A radical queer utopian future: A reciprocal relation beyond sexual difference

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.