Response to Haslanger

 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 they are is capable of change. They are not products of nature, and do not come with an immutable set of facts; instead our understanding of them varies across time periods and cultures. Since our understanding of socially constructed human kinds can change, we are allowed to (and we should) ask what we want them to change into. So when we consider Haslanger's defintion of  "woman," for example, and how to be a woman means to be oppressed, there seems to be an implication that nobody would want to be a woman, and nobody should have to be a woman. After all, nobody wants to be, or deserves to be oppressed based on what other people think of them based on their physiology. So, let's imagine that we reach a point where no one is oppressed in society based on their physiology/sex (which would be a desirable point to reach). In this society there would be no group that falls under the definition of "women" and therefore no group that could be considered "men" (because if nobody is subordinate based on sex/physiology then no one would be superior, as those terms describe one's position relative to other people), which means that there would be no such thing as "gender" as we understand it. This hypothetical world seems like a desirable one. 

The same thing can be applied to race. When we ask why we have race, we come to the answer that it was constructed as a justification for groups of humans to oppress other groups of humans. Nature did not divide us based on race, we did that ourselves.

I think most reasonable people agree with the sentiment that there is only one race, the human race, but most people would disagree that there is only one gender, human. I do not know why this is. Both are socially constructed categories based on physiology that were brought about as justification for one group to oppress another, yet many more people are hesitant to eliminate gender rather than equalize the gender groups, as opposed to race. Perhaps if we paired our desire for gender equality with Haslanger's definitions then more people would come to the conclusion that true gender equality is having not having gender at all.