Reposted by Teagan Bradway
📣 New Podcast! "“Neopronouns and It Pronouns” with Teagan Bradway (Queer Forms and Pronouns Series)" on @Spreaker #gender #genderedlanguage #gnc #it #itpronouns #lgbtqia #misgendering #neopronoun #neopronouns #pronoun #pronouns #pronounsharing #speculativefiction #spivakpronouns #theythem
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“Neopronouns and It Pronouns” with Teagan Bradway (Queer Forms and Pronouns Series)
The final episode of the Queer Forms and Pronouns series got a bit more personal than I expected. The incredible Teagan Bradway and I speak about misgendering ourselves, giving the gift of language to our loved ones and why not just the function but also the beauty of gender-nonconformity pronouns is politically and personally significant. We speak about my anxieties about it pronouns and how this plays out in different genres from speculative fiction to memoir. Teagan’s insights into narrative agency and pronominal shifts are incredibly helpful in taking one last deep dive into the world of pronouns.
This conversation is part of a miniseries that accompanies my book Queer Forms and Pronouns: Gender Nonconformity in Anglophone Literature (Oxford University Press, 2026). I hope you like hearing more from your host, but not to worry: we will be back to our usual format after this one.
References:
Bradway, Teagan. "Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form." PMLA 136.5 (2021): 711-727.
Bradway, Teagan, and Elizabeth Freeman, eds. Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form. Duke University Press, 2022.
Bradway, Teagan. "Introduction: Queer Metarelationality." differences 35.3 (2024): 1-13.
Bradway, Teagan. "Queer Formalism." The Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer and Trans* Narrative Studies. Palgrave, 2025. 95-109.
https://teaganbradway.com/
Les Feinberg
Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance
Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot
Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood
Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer
Diane Watt
Jack Halberstam
Dana Luciano
Mel Y. Chen
Spivak pronouns (E/em/eir)
Isaac Fellman
Andrea Gibson
Hekanaho, Laura. "A thematic analysis of attitudes towards English nonbinary pronouns." Journal of Language and Sexuality 11.2 (2022): 190-216.
Mattheis, Lena. "Nonbinary Narration." The Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer and Trans* Narrative Studies. Palgrave, 2025. 25-39.
Vera Nuenning
Corinna Assmann
Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
- What does narrative agency have to do with pronouns? How might narrative point of view affect pronouns?
- Why do we discuss genre? What could the implications of discussing pronouns in speculative fiction be?
- How can ‘it’ pronouns allow us to think about gender, personhood and humanness?
- What are Spivak pronouns? You may want to look this up as we only mention them very briefly.
- What do Lena and Teagan think about mispronouning?
- Why do we speak about pronouns as a gift that is not always easy to give? How do you feel about sharing your pronouns or learning someone else’s?
![An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Generally, antinarrative theorists define queerness as a force of negativity that ruptures the illusory structures of identity (see Edelman, No and Bad). Narrative perpetuates these structures by promising a satisfying closure that will never arrive. Butler similarly challenges the desire for 'narrative closure for our lives' (Giving 64). They are especially critical of those who idealize a coherent, definitive life story as key to a healthy psyche. In fact, they go so far as to suggest that 'something we might tentatively call the truth of the person [ . . . ] might well become more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness—in enigmatic
articulations that cannot easily be translated into narrative form.' While
they embrace the enigmas that exceed narration, Butler nonetheless refuses 'to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence' as a queer ideal. Rather than opposing incoherence to identity, Butler defines incoherence as the existential price of our relational being. In their words, '[O]ur ‘incoherence’ establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond us and before us.' We simply cannot do without incoherence. But too much incoherence can lead to painful or even unlivable states of fracture, and as Butler cautions, '[T]he suffering that belongs to conditions of dissociation should not be underestimated' (52). We need some measure of coherence to survive.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6phcm4yufghwwc67rd7ecymq/bafkreih7swt6qevxfrhlgkdansbyi5elbzqhmyllqdt5ijszefep7noxfm)
