Search results

Purpose: To consider the extent to which the legal recognition of non-binary gender has the potential to disrupt the gender binary.

Methodology/Approach: This chapter will employ case study as method, focusing on recent changes to Australian law and policy, which introduce a third gender category. I rely on the work of queer theorists on normativity and recognition as a theoretical framework and on the work of social scientists on transgender people as evidence.

Findings: This chapter finds that while there is much to be celebrated about increasing alternatives to the dominant categories of male and female, the legal recognition of non-binary gender may in fact serve to conceptually purge the dominant gender categories of non-conforming elements while simultaneously masking the ways in which institutions of regulatory power continue to demand conformity with normative standards of gender.

Research Limitations: Since few non-binary individuals in Australia have adopted the X marker the implications laid out in this paper are speculative. The experiences of non-binary individuals present an important avenue for further research.

Practical Implications: I recommend, as an alternative to further gender classifications, that we should seek to minimize the degree to which membership of a particular gender category is used to distribute rights and privileges.

Originality/Value of Paper: This chapter advances the literature on non-binary gender, contributes to existing queer and feminist analyses of the gender binary and extends work on normativity to legal recognition of alternative genders.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing mandates forced many young Australians to radically alter everyday interactions. Physical co-presence and embodied experience, a previously taken-for-granted dynamic of territorially embedded everyday lives, and interactions with urban surroundings, were reconfigured. Digital technology, while bringing people together for work, study, or socialising, is seen to dissolve material space, and mitigate geographic isolation. But what role does co-presence and embodied, spatially embedded experience play for young people living in the city? This chapter draws on the voices and experiences of young Australians aged 18–24 during the pandemic to clarify and understand the role of the digital in their everyday lives, how they negotiated disruptions to education, work, and managing relationships during the pandemic to articulate the relationships between digital lives and embodied experiences in the city.

In this comparative study, we explore the ways eight queer university students from Trinidad and Tobago and New Brunswick, Canada, use cellphilm production (cellphone + film production + intention) to share their experiences, make calls for change, and forge solidarities across racial, cultural, and national contexts. Engaging in cellphilm production as a research method for social change, we ask: What are queer, trans, and non-binary students’ experiences in campus spaces? What are the commonalities and tensions that exist between their experiences? How might cellphilm production work to disrupt unsafe campus spaces and create transnational queer solidarities? Through cellphilm production, participants crafted narratives highlighting significant systemic barriers, and speaking back to micro and macro aggressions. Both participating groups expressed feelings of exclusion and institutional neglect and highlighted their university’s disregard toward accommodating physical spaces, such as washrooms, downplaying of verbal hostilities, and other microaggressions. Participants also noted that students were at the forefront of creating purposefully queer spaces. Our comparative study disrupts the erasure of the experiences of queer, trans, and non-binary university students in Trinidad and Tobago and New Brunswick and speaks back to hegemonic whiteness in the context of queer campus spaces in New Brunswick, Canada.

Possibilities for self-representation for transgender (trans) and gender non-conforming (GNC) youth must be conceptualized in relation to youths’ placement within frames of power. Powerful institutional forces in youths’ lives include schools and policing and, as is evidenced by youths’ statements, extend to mass media portrayals. Library approaches that reify the inclusion of representative texts do not adequately meet the needs of trans and GNC youth. As a profession, librarianship must reflect on ideological approaches to gendered embodiment to push against an ongoing repetition of institutional harms done to trans and GNC youth.

This chapter offers examinations of information needs, complex online worlds, and incorporation of histories made invisible by power alongside critical literacy skills as crucial aspects of providing services to all possibly or actually trans and GNC youth. It critically situates the circumstances of trans youths’ lives in relation to the effect that adult perceptions have on trans and GNC youths’ ability to access resources. It provides a framework for reflection on how young adult librarians often unconsciously limit library access by enacting gendered expectations that do not always match the possibility or actuality of youths’ experiences or self-conceptions. The chapter outlines modes of communication – through library materials, programs, community resources and partnerships – that convey deeper understandings of trans and GNC experiences to possibly or actually trans and GNC youth.

Online environments have become a central part of our social, private, and economic life. The term for this is “digital existence,” characterized as a new epoch in mediated experience. Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in how online abuse impacts one's digital existence. Drawing on 15 interviews with women, this chapter demonstrates a type of labor—which I call “ontological labor”—that women exercise when processing their own experiences of online abuse, and when sharing their experiences with others. Ontological labor is the process of overcoming a denial of experience. In the case of online abuse, this denial stems partly from the treatment of online and offline life as separate and opposing. This division is known as digital dualism, which I argue is a discourse that denies women the space to have their experiences of online abuse recognized as such.

In vol. 6, 1976, of Advances in Librarianship, I published a review about relevance under the same title, without, of course, “Part I” in the title (Saracevic, 1976). [A substantively similar article was published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Saracevic, 1975)]. I did not plan then to have another related review 30 years later—but things happen. The 1976 work “attempted to trace the evolution of thinking on relevance, a key notion in information science, [and] to provide a framework within which the widely dissonant ideas on relevance might be interpreted and related to one another” (ibid.: 338).

This chapter aims to analyze the sociabilities, information-sharing behaviors, and types of social support among users of French non-mixed trans Facebook groups. First, our national survey (N = 405) reveals that the different uses of these groups (information retrieval, emotional support, etc.) vary according to the age and education levels of their trans users, or according to their progress on the transition pathways. Second, we perform a lexical analysis of the messages (N = 70,488) posted, since 2013, in a sample of 24 groups, in order to identify the main topics of discussion. This analysis leads us to emphasize the diversity of social support provided by trans people to one another, via posts and comments. These findings deemphasize the benefits of institutional support because they suggest, alternatively, that trans people are organizing themselves to avoid challenges associated with medical institutions and the French “therapeutic shield.. Such individuals use Facebook to this end, sharing information or support in order to create a safe space managed with a transfeminist ethic, and allowing themselves to make gender-related choices more autonomously, far away from normative judgements (in particular those expressed by the medical profession).