The Decadence of Becoming Oneself: The Bounding Rebellion of Moving-Gender

Abstract

This paper explores non-normative gender expression (NGE) as an ontologico-existential mode of being that unfolds through ‘moving-gender’: the lived experience of navigating and negotiating the boundaries of the gender binary in the context of the contemporary West. As its guide, this paper turns to Sakaguchi Ango (1906-1955), whose theory of the tangible-intangible decadent self provides a framework that attends to being as existential and material, individual and social – a movement of becoming through belonging. In an anachronistic and reconstructive reading of Ango, this paper illuminates moving-gender as an existential movement of becoming enacted through a belonging found in the migration of ontological regions, offering a phenomenological account of NGE as a mode of rebellious boundary-movement that pursues authenticity in its entirety.