The Bakla, The Agi: Our Genders Which Are Not One

While the discourses of solidarity which promise the formation of community may require us to speak in a language that renders "gender" to be intelligible -- received within a universe that thrives in sensus communis, so to speak -- the question of difference must put pressure on "universality" and the various platforms where its singular speech is heard. Such gesture is imperative. It can only enable modes of identity outside this "always already" inclusive matrix to speak for themselves, a position that is not always assured by the frames of the postcolonial, the modern, and their hybridities.1
A tropic opportunity that is summoned in many circles is the individual standing in for the collective (or the personal becoming the political), so that the one and the many may be deemed to imagine entry to a utopia only characterized by equality, precisely because "gender" had been opened up to be dissimulating or transitive, in the first place. The thought that this linguistic model is prone to lapses in inclusivity should be humbling, at the same time that reminds us of how much of what is yet to be done must begin with an intimately recalcitrant encounter with language: why it misapprehends, what it disavows, how it silences.