Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
The publication of my forthcoming book Androgynous Humanity (see AGTRT-BA20) is only a first step in my ambition to bring a new body of thought about gender and sexuality into the world. I see the book as the starting shot of a potentially long-term and comprehensive project, with the aim of giving Gender & Sexuality Studies a firmer scholarly foundation and guiding the derailed social debate in the right direction.
Read the latest update on Androgynous Humanity:
Update book Androgynous Humanity: roadmap to the new world
The academic field of Gender & Sexuality Studies is increasingly gripped by dogma and ideological struggle, contributing to the social polarization that is increasingly growing around this topic. Gender and sexuality scholarship is relatively young and in my view urgently needs a firmer interdisciplinary foundation so that ideologization and extremism can be contained. I have become convinced over the years that the concept of androgyny can provide that foundation (see also AGTRT-BA5 and AGTRT-BA12).
Androgynous Humanity is a public book with a small and independent publisher. It will also be translated into English soon after publication and will appear under the name Androgynous Humanity. The book neatly and securely references scholarly literature. The book meets high standards, but is not a scholarly publication. The book is expressly intended to be a popular science textbook accessible to the widest possible audience. This is because, in my view, the insights in the book have great social relevance. I see it as a first priority to make it available to anyone who is interested, not just a small group of specialist peers.
But as mentioned, I emphatically have broader goals with the androgynous ideology, social as well as scientific. After the public book is published, the real scientific work begins. Does this thinking also succeed in penetrating mainstream science? To that end, I will focus on the following five issues in the coming years.
1) The central ideas of the book will be broken down into small pieces and these will be developed as separate scientific papers over the next few years and submitted to scientific peer-reviewed journals. The book’s central hypotheses and conclusions will need to be shared with the scientific community. They will include publications in journals of social sciences, philosophy and psychology, as well as evolutionary biology.
2) Androgynous Humanity offers a radical new perspective on gender and sexuality. This means that it must be well worked out how this perspective relates to the current state of the field of Gender & Sexuality Studies. A kind of “translation key” needs to be made from current gender science to The Androgynous Man, and vice versa. It will need to be made crystal clear how the thinking around androgyny will solve the current problems and paradoxes in the field. Formal Gender Theory, the gender theory we are developing with the Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team (AGTRT), is well suited as such a “translation key.”
Read more about the Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team:
www.gender-theory.org
3) Androgynous Humanity will also need an empirical foundation. This means that the mind-set will also need to be used to conduct new empirical studies of gender and sexuality, so that it is also demonstrated that new studies designed with this framework produce high-quality and robust insights. As far as I am concerned, these long-term studies are emphatically happening not only in modern Western society. Ultimately, to truly map gender diversity, research is needed on as many different cultures as possible, including historical and archaeological research. Research will also need to be done on sex and gender in the animal kingdom from the androgynous perspective.
4) Gender & Sexuality Studies is an intrinsically interdisciplinary field. This means that gender and sexuality are topics that can only be really well understood by integrating insights from different fields. In the case of androgyny, these are at least sociology, psychology and evolutionary biology. Androgynous Humanity proposes an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that brings these three disciplines into dialogue. This conceptual framework will need to be tested, expanded and refined in the coming years, in consultation with experts in the various areas of expertise.
5) In addition, it is clear that gender and sexuality require a transdisciplinary approach, now more than ever. Transdisciplinarity means facilitating active dialogue between scientists and non-scientists. Gender and sexuality cannot be understood top-down from the ivory tower of the university. To restore peace in society and stop the worrisome polarization, a broad public debate is needed in which scientific knowledge is in dialogue with the knowledge, sentiments and experiences of non-scientists involved in the issue. Think LGBT people, feminists, parents of school-age children, religious, athletes, etc. Polarization may continue because many people feel that their perspectives and concerns are not being listened to properly. To change that, it is important for science to be more accessible and democratic. In the long run, for example, the use of instruments such as citizens’ councils could be envisaged to arrive at broad-based solutions, through “co-creation,” to the conflicts currently at play regarding gender and sexuality in sports, the workplace, education, religion, and so on.
Before 1) and 2) somewhat in the works will take two to five years, I estimate. For 3), 4) and 5) still more time is needed. So the androgynous egg did not just hatch in a day.
Science will have to be conquered step by step, and from there social peace can also increasingly return. This is certainly feasible, but very time-consuming of course. However, certain “tipping points” are to be expected: when certain milestones are reached, the ideas get wind in their sails. Then there can be schooling around the thinking and it will also take flight.
Read more about androgynous thought:
Why I think research on androgyny is so necessary, and what that research agenda will look like
Sooner or later I will also have to get another appointment at a university to get funding and institutional bedding for this work.
So this is a multi-year plan and I intend to keep focusing on this as long as I see space and openings. Because I believe in it and feel by everything that this has to happen.
Androgynous Humanity is thus potentially a vast project. But the launch of the public book remains the most important achievement. In this book, the entire body of thought comes together for the first time and the central idea is developed from beginning to end. This book is and always will be the starting shot, and how this book lands will determine the whole further course and whether any opportunities at all arise for further rollout of the androgynous ideology.
Read more about my work toward androgyny and the resistance it generated:
Meet my scholarly work on gender
Androgynous Humanity will generate a lot of resistance in the mainstream because it names too many pink elephants in the room and is ultimately a frontal attack on the established system. The book will undoubtedly be perceived as shocking and provocative when first encountering the establishment.
This whole project has a chance of success only if there is a bottom-up energy around the book in the first few months after launch. Initially, the book does not need a large audience at all. But an audience that becomes really fanatical about its value and wants to work with it and link it to their own work inside or outside the university.
There needs to be a broad movement, and that is what this book tries to contribute to. The more wagons are hung behind the train, the longer it keeps going and the harder it is to stop. It will be a matter of the long haul, but those who play the “long game” well will win in the end.
Androgynous Humanity tells a story that no one can ultimately ignore. It is a matter of persevering and continuing to work on this project piece by piece. Every little step is one. All new scientific paradigms started so slowly, until the moment of the “shift.” Because eventually the gates of the mainstream will also have to open to the new world.
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