2026 Theses Doctoral

Tracing the Nonbinary Present: Self-Definition and the Genre of Contemporary Gender Claims

Hord, Levi C.

How do the politics of gender self-definition change when the claim to be – rather than the body or aesthetics – becomes the primary signifier of gender? In the twenty-first century, acts of self-definition (such as pronoun declarations or disclosures of gender identity) have become central to gender’s social circulation, generating epistemological anxiety and renewed ethical inquiry across both trans studies scholarship and public discourse. Through the 2010s and 2020s, gender was increasingly articulated, and accepted in trans and queer communities, as a claim that one makes about oneself rather than necessarily substantiated through material or visual evidence.

Distilling this significant semiotic and political shift through the paradigmatic example of the proliferation of nonbinary claims between 2007 and 2025, I work through a series of literary and cinematic readings to engage with the latent political tensions of gender self-definition. This dissertation thus asks: what happens when gender’s meaning is located primarily in its enunciation rather than its embodiment, and what kinds of politics emerge – or unravel – as a result of that shift?

The first section of the dissertation elaborates the concept of the “unsubstantiated claim” as key to this shift in gender self-definition wherein the claim is foregrounded as sufficient. Situating this concept within the history of transgender studies and within public discourse about transness, I argue that the unsubstantiated claim animates both anti-trans and exclusionary transgender rhetoric. The middle of the dissertation engages in scholarly debates about the ethics of gender self-definition in relation to other contested forms of self-definition: cultural appropriation and state recognition.

The final chapter and the epilogue bring these insights to bear on the disciplinary foundations of transgender studies, particularly the return to substance that has characterized the field’s scholarship in the 2020s. I argue for reclaiming speculation and theory as vital to imagining possible genders beyond structuralist containment. By countering the compulsion towards substantiation, this dissertation embraces both the ethical challenges and radical potentials of a present in which gender exists most contentiously as a self-declared, discursive act.