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ERCC Conference Inventing the Human
Conference 2023: 'Inventing the Human' - University of Melbourne & Online
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Keynote 7: Susan Stryker, ‘The Romantic Roots of Gender in the Anthropocene’

Keynote

Keynote

9:30 am

02 December 2023

Arts West, Forum Theatre

Session Programme

The “gender” concept has experienced such a meteoric rise in popularity over the past thirty years that graphing its usage rates produces one of those hockey stick-shaped trend lines similar to those that graph rates of atmospheric carbon increase and other similar markers of anthropogenic climate change—suggesting that the recent history of this concept is in fact one element of the so-called “Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene. The orthodox history of the gender concept traces the long tail of its emergence to the work of New Zealand/US sexologist John Money in the 1950s, who is credited with first applying a term borrowed from grammar to the development of psychosocial identity. But the use of “gender” in the sense attributed to Money can in fact be traced to 1840s. It is deeply imbricated with the onto-epistemological fallout of Enlightenment humanism in ways that suggest, then as now, that “gender” does the work of aggregating disparate and incommensurable onto-epistemic power/knowledge formulations to produce a quotidian sense of lived reality—and that as such, it functions as a site for the transformation, as well as reproduction, of Anthropos itself.