Assembling Gender: Cultural Toolkits and Non-Binary Identity Formation in Taiwan

This paper investigates how the category of non-binary gender became socially intelligible in Taiwan through the work of knowledge mediators, who are transnationally mobile individuals whose embodied, racialised experience shaped how international non-binary frameworks were translated and reinterpreted in a Taiwanese context. Drawing on 14 semi-structured interviews with non-binary individuals in Taiwan and discourse analysis of community publications and social media, the paper traces two waves of knowledge transmission: an initial wave of cosmopolitan cultural mediators who filtered the concept through their biographical experience, and a second wave of community members who encountered a localised version through vernacular channels. Using Swidler's (1986) cultural toolkit theory, the paper argues that the strategies through which Taiwanese non-binary identity became legible: community surveys, collective publishing, coalition-building with Taiwan's pan-democratic social movements. These strategies reflect path dependencies from Taiwan's specific movement tradition rather than a straightforward adoption of Western visibility politics. The paper further demonstrates that the labour of making an unintelligible identity legible generates an unexpected cost: the classifications built to fight external unintelligibility feed back into internal self-doubt among community members, extending Hacking's (1995) looping effect to the community level. Finally, the paper identifies cosmopolitan capital, rather than educational capital alone, as the axis shaping community accessibility. The findings position Taiwan as a generative site of theory-making about non-Western identity formation.