Ex-Chromosomes: Contemporary Performance and the End of Gender

In the 1915 novel Herland , Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined a utopian society, populated only by women, that has been flourishing in the absence of men for more than two thousand years. When Gilman's narrator—one of three male explorers to “discover” this much-mythologized wonderland—discusses gender distinctions with the Herlanders, he quickly learns that these utopians have long shed any consciousness of what a society with two genders would entail. “And there are two of you—the two sexes—to love and help one another,” a Herlander exclaims, in one of the novel's many ironic flourishes. “It must be a rich and wonderful world.”