Word.ws English Dictionary

genderbending

genderbending noun: the changing of a character's gender within a story. Also the present participle and gerund of genderbend.

Noun

genderbending (uncountable)

  1. The changing of a character's gender within a story.
    • There is one episode in the novel, however, where questions of racial masquerade intrude on the freewheeling genderbending of the main characters.2000, David John Bell, Barbara M. Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader, page 452
    • The genre is traditionally nonsexual, despite the scantily clad bimbos on the covers of its pulp magazines of the 1950s and despite its politically correct genderbending of the 1970s and 1980s.2006, Peter Swirski, The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem, page 75

Adjective

genderbending (not comparable)

  1. Confounding attempts to identity one's gender, especially by dressing in the clothes of another sex or in a way that makes one's gender identity ambiguous.
    • When the band broke up, Reed reinvented himself as a genderbending gutter poet and earned the nickname “The Godfather of Punk”, mostly by going out his way to subvert his fans' expectations on albums […]2012, Combat Rock: A History of Punk (From It's^([sic]) Origins to the Present), →ISBN

Also used as

genderbending is also the present participle and gerund of genderbend.

Origin of genderbending

From gender + bending.

Questions about genderbending

What does genderbending mean?
Genderbending means the changing of a character's gender within a story.
What part of speech is genderbending?
Genderbending can be a noun or an adjective.

Words near genderbending in the dictionary

  1. genderable
  2. genderal
  3. genderbend
  4. genderbender
  5. genderbenders
  6. genderbending
  7. genderbends
  8. genderbendy
  9. genderbent
  10. genderblind
  11. genderbread people

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: genderbending (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-genderbending.wav.

Cite this entry: “genderbending.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/genderbending. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.