Book review: Queer Post-Gender Ethics: The Shape of Selves to Come

Lucy Nicholas’s Queer Post-Gender Ethics: The Shape of Selves to Come presents a determined, yet ultimately unconvincing argument for the complete leaving behind of sexual difference. Situated within philosophy, gender studies, queer theory and queer/anarchist activist communities, it argues that new subjects – androgynous ones, with critical reading capacities, who work collectively to refuse to be limited in their gendered and sexual self-actualization – must be fostered. Totally unconvinced that sexual difference can be conceived of in terms that are anything other than historical, binary and fixed, Nicholas seeks the complete transcendence of sexual difference.

The central theoretical question raised by Nicholas is: ‘How might we understand ourselves and the world without gender?’ (p. 2). The ‘we’ in this question and in the book is never interrogated. The absence of any acknowledgement that there might be conflicting subject positions inhabiting or refuting this ‘we’ is one of the major failings of the book. According to Nicholas, this question is important because despite feminist attempts to intervene in the sex/gender system, ‘people continue to be defined according to oppositional or dualistic understandings of biological sex and of gender whether they choose to or not’ (p. 10). Nicholas thus argues that sexual difference is ‘inherently ethically problematic and negative’ (p. 10) and advocates instead transcendence through a framing of androgyny. While the book’s challenge to sexual difference’s fixity is somewhat well established, the possibility of transgressing, opening up, or re-signifying sexual difference is given less attention than the concept of androgyny, which Nicholas also critiques (for reifying male universal subjectivity) but then privileges in a post-gender ethics (pp. 112–113).

In Chapters 1 and 2, Nicholas outlines why sexual difference, and the histories of critical interrogation which grapple with it, need to be wholly transcended. Leaving these critical histories behind, Nicolas assumes a lacuna in the conceptualization of a post-gendered ontology. In the first half of the book, Nicholas seeks to fill this gap by turning to, and critiquing, liberal frameworks for justice and freedom (Chapter 3), philosophical concepts of ontology (Chapter 4) and queer theory, gender deconstruction and androgyny (Chapters 5 and 6). The last three chapters of the book situate Nicholas’s post-gender ethics within queer/anarchist practices such as gender-neutral child rearing, Free Skools and radical practices of sexuality. Nicholas argues that these queer/anarchist practices produce a world free of the problems of sexual difference.

The book’s originality lies in the alternative archives on which it draws to historicize gender. The most interesting and in-depth engagement with an alternative archive comes in Chapter 4 from Nicholas’s privileging of de Beauvoir’s political essays, philosophy books, novels and autobiography – rather than her more canonical The Second Sex (1997). And yet, the call for these works to be further interrogated in feminist and queer theory (cf. Stanley, 2001) is a more convincing argument than that which emerges from the straightforward readings of these texts that Nicholas provides. Nicholas pulls out snippets of de Beauvoir’s arguments, such as her statement in The Ethics of Ambiguity that ‘I concern others and they concern me’ (1976: 72) and, in The Second Sex, that selfhood should be ‘a freely chosen project’ (1997: 29), to suggest that, ‘a preferable way of seeing the self and others … that maximizes individual purposiveness but does not foreclose the agency of others to create the self as a project, would be a reciprocal relation’ (p. 109). For Nicholas, this means that because the self and the other are interconnected, a post-gender ethics needs to be collectively enacted and any individual attempts to transcend sexual difference will be questionable.

Following Browne and Nash (2010), Nicholas describes the book’s patchwork of sources as part of a ‘promiscuous methodology’ and a ‘methodologically “queer” “scavenger” approach’ (p. 11). Nicholas strings together scholarly texts, anarchist organizing tactics such as ‘progressive speaking lists’ (p. 187), observations from ‘radical queer communities’ such as Queer Mutiny and Queeruption, zines, science fiction novels, online communities and other scholars’ empirical research data. A number of issues emerge in Nicholas’s scavenger approach. First, because each type of material is deemed equally available, the differences in form and production across disparate sites are disregarded. This often means that the texts, communities, disciplines, interviews and long lines of theoretical enquiry that Nicholas dips in and out of are not adequately situated within their contexts of emergence, their nuances, or their limitations.

A more troubling problem that emerges from this approach comes from its application in the moments that Queer Post-Gender Ethics is attempting to diagnose issues within particular fields of knowledge. In a section titled ‘The binary limits of trans identity politics’, for example, Nicholas critiques trans theorists – specifically Halberstam (1998) and Feinberg (1998) – for their clinging onto identity politics and their reification of biological sex as stable and binary (pp. 25–27), a claim which does not actually account for the positions of either Halberstam or Feinberg, nor for the diversity of trans positions on sex/gender. Two paragraphs later, Nicholas attempts to intervene in what has been identified as trans theory’s ‘resilient bigenderism’, by calling upon ‘some queer thinkers with more complex ontological understandings of sex/gender’ (p. 26). In an inexplicable yet symptomatic move, the ‘more complex’ queer theorists Nicholas cites include two publications on Glee – one of which is a Master’s thesis – and the very same Feinberg book, indeed the very same page of that book, that Nicholas previously critiqued. This use of a theorist both to stand in for a field and to be a counterpoint against that field’s very figuration is repeated throughout the book. Often, as with the above example, the field or critique that is left behind is trans or feminist, while the intervention that comes to the rescue is queer.

The aim of Queer Post-Gender Ethics is to produce a prefigurative post-gender politics. Prefiguration, which Greenway describes as ‘the demonstration or rehearsal or sample of how life could be in a better world [which] is usually but not always transgressive’ (Greenway, cited in Bowen and Purkis, 1997: 175), is a collective, purposive and experimental enacting of utopian notions of a (queer) world on the horizon. One of the tenets of Nicholas’s prefigurative enactment of post-gender ethics is the use of gender-neutral pronouns like per and ze. Not wanting to reinstate the violence of sexual difference through the use of gendered pronouns, Nicholas exclusively uses gender-neutral pronouns. While the legitimation of gender-neutral pronouns is both an understandable desire and a highly debated topic, particularly around their recognition by nation-states, I remain unconvinced by the justification for the prefigurative use of gender-neutral pronouns for people who do not self-identify as gender-neutral or genderqueer. Nicholas sometimes uses these terms in reference to female scholars such as Butler and de Beauvoir, who identify with and trouble the category ‘woman’, or trans scholars such as Feinberg or Spade, who have advocated fiercely for the recognition of their own gendered identifications and those of other trans people. In doing so, Nicholas tends to deny people’s legitimate claims for gendered self-identification, as well as to negate the gendered politics of location from which these scholars’ interventions have emerged. In addition, Queer Post-Gender Ethics’ complete absence of any racial analysis means that Nicholas’s dismissal of gendered identification ends up ignoring the forms of racialized attachments to, embodiments of and negotiations with gendered identities.

While Nicholas’s desire to end the violence caused by compulsory, hierarchical and binary understandings of sexual difference is of course important, its realization of a post-gender ontological ethics produces its own form of compulsory non-gendering, one which is often in tension with the very real feminist, trans, racialized and classed identifications with, and desires for, gender. For potential readers seeking a comprehensive answer to what it might mean to ‘understand ourselves and the world without gender’ (p. 2), I would gesture towards Spade’s Normal Life (2011). Spade’s argument is that gendered injustice does not come from people’s identification with sex/gender (binary or otherwise) but rather from what he calls the ‘administrative life’ of gender – the utilization of the category of sex as a tool to regulate people’s access to social, legal and political services. Normal Life’s argument for doing away with the governmentality of sex, rather than sex itself, is not only more convincing, it makes central the experiences of women, trans people and racialized communities that Queer Post-Gender Ethics often ignores.