Agender as Cyborg: Feminism Beyond the Binary
Introduction: A self-experience as an Agender
I am neither female or a male.I resist even being called as “non-woman”or “non-man”.I am someone without a specific gender designation, and this “without” is not an absence or a void, but a way that living in the borders, a way that constantly rebuild how I exist.Also, when people ask about my gender, actually “what I’m I”, it’s rarely to have an straightforward answer.As it not a question that can be simply defined, but an experience, a non-linear way of existence. Donna Haraway, in her Cyborg Manifesto, offers a figure that resonates deeply with me: the cyborg—a creature of uncleared boundaries, which rejects origin myths. It does not seek purity, but rather connection across divisions. As an agender, I recognize myself in this fragmented subject: not in spite of being unclassifiable, but precisely through it.
In this op-ed, i’m not trying to be a “better woman”, nor to claim the space of the radical other.I aim to ask a different question: as gender is no longer a stable ground, what forms our life, kinship, and struggle as a feminist?
The Dissolution of Boundaries:Reconfiguration of Identity
The cyborg is not simply a metaphor; it is a way to exist. In Haraway's terms, we are no longer comfortably separate into organism and machine, physical and non-physical, human and animal. The cyborg lives in the interactions. It emerges not from the reconciliation of opposites, but from their refusal to remain distinct.
As an agender, I found in this collapse an uncanny family. I do not stand as a "third option" for a man and woman. I am not the midpoint of a linear scale. My presentation is a substitution of the grid itself—a body whose meaning is not deduced to gender, whose legitimacy resists category.
This is not a stack of identity, but the article of a different kind of positionality: one that requires no longer than the scaffolding of opposition. The cyborg's power rely on its refusal to perform well. Likewise, agenders lives do not resolve the binary; we dissolve it. We are not a new pole, but a reconfiguration of the entire field.
Agender, in the Heteropia of Identity and Technology
If we could say,the cyborg is born from the collapse of binaries, then agender bodies dwell in the aftermath: in the indeed heterotopia refers to spaces that exist beside, within, and against the real. Our identities are not just imagined futures, but malfunctioning presents, glitches in the system that expose the limits of its logic.
The logic of an agender is not simply based on the absence of gender, but the presence of another logic of embodiment. Our flesh does not signify a binary, and our languages does not demand allegiance to “he” or “she.” The body becomes interface — not only metaphorically, but also materially. We navigate systems designed for two, refusing both and accepted by none, reconstructing ourselves through digital, medical, and semiotic networks not built for us but rewired by us.
If we are cyborgs, we are the ones that misfiring, we may refuse efficiency, creating noise and resisting optimization, through our documents, our pronouns, our clothes.Yet this misalignment reflects power.There’s truly an declaration that the body of agenders is not as blank space, but as heterotopic, as a place that refuse all discipline.
The state, the hospital, the classroom, even the online community, each of them is a stable categories.But the agender cyborg is not a location. We are disturbance.Not a body “yet to be understood,” but a body that understands differently. A body that slips through the grid.
Not Sisters, Not Classmates: Agender and the Affinity Politics of Future Feminism
We are not sisters.We are not “woman” united by a shared body, nor proletarian women defined by a common relation to labour.If there is a feminism for the future, it must be built on the friction of dissonance, on the alliance of those who fail to belong.Radical feminism sought to locate a womanhood outside of patriarchy, a purity before contamination. Marxist feminism sought to analyze womanhood within the logic of production. But both, in their own ways, required a stable subject: “the woman.” Agender subjects — not quite women, not quite men — fracture that subject. We bring noise to its clarity.
We do not want to become women. We want to rupture “woman” as a category that has so long been asked to carry both oppression and salvation. We want to be in coalition with those whose borders leak, who cross wires, who shift pronouns, who refuse coherence, those cyborgs, queers, nonbinary ghosts in the machine.
Agender does not demand erasure of womanhood, but demands a feminism that does not flinch when the subject blurs. A feminism that sees in the glitch not an error, but a threshold. We are not sisters. We are kin of distortion. Of divergence. Of possibility.
And in this refusal to be “women,” we may be freeing women themselves.If the identity of "female" is always a product of being oppressed, defined, labeled, gazed upon, and mutually disciplined within patriarchy,Will the continue to use "female" as the sole legitimate subject, stick us on the structured web? And what could be more liberal than a feminism that no longer requires its subjects to perform womanhood? A feminism where one does not have to be soft, legible, reproductive, or legibly oppressed to be part of the struggle? Agender feminism does not abandon women, actually, it unburdens them. It lets the category “woman” breathe, shape-shift, and be undone.
We do not stand outside feminism.We stand at its fault lines, and from there, we ask what else might be born when the ground breaks.
Written by: Staffy
