ENBrg past sessions

The final session of the cycle!

Open mic

This month, we'll be holding an open-mic for students, staff and researchers to discuss their work, projects or interests in research beyond the binary. This will include short discussions of:

• Farida Soliman: 'Attitudes towards grammatical gendering in Arabic.'

• Robert James Hellyer: 'Discourses around gender-inclusive and -exclusionary plural address terms in Tiktok'

Feel free to bring:

• a short description of something you are working on

• or, a piece of research or reading we haven't discussed yet

• or, something you think is interesting! (It's very relaxed!)

Last, but not least:

We will close with a discussion of future plans, including the re-run of the interest group next year, invited speakers, conferences and publications.

This session will take place in May at 4pm BST and the Zoom link will be shared in advance through the ENBrg mailing list. Subscribe here.

This month's reading group is the rescheduled due to strike action at QMUL from last month.

The readings we’ll be taking a look at are:

• Chang, S. C. (2019) Token Act. In Rajunov, M., & Duane, A. S. (Eds.), Nonbinary: Memoirs of gender and identity. Columbia University Press. pp. 76-85.

• Office for National Statistics. (2017). Qualitative research on gender identity: phase 1 summary report. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/measuringequality/genderidentity/qualitativeresearchongenderidentityphase1summaryreport

With the Chang chapter, we thought it might be useful to consider how we might approach working with participants such as Chang. What aspects of our methodologies might Chang problematise?

We discussed the folowing:

• Chantal Gratton's (2016) Resisting the Gender Binary: The Use of (ING) in the Construction of Non-binary Transgender Identities. (read here; a ~30 min read)

• Beyond pronouns: How languages are reshaping to include nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people. A graphic article by Minami Funakoshi and illustrated by Sam Granados (read here; a ~10 min read).

Thanks to Caitlin for recommending the Funakoshi graphic article! It's also been doing the rounds on social media a lot this week, so you might have seen it! Particularly good for those not as familiar with gender across languages.