Postmodern Gender Fluidity versus the Victorian-era Binary Model of Gender: A Steampunk Feminist Perseptive

I was pretty excited when I found the Genderbread Person meme. It clears up the confusion about what defines gender, sexuality, and biological sex. What I really like about it is the use of the word ‘person’. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop calling those doll-shaped gingerbread biscuits ‘gingerbread men’; but it allows for the possibility of ‘gingerbread women’, and everything else in between. It is only in the last decade that the majority of the Western World has come to understand that gender isn’t cut and dried, that gender is a performance, and gender is fluid, not a binary.

So let’s breakdown the concept of gender binaries for the Victorian era. Basically, whatever a man was, a woman wasn’t. Men were strong; women were weak. Men were tool-users; women weren’t (so who do you think invented grinding stones, baskets and slings?). Men were innately honest; women were deceitful by nature. The…