Feeling into Categorization: Race/Gender Formations and the Proliferation of Gender

Rae Willis-Conger, University of California, Berkeley

In recent years the visibility of gender outside the binary has expanded. A growing minority of people within the United States no longer identify with the gender the medical system assigned them at birth, and terms like “non-binary” and “agender” have proliferated. This paper asks what constellation of experiences and sensations prompts people to identify outside of immediately available categories. How do people know they are outside the gender binary? Through in-depth interviews with forty participants in California and North Carolina, I find that an epistemology of feeling prompts identification outside the man/woman binary. I use the term epistemology of feeling to describe an interior understanding of the self, rooted in cognition, emotion, and embodiment. This work contributes to understandings of how we grapple with and internalize externally imposed forms of classification, as well as literature on the recent proliferation of gender identities.

Keywords: Qualitative data/methods/approaches

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