Posthuman Feminism¹ Sexuality Beyond Gender

Rosi Braidotti’s chapter elaborates a rigorous account of posthumanism as a philosophical and political project that challenges the centrality of the humanist subject and the binary architectures that have historically organized sexuality, embodiment, and knowledge. She distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanist techno‑optimism, insisting that the former is grounded in a critical, materialist ontology where subjectivity is relational, embedded in ecologies of affects, technologies, and planetary forces. Drawing on Deleuze, Spinoza, and Haraway, Braidotti conceptualizes subjectivity as nomadic, non‑unitary, and processual, rejecting the psychoanalytic notion of desire as lack and affirming a generative, affective continuum where the sexual is a vital force irreducible to gender norms. She critiques anthropocentrism and links the posthuman to global crises – environmental devastation, digital saturation, capitalism’s extractive logics – arguing that these crises expose the limits of human exceptionalism. The sexual ‘beyond gender’ becomes central: an onto‑ethical reconfiguration of embodied difference that exceeds identity and invites new modes of political imagination. Braidotti positions minoritized subjects – women, queer people, racialized populations – as those historically excluded from “the human”, whose perspectives enable alternative futures. The text ultimately frames the posthuman as an affirmative ethical horizon grounded in interdependence, complexity, and responsibility in the face of technoscientific acceleration.