Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In this talk, I defend a non-realistic view of gender categories vis-à-vis Sally Haslanger's recent attempt to argue in favour of a ‘thin' metaphysical realism of gender categories. The talk is divided in three parts. In the first part, I will be focusing on Haslanger's view, as characterized by the following two theses: (i) there is an objective basis for gender distinction; (ii) gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In the second part, I shall point out why Haslanger's approach is inadequate, by arguing that her account does not adequately capture that each person's gender is unique to them and it disconnects gender from the fact that criteria for distinguishing sexes differ across times and places. In the last part, I propose that these defects may be resolved by thinking of gender as referring to tropes. Womanness, I suggest, is neither the special way a woman participates in a universal, nor a peculiar quality of a woman, but simply something that a particular person - and that person alone - has. Such a way of thinking about gender allows us to see a woman without identifying common attributes that all women have, or without implying that all women have a common - natural or social - identity and to explain what it is for two tokens (individual instances) to be of the same type in terms of resemblance. As result, one's gender may not be entirely stable and there is no feature of identity or unity itself that all women share. If so, I conclude, then we can say that an individual becomes not simply a woman or a man, but a particularwoman or a particular man.