Beyond the Narrow Expectations of Gender

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“What are you?”

As a “butch-light” lesbian, I get this question a lot, reading to the straight world as not quite man, but definitely not woman enough. Linda Bournane Engelberth’s “Outside the Binary” lingers in this space, creating portraits that deny the conventional male-female binary and defy gender as something easily written — or read — on the body.

“Non-binary” resists simple definition. As Gabriel, one of Ms. Bournane Engelberth’s subjects, notes, “I do not want to be pulled into one gender, I want to embrace both but also be in between and not be either.” Non-binary moves beyond gender identifications or vacillates between them, reminding us that gender, that oh-so-serious subject, is play, after all. Non-binary exposes the limitations of language that seeks to master, explain and contain identity.

Each portrait has a personal reflection about identity, proof that non-binary is about more than external markers: it is also about internal feelings. These first-person accounts exist beyond the frame, with and against the portraits they illuminate and complicate.

Non-binary may be beyond the categories we think we know, but it also might include and embrace them: male, female, genderqueer, gender-fluid, agender, transgender, etc. The “et cetera” of non-binary identity cannot be overstated. Or can it? I’m caught in a linguistic conundrum: as soon as I write “non-binary identity,” I stop and think, “No, the point is non-identification.”