Removing, transcending, or otherwise rendering void or absent sex/gender as a central element of selfhood is an aim rarely pursued in theory or in activism concerned with deconstructing sex/gender. Even in queer and transgender theory that imagines alternative models or landscapes of identity or the self, sex/gender is usually merely adjusted, varied, and multiplied rather than rejected or transcended. The few visions of future landscapes of identity and sexuality in Western contexts that dare to imagine a selfhood without sex /gender, or at least without sexual difference, appear to be limited to a strain of 1970s utopian feminist science fiction and more recently among the theory and prefigurative practices of contemporary anarchist-queer communities.

This article views the current relationship between self and other as one that, in departing from the assumption of sex/gender, does not allow subjects to define themselves and others outside of it. In its place I propose an alternative way of being (ethics) derived from a social and intersubjective ontological basis that values reciprocal relations between subjects that are not reducible to antagonism or difference.

I will first survey some approaches that also deconstruct gender and view the current gender order as limiting but leave intact sex and, more specifically, sexual difference and wish to maintain some kind of gender as an aspect of identity. This helps me to refine my approach to a deconstruction of both sex and gender as socially created and maintained aspects of selfhood. I then draw on the few approaches that do not simply rearrange sex and gender as elements of selfhood but attempt to envisage selfhood or ethos (ways of being) – as well as ways of being sexual – without sex and gender as elements of selfhood. Drawing from science fiction and contemporary anarchist communities, I will emphasize elements of these approaches that are useful while noting their limitations. Especially useful for my purpose are the normative, ethical evaluations and their application to sex/gender made in sci-fi texts and in anarchist queer communities that valorize autonomy and reject behaviour that restricts autonomy. However, these approaches continue to rest on ontological foundations that rely on essential foundations, and they do not articulate a clear source of agency.

To remedy these limitations, I look to ontological ethical theory from Simone de Beauvoir’s so-called moral period and Judith Butler’s later, more ethically engaged, period – to develop a foundation for an ethos beyond sexual difference. This work articulates an ethical basis of the valorization of freedom, understood as transcendence of imminence (in Beauvoir’s terminology), and a rejection of ways of being that prevent the transcendence of others. This idea can be usefully applied to sexual difference – understood as a socially and intersubjectively maintained phenomenon that prevents transcendence and renders subjects imminent. Beauvoir’s and Butler’s emphasis on the social and intersubjective in subject formation forms the basis for a humyn-created and argued-for ethics of reciprocity.[1] A situated ontology that perceives self as always self/other/situation also affects the ways that agency and resistance are possible, thus refining the extent to which, and how, subjects can act towards a chosen ethos.

This discussion of agency, then, leads to a discussion of how a reciprocal ethics of a subjecthood without sex/gender, given this refined ontology and agency, can be put into practice. I will draw on anarchist approaches to education as paradigmatic, but not exhaustive, examples of a fostering of capacities that may offer a way to argue for this ethos and create a context conducive to a reciprocal ethos, while staying true to the principles of the ethos that it could be used to foster.

The Imaginative Poverty of Gender Transgression

Many queer theory and transgender texts focus on deconstructing gender, assuming that while gender may be variable sex, or more specifically sexual difference, is a given. The sex/gender divide allowed feminists to argue that although sex was a biological category, gender was a separate and social, and therefore not essential, category. This divide gained salience after Ann Oakley used it in Sex, Gender and Society in 1972 and this way of thinking has undoubtedly helped feminists to further the notion that gender is social and, therefore, not fixed. However, critics have argued that this analysis limits the diagnosis of the causal relationship between sex and gender, and many theorists (Butler, Gender Trouble; Fausto-Sterling; Gatens; Hird; Hood-Williams; Hubbard) theorize that it is gender that precedes sex:

Paradigmatic models that rearrange the binary variables of feminine/masculine and male/female to deconstruct gender but fail to transcend the difference that underpins them are found in well-known queer and transgender texts such as Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity and Leslie Feinberg's Trans Liberation, which critique the current gender order and sketch out alternative visions or models. Halberstam's project, although a great deconstruction of the idea that masculinity is inherently linked to maleness and challenging "the permitted parameters of adult male and female gender" (5-6), is more limited in its brief imagining of alternatives and its reliance on the idea of female and male as fixed sex categories as it seeks to multiply gender. Halberstam asks, "Why do we not have multiple gender options, multiple gender categories?" and seems to build per ideal model for gender on a perceived actuality of gender as really a continuum from which to choose gender (20). Feinberg's model is similarly articulated as "hues of the palette" (1). Hausman has noted that reliance on an alternative essentialism and a voluntarism about gender's mechanism are both aspects of many transgender texts, which often contain the idea that the mind contains the "'true being' of that subject" (191) in the form of gender and "the idea that the subject has a voluntary or entirely self-willed identity" (196). Indeed, both models cited above multiply the relationship and the area between the poles and, by focusing only on social gender, implicitly leave biological sex unscathed. Through these models, they tacitly reproduce the premise not only that identification to some kind of gender is imperative to selfhood but also that choosing is a simple subjective act. These formulations fail to transcend the binaries that are the focus of their critique because their modest aim is to rearrange the binary variables of male/female, masculine/feminine.

The discontinuity between sex and gender that the above texts advocate is, however, still a disruption of traditional perceptions, and it has made life more liveable for large numbers of transgender people. Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna identify the sex/gender distinction that allows for an incongruence between sex and gender as the second use of the word ‘transgender’ (after the first use, which they define as transition) and describe its valuable but limited challenge as “a previously unthinkable combination of male and female” (Kessler and McKenna, “Who Put the ‘Trans’” para. 2). This approach, however, is limited for my purposes because it maintains binary understandings of both sex and gender.[2]

Kessler and McKenna suggest that there is a third use of ‘transgender’ that represents not only a discontinuity between sex and gender but also perceives the ‘trans’ to be a transcendence, a description of a person “who has gotten through gender, beyond gender” (Kessler and McKenna, “Who Put the ‘Trans’” para. 2). This is one of the only examples in academia of a use of ‘gender’ that implicitly includes sex as social and that envisages the possibility of selfhood beyond or without these categories. This is a useful place to begin thinking about the possibility of selfhood and desire without sexual difference.

Even in virtual worlds, where anything is potentially possible, users’ imaginations are restricted almost entirely by an attachment to gender, usually binary gender, but certainly to the compulsarity of having some kind of gender as a central marker of identity. Additionally, gender is usually expected to be congruent with the real life biological sex of the participant. An illustrative example is the 2007 book Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators (Cooper), which presents a useful data set of sixty-six avatars – “computer generated visual representations of people or bots” (Nowak and Rauh para. 2) – alongside portraits and stories about their creators that demonstrates “the imaginative poverty of virtual reality” (Braidotti para. 49) in relation to gender. Within this varied and international collection of participants in virtual worlds, an overwhelming fifty-six are gender referential in that the apparent gender of the avatar is continuous with the gender of the creator. Additionally, although six avatars are entirely non-humyn, five of them are anthropomorphized and gendered, a fact that suggests that having a clear gender is considered an integral part of self-representation. Only one avatar is non-humyn and non-gendered. None of the avatars are gender ambiguous. Additionally, research by Kristine Nowak and Christian Rauh further demonstrates the intersubjective imperative of gender. They discovered that the more androgynous and less humyn avatars are, the more difficult people find it to communicate with them:

Uncertainty reduction theory demonstrates that the more familiar and understandable the other person is in an interaction, the more likely we are to trust and like them. The above research demonstrates that this holds true for online interaction, and that placing gender is an integral part of placing someone in familiar terms. This research challenges early futurological predictions of the Internet as a space in which traditional identity would be challenged by demonstrating that the same rules of social interaction apply in virtual contexts as in real life, limiting the qualitative possibilities of self-presentation and of intersubjective understanding.[3]

Likewise, the queer theory I refer to tends to negate the extent to which sex/gender, and indeed subjectivity itself, is intersubjective and social, and that its subversion cannot be an individual choice. For example, by imagining an alternative gender system in which sex no longer dictates gender, Halberstam suggests that all one must do is to choose one’s gender from the selection and come out:

My project, then, departs from the premise that gender alone is an incomplete focus of critique for those whose aim is to eradicate the inequalities that it seemingly generates and that the aim of undermining it would be better served by shifting to the ontological premise of sexual difference that underpins both sex and gender. In the following sections, I explore normative values that could justify this type of project, and I develop ontological premises that could underpin it.

I: Ethos and Telos beyond Sexual Difference

In this section I explore alternative visions of selfhood, visions that are not premised on sexual difference but, instead, imagine the possibility of a person “who has gotten through gender, beyond gender” (Kessler and McKenna para. 2). In particular, I interrogate their normative points of departure to explore what values an ethics beyond sexual difference may be premised on and their ontological premises to see if they are consistent with the non-foundational sex/gender deconstructive approach I posit above.

Utopian Feminist Science Fiction

Alternative ways of being in relation to sex/gender as an aspect of selfhood are apparent in many feminist utopian science fiction texts from the 1970s. Carol Pearson points out that a common feature of feminist science fiction from this period is the vision of the elimination of sex-role differences, without which “there is no model for a relationship in which one person ‘masters,’ dominates or controls another” (Pearson 51). This suggests that the eradication of sex/gender is usually tied up in these fictions with the eradication of other hierarchies of difference and with the maximization of individual autonomy, both of which are also features of much contemporary anarchist thought and practice. Indeed, Pearson (53) notes that many of the imagined societies are based on a horizontal model of the network and consensus as alternatives to hierarchy, features of anarchist theory and practice. Paradigmatic of these “feminist novel[s] of androgynous fantasy” (Morgan, 41) are Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1979) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974).

The future utopia of Woman on the Edge of Time is a society in which there is no sex distinction between humyn beings. Because breeding is no longer biological, people cannot be categorized through this capacity, and child rearing is undertaken by three co-parents. Because anyone can be enhanced hormonally to undertake breast-feeding, this nurturing capacity also cannot be a marker of a sexed identity, and biology is not considered in dualistic terms. Piercy’s vision results in much more diverse, less dualistic, and less difference-based behaviours or ways of being, behaviours that are unrelated to biology and any concept of gender. This is played out in the narrative when the protagonist, Connie, first meets Luciente, who visits her from the future utopia, and Connie is unable to place per gender because of the combination of characteristics that Luciente displays, including grace and beauty alongside a confidence to take up space and an unselfconsciousness about per body.

As a result of this lack of sex/gender distinction, sexuality is no longer considered dualistically or as a central element of identity; rather, sexual desire is viewed as a universal characteristic: “We couple. Not for money, not for a living. For love, for pleasure, for relief, out of habit, out of curiosity and lust” (Piercy 64). Additionally, people who undertake this ‘coupling’ together are called sweet friends and are not socially bound together in a relationship of exclusivity. This demonstrates an understanding of lovers as a different type of friend, rather than privileging them in a relationship hierarchy, a concern that is also present in much contemporary anarchist practice, as I will discuss below. Non-gendered pronouns are also a feature of Woman on the Edge of Time (in the form of ‘per’ for ‘her/his’ and ‘person’ for ‘s/he’) and later versions of The Left Hand of Darkness (which Le Guin has denied is a utopian novel [“Is Gender Necessary?”]).

The anarchist society of Annares in The Dispossessed maintains the use of gendered pronouns and a vague distinction between the sexes, but this aspect of identity is irrelevant to characteristics and abilities, except in the sense of the ability to reproduce. Additionally, sexuality is not guided by sex/gender and is an aspect of desire and acts, not identity. As in Woman on the Edge of Time, sexuality is something you do, not something you are. An interesting aspect of this ambiguous utopia (as the book is subtitled) is the suggestion that, in striving to deconstruct the norms of monogamy, non-monogamy has become reified as the prevalent and socially sanctioned norm in Annares. This is a wider theme of the book and demonstrates how easily a utopian society, even when based on an anarchist ethos rather than on a blueprint, is still capable of sliding into the social, intersubjective maintenance of uncritical norms. To investigate the means of fostering an autonomous relation to the self in terms of identity in Part 3, it will be necessary for me to return to this potential antinomy of anarchist ethics and explore how autonomy can be maintained and the congealment of previously minority norms into dominant norms prevented. To address this I will explore by what means a permanently critical ethics (in Michel Foucault’s sense of “a mode of relation to the self” [“Preface to the History of Sexuality, Vol II,” 333]) can be fostered to safeguard against the reification of an alternative set of norms.

In many of the imagined societies in 1970s feminist science fiction, the individuals’ sense of self is holisitically tied up with those of individuals in their immediate community, humynity, and the natural world. Thus, one of the central dualisms that is challenged in these visions is that of self/other, which is seen by many as the foundational dualism that underpins all oppositional hierarchical dualisms. Lucy Sargisson, for example, argues that it is “the self/other relation […] rather than Man/Woman, which underwrites the system” (175). Not only do the relations between individuals in many of these future alternative worlds not derive from a sense of sexual difference, they are also non-exploitative and non-hierarchical, demonstrating the perceived inextricability of sex/gender to self/other relations and to hierarchy and oppression more broadly. Relations are more informal and akin to the private sphere traditionally associated with women. It is this aspect of the visions that has led some theorists to suggest that the utopias are based on a female ethic. For example, Caroline Whitbeck envisions a different relation of self/other premised on an ethic of nurturing commonly associated with the feminine and states that women’s practices are those that should be “the primary traits developed in everyone” (67). Carol Pearson points out that in many fictional feminist utopias “men […] convert to a nurturing ethic” (55). This is apparent in Woman on the Edge of Time, wherein all humyns are engineered to be capable of breast-feeding, even if their biology is what the current paradigm would consider male: “As long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males would never be humanized to be loving and tender” (Piercy 105). Additionally, society resembles the family structure, not the depersonalized public realm. Science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, like Whitbeck, valorizes the idea of the feminine principle in per 1976 essay “Is Gender Necessary?” as analogous with a non-patriarchal, anarchistic mode of thought and being. However, by referring to the feminine in terms of a set of traits and modalities, it is possible to read this feminine principle as a set of non-essentialist principles traditionally associated with people considered to be women. Le Guin’s vision in this essay is for an alternative mode of thinking and being or modality (in per words) of “integration and integrity” (“Is Gender Necessary?” 139).

An alternative to exploitative, hierarchical, and difference-based ways of being and relating is exemplified in the reciprocal ethics apparent in the child-rearing practices and parent/child relations in Woman on the Edge of Time. The authority and biological enchainment of parenthood is broken because children are bred outside of bodies: every child has three non-biological mothers and ‘mother’ is synonymous with ‘parent.’ The goal is “to break the nuclear bonding” (Piercy 105). The role of these parents is not ownership but rather guidance and coexistence. At around the age of thirteen, all children go through a naming ceremony, wherein they are taken to the wilderness and left to choose their name and make their own way home. After this, they and their co-mothers cannot speak or live together for a year. This arrangement demonstrates not only a valorization of non-hierarchical nurturing relations but also a social context that encourages and is conducive to a kind of autonomy in individuals.

This ethic resonates directly with many of the points of departure of contemporary anarchist-queer politics and practice, which also links sex and gender to other types of hierarchy and envisions, and prefigures, alternative ways of being and relating. The positive aspect of both of these ethical approaches is a valorization of mutual respect for the autonomy of others according to a situated ontology that concedes that autonomy is not an entirely subjective phenomenon – it departs instead from a more social analysis.

Contemporary Anarchist and Queer Practices

By maintaining that this non-exploitative, reciprocal ethic is a feminine ethic, however grounded in social or psycho-social conceptions of femininity/masculinity, the approaches of these feminist utopias still do not go far enough in fully transcending the sex/gender dualisms that are, after all, symptomatic of the very self/other dualism that such a reciprocal and nurturing ethic seeks to reject. Whitbeck claims that the feminine ethic is available to both men and women and that “people may become convinced of the superiority of a particular ontology and seek the relationships and practices consistent with that view. (Theory may guide practice!)” (60). However, ze maintains a special access to this ethic for women by stating that men’s “ways of acquisition are necessarily different from our’s” (60). The approaches of Le Guin, Whitbeck, and others who valorize the feminine ethic did, indeed, emerge out of their involvement in 1970s feminism and, thus, from a movement that, owing to its context, sought to strategically valorize the female sphere.[4] It is my contention, however, that contemporary anarcho-queer ethics, along with a theoretical ontological ethics developed from the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, is able to reach similar ethical conclusions without recourse to sex/gender hierarchy inversion.

The practices of contemporary anarcho-queer and radical queer communities can be seen as similarly utopian in their prefigurative form, that is, they attempt to put into practice a mode of being or an ethic that they perceive as ideal.[5] Thus, it is possible to explore the aims and points of departure of these practices to gauge their usefulness for imagining a future way of being and relating without sexual difference. Temporary community spaces such as Queeruption or ongoing self-identified queer groups such as Queer Mutiny illustrate the bottom-up creation of community premised on alternative ethos of sex/gender. Queeruption is an annual festival or gathering, first held in 1998, that is hosted by different collectives in different countries each year and organized according to DIY (do-it-yourself) anarchist principles. It is a self-described space for “alternative/radical/disenfranchized queers” (Queeruption, para. 1), according to “a definition of queer that confounds and contradicts the limited representation of the ‘normal’/consumerist model” (Queeruption, para. 1). The festival revolves around community building, usually including workshops and discussion groups, many of which are related to queer issues such as different relationship structures, queer histories, and activist methods. Additionally, there is engagement with broader radical and anarchist issues, including race, body image, education, and alternative media. The festivals usually include skill sharing, parties, performances, sex parties, and communal eating, and they are a catalyst to activism regarding queer issues and broader anarchist issues.

These activities demonstrate the attempt to put into practice the sex/gender deconstructive elements of queer theory, an anarchist critique of oppression and hierarchy, and the valorization of autonomy. Indeed, the community group Queer Mutiny, of which different autonomous chapters are found in various cities in the United Kingdom, explicates this combination of Queer theory and anarchism by describing itself as “a radical queer anarcho group” (Queer Mutiny London). Engagement with queer theory is apparent in the zines (amateur publications) produced by members of anarcho-queer communities. These zines tend to articulate many of the ideas of queer theory but with more accessible language and more reference to activism and practice, a tendency that I discuss in greater detail elsewhere (Nicholas). They tend to be especially influenced by writings on the deconstruction of essentialist identity politics, which employ queer as a verb rather than as an identity category (see David Halperin and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, both of which are influenced by Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality). They concern themselves with the deconstruction of the heteronormativity they see at the core of assimilationist gay and lesbian identity politics and use queer according to its traditional definition as ‘abnormal.’ Additionally, a preoccupation with culture, language, and discourse as loci of power allies them with the poststructuralist influences of queer theory, an aspect of queer theory strongly associated with Judith Butler, who is, in turn, influenced by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Judy Greenway has also drawn links between anarchism and queer and sex/gender deconstructive theory, but little specifically anarchist-queer literature exists outside of informally made and distributed zines. For example, a queer zine titled Judy! and dedicated specifically to Judith Butler was produced in the United States in 1992 by Andrea Lawlor-Mariano. Similarly, Coughing up Legomen is an Australian anarchist zine that directly discusses the work of Pat Califia and touches on many aspects of queer theory, including the issue of choice and agency in subverting gender.

However, the increasing preoccupation with gender in some anarchist communities reflects a desire in anarchist thought to widen definitions of authority and to connect the hierarchical relation of sex and gender to hierarchical relations more generally. Poststructuralist anarchist theorists, for example, “employ a deliberately broad definition of authority: it refers not only to institutions like the state and the prison, etc.; it also refers to authoritarian discursive structures like rational truth, essence, and the subjectifying norms they produce” (Newman 12–13). These contemporary takes on anarchism (see May) distinguish themselves from classical anarchism in their non-foundationalist points of departure (they do not use an innately co-operative humyn nature as their basis) and a greater concern for the decentralized ways that power and authority operates. This parallels a shift in much recent anarchist activism (especially DIY anarchist punk) towards the deconstruction of authoritative/hierarchical modes of thought in addition to hierarchical structures and a more personal DIY (prefigurative) politics.[6]

An example of a practice that seems to put this convergence of contemporary queer and anarchist ethos into practice is the adoption in many transgender and anarcho-queer communities of gender-neutral pronouns (like those often found in feminist science fiction). I have noted the use of such language in Australian anarcho-queer zines (Nicholas), and it is not uncommon in radical queer spaces to hear people asked not what their gender is but what pronouns they use. These practices demonstrate a collective valorization of multiplicity and a collective valorization of choice or autonomy in gender identity.

Interestingly, in these contexts the use of identity politics often coexists unproblematically alongside the deconstruction of the categories that identity is based upon. This is demonstrated by the tactics of the gender-neutral bathroom campaigns. This use of identity politics and reverence of choice in gender identity could be understood as being parallel to the voluntarism that I noted in Halberstam and Feinberg earlier. However, I believe that the situated and collective characteristics of the politics of these communities transcends simplistic formulations of identity as a subjective choice and that collective cultural creations, of which zines are the paradigmatic example, create a cultural context for fostering an intersubjective context conducive to autonomy on the subjective level. I will discuss this creation of an autonomous context in Part 3, where I consider how ethos beyond sex/gender can be, and are, fostered.

The gender-neutral bathroom(US)/toilet(UK) campaign (called the pan toilet campaign in Australia) is a popular activist campaign or practice that works towards different conceptions of sex/gender both as an advocate for the transgender community and as an act of gender deconstructive activism. Australian pan toilet campaigner Larx (formerly National Union of Students Queensland queer officer) stated that

In terms of attitudes towards sexuality in many anarchist and queer communities, the same critique of hierarchy and attempted implementation of alternative models that is found in the sci-fi is present, wherein ‘different kinds of relationships’ (the name of a workshop at the DIY anarchist punk festival Between The Lines in Brighton 2007) – such as non-monogamy, polyamory, and radical love – are discussed in a political framework. Anarchist gatherings, for example, often hold workshops or discussion groups about different relationship possibilities, there are various zines on the subject, and a popular book has been published by an anarcho-queer member of the punk community in the United States titled Redefining Our Relationships: Guidelines for Responsible Open Relationships (Matik). Wendy O. Matik in particular is keen to stress in per book that alternative relationship structures should not replicate current hegemonic attitudes to relationships through the enforcement of an alternative hegemonic set of norms. Matik stresses the importance of having the autonomy to choose a preferred model for sexual relationships in contrast to the perceived social compulsoriness of monogamy in Anglo society. Indeed, Matik emphasizes in per book that monogamy or non-monogamy must be choices, not defaults. This relates to the broader understanding of anarchism as an autonomous ethos, not a blueprint, and anarchist theorists stress that “applying a utopian blueprint would involve enforcing others to live under a social model designed by just a few individuals, thereby restricting autonomy and (re-) creating patterns of domination” (Franks 99). An emphasis on autonomy and informed choice is also apparent in the way that sex spaces at events such as Queeruption are organized and in the creation of safer spaces policies and agreements that demonstrate that responsibility for your self (i.e., autonomy) and for others (i.e., responsibility) is a major concern in this particular anarchist approach to autonomy.

By valorizing the autonomy of sexual expression and by stressing consent and non-coercive, reciprocal behaviour and non-hierarchical relations that do not limit the autonomy of others, anarcho-queer/radical queer spaces often develop safer spaces policies to encourage individuals to value other people’s autonomy. These policies foster respect for people’s chosen identities and ensure the well-being of others by discouraging behaviour that makes them uncomfortable. An example of a typical policy is available on the website of the Auckland Anarchist Conference 2007:

What these various prefigurative enactments of anarchist-queer ethos demonstrate, then, is that the primary goals regarding sexuality are deconstructing the identity aspect of sexuality and maximizing its choice, autonomy, and pleasure aspects - goals that require collective mutual respect and responsibility if they are to be met. Such endeavours parallel the anarchist maxim of "total freedom/total responsibility" that derives from the anarchist principle of mutual aid (a concept developed by anarchist philosophers Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin) and seem, like feminist science fiction, to envision an idealistic alternative relationship between individuals that is not the antagonistic or oppositional self/other relation upon which current conceptions of sexuality, gender, and sex are premised.

These anarchist-queer approaches tend to draw heavily on the language of autonomy and freedom to articulate their ethical ideals. But is it possible to defend these ethical ideals and escape the reductive ontological premise of voluntarism that the aforementioned queer texts rely on? Is there an alternative ontological premise that is more true to their non-essentialist principles? I draw upon the ontological ethics of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler’s account of subject development, as well as per later ethical writing, to refine my understanding of autonomy, responsibility, and freedom to develop a social ontology that could be usefully applied to the normative goals contained in the examples above. By developing an account of subjectivity that takes into consideration self, other, and situation, I employ a less voluntaristic and essentializing conception of agency and the self that problematizes the notion of autonomy while retaining a commitment to an ethos of freedom, in a specific qualified sense, and taking into account responsibility and respect for others. With this ontological premise, I develop a qualified and specific definition of ‘autonomy’ to work with to imagine an alternative way of being that is not premised on sexual difference as a compulsory aspect of the self. Beauvoir and Butler posit ontologies that take the role of the other and the situation in the shaping of subjectivity seriously, but they do not see this as an impasse to ethical vale judgment and autonomy, premises that I see as compatible with, and sometimes implicitly present in, the science fiction and anarcho-queer communities discussed above.

II: Non-Foundational Ontological Ethics

An ontology of self/other/situation can justify an ethics of selfhood beyond sexual difference, one that posits reciprocity and mutual recognition as an alternative to difference-based hierarchical thinking. Using Beauvoir’s particular take on existentialist ontology and the ethics ze directly derives from this, it is possible to argue that reciprocal relations between equal subjects are not only ideal but, to some extent, also ontologically and normatively inevitable. In the service of arguing for a future without sexual difference, I draw from the ontological formulations of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler to demonstrate that the role of other and situation must be taken into account to understand subject formation, but this recognition need not result in the negation or oppression of the other. This will have important implications for the way that freedom and autonomy are understood. Additionally, Beauvoir’s existentialist, value-based assertion that existence gains value only through doing and through the transcendence of facticity achieved with freely chosen projects needs to be considered alongside these ontological premises of the delimited and intersubjective freedom that ze posits. These assertions together lead to the corollary that projects only aid transcendence when they are freely undertaken by others of equal agency. This is an important revelation if we are to explore how an alternative ethics beyond sexual difference of autonomous sexual identity (understood as a project of transcendence) can be programmatized and fostered.

In per early novels and philosophical texts (She Came to Stay, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” The Ethics of Ambiguity), Beauvoir developed an ontology in which self is always self/other/situation, what ze calls the fundamental ambiguity of the self – “that subjectivity which realises itself only as a presence in the world” (de Beauvoir, Ethics 9, 10). The acknowledgement of situation was a revelation for and break from much malestream existentialism, and it allowed Beauvoir to refine the existentialist notion of a free subject and to account for different levels of freedom. Additionally, Beauvoir was able to avoid the solipsism of much existentialism by suggesting that the discovery that others possess subjectivity just as I do – that is, the discovery of the other – need not necessarily result in fear of negation by or antagonism with the other. Rather, Beauvoir suggests that this realization can have positive consequences and is what demarcates the transition from the irresponsibility of the child-like stage of subjectivity to the responsibility to the other that comes with being a self/other. This ethical imperative and responsibility of an inherently social ontology is the central metaphor of Beauvoir’s novel The Blood of Others. Another ongoing concern of pers is the inescapability of decisions and responsibility as a result of existing in the world. This situated ontology has profound significance for understanding the self, for it forces the realization that when faced with the other, “I am not a thing, but a project of self toward the other, a transcendence” (Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas” 93).

The ideas of transcendence and project are also significant in Beauvoir’s account of the value of existence in that Beauvoir defines existence as the projection of the self into the future, the transcendence of facticity. By stating that “man is project” (Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas” 98), Beauvoir states that doing is per definition of being and of freedom. Indeed, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir explicates that “every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects” and, more strongly and normatively, that “subjection to given conditions […] is an absolute evil” (29). Thus, we have an explicit normative point of departure that can be applied to overcoming sexual difference – that subjection is to be avoided and transcendence is to be striven for to make existence worthwhile.

Butler’s account of subject formation is similarly social and somewhat limiting in that in order to be, one must attach to pre-existing norms (Psychic Life of Power), the corollary of which is an opaque ontology (Giving an Account). This results in an “ambivalent scene of agency” (Butler, Psychic Life of Power 15) that is contingent on never being a self-contained self, but it is also, in Butler’s later work, the very condition of action or “the paradoxical condition for moral deliberation” (Butler, Giving an Account 10).[7]

These ontological approaches can be points of departure for an ethics of responsibility to the other and of autonomy, in a specific refined sense. If the purpose or fulfillment of existence is to be found in transcending facticity – and my ontological condition is that of opacity or of the ambiguity of my freedom being tied up in the freedom of others and vice versa, as well as being contingent on my situation – the modest corollary would seem to be that freedom is not an individual state. Indeed, Beauvoir clarifies per particular notion of freedom as transcendence in the following: “To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom” (Ethics 91, my emphasis).

These different articulations of the limits to which we are autonomous in the traditional sense do not, for Beauvoir and Butler, preclude action. Their accounts offer refined understandings of autonomy that have implications for the ways that the ideal of freely chosen transcendence can be achieved. Judith Butler’s account of gendered subject formation is interesting to bring in at this stage because per development of the idea of performativity was deeply influenced by a particular reading of Beauvoir’s notion of becoming a gendered subject and because per early work was so concerned with the type of autonomy or agency that Beauvoir’s account allowed for (see Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex”). Indeed, Stoetzler emphasizes the similarities in thinking about structure and agency in Beauvoir and Butler, even after Butler rejected Beauvoir because ze perceived an adherence to the sex/gender divide and the assumption of a pre-discursive self in per work. These similarities suggest that both draw out the contradictions or ambiguities of agency that must necessarily work from within its situation. The self as always self/other/situation severely delimits the possibility of agency and change but “not the impossibility of resistance” (Stoetzler 360). Sonia Kruks, for instance, articulates Beauvoir’s formulation of agency as “living on rails” (67). Additionally, Butler’s model of performativity, especially as it is distinguished from performance, articulates an ambiguous stance on situated agency and demonstrates what most voluntaristic queer theory negates in formulating methods of resistance. Hausman suggests that queer and transgender theory and activism from the 1990s that was influenced by Butler’s seemingly agentic theory often worked within a popularized understanding of performativity that elided its important situational aspects and reduced the meaning of the concept to voluntaristic performance of a social gender that was perceived as separate from sex.

That one cannot be without doing gender (Butler, Psychic Life); that one’s identity is in large part attributional and, thus, social; and that one’s autonomy is a situated autonomy has profound implications for modes of resistance. Beauvoir and Butler, then, refuse to consider the possibility of some precultural autonomy and go beyond suggesting that there exists merely a delimited agency in some totality. Instead, they assert that the condition of self/other/situation is agency, that it is “the condition of my own freedom” (Beauvoir, Ethics 91). This line of argument means that we are able to ignore as a false line of inquiry the issue of how to foster individual autonomy and, instead, focus on transcending imminence in concert with others.

Because my freedom is contingent on the freedom of others, my own existence can be fulfilled only through the freedom of others; hence the ontological inevitability of reciprocity and responsibility. What Beauvoir’s ethics inherently valorize is, then, relations that maximize the autonomy of the self and of others so that freedom (as the fulfillment of existence) can be achieved. However, it is worth restating that these values are not derived from the assumption of inherently or essentially good or bad or co-operative or non-cooperative relations between people (as in the pessimistic assumptions of liberal theory or, conversely, the optimism of classical anarchism). By stating that “there doesn’t exist any pre-established harmony between men” (Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas” 108), Beauvoir suggests that the foundation for per ethics should be derived from the facticity of humynity’s interrelated ontological situation, along with a humyn-created ethical ideal of transcendence (similar to the normative ethical ideal in anarcho-queer communities) that takes this ontology as its starting point. Additionally, transcendence, while ideal, is not an inherent capacity but rather contingent on others and situations.

A similar value distinction can also be derived from Butler’s work on subject formation. While claiming that there is an ontological imperative to attach to pre-existing norms in order to be, it is possible to make a value distinction, as Amy Allen does, between subordinating and non-subordinating norms. And it is important to remember that it is individuals who uphold and perpetuate these norms. Thus, Allen suggests that Butler can be used to “resist the idea that subjection is per se subordinating” (Allen 210). This value-based distinction of autonomy or ‘power to’ in contrast to domination or ‘power over,’ is also apparent in Foucault’s explicitly ethical work, in which ze defines ethics as “a way of being and of behaviour […] a mode of being for the subject” (Foucault, Ethics 286). By seeing the self as something to be worked on, Foucault departs from a non-foundational ontology and inherently valorizes as ideal this ability, or freedom, to be able to work on the self. Like Beauvoir, Foucault emphasizes that sometimes these conditions for freedom, the ability to practice freedom, are not present: “One sometimes encounters what may be called situations or states of domination in which the power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remain blocked, frozen” (Foucault, Ethics 283). By defining this situation as domination, Foucault valorizes its opposite, the practices of freedom (Foucault, Ethics 283).

This has practical implications for a transformatory politics rooted in similar non-foundational ontological assumptions, politics that hold similar ethos of autonomy and responsibility and similar normative aims of transcendence of facticity towards “the variable construction of identity” (Butler, Gender Trouble 5). This is the fairly modest lesson that the creation of an alternative, non-subordinating way of being must be a freely chosen collective endeavour, like those seen in the anarchist-queer practices discussed above. In Allen’s words: “Resistance to and transformation of subjection will require not only critical reflection on the legitimacy of prevailing norms of sex/gender, but also the cultivation of alternative sources and modes of recognition” (207).

III: Ethos in Practice

In departing from this ambiguous ontological condition, as well as from the valorization of a qualified definition of ‘freedom’ developed from a qualified notion of autonomy that takes this ambiguity seriously, how can freedom be fostered, especially in relation to sex/gender? Anarchist approaches to education can be drawn on here. Although anarchist education does not exhaust the possible approaches to fostering a reciprocal ethics beyond sexual difference, it does offer a way to bring together aspects of anarchist pedagogy, non-essentialist ideas about humyn nature, and the deconstruction of the sex/gender order.

Theory of De/Reschooling: Fostering Capacities, Not Inculcation

Although Geoffrey Fidler rightly notes that much classical anarchist pedagogy departs from the classical anarchist assumption of the essential co-operative nature of humyns, this pedagogy, like much contemporary anarchism, strives to develop humyns who are capable of participating freely and autonomously in a society based on anarchist principles of non-hierarchy. In this schema, education is an instrumental component in the process of achieving the transformation of society. While this aim for classical anarchists often departs from a typically humanist essentialism, it can, I maintain, also depart from a less essentialist notion of the subject that is more akin to the non-foundational intersubjective ontologies of Beauvoir and Butler, wherein autonomy, co-operation, and mutual aid can be seen as characteristics to be fostered rather than liberated. Demonstrating conceptions compatible with those of contemporary anarchism, some classical anarchist texts in fact employed the language of cultivation, such as “the naturalist metaphor of the educational gardener or farmer” and discussion of the “art or technique of cultivation” (Fidler 23). Anarchist pedagogy can therefore be useful in the search for practical discussions of how to achieve an autonomous ethos that gets beyond sexual difference and that acknowledges the role of others and situation in subject formation. These aims do not inherently need to be premised on humanistic assumptions about humyn nature or asocial, traditionally autonomist concepts of subject formation; rather, the humyn subject can be viewed in Foucauldian terms as inhering potential capacities (Patton 69) rather than essence. Such postulations are of use to anarchists attempting to foster a society devoid of the sexual difference at the root of sex/gender inequality.

Indeed, in advocating an approach to education that develops critical capacities, Kenneth Wain uses Foucault’s late work on “the ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom” to challenge the orthodoxy in the liberal philosophy of education that “education is the development of the rationally autonomous person” (Wain 349), but ze still valorizes a qualified type of autonomy. This approach is of use in the development of methods to encourage an informed, responsible, autonomous ethic in relation to the self, others, and sexuality that takes seriously the role of the social and the intersubjective in subject formation and views the self as always self/other/situation. What such an approach acknowledges is the Foucauldian contention that power is inescapable in humyn relations, especially where knowledge is concerned, and that one must distinguish between types of power and strive to make the power relations transparent, consensual, and positive. Paul Patton builds on Foucault’s ethics, suggesting that power can be distinguished as either extractive power or developmental power (Patton 66), which are “those modes of exercise of power which inhibit and those which allow the self-directed use and development of human capacities” (Patton 68). This resonates with Allen’s distinction, derived from Butler, between subordinating and non-subordinating norms, which leaves open the possibility of developing non-subordinating norms. These two approaches demonstrate that the insight that power is pervasive in intersubjective relations need not be debilitating in the pursuit of this qualified autonomy.

These developmental or non-subordinating relationships play out in the parental relations and collective child-rearing practices that replace nuclear families and official education in Woman on the Edge of Time. Additionally, Pearson cites Mary Staton’s 1976 sci-fi novel From the Legend of Biel as containing relationships that are emblematic of such a reciprocal self/other relation: “The mentor/charge relationship is based on mutual sovereignty […] two people of relaxed and curious mind, who learn and share together, who confront the unknown, also create joy” (Pearson 56). This developmental approach to power is also explicit in the premises of the anarchist practice of Free Skool and in the structure of workshops, meetings, and discussion groups at many anarchist and queer gatherings and groups. In these spaces, attempts to break down the traditional structures of information provision are apparent in the use of terms such as ‘skill sharing’ and ‘knowledge sharing.’

As I have pointed out, contemporary queer anarchism encompasses under its overarching ethos of the deconstruction of hierarchy for mutual aid, the deconstruction of gender and sexuality norms and the prefiguration of alternatives, which can be predicated on non-essentialist bases, as I have demonstrated. The deconstruction part is certainly the easier of these two tasks, but it is clear that many contemporary anarchist communities also consider what comes after this, how alternative ways of being premised on autonomy can be fostered without reifying a new set of norms through a blueprint.

Free Skool is an example of a contemporary anarchist practice that is derived from anarchist education practices that have been documented from the early nineteenth century (see Avrich). This practice can, however, also be understood as a departure from a conception of selfhood akin to that discussed by Beauvoir and Butler rather than from the humanistic premise often found in classical anarchism. This is apparent in its participants’ explications that the aims of Free Skool are to de-educate and re-educate themselves and one another on autonomous terms. They do not assume, therefore, that they are revealing an innate co-operative nature like the one presumed in classical anarchism. Free Skool Santa Cruz describes its aim, for example, as “an attempt to de-school ourselves and to learn from one another the skills necessary to transform society and challenge oppressive systems” (Free Skool Santa Cruz para. 1). This type of practice exemplifies contemporary anarchism’s integration of the personal and the political, whereby everyday hierarchies such as those embedded in sex/gender/sexuality are addressed as part of the deconstruction of taken-for-granted modes of thought and alternatives envisioned and enacted. Additionally, this language of “learning from one another” reflects the intersubjective formulations of Beauvoir and Butler in which subjectivity is never developed in isolation.

Demonstrating this contemporary anarchist concern with sex/gender as a central hierarchy, the Free Skool Santa Cruz schedule for spring 2008 included a series called Unpacking Gender, which included sessions titled Unpacking Gender Norms, Radical Sex, TransGENDERqueer, and Refusing to be the Patriarch. Additionally, there were sessions concerned with relationships more broadly such as Love Unabashedly: The Undefining of Relationships, which demonstrates a desire to foster alternative ways of relating. Likewise, Free Skool Vancouver holds sexuality learning groups, including a session titled Linguistic Analysis of Sexual Discourse: Noun Classes and Gendered Language Explored, How Might the Structure of Language Inform Our Understanding of Sexuality? (Free Skool Vancouver).

Clearly, these types of sessions involve aspects of deconstruction (reflected in the terms ‘analysis,’ ‘unpacking,’ ‘undefining,’ and ‘refusing’) but are also concerned with with re-creation (reflected in the positive statements ‘love unabashedly’ and ‘radical sex’ and the use of alternative-created language such as ‘TransGENDERqueer’). The positive values that sessions strive towards seem to be those of autonomy and pleasure, in loving unabashedly, renaming and reconstructing language, and in redefining sex and relationships radically.

What this demonstrates is that “there are, then, structural alternatives to the carceral school, classroom, and society, because there are power relationships and technologies that are not dominating” (Wain 358). In this sense, Foucault’s, Beauvoir’s, and Butler’s conceptions of power, subject formation, and freedom as applied to education mesh nicely with aspects of anarchist ethos inherent in contemporary anarchist-queer theory, practices, and communities: that of autonomy in the sense of self-power rather than a simplistic ‘freedom from.’ In terms of education, this would result in “a pedagogical project that enables subjects to ‘give laws to themselves’” (Wain 358). This is an ideal approach for those who want to reconstruct identity for themselves (understood within the refined definition of ‘selves,’ not as an atomized self but as situated, social selves developed in Part 2) without the perceived restrictions of sex and gender and of a sexuality derived from these restrictions.

This focus on education specifically is analogous to the creation of cultural contexts more broadly by communities that foster the capacities for alternative ways of being. Anarcho-queer communities also engage in the creation of zines and online communities that are able to foster shared culture in geographically diverse contexts, gatherings and spaces that enable physical space for fostering alternative culture and cultural creations such as music and art that may also foster alternative consciousness (see Nicholas for discussion of broader anarcho-queer cultural creation).

These fundamentally collective approaches evade the individualistic voluntarism that plagues some early queer theory and are also ideal tactics for deconstructing the assumption that sex and sexual difference, alongside and as part of gender, are necessary elements of identity. They are also useful methods for fostering ways of relating according to explicit ethics of reciprocity and recognition rather than according to pre-existing identity categories.

Conclusion

I suggest that the ontological ethics of Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault offer utopian visions of a world without sexual difference useful ways to think about a subject formed with an alternative relationship to the other that is not premised on the opposition and struggle that underpins sexual difference and, thus, sex/gender.

Additionally, I suggest that for those who wish to develop ways of being beyond sexual difference, the strategies of contemporary anarchist and radical queer practice may be of use and inspiration. These strategies offer a way forward from the point of departure of non-foundational social subjects because they operate from the premise that change must be a collective process and that a certain amount of explicit developmental power is necessary to foster the capacities of selves in the pursuit of autonomy over identity.

The future of sexuality without sexual difference, then, is a future without notions of biological sex or gender or identities of binary hetero/homo/bi/trans sexuality. Much like Foucault’s notion of being agents of pleasure rather than subjects of desire (Foucault, “Michel Foucault on ‘Pleasure vs. Desire’”) and the queer separation of acts from identity that built upon this notion, sexuality without sexual difference would be about pleasure and acts rather than identity and essences. It would not be preoccupied with the “orientation of […] desire” (Foucault, “Michel Foucault on ‘Pleasure vs. Desire’”) because orientation would be meaningless without sexual difference to orient towards.