Symposia: Lesbian and Post-Gender Ethics: 'Belonging in difference[s]' : the potentialities of post-gender ethics

This article offers an overview of the motivations and contexts for my wider work in post-gender ethics (Nicholas 2014). This considers whether gender and sexual difference itself can be eradicated, and what kind of positive mode of understanding oneself and others, and thus of conducting oneself and being sexual, could replace them. This work is inspired by queer deconstructions of gender, as well as feminist biology that undermines the 'realness' of biological sexual difference and offers the potential for understanding bodies differently. I argue that these offer exciting premises for developing a reconstructive, ethical counterpart of a more queer mode of being. I briefly chart how I use Simone de Beauvoir's 'ethics of ambiguity' as reconstructive principles for a more enabling alternative, and consider how such an alternative could resist reification by remaining 'queer'.