ABSTRACT
This sentence, in a book chapter titled Beyond Gender: Towards a Decolonized Queer Feminist Future by Olson and Horn-Schott (2018), captures in a sense the journey of the notion of gender in feminist theorising over the past half a century or so:
The heyday of gender – as the basis of critical attention to how individuals are constructed ideologically to be women and men and as a research paradigm and central category of analysis – has passed even if the discourse about gender remains ubiquitously present.
(Olson & Horn-Schott, 2018) Indeed, a distinctive feature of the evolution of feminist theory from its initial focus on women’s rights and advancement of gender equality has been its expansion to include “both inequality in gender relations and the constitution of gender” (Carlson & Ray, 2020, p. 4). And examining the constitution of gender meant that feminism could no longer be confined to the definition of gender as based on the biological binary of female/male but rather that it needed to indicate to a spectrum of sexual/gender identity formations.