Beyond Gender was formed (or rather, co-gestated) in 2018 by a group of researchers, activists and practitioners who wanted to move beyond endless demands for representation and into discussions of the joys of queer sf.

This group continues to grow: it now comprises sixteen members who have found in sf, in the words of our Beyond Gender Manifesto, ‘new worlds, forgotten ways of being, creatures whose strangeness shows us the strangeness in ourselves’.

Beyond Gender seeks to provide a space where we can fulfil both our need for queer and feminist community and our desire to learn more about those texts which have shown us what such communities might offer.

In our work, we endeavour to approach texts of many different kinds through a process we have called Collective Close Reading. CCR involves non-hierarchical knowledge production, based on the close reading of a plurality of texts in which the ideas of individuals develop and aggregate to form a collective understanding of text(s). Through CCR, we seek to de-centre and escape the damaging myth of individualized authorship, and to produce knowledge collectively, through a diversity of voice.

In the future, we want Beyond Gender to grow wider and deeper, learning along with us and becoming something strange and new. As Octavia Butler wrote: 'All that we touch, we change. And that we change, changes us.'