Tori Mather - Research Progress - MOGAI

As I dig into the main topics I want to research under the umbrella of "queer online culture," I've found my first rabbit hole to be MOGAI. MOGAI, for those who may not know, stands for Marginalized Orientations Gender Alignments Intersex and is an alternate acronym for LGBTQIA+ proposed in 2015 by Tumblr users who aimed to come up with an all-encompassing community label with no need to be continuously added to, and which included everybody in the community but specifically excluded people like pedophiles. While my sources covering this community focus more on the "spectrum" identities, which is to say identities that fall somewhere between or involve a rejection of the linear gender spectrum, I find myself intrigued by what seems to be a more modern demographic in this community. Under the MOGAI tag on Tumblr today, you're less likely to find "exgender" (rejecting the question of gender altogether) or "paragender" (close to but not identifying as a certain gender), and more likely to see "dollgender" or "clowngender", which are exactly what they sound like: xenogenders tied to concepts, objects, or aesthetics. My conclusion after looking through blogs that employ and coin terms like this is that these are not genders in the traditional, linear sense, but can more accurately be viewed as an expression of one's gender-- i.e., they do not "identify as a clown", but rather feel like the aesthetic of a clown communicates to the common mind the amorphous way in which they experience their gender. However, I figure that I'm not one to make these sorts of conclusions yet, so I reached out to a few members of the MOGAI community on Tumblr to see if they'd be willing to share their experiences. Hopefully, I gain some good insight from them!