Feminist theorists: Comment on my setting?

[endoperez]

Undead nation?

When you're nothing but bones, genres don't exactly matter. So any campaign that starts, or has such undead society as the default society is bound to be non gendered by default... I think.

Do souls have sexes ?

That could be an interesting take on it. There's men, women, and undead. The undead would be a third gender, a neutral gender, and everyone (everyone rich enough? everyone whose body is recovered in more or less one piece?) will at one point leave his or her previous gender behind, becoming a genderless undead.

I'd say that, at first, memories of the past life would still affect most people. However, at the same time, old people who were looking forward to their coming unlife might start feeling closer to the third gender than to their living gender.

I hope I'm using the word gender right here...

[AMFV]

Undead nation?

When you're nothing but bones, genres don't exactly matter. So any campaign that starts, or has such undead society as the default society is bound to be non gendered by default... I think.

Do souls have sexes ?

Well I think it has a lot to do with how much the undead try to cling to their mortal lives, if they consider themselves to be the same people, then they may even try to reinforce gender roles in order to try to portray something they really aren't anymore. So you could have a young group of undead that create divisive gender roles, or attempt to act in a fashion they perceive as stereotypical for their gender.

Then you'd have the middle aged undead, they adopt gender roles to a degree but only when dealing with the living, because they find it useful. At this point they're growing in power and dealing with the living from nearby nations is important. However they themselves have lost most of their identity.

The oldest undead have no gender at all, they've forgotten completely about it, with no hormonal differences and no need to reproduce it has slipped out of memory completely. Any attempt for them to replicate gender would a poor caricature, and not the most useful one. They're also starting to suffer from the boredom of centuries and this may lead to experimentation with roles or ideas they otherwise might not.

Would this be the sort of thing you were imagining?

[Gabe the Bard]

Sorry, didn't have time to read the whole thread, but here's a thought.

Assuming you're just talking about humans and not demihumans or monstrous humanoids with different mating/breeding habits, you could have two different segments of the female population, one that has female roles of motherhood and domestic care, and another that makes them virtually indistinguishable from men, like the Sworn Virgins of Albania (http://www.jillpetersphotography.com/swornvirginsofalbania).

I know this is getting into a real life example, but it's an interesting example that could lead to a different kind of social structure in your setting. Perhaps due to the necessity of having twice as many women to fill both the roles of mothers and soldiers, newborn girls and boys have to fit into a 2:1 quota and any extra sons are left in the wild.

On the other hand, it could result in women themselves becoming segregated, so you might end up with three genders instead: men, women, and sworn virgins. There might be a problem of mobility between the two groups of women, so that mothers can't become soldiers and soldiers can't become mothers regardless of their personal desires.

Some of the abandoned sons that didn't make the quota might also survive and create a faction of their own, something like the "Unwanted Brotherhood". Maybe they're a group of rebels trying to change the society so that people can have any number of sons and daughters they want, or a band of brigands that only cares about looting and pillaging.