Conclusion: Utopian Realism

I have proposed in this book that radical deconstructions of biological sex and gender can be applied to reconstructive ethics to underpin a queer, post-gender ethics. This extends the project undertaken by queer theorists and gender-deconstructive theorists, and explicates the implications of these ideas for social change, towards a more inclusive and positive sociality than the heteronormative or gender-fundamentalist ones that provoked them. The strength of this utopian vision of an androgynous mode of being and relating that does not rely on the classifications of biological sex and gender is that it takes inspiration from queer theory by coalescing around an ethico-political potentiality, not an identity. The intention is that it serves as ‘an ethos and mode of sociability that escapes … dialectical determination or that emerges as a third term effectively exceeding the dialectical opposition which forms its condition’ (Butler 2011a: n.p.). It is this key aspect that, I hope, can speak to some of the possible limits or problematic outcomes of a call for an end to sex/gender.