Aidan Anderson - Philosophy of Gender

Revised Response to Beyond the Binary Chapters 9-12 The prompt that I am responding to is: How sympathetic are you to social construction theses as they apply to sex, gender, womanhood, manhood, femininity, and masculinity? On your own view, how much of our gendered reality is socially constructed? How much is inevitable? Again, I want to limit this post to just a discussion about gender. I would say that I am now the most sympathetic that I have ever been to social construction theses of gender, manhood, womanhood, femininity, and masculinity.  Not only do I believe that gender is a social construct, but I would go as far as to adopt the radical view that gender should be done away with entirely. In his book, The Social construction of What? Ian Hacking discusses social construction claims. They argue that when considering social construction claims it is not enough to just answer the question of whether or not something is socially constructed, instead we must ask what is the...

      The main point of  Butler's essay, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, can be very crudely summarized as the following. Gender is a social construct; furthermore,gender is performative. Meaning one is not a particular gender, but rather performs that gender through their speech, dress, behavior, and actions. What informs our performance is the collection of other performances put on by those who have performed our respective role before us, as well as those who are currently performing it. In other words, there is no essence of a man, but rather what makes one a man is if they perform the gender of man. The "script" that informs what our performance should resemble is not set in stone, however. It can and does change, based, at least in part, on the choices that the actors of a gender make; hence why gendered fashion norms have changed over time, however, gendered fashion norms still exist and still imp...

I think that the prompt I want to create for myself in response to the Ásta reading is something like: can someone confer a social property onto themselves? I think that the answer is yes. When I first considered this question in regards to the text the answer I came  to was "no," but the more that I thought about the more I think that the answer is yes. The answer seems intuitively to be no because social properties cannot really exist outside of society. Asta makes the point that one can not be popular on their own to exemplify this point. However, if we consider the five aspects of the conferralist account, I think that one can confer, at least some, social properties onto themselves. To put this all in other words, I think that one can confer the property "man" onto themselves, regardless of whether or not other members of society would confer the same property onto them.  I think that someone determining for themselves if they are a man using Asta's method ...

 The fact that 100 percent of transgender students at Siena said that they experienced some sort of harrassment/discrimination/bias at our college during the 2016/2017 climate survey makes me feel a mix of emotions. On the one hand I am ashamed that anyone at this college was made to feel discriminated against based on their gender identity. On the other hand, however, when I first heard this fact my mind jumped to a more hopeful thought. That thought being, this survey was in 2017, three years ago. That does not seem like a long time, but trans-activism has come a long way since then, and perhaps if the same survey was done now the results would be better. But they might not be. This is because we have to consider what this survey is really saying. It is not saying that most people at Siena would discriminate against trans people, but rather that everyone who is trans has experienced discrimination. This seems to be in the nature of many forms of harassment and discrimination, onl...

 In her essay " Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?" Sally Haslanger offers some answers to the question of how we should define race and gender. Ultimately both of the definitions that they give are predicated upon a dynamic of subordination between the groups within each social category.  In general I agree with the definitions that Haslanger gives, not in spite of, but primarily because of, the fact that her definitions of social groups are inextricable from their places within hierarchies. When considering the questions of what is race and what is gender, I am sympathetic to answering them with an analytical approach. This means that when asking what they are we must ask what they do for us, and whether or not they are useful to us as categories. I think out of the three approaches that Hasslanger gives, this one is the best for considering social constructed categories because it aligns most with our understanding of what they are. And what th...