendering of the world, in fact, takes many forms. And one of them is the daily assigning practices and the apparent incidental manner in which the gender binary accosts us, always interacting with other structuring and hierarchized identity norms. These are social moments of ordinary existence where the gender binary calls upon us, whether or not we desire this call, moments where we cannot really look away, moments where the option “prefer not to say” is not available. A feminist and queer practice of the Neutral would consist in interrupting or resisting the performative reconduction of gender differences through the persistent affirmation, identification, and classification of one’s and others’ genders. It would ask us, What if we didn’t care that much? What if we recognized that gender is ascribed to us and can be an important aspect of our subjectivity while also trying to undo, at times, the regular occurrences of this ascription?