‘A Catalyst Into Queer Life’: Gender-Open Parenting as an Abolitionist Practice

Abstract: As practitioners of gender-open parenting, the refusal to impose a gendersex identity on children, my interviewee/collaborator and I engage in a dialogic interview about our shared embodied, everyday, relational parenting practices. I ask: What do we do when we do gender-open parenting? What does gender-open parenting do? If Marquis Bey and their black trans feminist theory set the scene, Sara Ahmed provides me with the concepts to move the methodology toward an abolitionist phenomenology beyond resistance to cisgender ideology. In my analysis, I find that because language makes people, suspending and refusing cisnormative interpellations opens us to processes of desedimentation and incorporation of alternative modes of relating. Yet, in doing so, we stumble on the stickiness of words, and by stumbling we make others stumble: we disrupt the flow that keeps us in line with the family as the fundamental unit of time. I also find that gender-open parenting allows itself to be framed by different frameworks (gendersex abolitionist and expansionist) that carry different promises. I find that the abolitionist promise as presence turns the emptiness of promises into a liberatory feature, making room for the possibility of alternative possibilities. As such, stumbling out-of-line of the family line means also letting chance happen, rejecting the modern/colonial need to know and categorize, and welcoming the unknown. This thesis is an invitation to gender-open parenting practitioners to refuse to pass on to children the liberal promises of recognition and inclusion in cisnormative racial capitalism and to answer the coalitionary nonnormative calls for gendersex and family abolition.