We Are Not (Yet) Nonbinary

"The Solacii" by Tigre Mashaal-Lively, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo courtesy of Dorrie Mazzone (2023).

I am addressing this paper to other white temporarily-able-bodied settler feminists interested in moving, not just toward a queer (queerer?) horizon, but toward a nonbinary liberatory futurity as a collective political aspiration (not an identitarian goal of self-actualization). In this paper, I consider how we might mobilize the nonbinary as a freedom practice, a practice building toward a future where we are all free. Imagining and creating a liberatory inclusive future necessarily requires dismantling the constrictions of reproductive futurity, constrictions built on binary analytics. This paper begins with an outline of how a sense of urgency, legal and medicalized frameworks, and anti-victimism have dominated post- Dobbs responses and reinvigorated an allegiance to retrograde, repressive reproductive futurity. This brief discussion of post-Dobbs responses sets the stage for an exploration of a more expansive, inclusive, collective futurity beyond the settler state, a freer futurity made possible by mobilizing a nonbinary intersectional critique anchored in queer/crip/Indigenous analytics.