Given the increasing frequency of the cis-heteropatriarchy’s attacks against transness, and the ostensible need for transness’s legibility within the gender binary’s totalizing gaze, where does the nonbinary body fit? Is it possible that the nonbinary body might not need to fit? In the search for more complete theories of nonbinary embodiment, and particularly those theories which are not only nonnormative but actively anti-normative, phenomenology seems particularly well-positioned: in its attention to appearances, phenomenology allows for a questioning of the given, and, notably, what does not appear, suggesting that it possesses an especially liberatory potential for the nonbinary subject. In particular, there exist within Merleau-Ponty’s later work, particularly work detailing the chiasmatic body (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968), speculative moments which allow for an opening into the development of liberatory theories of nonbinary embodiment. When drawing on the ontological principles motivating this work, allowing nonbinaryness to speak its own experience of embodiment provides a crucial continuation of this project. This ontological stance entails an ethical stance as well—one which delivers a powerful rebuke to the workings of a cis-heteropatriarchal system, and counters its panoptic (cf. Foucault Reference Foucault2008) demand for visibility.
One prevailing model of dysphoria, and, therefore, of how the nonbinary body is conceptualized (cf. Galupo et al. Reference Galupo, Pulice-Farrow and Pehl2021), is that of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-5-Text Revision (American Psychiatric Association 2022). This model is based in the “wrong-body” model of trans identity,Footnote 1 a model which leaves the nonbinary individual with “nothing to do” about their dysphoria (Galupo et al. Reference Galupo, Pulice-Farrow and Pehl2021). Yet this is not the primary problem of the DSM’s conceptualization; rather, its primary problem is that it subordinates one’s sense to the third-person assignment of gender, thus reifying the workings of what Burke (Reference Burke2022) calls “cis sense.” Cis sense is the system of meaning-making which centers how a subject appears in the eyes of the third-person other, and, in particular, their intelligibility within normative understandings of binary gender. Cis sense thus dictates that validity comes from the legitimacy accorded to my identity by the other, rather than the legitimacy which my self-definition has because it is the condition of possibility of my subjectivity. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s (Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968) notion of the chiasm (le chiasme), and of both visibility and invisibility (Muller Reference Muller2017), develops a multiplicitous account of identity (cf. Daves Reference Daves2021), thus allowing for modes of embodiment which are radically anti-normative. The notion of the chiasm takes conceptual inspiration from the optic chiasm of the brain, where the optic nerves cross each other to enable vision, while also creating a blind spot at the point of their crossing. Similarly, for Merleau-Ponty, subjectivity is chiasmic—the body is the mode through which I can cross into the world, but in doing so, I am also touched by the world; the world thus acts on me. Moreover, this crossing contains layers within it: I cross into the world in ways which appear perceptibly to me, but I can also never fully perceive the nature of these crossings.
On this basis, I develop a model of nonbinary embodiment which is compatible with contemporary thought in trans studies, while also presenting important resources for the more under-elaborated areas of nonbinary embodiment. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, this Merleau-Pontian interplay found in the chiasm points toward a remedy to the lack of philosophical resources for nonbinary embodiment: the chiasmatic body’s position as the interplay between the self and the world counters the need for legibility in the eyes of cis-heteronormativity, and instead develops first-person readings of the body as the “ethical response to dominant institutions of meaning” (Burke Reference Burke2022, 215). The importance of first-person meaning-making invokes the Merleau-Pontian notion of flesh; ultimately, the ontology of flesh must arise out of the particular phenomenological nature of reversibility. I demonstrate how the ontology of the chiasm ultimately leads to the possibility of an ethic of first-person subjectivity; invisibility appears as that which might be leveraged as the particular territory of nonbinaryness, illuminating the ethics of first-person knowledge contra dominant institutions of meaning which insist upon my legibility for the other.
1. The problem is with the body
Third-person conferral of gender gains legibility through the workings of cis sense, “a mode of perception that institutes and sediments an individual and social habit of the third-person conferral of gender” (Burke Reference Burke2022, 206). Furthermore, “cis sense grants indisputable authority to the third-person conferral creating a habit of gendered meaning-making that occludes gender variance and creates the social conditions necessary for transphobia” (2022, 207). While gender invariantly connotes a degree of interaction with the realm of the third person, the key working of cis sense is that it subordinates my own sense to the sense another makes of me (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022). Within the logic of cis sense, a sense which does not match another’s sense of me is often treated as nonsense (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022); when such incongruities occur, cis sense dictates that third-person legibility takes precedence over my own sense (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022).
In the DSM, gender dysphoria is thought of as “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and natal gender” (APA 2022), which can appear through a variety of “symptoms”; while the DSM-5-TR does include language clarifying that dysphoria can emerge through “a strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s designated gender)” (APA 2022), the criteria nevertheless emerge from a binary conception of gender. For instance, Galupo and colleagues (2021) note that “many transgender and nonbinary individuals do not feel that these scales capture their experiences of gender dysphoria” (102). Furthermore, “[m]odels of gender dysphoria also reify binary understandings of gender/sex” (102). Indeed, when turning to Burke’s (Reference Burke2022) discussion of the construct of cis sense, it becomes evident that this conceptualization of dysphoria could be said to go further: by associating psychosocial distress with the incongruence between one’s “felt sense” of their body, on the one hand, and how the body is perceived, on the other hand, power to resolve one’s distress resides in the transition process (cf. Bettcher Reference Bettcher2014; Galupo et al. Reference Galupo, Pulice-Farrow and Pehl2021, for instance). Yet this leaves the nonbinary individual with “nothing to do about it” (cf. Galupo et al. Reference Galupo, Pulice-Farrow and Pehl2021). In the wrong-body model, “one’s real sex is determined by gender identity. On the basis of this native identity one affirms that one has always been the woman or man that one claims to be” (Bettcher Reference Bettcher2014, 383). Here, the presence of cis sense is made manifest: that one’s “real sex is determined by gender identity” (2014, 383; emphasis added) compels the body to be made legible for the other. In other words, the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and hence the gender-affirming care which is contingent upon the provision of this diagnosis (cf. Galupo et al. Reference Galupo, Pulice-Farrow and Pehl2021), is conditioned upon one making their body more legible in the realm of the third person.
The workings of cis sense smother the possibilities for meaning-making: “As an institution of meaning, an assignment is meaning made for me, that institutes and smothers ‘me,’ even if I eventually come to take up that assignment such that it becomes meaning I make with others” (Burke Reference Burke2022, 210; emphasis original). Dysphoria can be seen to perform this same function: “incongruence” demonstrates that there is something out of orientation, which must be made to come into orientation (cf. Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006), leaving out individuals for whom the possibility of bringing the body back into alignment is not present (cf. Bettcher Reference Bettcher2014; Galupo et al. Reference Galupo, Pulice-Farrow and Pehl2021). As Burke (Reference Burke2022) notes, “[c]is sense thus propels ‘me’ into being by prioritizing the gendered sens(e) others give to me” (210). Ultimately, the DSM’s conceptualization of dysphoria reifies the pre-eminence of the body for the other, such that the body’s meaning is given back to me, rather than being constructed by me. Dysphoria exists, therefore, only within the realm of the visible: another’s perception of my body is given to me, and even if I take up this meaning (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022), doing so is only an engagement with the visibility of my body; it leaves me no room for my body to not make sense. From this perspective, I only can take up a meaning which makes sense to others—that is, as male or as female. In the DSM’s account, my sense of incongruity is determined on the basis of my relation to the visible (e.g., feelings of “distress” which arise in relation to secondary sex characteristics; cf. APA 2022), thus the only option available for me to conceptualize my experience comes from the realm of visibility. Instead, I maintain that the invisible of nonbinary experience must remain invisible; I illustrate invisibility to allow it to speak for itself, not to demonstrate a need to make it appear as visible.
In the development of the notion of the chiasm, a “crossing-over, an intertwining” (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968) between primarily the visible and the invisible—and between self and world—Merleau-Ponty proposes a radically non-dualistic subjectivity: I am not primarily body or mind, but rather the point of intersection between the world and the self. Analogously to the optic chiasm, wherein the optic nerves cross each other invisibly, producing the necessary conditions to enable vision, my subjectivity can primarily be defined as the crossing-over between essence and world, a crossing which contains dimensions of visibility and invisibility. For Burke (Reference Burke2022), trans sense is an additive process: “In trans contexts, there is an openness in meaning, but that openness requires others to hold it open for a ‘me’.” (215). This account prefigures my crossing-over into meaning-making with others: no longer is the realm of visibility—the sense of “distress” and “incongruity”—sufficient. Rather, that others “hold it open for a ‘me’” references not only the intersubjective but also the invisible: the “me” for which others hold “openness” is not prefigurative, as is the case for the purely visible, but is a “me” who emerges into visibility out of invisibility. In this manner, trans sense’s return to the realm of the first-person is chiasmatic par excellence; this emergence out of invisibility of “my” sense, prioritizing the first person, is the “ethical response to dominant institutions of meaning-making” (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022, 215).
2. The flesh; the chiasm
Fundamentally, the metaphor of flesh is a way of understanding the body which aims to reanimate and redynamize the body, rather than making it a static thing. Merleau-Ponty introduced flesh in his late work, elaborating that flesh is—roughly speaking—the whole of my body, a complex, self-organizing organism which is both living and lived, contra the Husserlian distinction between Körper (object body) and Leib (lived body). Yet flesh also refers to something which goes beyond the physical body, and cannot be captured by the limits of this body (cf. Dastur Reference Dastur, Evans and Lawlor2012). As Muller (Reference Muller2017) notes, “the body is not just a thing, but a crossing-over between myself and the world, as well as between visible and invisible” (184). Furthermore, “the emphasis on the flesh of the body brings out its living aspect” (Muller Reference Muller2017, 184; emphasis original). The “living aspect” of the flesh performs an important way to recover the first-person authority over one’s body; the revitalization of the notion of flesh allows phenomenology to critique the DSM’s notion of dysphoria. While one’s flesh is partially structured by the cultural atmosphere around it, it is not determined by the atmosphere; its crossings-over both interact with and resist this atmosphere.
Potently, as Dastur (Reference Dastur, Evans and Lawlor2012) notes, “[t]he flesh does not arise from a determinate region of being; it is no more substance than matter or spirit” (34). Reconfiguring the nonbinary body chiasmatically is not reducible to a theory of concrete theory of embodiment; similarly to Belcourt’s (Reference Belcourt2019) articulation of negative space,Footnote 2 the articulation of the nonbinary body as chiasmatic is not a positive articulation, but little more than my expression of my wish for an “otherwise.” In a personal, affective way, this article is my desire to engender a relationship with my own body through which my body might become “a constantly moving outside” (Belcourt Reference Belcourt2019) beyond ways of viewing the body which have never been able to account for my experience. Just as the flesh includes the physical body while not being reducible to it, reconfiguring nonbinary embodiment as chiasmatic should not be understood as aiming to replace concrete theories of embodiment, but as aiming to phenomenalize the experience of nonbinary being as that which encompasses the whole of my being. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, “[t]he flesh is the body inasmuch as it is the visible seer, the audible hearer, the tangible touch—the sensitive sensible: inasmuch as in it is accomplished an equivalence of sensibility and sensible thing” (Lingus, in Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, liv). In the notion of flesh, introducing that which “has no name in any philosophy”Footnote 3 (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 147), Merleau-Ponty hopes to revitalize the body, in order to bring the lived body back into its proper place within the order of nature (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Seglard2003). Flesh, therefore, is the stratagem aiming to overcome the limitations of dualism which have haunted philosophy since the time of Descartes (cf. Daly Reference Daly2016, for instance). The “fleshy” body can no longer be separated into that which is perceived and that which perceives; rather, perception and percept are always already intertwined with one another, an intertwining of body-as-object and body-as-verb. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, the flesh “for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 133). Flesh takes on the animate dimensions of the body: that which does and that to which things are done can no longer be separated from each other, but rather, both find an inseparable meeting-point as flesh, which fluidly and constantly transitions between these dimensions. As Leder (Reference Leder1990) notes, there exists in the body both a “’lateral, transversal’ synergy of hands and eyes. There is also what one might call a ‘vertical’ synergy” (213). The body is a “hidden vitality that courses within me” (Leder Reference Leder1990, 213–14); the body weaves between that which is perceived and that which perceives, just as it weaves between visibility and invisibility (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968); this interlacing also implies a motion between interiority and exteriority.
Crucial for understanding the profound novelty of the Merleau-Pontian notion of flesh is an elaboration of what Merleau-Ponty means by “the flesh of the world” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 121). Dastur (Reference Dastur, Evans and Lawlor2012) provides a helpful clarification of the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s expressions in The visible and the invisible, writing that, in using the expressions “flesh of the world” and “flesh of things” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 121, as cited in Dastur Reference Dastur, Evans and Lawlor2012, 33),
[o]ne is tempted to see only metaphors in them … Through this term, however, Merleau-Ponty is really trying to conceive the openness of being, this coiling of being on itself or this “specular phenomenon” internal to being by which the reign of visibility is opened. (Dastur Reference Dastur, Evans and Lawlor2012, 33)
To Dastur, the term “flesh of the world” is no mere metaphor; rather, it is a profound expression of the very interlacing between subject and the world which the flesh performs (being’s chiasmatic nature). The introduction of flesh seeks to undo the separation between body and world; as Halák notes, “[w]hereas Husserl views the body as a philosophical limit case, Merleau-Ponty identifies its ‘ontological signification’ and adopts it as a starting point for the elaboration of a ‘new ontology’” (2021b, 311). For both Halák and Dastur, Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology seeks to move the body past the bifurcated status it has held throughout the history of Western philosophy. As Dastur notes,
It is not by a generalizing induction and by a projection that one passes from the being of the subject to the being of the world. On the contrary, it is rather the being of the subject that appears as a variant of the being of the world. (2012, 34)
The ontological primacy of flesh already points to the interlacing between the flesh and the world, even before Merleau-Ponty has introduced the notion of the chiasm. The fact that “the being of the subject … appears as a variant of the being of the world” (Dastur Reference Dastur, Evans and Lawlor2012, 34) highlights the ontological significance of the body qua flesh, calling into question the secondary status given to the body both in Husserl and in Merleau-Ponty’s early work (cf. Halák Reference Halák2021b, 331).
The notion of the chiasm brings forth the intertwining between not only the subject and the world, but also the various dimensions which always already constitute subjectivity. The chiasm introduces an important metaphor which guides much of Merleau-Ponty’s late work (cf. Daly Reference Daly2016). Analogously to the brain’s optic chiasm, it is an evocative notion of embodiment: just as the chiasm is “the condition of possibility of vision” (cf. Muller Reference Muller2017, 185), the body becomes the condition of possibility of subjectivity (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 199); moreover, this implies not only a crossing-over between self and world, but also between visibility and invisibility (cf. Muller Reference Muller2017, 185). While discussions of flesh and the chiasm appear separately, the difference between the notion of flesh and that of chiasm is difficult to parse out, with Merleau-Ponty offering only enigmatic definitions of each throughout The visible and the invisible. Merleau-Ponty writes of the chiasm that: “Like the natural man, we situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become world” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 160), echoing the language which he used for the notion of flesh; later, in the working notes, Merleau-Ponty writes: “Grasp this chiasm, this reversal. That is the mind” (1968, 199).
Hughes (Reference Hughes2017) suggests that “Chiasm is the structure of flesh, by which I mean that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical notion of the chiasm refers to nothing other than the organization of flesh” (9). She notes that the so-called “reversibility thesis” (cf. Dillon Reference Dillon1997) is often taken as equivalent to the notion of the chiasm. Hughes troubles this equivalency, noting that “the introduction of the notion of imminence leads to a crisis in the strategy of Reversibility, opening up as an alternative the elaboration of a plurality of expressions for the chiasm” (10). Nonbinary invisibility possesses a similar “plurality of functions”: invisibility refers not only to that which is facticly invisible, but also aims to serve as an entry-point for a discussion of what is interior within one (cf. Daly Reference Daly2016). There is not only a chiasm between visibility and invisibility, but also one which intertwines the layers of invisibility with each other. That is, the invisible of this world is not a “de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151); rather, the invisible of the world, while departing from the visible, must be understood not to be constrained by its relation to the visible. The invisible of the world, in contrast to a de facto invisible, supersedes the visible; as Merleau-Ponty writes:
what I live is as “substantial,” as “explicit,” as a positive thought could be—even more so: a positive thought is what it is, but, precisely, is only what it is and accordingly cannot hold us … We do not possess the musical or sensible ideas, precisely because they are negativity or absence circumscribed; they possess us. (1968, 151)
The invisible of the world has, as its point of departure, the visible—indeed, for it to remain “of the world,” it must do so, in contrast to an “absolute invisible,” which would “have nothing to do with the visible” (1968, 151), and which Merleau-Ponty is careful to avoid. However, for nonbinaryness it is crucial that Merleau-Ponty does not limit the invisible to the substance of the world; rather, as he notes, the invisible—or “interiority,” as Daly (Reference Daly2016) refigures it—becomes the ideas which “possess us” (1968, 151).
The chiasm is precisely that which is impossible to visualize; importantly, this invisibility is not the opposite of visibility: where the invisible of perception is “not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather, it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being” (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151). As Muller highlights, Merleau-Ponty “makes invisibility a condition of perception” (2017, 185), signifying that invisibility can only arise from the visible; it is precisely when the visible disappears from view that something might be said to be invisible. Invisibility is not only not the opposite of visibility; instead, invisibility is always in relation with visibility, thus allowing for moments wherein invisibility might not only emerge passively, but could also represent strikes against ocularcentrism and cis sense itself.
2.1 The chiasm of invisibility
It is the chiasmatic nonbinary body’s ability to navigate this chiasm of invisibility which enables the leveraging of invisibility as a “tactic”—that is, as a purposeful mechanism through which to resist the dominance of cis sense. Just as Belcourt’s notion of negative space is a beyond which surpasses the confines of static positive space, so too can the nonbinary body’s navigation of these layers of invisibility be understood to exceed the reference to visibility in which they originated. Negative space, then, is not a mere foil to positive space, as Belcourt makes clear; similarly, Merleau-Ponty, in differentiating between the “de facto invisible” and the “invisible of the world,” shows that invisibility is never a mere foil to visibility, but in itself is phenomenologically and ontologically meaningful. As such, he points us toward another chiasm, one which crosses not between the visible and the invisible, but between these layers of invisibility. In positing that the nonbinary body contains layers of invisibility, I am not merely arguing that invisibility goes beyond the mere opposite of visibility; I am also insisting that the nonbinary body’s navigation of invisibility, in itself, contains a crucial dynamism.
In recognizing oneself as nonbinary, one takes up a radical potentiality which is endogenous to the body, something which is poignant to recognize in Merleau-Ponty’s multidimensional readings of invisibility. The nonbinary body thus depends on a chiasmatic expression in order to instantiate itself in the world; in other words, that there are multiple dimensions to the body, not solely of visibility and invisibility, but also the layers of invisibility, is crucial to deepen our understanding of nonbinary interiority. This Merleau-Pontian reading of the nonbinary body has an explicitly ethical dimension: “What is at stake in the Invisible is the imperative not only to explain how it is possible to relate interiority to exteriority beyond dualisms and monisms but also to ascertain the nature of interiority itself” (Daly Reference Daly2016, 87; emphasis added). The positing of a chiasm of invisibility—the numerous layers which comprise the “invisible of the world” (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151)—is a crucial addition with respect to the nonbinary body: the nonbinary body introduces a layer of invisibility, not perceptible in the cisgender body, with recourse to that which Belcourt (Reference Belcourt2019) describes as the imperative to “be negative space.” Starting from a position of third-person visibility and returning only the possibility for engagement with the visible, to the exclusion of the invisible, it is crucial that the chiasm of invisibility offers a point of departure not only from the visible, but also from the notion of the de facto invisible. The de facto invisible, as the direct inverse of the visible, cannot account for the nature of nonbinary experience, as such an invisible would necessarily allow only for the creation of another category, rather than a true nonbinary.Footnote 4 A true nonbinary, by contrast, must possess layers of invisibility. Nonbinary invisibility is not only interior in the traditional sense of one’s inner thoughts; rather, nonbinary interiority is “the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed, the establishment of a level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151). A nonbinary which allows for the maintenance of interiority would necessarily be the “invisible of the world … which inhabits this world … and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151). A chiasmatic theory of nonbinary embodiment as the “ethical response … to dominant institutions of meaning-making” (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022, 215) follows from the recognition that, while the notion of invisibility per se provides crucial recourse to interiority, it is nonbinary being’s recourse to the “invisible of the world,” and ultimately the layers of invisibility which allow for nonbinaryness’s “own and interior possibility” (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151), which allows for the speculative positing of this “otherwise” (cf. Rohrer Reference Rohrer2024), which might, ultimately, escape the confines of the visibility which suffocates it.
The complex nature of the invisible found in Merleau-Ponty’s work counters the DSM’s narrative of dysphoria as purely visible, thus returning the body into the realm of the first person. However, the “de facto invisible” falls short in providing the nonbinary individual with a recourse through which to escape the confines of cis sense (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022). As Rohrer (Reference Rohrer2024) points out, “our imaginaries are constrained by fantasies of a benevolent settler state and teleological progress narratives.” Where Rohrer’s discussion of “teleological progress narratives” is a crucial elucidation of the role of these narratives in the maintenance of the gender binary’s panoptic gaze, Belcourt points toward a solution: “How to punctuate an aesthetics of suffering, its visibilization regime, with a counternarrative of NDNFootnote 5 possibility? Hypothesis: be negative space” (2019, 73). This negative space “is not the opposite of a static positive space, but rather a constantly moving outside, a beyond” (Rohrer Reference Rohrer2024). Cis sense is a “visibilization regime” which emerges out of the logic of the settler state, a talon of its panoptic gaze disguised by the benevolent fantasy of “visibility.” Yet such visibility is not progress, but acquiescence to these demands: the de facto invisible is, as Rohrer points out, “constrained by fantasies of a benevolent settler state”; thus, the “invisible of the world” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151) is needed. Where the invisible of the world is not merely the antonym of the visible, the nonbinary imaginary goes beyond the de facto invisible.
The “invisible of this world,” which allows for the “opening of a dimension that can never again be closed, the establishment of a level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151), contains already within it numerous layers of invisibility, and consequently can be deployed to constitute a notion of nonbinary invisibility which exceeds the constraints of the visibility of cis sense and resists its “visibilization regime.” It is the nonbinary body’s need to resist this “visibilization regime” that surfaces the need for anti-normative, deliberate modes of embodiment. When the invisibility of nonbinaryness allows for the opening of a new dimension, when my body can play with sense and nonsense, beyond the dicta of visibility, we come to understand how it can be that “This flesh that I see and touch … is not all there is to my flesh.”
This reading resonates with many nonbinary folk’s experiences, wherein accounts of the body which focus on legibility within the male/female binary leaves them finding no satisfactory way to understand their body (cf. Galupo Reference Galupo, Pulice-Farrow and Pehl2021). By contrast, a reading of nonbinary flesh as navigating the chiasm not only of visibility and invisibility, but of the invisible of the world—as the “opening of a dimension that can never again be closed”—recognizes the ways in which my flesh goes beyond how it appears to the other, but instead possesses an endemic multidimensional interiority. Where Leder (Reference Leder1990) argues similarly, discussing the ways in which the viscera—the internal workings of my body—are invisible to me and function as “neither the agents nor objects of my sensibility” (212), Leder’s reading is restricted to the physiological workings of the viscera. Leder’s reading, in exploring the relationship between the literal visible and literal invisible, seems to be a de facto invisible (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151); however, the viscera, which “constitute their own circuitry of vibrant, pulsing life” (Leder Reference Leder1990, 212), can be read to possess their “own and interior possibility, the Being of this being” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151). In this skillful constitution of this vibrancy, the viscera take up a role in sustaining (cf. Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151) the world, and as such are also the “invisible of the world.”
The nonbinary recognition of the multidimensionality of my own interiority introduces into flesh another layer of invisibility: where Leder’s analysis begins from the notion that flesh is visibility (1990, 212), this reading problematizes visibility, demonstrating that even within the flesh which I see and touch, there exists that which I cannot see, but which is nonetheless sensible to me. That my interiority is multidimensional—contains within it interiorities upon interiorities, at times unknown even to me—is useful to put into dialogue with ideas of spatiality which transcend static negative space. This notion—that interiority possesses dimensions within it which infinitely transcend how it is reflected in the eyes of the other—suggests that my hands are not only hands, but that they are the instruments with which I write this paper, enabling me to imagine my connection to an “invisible of the world,” to that which might lead to new ways of thinking my own embodiment. My hands—which presently belong to a body that has been essentialized, and for which visibility has always translated to maleness, to that which I am not—contain within them something deeper, something which must not be categorized. In refusing to categorize my hands—even, to take this to the extreme, if I refuse to see them as merely hands—then, I might come to inhabit Burke’s (Reference Burke2022) principle of an “ethical response to dominant institutions of meaning” (215). I inhabit first-person meaning-making to a radical degree: not only am I allowed to make my own sense, but I am allowed not to make sense of my body. Ultimately, this is the ethical demand of the layers of invisibility of nonbinary flesh: contra the demand of legibility (for others and even for myself), I steadfastly assert that in retaining my own authority over my body, I reserve the right not to make sense, and to make my own sense—to speak a sensibility which lives in me, even if it is invisible to the other. This flesh that I see and touch is not all there is to my flesh and blood.
2.2 The chiasm and invisibility
Through the return to first-person authority (cf. Burke Reference Burke2025) over the body, however, it is possible to experience the truest meaning of a chiasmatic ontology—an experience of the body which radically rejects categorization, and privileges the phenomenal appearance of the body to the individual above any other purposes for which the body may be thought to serve. Moreover, the principle of the chiasmatic body as an ontological expression insists upon the continuous performance of phenomenological critique (Marder Reference Marder2014) as the sole means through which the preservation of the chiasmatic body’s nature is possible. The nonbinary, chiasmatic body thus insists upon the voicing of its claim to a fundamental ontology: this is the essence of nonbinary embodiment qua project, a project whose continued development and refinement challenges all categorical and normative conceptions of the body. The chiasm’s reference to both visibility and invisibility underlines this nonnormative critique. One finds oneself compelled to inquire as to the ontological implications of the intertwining of visibility and invisibility: within a phenomenological ontology—that is, an ontology which is based on the primacy of the appearance of a phenomenon—what status is to be accorded to non-appearances?
Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of invisibility implies a manifest departure from traditional notions of invisibility (cf. Almog Reference Almog2024), which take a particularly categorical and dualist approach to the distinction between the visible and the invisible. In proceeding from this traditional understanding of invisibility, we would be forced to conclude that that which is invisible in nonbinary embodiment is “not related in any way to the visible world,” a view which would correspond to the ontological demands of cis sense as an ontology of pure visibility. Cis sense proceeds as an ontology of pure visibility as an extension of its demand for legibility (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022): it sets up “a domain of orienting, of giving meaning and direction to existence that prioritizes the third-person conferral of gender” (207), suggesting that it privileges that which “makes sens(e)”Footnote 6 in the eyes of the third-person other. In other words, cis sense’s privileging of third-person conferral of gender means that it is that which is visible to the other—the other’s perceptual account of my body—which legitimates gender. The account within cis sense of the body is the body-for-the-other (cf. Sartre Reference Sartre2018, 409–11), causing that which is invisible—my body as I experience it—to be that which is conceived as a “pure invisibility” (Almog Reference Almog2024, 51), an “absolute invisible, which [has] nothing to do with the visible” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 151).
However, this is not the account which is developed by Merleau-Ponty, nor is it the account of invisibility from which Almog (Reference Almog2024) proceeds. Instead, a chiasmatic ontology must develop a “phenomenological invisibility” (Almog Reference Almog2024, 51), drawing upon the multidimensionality endemic to the ways in which Merleau-Ponty writes about invisibility throughout The visible and the invisible. Almog describes this contrasting notion of invisibility thus:
Unlike these traditional forms of invisibility, what interests Merleau-Ponty is a sort of “phenomenological invisibility”—an invisibility that is not completely detached from the visible realm and has no full positivity of its own … (Almog Reference Almog2024, 51)
Proceeding from a Merleau-Pontian account of invisibility, as outlined by Almog, it becomes possible to outline a more complete, chiasmatic account of the relationship between visibility and invisibility. Instead of suggesting that the reference to invisibility suggests that which is not, it becomes possible to develop a notion of invisibility which, as Almog (Reference Almog2024) articulates, adheres to “this comprehensive ontology that entwines invisibility with visibility” (51). Where visibility—and the ontology which asserts the primacy of the visible—is an elaboration of the workings of cis sense, the reference to invisibility brings forward the workings of trans sense (Burke Reference Burke2022, 215). Even beyond these workings, nonbinary invisibility promises not only to counter visibility, but at times also to reconfigure visibility.
The givenness of sense-data to visibility is inherently an acquiescence to the regime of the third person; to reconfigure visibility is to propose that a refocusing of perception on first-person experience would call into question such ocularcentrism.Footnote 7 To say that the nonbinary body must be “visible,” that its meaning must be “seen,” is a dimension of this ocularcentrism, and subsumes the nonbinary body-as-chiasm under a more central Husserlian conception of the body as Körper, or object-body. Yet this is not a meaning which is contingent to the body itself; this is only a product of the mechanisms whereby visibility has been conceptualized. From the first moment of birth, this privileging of the third person is on display: as Burke (Reference Burke2022) notes, “[c]is sense thus propels ‘me’ into being by prioritizing the gendered sens(e) others give to me” (210), starting with the moment in which a body (as Körper; that is, an infant’s object-body possessing a penis, a vagina, or some variation thereupon) is seen, and an assignment is made on the basis of this seeing. Yet the infant possesses sensibility—touch, olfaction, proprioception, gustation of the air, audition of a cacophony of sounds suddenly unmuffled by a new environment—which are irreducible to this vision, and which have nothing to do with the vision given to them of a foreign-object-body.
What changes might we develop to our ways of thinking being-in-the-world if gendered meaning were to center these sensibilities, rather than a one-dimensional vision which is given back as unrecognizable? To reconfigure visibility is somewhat paradoxical: in a cursory sense, reconfiguring visibility would seem to require countering ocularcentrism by foregrounding another of the senses, thus moving away from visibility qua visibility. However, to reconfigure visibility following Merleau-Ponty suggests a return to the sensible; that is, how sens(e) appears to the individual, and how the body is not only visible to the individual, but is also—and more so than visible—graspable, audible, available to be understood proprioceptively in relation to space, and the like. Where a visibility which is based in vision as a factical operation of the body serves a normative, orientating purpose (cf. Breyer Reference Breyer, Doyon and Breyer2015)—the fundamental equivalency between a body in the world and a percept belonging to this body, in its one-to-one correspondence, seems to be “in orientation” (cf. Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006)—a “queering” of visibility, in a sense (cf. Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006), is a visibility which allows for spaces of nonequivalence. In such a visibility, the “me” that appears in the other’s vision is only a provisional “me,” an impoverished noetic object which is but one dimension of the “me” who I truly am. This “me” has no flesh, no “sens(e),” because these are dimensions which cannot be given in such a vision. It is once I speak my sens(e), once I allow the “you” who has aimed to take possession of “me” in “your” vision, to be corrected, that “you” might come to “see” me.Footnote 8 This is a consensus process: in a reconfigured visibility, there is the necessity of a reciprocal sense of trust. I must trust that “you” are capable of going beyond your initial vision, and correcting your own sens(e)—that is, of allowing your vision to be an incomplete picture of what you see. Conversely, “you” must trust that “I” will complete this vision, that my sensibility will allow you to see beyond what you now know you cannot see.
While the discussion of nonbinary interiority may initially appear as solipsistic, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the chiasm must be understood intersubjectively, a view supported by current discussions of trans sense. They write that: “There are spaces in which ‘my sense’ is not nonsense … in trans contexts, there is an openness in meaning, but that openness requires others to hold it open for a ‘me’” (Burke Reference Burke2022, 215). Trans sense, similarly, makes both visibility and invisibility a condition of perception (cf. Muller Reference Muller2017); “I” make meaning for myself, following the principle of first-person authority, but the meaning which “I” make for myself “requires others to hold it open for a ‘me’” (Burke Reference Burke2022, 215); as such, my meaning is developed intersubjectively, through conversation with others. While my first-person authority over my body—my sense of the “invisible” of my body—is privileged, for the invisible to make sense, it must be intertwined with that which is visible to the other. In other words, understanding invisibility as an expression of the ontological principle of trans sense does not mean that I constitute myself through “pure invisibility”—I do not constitute myself solipsistically—but, rather, through a negotiation of the entwining between visibility and invisibility. As such, the recourse to phenomenological invisibility brings forward first-person authority over my body, while at the same time it refuses to fall into a sedimented and static conception of the body. This negotiation also requires the navigation of the meanings which are given sensibly to my different senses: the invisibility of my body is only invisible within the register of ocularcentrism. For instance, the viscera of my body are invisible to me in an ocularcentric modality, but nevertheless they remain essentially sensible to my body, if I allow for meanings constituted outside of this ocularcentrism.
Yet this is not the end of the meaning of this invisibility; the viscera are not unique properties of nonbinary embodiment, but neither is physical interiority all there is to such a phenomenological invisibility. Rather, nonbinary invisibility must not be mistakenly understood to refer back only to the physical dimensions of the body, instead dictating that there is no pre-given, constitutive meaning which belongs to the body. Indeed, when this dictum is taken to the extreme, it posits that the assertion of any such meaning as endemic to embodiment runs contrary to the fleshiness which defines the nature of the body. Nonbinary invisibility is the deliberate, meaning-laden assertion that there can be no fundamental assertion of equivalency between that which exists as visible from a third-person perspective and that which is interior to oneself, whether as a sensible dimension of the corporeal, “fleshy” body or as interiority which is not able to be mapped onto any “determinate region of being” (cf. Dastur Reference Dastur, Evans and Lawlor2012, 34) which exists in my physical body. As in the notion of the opening of a new dimension, a chiasmatic elaboration of nonbinary embodiment must not be the opposite of positive theories of embodiment. Nonbinary embodiment might represent the a “beyond” of embodiment, the defiant refusal of any correlation between the (mis-)apprehended labels which cis sense applies to my body and the meanings which I have assigned—or I refuse to assign—to my flesh.
2.3 Invisibility as a tactic
Invisibility might not—at least exclusively—be a pre-existent dimension of being, but may also be comprehensible as a tactic which can be deployed as a mechanism which might enable resistance to the particularly panoptic workings of visibility. Invisibility becomes a tactic in the sense in which Mariana Ortega (Reference Ortega2016) employs the term: “Tactics are creative, inventive, combining different elements of a system (or a set of strategies) ‘blow by blow,’ and cannot be easily traced or mapped” (Ortega Reference Ortega2016, 202). Invisibility as a potential tactic contra the panopticon of cis sense would mean that meanings emerge and find their particular applicability and utility in their inability to be “easily traced or mapped” (Ortega Reference Ortega2016, 202); indeed, conceptualizing invisibility as a tactic contra cis sense reveals that the tactic of invisibility is not an a priori fact of being, but is, instead, a means through which the nonbinary body might resist the demands for legibility which cis sense exerts upon it.
Legibility is the implication of a direct relationship: while allowances can be made for indirect correlation, as is the case for an image distorted by water, there is also the assumption of linearity—even if the image I see in the water might not be a one-to-one correspondence with the image as it appears on land, there is a predictability to the distortion, thus corrections can be made. I may aim once at an object and miss, then in a subsequent overcorrection I may miss similarly in the other respect; however, in my third correction, I grasp the target, and thus find myself paralyzed by visibility.
By contrast, conceptualizing nonbinary embodiment as enabling for, or indeed anticipating, tactical deployments of non-correlation, allows the nonbinary individual to thwart any such relationship which would allow for easy correction. If the invisibility which is endemic to my body is as multidimensional—as navigating between diffuse levels of invisibility, rather than just between visibility and invisibility—then, by extension those simple notions of being which would depend upon a linear relationship between exterior and interior become wholly nonresponsive to any notion of the body which would be able to be mapped onto theories of embodiment which depend upon direct correlation. In contrast to the image distorted by water, such a non-responsiveness would be more akin to a reflection etched in plasma, just as liable to disappear upon efforts to grasp it as it is to materialize within the grasper’s hand. Yet for all this non-responsiveness, such accounts of myself remain intelligible by turning to notions of trans sense (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022): my nonsense is met by others’ nonsense, and in this shared nonsense, our nonsense has a sensibility—a fleshiness—to it, which grounds it. This ability for flesh to leverage the principle of invisibility lends it an ability to launch a critique contra the cisgender-ed body and its “a priori rules of experience” (Weate Reference Weate2003, 7) which encounter it.
3. Moving away from the “wrong body” model: flesh as critique
To develop a tactical understanding of flesh, one is compelled to ask the following question: what becomes of the nonbinary subject’s flesh, if it is the case that flesh refers to one’s fundamental being? Giving voice to the nature of nonbinary flesh allows for the emergence of a deeper understanding of the qualities of embodiment in all its forms. A subsequent turn to the structure of the chiasm ultimately facilitates an understanding of how the chiasmatic body challenges a not only more facile understanding of not only nonbinary embodiment, but also the nonbinary individual’s relationship with the world itself.
There is a rhythm of critique which is, even from the beginnings of phenomenological philosophy, endemic to phenomenology: “the critiques of logos by phenomena and of phenomena by logos Footnote 9 jointly amount to the critique of phenomenology by itself, in the absence of its final self-identity and ultimate ‘truth’” (Marder Reference Marder2014, 13; emphasis original).Footnote 10 Central to Marder’s elaboration of the project of critique for critical phenomenology is the notion of rhythm: there is a rhythmicality to the ongoing expansion and refinement of meaning which characterizes phenomenology. What Marder crucially recognizes is the fact that the phenomenality—the “essences”—of the being of a phenomenon must be recognized as nonequivalent to the initial appearance of this phenomenon. Perhaps my own experience of nonbinaryness is informative here: it was not a static recognition which emerged all at once, but a process of self-recognition through which, at least in retrospect, I see in myself the process of enacting the critique toward which Marder gestures. From the start, nonbinary was, for me, both polysemic and obtuse: it was both an openness of meaning, an allowability of the multitudinous, often contradictory meanings gender had for me,Footnote 11 as well as an obtuse thing, a destination for which I yearned deeply despite its imperceptibility. Initially, androgynyFootnote 12 emerged as a sort of “false prophet” of this obtuse meaning, a concrete “thing” in the world toward which I could position myself; yet, even from the start there was an inkling of the wrongness of this destination, which became more and more apparent the more that the impracticality of androgyny as a destination became clear to me. Androgyny, I realized, was a discourse, an idea presented as a savior but which could never be my savior. Androgyny meant little to me, because nonbinary has never been reducible to differing proportions of maleness and femaleness. Had I rested in the initial ephemeral quality of contentment promised by androgyny, this critique would have become nigh-on impossible, as androgyny would have sedimented itself as the “truth” of a “final self-identity” (cf. Marder Reference Marder2014, 13). By contrast, I allowed this initial discourse of androgyny—which, importantly, has never been a phenomenological logos for me since it has never lived in me—to be something which I could test against my own experience, which I could try on for size and test the fitting and ill-fitting contours of its shapeliness. In trying it on, it had no form for me, and it failed even to make it past my stereotypically masculine shoulders, because it criticized them too much for them to live in it. This is Marder’s meaning of phenomenological critique: how does the supposed phenomenality of a description live in the reality of one’s experience of the phenomenon? The rhythm of critique of phenomenology is the recognition that this is never finished, because a description can never fit quite right to the contours of a life. Doubtless I will find more descriptions like androgyny, which I will try on for size; some may fit better, at least for a time, but they will always only be the clothes I dress my experience in, and as such, they will always be woefully insufficient in the face of the naked truth of my being.
The imminence of this critique (cf. Hughes Reference Hughes2017) calls into focus the temporal unfolding of the chiasmatic structure of flesh, which becomes an important dimension of the promise of this model of dysphoria and embodiment, in contrast to the DSM model. Muller (Reference Muller2017) notes that “the emphasis on the flesh of the body brings out its living aspect” (2017, 184; emphasis original). Aarø (Reference Aarø2010) offers an important in-road into the ontological nature of the notion of flesh, writing particularly about the concept of reversibility endemic to Merleau-Ponty’s later work:
The layers never coincide; the perception of the self, in the meaning-laden perception of the hand touching the hand that touches, is only imminent, is in principle unattainable, nor can there be any coinciding aspects of the self in consciousness … (Aarø Reference Aarø2010, 336–37)
The ontological perspective expressed by the notion of flesh must arise out of the particular phenomenological nature of reversibility. The key to such an understanding arises out of an understanding of the imminence of the chiasm (cf. Hughes Reference Hughes2017): the fact that the chiasm is not a single crossing-over to be accomplished, but a continual series of crossings across both intersubjective and interpsychic space and time.
4. Moving away from dualism
Querying the nature of nonbinary flesh expands the Merleau-Pontian project of the development of a “new ontology” (cf. Halák Reference Halák, Ataria, Tanaka and Gallagher2021a). The nonbinary attempt to dismantle the male-female binary is not a mere rejection of a simple dichotomy, but is, rather, in itself a continuation of the development of a radically non-dualist ontology. As such, we come to question the nature of nonbinary flesh as the “flesh of the world.” Nonbinary embodiment eschews the dicta of cis sense, in favor of not only trans sense, but a radical return to what Burke (Reference Burke2025) calls “first person authority” over the body—the notion that it is only I who can speak about my body, and that the third-person legibility of my body must be understood as only a secondary concern to my body as it is given to me.
Nonbinary flesh is “of the world,” before it is anything else. In the most basic iteration of this extension of the Merleau-Pontian notion of the chiasmatic body, the assertion that nonbinary flesh is “of the world” would mean that what my flesh, as a nonbinary individual, allows me to do, and the ways in which my flesh contains echoes of the world, are the foundational functions of my flesh—not my flesh’s “maleness.” This is the critical function of the nonbinary flesh of the world: it articulates that my flesh is first and foremost my flesh, and that its “maleness” is merely a layer of “theoretical constructions and ungrounded assumptions” (cf. Marder Reference Marder2014, 39). My body, thus, is returned to me: my shoulders are made of the “same stuff as the world” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968), and their nature in their supposed maleness is subsumed in importance to that of their function. Instead of the body as essentially male, this understanding makes the body essentially worldly; here, I am empowered by my nonbinaryness to critique the parts of myself that might contain some essential “maleness,” to instead find something recognizable within them, something which is more “sensible.”
Where cis sense dictates that my body must, first and foremost, attain legibility, attention to the ontological dicta of the chiasmatic principle of the body allows me to perform a critical function of the epochē, the “bracketing” of the “belief in the existence of the world” which is at the heart of the (Husserlian) phenomenological method,Footnote 13 revealing cis sense’s demand for legibility to be a layer of “ungrounded assumptions” which only appear to be that which is given. Here, the epochē is not understood as the holding-at-bay of the existence of the world, but is more akin to Guenther’s (Reference Guenther2022) conceptualization of the epochē “not as suspension of belief in the existence of the world, but as a disruption of the world as we know it” (39). This was at play when I came to reject the notion of androgyny as ill-fitting: attention to my own self-experience, to the contours of my body as it is given to me in my corporeal experience, allowed me to suspend androgyny as “the world as [I] know it,” in order to enter into the roots of my experience; indeed, this has proven to be a “disruption of the world as [I] know it,” as it has refigured my orientation, not only toward the world, but toward myself. Indeed, this nicely reflects Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) important critique of the epochē as an impossible proposition: when the project of bracketing is refigured to be the mechanism through which individuals might suspend their beliefs in the world as they know it, in its ill-fitting contours to their experience, the ongoing—yet unachievable—project of critique becomes a more concrete exercise.
A focus on the development of flesh as an extension of the development of a phenomenological ontology (cf. Dillon Reference Dillon1997) means that access to the nature of reality is possible only through the critique of givenness which strips away that which is “not given enough” (Marder Reference Marder2014, 39). It is through first-person authority over the self that the nature of reality reveals itself. What remains to be uncovered is how the chiasmatic nature of nonbinary flesh—its visible and invisible aspects—develops a notion of the body (and, by extension, of dysphoria) which is able to account for nonbinary experience better than the DSM’s account of dysphoria.
5. Chiasmatic dynamism is an ethical stance
The crucial feature of a chiasmatic ontology—and thus by extension the ontology of nonbinary being—is its dynamism, which functions to prevent it from devolving into sedimented rationality which scarcely resembles nature. Through the repeated crossings-over, and appearances into and out of visibility, a chiasmatic ontology takes on its critical rhythm by embracing this ongoing self-critique. Ultimately, it is not that nonbinaryness takes on a chiasmatic ontology; rather, the ontological principle of the chiasm must be nonbinary, as an effect of its resistance to categorization; consequently, it is this chiasmatic ontology which allows nonbinaryness to resist categorization. Importantly, as Leder (Reference Leder1990) demonstrates, the chiasm is not a single crossing-over, but rather a series of crossings which occur both intersubjectively and interpsychically; as such, bringing into focus the temporal dimension of these crossings-over is key to developing an understanding of the chiasmatic ontology of the nonbinary body. This is a process of co-constitution, and a process comprised of the “imminence” (Hughes Reference Hughes2017) of the chiasm. It is both this co-constructed nature, and its imminent unfolding, which allows nonbinaryness to resist categorization.
Understanding trans sense through a chiasmatic ontology surfaces the dynamism of its ontological workings, contra the sedimented rationality of cis sense as being purely an ontology of the visible, as demonstrated earlier. Such a dynamic and de-sedimented mode of being reveals itself, from the start, in Burke’s (Reference Burke2022) initial elucidation of the method of trans sense: “Cis sense is not the only way forward with one another. There are spaces in which ‘my sense’ is not nonsense” (215; emphasis added). The intersubjective nature of the constitution of subjectivities through trans sense emphatically refuses the static ontology of the visible, and instead discloses essentially and unequivocally its necessarily dynamic and chiasmatic ontology. While Burke’s analysis of the nature of trans sense is only briefly illustrated in their article, their highlighting of the intersubjectively constituted nature of subjectivities which trans sense enables nevertheless provides the necessary conceptual scaffolding through which to conceptualize a chiasmatic ontology of nonbinary being. Importantly, understanding the chiasmatic ontology of nonbinary existence in particular provides a rich conceptual mechanism through which to resist the totalizing workings of the ontology of the visible, and of dysphoria in particular. The openness in meaning foregrounded in trans sense takes on an ethical dimension as the way forward “with one another,” promising to disarm visibility’s panoptic workings for all.
Trans sense is intersubjectively co-constituted: Burke describes an additive process of meaning-making by which my sense is not nonsense (or perhaps more aptly, becomes not nonsense): “in trans contexts there is a different way of making gendered sense with others. In trans contexts, there is an openness in meaning, but that openness requires others to hold it open for a ‘me’” (Burke Reference Burke2022, 215). Trans sense need not be contingently linked to visibility; rather, in moving toward understand nonbinaryness as the ontology of invisibility, trans sense offers to assist in tactically disarming cis sense’s panopticon.
Merleau-Ponty writes that “this flesh that one sees and touches is not all there is to flesh” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty and Lefort1968, 144) and that it is “even incomparably more agile there and capable of weaving relations between bodies that this time will not only enlarge, but will pass definitively beyond the circle of the visible” (144), suggesting both the intercorporeality as well as the ephemerality of flesh, bringing it, therefore, out of the reification to which cis sense subjects it: if the body existed purely within the realm of cis sense, and the sense which others made of a “me” held an ontological primacy over the sense which “I” make of “me” (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022), it would be nonsensical for Merleau-Ponty to assert that the flesh “is not all there is to flesh.” Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that this is not “all there is to flesh” leads one to decidedly reject the notion that the sense others make of a “me” is ontologically primal. This allows for the possibility of the flesh to “pass definitively beyond the circle of the visible” (144): the other’s perception of “all there is to flesh” is insufficient, and instead, the other must rely upon me and the “sense” (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022, 215) that I make of a “me” is ontologically primal.
Where the merging of critique for phenomenology asymptotically approaches the merging of these two poles into one, the chiasmatic meeting between my body-for-me and my body as it appears to the other performs a function similar to that of the optic chiasm. Where the optic chiasm is the “condition of possibility of vision” (cf. Muller Reference Muller2017, 185), the chiasmatic nature of the nonbinary body is the possibility of an otherwise: the potentiality that my body is not exclusively for the other, nor exclusively mine (in a solipsistic sense), but rather that which enables me to express a generative and additive sense of myself. Nor is my body settled and fixed in my sense of my body, but my process of making sense of myself intends toward the sense which others make of themselves; witnessing the other’s understanding of their body is inherently an expansion of the possibilities of sense-making, and thus the sense they make of themself within my view expands my horizons of possibility, just as their witnessing of my sense-making of myself expands their horizons of possibility.
Stripped to its barest essence, the chiasm is not the distance between myself and the world, but the fact of our meeting, and, most crucially, the facticity (a phenomenological term which refers to that which concretely exists in the world; the concrete constraints my subjectivity must navigate) of both my self-knowledge and my encounter with the substance of others’ accounts of their bodies. This creates an upwards spiral in the horizons of possibility of bodily sense, one which provides the truest account of my body. The most crucial reading is of that it is the chiasmatic body which is “the condition of possibility” (cf. Muller Reference Muller2017) enabling a world in which “my sense is not nonsense” (cf. Burke Reference Burke2022, 215). Moreover, the meeting between these two meanings of nonbinaryness is additive, and expands the conditions of possibility which the nonbinary body represents. The applications of the present reading of the nonbinary body go beyond the body itself: the nonbinaryness of the chiasm stresses the need to develop an understanding of the nonbinary body as an expression of the ontological principle of a meeting “without presupposing a specific account of their difference” (Muller Reference Muller2017, 184); in other words, an ontology in which the relationships between the visible and the invisible dimensions of flesh are not predefined, but are rather left to the individual’s first-person processes of meaning-finding and meaning-creation. To do so requires one to radically adopt, as an ontological principle, Merleau-Ponty’s claim, cited above but worth emphasizing: “This flesh that one sees and touches is not all there is to flesh” (1968, 144).
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Shea Stevens, MA, and Jeffrey McCurry, PhD, for their generous contributions of both time spent reviewing earlier versions of this article, as well as for many generative discussions which substantially enriched the content of my argument. Finally, the author wishes to thank Fred Evans, PhD, for a particularly enriching conversation which deepened the conceptual argument motivating this article, and the author’s understanding of the chiasm.
River Heisler is a doctoral student at Duquesne University pursuing their PhD in clinical psychology, and a nonbinary person. They are primarily interested in how nonbinary subjectivity is lived; that is, how being nonbinary calls into question the basic assumptions as to the phenomenological nature of subjectivity. They also have interests in phenomenological philosophy, particularly the work of Merleau-Ponty, and in Gestalt psychology. In addition to their philosophical inquiries, River deeply enjoys their clinical work, where they also aim to draw upon phenomenological philosophy to deepen their work with clients.
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