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and sex between women. The history of female homoerotic relations throughout time and in different places is widely varied, shaped by the societies and cultures in which women lived. How women act on their desires, what kinds of acts they engage in and with whom, what kinds of meanings they attribute to those desires and acts, how they think about the relationship between love and sexuality, whether they think of sexuality as having meaning for identities, whether they form communities with people with like desires—all of this differs across time and place. Yet there are discernible patterns, both in the ways that homoerotic relations have been conceived within persistently male-dominated social arrangements and in the forms of desire and intimacy experienced by women. A global historical view makes clear that emergence into public is not everywhere significant, that desire and love between women can flourish within heteronormative social arrangements, and that the emergence of a lesbian identity is a minor part of the whole story of female homoerotic relations.
This autotheoretical Element, written in the tense space between feminist and trans theory, argues that movement between 'woman' and 'nonbinary' is possible, affectively and politically. In fact, a nonbinary structure of feeling has been central in the history of feminist thought, such as in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949). This structure of feeling is not antifeminist but indexical of a desire for a form of embodiment and relationality beyond binary sex and gender. Finally, the Element provides a partial defense of nonbinary gender identity by tracing the development of the term in online spaces of the early 2000s. While it might be tempting to read its development as symptomatic of the forms of selfhood reproduced in (neo)liberal, racialized platform capitalism, this reading is too simplistic because it misses how the term emerged within communities of care.
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