Postgenderism

Postgenderism is a social, political and cultural movement which arose from the eroding of the cultural, psychological, and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory. Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and foresee the elimination of involuntary psychological gendering in the human species as a result of social and cultural designations and through the application of neurotechnology, biotechnology, and assistive reproductive technologies. Advocates of postgenderism argue that the presence of gender roles, social stratification, and gender differences is generally to the detriment of individuals and society. Given the radical potential for advanced assistive reproductive options, postgenderists believe that sex for reproductive purposes will either become obsolete or that all post-gendered humans will have the ability, if they so choose, to both carry a pregnancy to term and impregnate someone, which, postgenderists believe, would have the effect of eliminating the need for definite genders in such a society. Postgenderism as a cultural phenomenon has roots in feminism, masculism, along with the androgyny, metrosexual/technosexual and transgender movements. However, it has been through the application of transhumanist philosophy that postgenderists have conceived the potential for actual morphological changes to the members of the human species and how future humans in a postgender society will reproduce. In this sense, it is an offshoot of transhumanism, posthumanism, and futurism. In the 19th century, Russian philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky believed that "people will be happy when there will be neither women nor men". Urania, a feminist journal privately published between 1916 and 1940, advanced the abolishment of gender; each issue was headed with the statement: "There are no 'men' or 'women' in Urania." One of the earliest expressions of postgenderism was Shulamith Firestone's 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex.

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Related publications (1)

Related concepts (8)

Assessment of brain metabolite correlates of AAV-mediated overexpression of human alpha-synuclein in cortical neurons by in vivo(1) H-MR spectroscopy at 9.4 T

Sarah Catherine Sonnay

In this study, we used proton-localized spectroscopy ((1) H-MRS) for the acquisition of the neurochemical profile longitudinally in a novel rat model of human wild type alpha-synuclein (a-syn) overexpression. Our goal was to find out if the increased a-syn ...

Wiley-Blackwell2016

Social construction of gender

The social construction of gender is a theory in sociology about the manifestation of cultural origins, mechanisms, and corollaries of gender perception and expression in the context of interpersonal and group social interaction. Specifically, the social construction of gender theory stipulates that gender roles are an achieved "status" in a social environment, which implicitly and explicitly categorize people and therefore motivate social behaviors.

Sociology of gender

Sociology of gender is a prominent subfield of sociology. Social interaction directly correlated with sociology regarding social structure. One of the most important social structures is status. This is determined based on position that an individual possesses which effects how they will be treated by society. One of the most important statuses an individual claims is gender. Public discourse and the academic literature generally use the term gender for the perceived or projected (self-identified) masculinity or femininity of a person.

Gender neutrality

Gender neutrality (adjective form: gender-neutral), also known as gender-neutralism or the gender neutrality movement, is the idea that policies, language, and other social institutions (social structures or gender roles) should avoid distinguishing roles according to people's sex or gender. This is in order to avoid discrimination arising from the impression that there are social roles for which one gender is more suited than another.