Genderpunk

It is filed here as an expression term because what it primarily reports is a stance and the scene it comes from rather than an answer to the question of gender. A genderpunk may be a woman, a man, Non-binary, trans or something else. The sources on file also call it an identity, and that reading is recorded here without argument.

What genderpunk claims to resist

Norton-Kertson describes the practice as mocking traditional ideas of gender identity, gender roles and gender presentation, specifically the assumption that a person's sense of self, social roles and sexual orientation follow from the sex they were assigned at birth. The Stimpunks Foundation glossary, quoting the page Have A Gay Day, puts it as resistance against gendernormativity, homophobia and transphobia, and against oppression and social status generally.

Those two definitions are close and differ in kind. One describes a technique, mockery aimed at a set of assumptions. The other describes a target, a list of norms and hierarchies. A reader looking for what genderpunk means will find a method in one source and a target in the other, and no source on file reconciles them.

The Himoon glossary, a knowledge-hub page attached to a dating app, supplies the third and vaguest reading: a movement or subculture challenging societal norms and expectations regarding gender, which blurs traditionally feminine and masculine attributes across clothing, hairstyles, makeup and behaviour, and reclaims symbols conventionally attached to one gender. It also places the word's present home in online communities and social media, and not in any physical scene.

Why anyone can be genderpunk

The Stimpunks glossary makes a claim about eligibility that few gender words make. Gender has nothing to do with whether a person can be genderpunk, it says: agreement with the mindset is the qualification, however the person identifies. That inverts the usual shape: most of the words in this catalogue answer who somebody is, and this one answers what somebody refuses.

The consequence is that genderpunk cannot be counted the way a gender label can. A survey question asking which words a respondent uses for their gender will catch Genderqueer or Agender and will miss a term whose own definition says that gender is beside the point. That is one reason the record here is as thin as it is, and it is a property of the word itself.

Where genderpunk gets the punk from

The Himoon glossary ties the word to the punk rock of the 1970s and 1980s and to the aesthetic that came with it: dyed hair, body modification, clothing assembled so that it will not sort into a category. Stimpunks does something more useful with the same lineage. It files genderpunk beside four other glossary terms built the same way, each one a norm with a refusal attached, and each defined by quoting somebody else.

Read as a set, those five make the argument for treating genderpunk as a stance rather than a style. None of them names a way of looking, and all of them name something to refuse. The Stimpunks entry was posted on 27 September 2022 by Ryan Boren.

What genderpunk would look like as fiction

Norton-Kertson's essay is not primarily a report on the word. It is a proposal, and the proposal is that genderpunk should become a science-fiction genre, on the observation that the many -punk subgenres already in circulation had not yet produced one under this name.

The setting proposed is a world where the ordinary power structures of gender and sexuality have been pushed to dystopian extremes, with a right-wing theocracy using capitalism and state-sponsored violence to enforce them. The borrowings are named one by one: authoritarian urban landscapes and the spirit of rebellion from cyberpunk, ecological optimism and rooftop gardens from solarpunk, body modification as both metaphor and risk from biopunk, and magic from aetherpunk. The heroes are listed as trans people, activists, hackers, witches, scientists and artists.

The essay is explicit about what prompted it: a wave of anti-trans rhetoric, legislation and violence, the rise of trans-exclusionary radical feminist positions, and the overturning of Roe versus Wade, which it connects to the body-horror strand of the proposed genre through the question of bodily autonomy. It was published on Medium on 27 June 2023 and republished by Solarpunk Magazine, and its author followed it with a companion list of ten example books.

Why readers argued about the genderpunk label

The essay's comment thread is the only recorded disagreement about the word on file, and the disagreement is about labels, with gender itself left out of it.

A reader answered that the idea was hardly new, naming Samuel Delany's Triton and Alan Moore's Halo Jones as science fiction that had already done the work. Norton-Kertson replied that the genre label is what is new, that queer science fiction with protagonists taking on systemic bigotry had never been grouped under a single name, and drew the parallel with Ecotopia, written in the 1970s and now read as solarpunk although the word solarpunk was coined some forty years later. The reader rejected the parallel: inventing a label for something that has been there for decades does not make it a branch of literature, and Ecotopia cannot be genrefied retrospectively any more than Ubik can be called cyberpunk. Norton-Kertson answered that avant-garde science fiction had been discussing gender since Virginia Woolf's Orlando in the 1920s.

Neither side is arguing about what genderpunk means. Both take the definition for granted and argue about whether a name applied late can organise work made earlier, which is a question about genre criticism that happens to be attached to this word.

Why nobody has dated the word

No dictionary traced for this entry carries genderpunk, and none of the sources dates a first use. Norton-Kertson writes that it is not a new term, without saying how old it is or who used it first. The reference workbook behind this catalogue records the word at write-in level only, with no survey figure attached to it.

That absence is consistent with where the word lives. Its documented use is in glossaries, community pages and essays. No dictionary carries it, and neither do the community surveys that produce counts for other terms. The dated appearances on file run backwards from an essay of June 2023 that treats the word as already established, through a glossary entry of September 2022 that quotes somebody else's definition, to a journal article of December 2021 that uses the word for something of its own.

The academic record is a single article and it is doing something else again. Writing in the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture for December 2021, a researcher at Auckland University of Technology traced Frankenstein's monster from its Gothic origins through transphobic scholarship to its reclamation by queer writers, took in the social-media phenomenon of the Babadook being read as gay and the figure of the mutant, and arrived at what the article calls the genderpunk gayme, an aesthetic and political form committed to queer acceptance and intersectional solidarity. The word arrives there as the name of a form the author is proposing, which is the third distinct job genderpunk is doing across four sources.