Beyond the Binary. Challenges and Opportunities of a Gender Revolution

Editors: Mariella Popolla (University of Genoa, Italy), Fau Rosati (University of Rome Sapienza), Emanuela Abbatecola (University of Genoa, Italy), Arantxa Grau i Muñoz (University of Valencia, Spain), Barbara Risman (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA).

Nonbinary is an umbrella term encompassing a wide range of gender experiences, all united by the perception of one’s identity beyond the woman/man dichotomy (Richards et al., 2016). Conceptually, in some contexts, nonbinary identity falls under the trans umbrella, while in others it stands as its own category.

Over time, the nonbinary umbrella has significantly expanded, encompassing an increasingly diverse range of gender experiences and allowing more and more people to recognize themselves within this category. This expansion is also driven by the growing visibility of nonbinary people in parts of the Western world (Risman et al., 2022), fostered by an ever‑increasing representation—media, literary, lived—created by and for the community (Borrelli, 2024). Yet—or perhaps precisely because of this—at the institutional level, we are witnessing an intensification of the erasure—and in some cases outright cancellation—of non‑binary experiences.

These cancellation policies stem from a cisgenderist (Ansara & Berger, 2016) and heteropatriarchal matrix of oppression that links the experiences of (trans and) non‑binary people with those of other minoritized groups: women, lesbians, disabled people, fat people, and racialized people (Baril, 2015). When these axes of identity intertwine and intersect, there is an exponential increase in forms of marginalization (Rosati, 2024). This is evident in the repressive policies enacted by far‑right and reactionary governments—from the United States to Europe—which escalate the institutionalization of racism and sexual and gender violence; in the rise of anti‑gender movements (Prearo, 2020)—coalitions that bring together Catholic extremists, anti‑abortion and anti‑choice activists, and TERFs (trans‑exclusionary radical feminists)—and in the rhetoric that mobilizes concepts such as “cancel culture” and “wokeness” as threats to freedom and Western values, spreading conspiracy theories and fueling a climate of hate and moral panic (Kováts & Põim, 2015; Garbagnoli, 2017). Within this sociopolitical context, non‑binary identities (and, in some countries, trans identities more broadly) have become prime targets of repressive legislation, often in legal systems that had never formally recognized them (Schillaci, 2021). This functions to channel broader social anxieties—driven by, for example, the climate and economic crises—onto a specter of “gender” (Butler, 2024), of which non‑binary people are among the most easily instrumentalized expressions.

Despite these challenges, the proliferation of nonbinary representations and knowledges—both inside and outside academia—is continuously expanding. These can be understood as minoritarian epistemologies and knowledges (Garbagnoli, Noûs, 2020) which, across multiple disciplines, offer theoretical and empirical contributions to articulating and legitimizing gender diversity. Among these are political, sociological, psychological, legal, philosophical, and artistic disciplines—among others—so much so that disciplinary boundaries sometimes become permeable, restoring value to interdisciplinarity.

This call seeks to embrace different disciplinary and methodological approaches, as well as to address various thematic areas of interest that, in our view, deserve to be explored in the current context:

• Linguistic, terminological, and identity-related evolutions linked to “non‑binary” and their impact on processes of subjectivation
• Media representations (social media, music, film, illustration, comics, literature, TV series, journalism)
• Communities (in their plurality): queerness, transness, neuroqueerness
• Alliances (feminisms, transfeminisms)
• Intersectional domains: age, disability, neurodiversity, fatness, racialization, class
• Impact of stigma and mental health
• Relationships and sexuality
• Gender euphoria and other individual and communal affirmative experiences
• Current policies and sociopolitical contexts
• Juridical aspects
• Acts of resistance and strategies of “hacking” the system
• Implications for rethinking gender, social change, and social justice
  
  

Submission Information
 Please upload your full paper along with a brief abstract (maximum 300 words) outlining the research’s significance, methods, and key findings via the journal’s submission platform (details available here).
 We accept articles in English, Italian, and Spanish and warmly encourage contributions from all social science and humanities disciplines.

• Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2025
  
• Final manuscripts must adhere to the journal’s formatting guidelines. All submissions will undergo a double‑blind peer review.
• All accepted papers will be published open access.
  
  

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