The nonbinary playing field: confusion as participatory affect in contemporary memoir

This article theorizes confusion as a central affect in nonbinary life writing. Drawing on a corpus of contemporary nonbinary memoirs, I propose the metaphor of the nonbinary playing field to describe how confusion circulates between nonbinary people and those that encounter them, binding them into social relations that are as fraught as they are generative. Confusion is often weaponized against nonbinary people. Yet in memoirs by Jamie Windust, T.C. Oakes-Monger, and others, confusion emerges as an affective force that exposes how gendered legibility is enforced and strategically withheld. It may manifest as scrutiny, violence or policing, but it can also open possibilities for refusal and reorientation. Reading with Sara Ahmed’s work on affective politics and Thom van Dooren’s notion of species participation, I argue that confusion is a participatory affect that implicates bystanders and disturbs the normative order of binary gender. In that way, I consider confusion not only as an indicator of gender mis/recognition or nonbinary tactic that exposes the violence of gendered norms, but as an affective hook into the nonbinary as political sphere – a hook through which the nonbinary becomes a coalitional position to occupy.