Travis Alabanza: None of the Above
Writer and performer Travis Alabanza discusses their new memoir with Emma Dabiri, asking what it means to live outside the gender boundaries imposed by society.
‘When you are someone that falls outside of categories in so many ways,’ says Alabanza, ‘a lot of things are said to you. And I have had a lot of things said to me.’
In None of the Above, Travis Alabanza examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity.
These phrases have stayed with them over the years. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory.
These are sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse, sentences that speak to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary.
Through these seven phrases, which include some of their most transformative experiences as a Black, mixed race, non-binary person, Travis Alabanza turns a mirror back on society, giving us reason to question the very framework in which we live and the ways we treat each other.
Emma Dabiri is an Irish-Nigerian academic, activist and broadcaster. Her 2019 debut, Don’t Touch My Hair, was published to critical and commercial acclaim. Her latest book, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, published in April 2021, is a Sunday Times and Irish Times bestseller.
A regular broadcaster on the BBC, Dabiri recently hosted BBC Radio 4’s critically-acclaimed documentary Journeys in Afrofuturism, as well as presenting and co-producing Hair Power: Me and My Afro on Channel 4.
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