## 1. Questions



Speaking very generally, the project of feminist metaphysics asks:
Have metaphysical claims about what there is, and what it is like,
supported sexism, and if so, how? Are there particular metaphysical
assumptions or patterns of inference that feminists should challenge
(or endorse)? Replies to these questions have offered critiques and
reconstructions of concepts for thinking about, e.g., the self (Meyers
1997, 2004a; Willett, Anderson, & Meyers 2016), sex and sexuality
(Butler 1987, 1990, 1993; Fausto-Sterling 2000), mind and body (Bordo
1987, 1993; Young 1990; Scheman 1993; Gatens 1996; Wendell 1996;
Schiebinger 2000), nature (Lloyd 1984; Haraway1991; Butler 1993;
Warren 1997), essence (Witt 1993, 1995, 2011b,c; Schor & Weed
1994; Stoljar 1995), identity (Spelman 1988; Lugones 1994; Young 1994;
Frye 1996; Lindemann Nelson 2001; Alcoff 2006; Warnke 2008;
Heinamaa 2011; Lindemann 2014), and objectification (Papadaki 2015).
Feminists have also questioned whether metaphysics is a legitimate
form of inquiry at all, raising epistemological questions about, e.g.,
foundationalist assumptions implicit in metaphysical inquiry (Irigaray
1985; Flax 1986; Fraser & Nicholson 1990; Haslanger 2000a). We
will focus here on the former set of issues, mentioning methodological
and epistemological questions only in passing.



To begin an overview of feminist metaphysics in this century, it is
helpful to return to Simone de Beauvoir's classic work *The
Second Sex* (Beauvoir 1949). Two of her most famous claims appear
to have profound metaphysical implications: "One is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman", (Beauvoir [1949] 1989: 267) and
"He is the Subject, he is the Absolute--she is the
Other" (Beauvoir [1949] 1989: xxviii). There is disagreement
about how to interpret both claims, yet to many the former serves as
the slogan for the view that gender is socially constructed, and the
latter identifies the content of feminine construction as what is
opposed to the masculine, the masculine also being what counts as the
subject or self. Three interconnected themes prominent in feminist
metaphysics emerge here: (i) the social construction of gender (and
other categories), (ii) the relational nature of the self (and other
categories), (iii) the dangers of dualistic thinking. We will conclude
by mentioning the challenges feminist metaphysics poses to the content
and practice of mainstream metaphysics.


## 2. Social Construction



In claiming that one is not born a woman, Beauvoir was not suggesting
that one is never born with female body parts; rather, her concern was
that possession of female (or male) body parts, in and of itself, does
not imply how one could or should be socially
 situated.[1]
 In spite of this, societies, for the most part, reserve for females
certain social roles, norms, and activities that disadvantage them in
relation to males, casting the differences as necessary because
natural (Beauvoir [1949] 1989: Ch.1). If it is recognized, as Beauvoir
urged, that what women and men are is at least partly a social matter,
this opens up the possibility that gender roles could be and so should
be made more equitable through social change. To simplify discussion,
we will use the terms 'male'/'female' to mark
the currently familiar sex distinction drawn in terms of primary and
secondary sex characteristics, and
'man'/'woman' to mark the gender distinction,
where gender is, according to the slogan, "the social meaning of
sex".



This theme--that social hierarchies are sustained through myths
of their natural basis--has prompted a tremendous amount of work
on the construction of gender in particular (Delphy 1984; Scott 1986;
MacKinnon 1989; Butler 1990; Wittig 1992; Alcoff 2006; Warnke 2008;
Witt 2011a,c; Haslanger 2012), but also on the construction of other
"naturalized" social categories such as race (Appiah 1996;
Zack 2002; Warnke 2008) and in a somewhat different way, sexuality
(Butler 1990, 1993; Fausto-Sterling 2000). Research in history,
anthropology, literature, and sociology has chronicled the various
mechanisms by which gender (and other such categories) is enforced,
and research in psychology and biology has further loosened the ties
between body types and social roles. Having witnessed the power of
naturalizing "myths", feminists tend to be wary of any
suggestion that a category is "natural" or that
what's "natural" should dictate how we organize
ourselves socially. However, there are several different
de-naturalizing projects that are often mistaken for each other that
engage different sorts of metaphysical issues.


### 2.1 The Construction of Ideas and Concepts



It is important to distinguish first the construction of ideas and the
construction of
 objects[2]
 (Hacking 1999: 9-16). Let's start with ideas. On one
reading, the claim that an idea or a concept is only possible within
and due to a social context is utterly obvious. It would seem to be a
matter of common sense that concepts are taught to us by our parents
through our language; different cultures have different concepts (that
go along with their different languages); and concepts evolve over
time as a result of historical changes, science, technological
advances, etc. Let's (albeit contentiously) call this the
"ordinary view" of concepts and ideas. Even someone who
believes that our scientific concepts perfectly map
"nature's joints" can allow that scientists come to
have the ideas and concepts they do through social-historical
processes. After all, social and cultural forces (including, possibly,
the practices and methods of science) may help us develop concepts
that are apt or accurate, and beliefs that are true.



We may sometimes forget that what and how we think is affected by
social forces because our experiences seem to be caused simply and
directly by world itself. However, it does not take much prompting to
recall that our culture is largely responsible for the interpretive
tools we bring to the world in order to understand it. Once
we've noted that our experience of the world is already an
interpretation of it, we can begin to raise questions about the
adequacy of our conceptual framework. Concepts help us organize
phenomena; different concepts organize it in different ways. It is
important, then, to ask: what phenomena are highlighted and what are
eclipsed by a particular framework of concepts? What assumptions
provide structure for the framework?



For example, our everyday framework for thinking about human beings is
structured by the assumptions that there are two (and only two) sexes,
and that every human is either a male or a female. But in fact a
significant percentage of humans have a mix of male and female
anatomical features. Intersexed bodies are eclipsed in our everyday
framework (Fausto-Sterling 2000). This should invite us to ask: Why?
Whose interests are served, if anyone's, by the intersexed being
ignored in the dominant conceptual framework? (It can't be
plausibly argued that sex isn't important enough to us to make
fine-grained distinctions between bodies!) Further, once we recognize
the intersexed, how should we revise our conceptual framework? Should
we group bodies into more than two sexes, or are there reasons instead
to complicate the definitions of male and female to include everyone
in just two sex categories? More generally, on what basis should we
decide what categories to use? (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Butler 1990: Ch.
1) What is the proper scope of application of these categories? In
asking these questions it is important to remember that an idea or
conceptual framework may be inadequate without being false, e.g., a
claim might be true and yet incomplete, misleading, unjustified,
biased, etc. (Anderson 1995).



Saying that this or that idea is socially constructed may just be an
invitation to recall the ordinary view of concepts and note the
motivations behind and limitations of our current framework. Every
framework will have some limits; the issue is whether the limits
eclipse something that, given the (legitimate) goals of our inquiry,
matters. However, sometimes a social constructionist is making a more
controversial claim. The suggestion would be that something or other
is "merely" a social construction, in other words, that
what we are taking to be real is only a fiction, an idea that fails to
capture reality. Feminists have argued, for example, that certain
mental "disorders" that have been used to diagnose
battered women are merely social constructions. Andrea Westlund points
out how



> 
> 
> [b]attered women's "abnormalities" have been
> described and redescribed within the psychiatric literature of the
> twentieth century, characterized as everything from hysteria to
> masochistic or self-defeating personality disorders (SDPD) to
> codependency (Herman 1992, 116-118; Tavris 1992,
> 170-207). Moreover, such pathologies measure, classify, and
> define battered women's deviance not just from
> "normal" female behavior but also from universalized male
> norms of independence and self-interest. (Westlund 1999,
> 1050-1) 
> 
> 
> 



Such diagnoses invite us to explain domestic violence by reference to
the woman's psychological state rather than the batterer's
need for power and control; they also "deflect attention from
the social and political aspects of domestic violence to the private
neuroses to which women as a group are thought to be prone"
(Westlund 1999: 1051). Westlund and others have argued that although
victims of domestic violence often do suffer from psychological
conditions, e.g., major depression, there is a range of gender coded
mental disorders included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorder (DSM) for which there is little, if any, good
evidence. These diagnoses, it could be claimed, are merely social
constructions in the sense that they are ideas used to interpret and
regulate social phenomena, but do not describe anything real. Applying
this to the case at hand would entail that "Self-Defeating
Personality Disorder" doesn't really exist. The
description of SDPD does not capture a mental disorder of the sort
 alleged.[3]



So in considering the claim that something is socially constructed, we
should ask first: Is it an object or an idea? If it is an idea, then
we should raise a series of epistemological questions, e.g., are we
justified in employing this idea as we do, and metaphysical questions,
e.g., is there anything real corresponding to the idea, or is it a
fiction? Social constructionists often begin by noticing that an idea
is functioning socially to support an unjust institution and then
consider how that idea functions within a broader framework of ideas
and concepts to structure our experience: does it illegitimately or
inappropriately privilege one set of phenomena over another? Does it
obscure some phenomena completely? Does it create an illusion of
certain kinds of things?



Of course in some contexts privileging certain phenomena is useful and
even necessary: medical sciences are not "neutral" with
respect to what phenomena count as significant and how they are
categorized; medicine has a legitimate concern with human health and
the organisms that affect human health. However, other things being
equal, medicine that privileges phenomena related to men's
health or the health of the wealthy would not be epistemically or
politically legitimate (Anderson 1995). Considering what is left out
of a framework of categories, or what assumptions structure it can
also reveal biases of many sorts.



In some cases of social construction what's at issue is the
aptness of the classification, in other cases it is whether the
classification captures a natural kind or a social kind. In yet
further cases, the point is to reveal that classification does not
describe anything real at all and, instead, is just a fiction being
treated as real. In such cases, substantial work must be done to
demonstrate that the idea in question is only a fiction. But
that's not all, for we should also ask: How are such distortions
and fictions established and maintained? Whose interests do they
serve?


### 2.2 The Construction of Objects



Now consider objects (understanding 'objects' in the
broadest sense as virtually anything that's not an idea). There
is a sense in which any artifact is a construction; but claiming that
scissors or cars are social constructions would not have much point,
given how mundane this claim would be. Social constructionists, on the
whole, are arguing for a surprising thesis that they believe
challenges our everyday view of things. It is much more surprising to
say that women or Asian-Americans, homosexuals, child abusers, or
refugees, are social constructions. What could this mean?



In considering the construction of objects, the first point to note is
that our classificatory schemes, at least in social contexts, may do
more than just map pre-existing groups of individuals; rather our
attributions have the power to both establish and reinforce groupings
which may eventually come to "fit" the classifications.
This works in several ways. Forms of description or classification
provide for kinds of intention; e.g., given the classification
"cool", we can set about to become cool, or avoid being
cool, etc. But also, such classifications can function in justifying
behavior; e.g., "we didn't invite him because he's
not cool", and such justifications, in turn, can reinforce the
distinction between those who are cool and those who are uncool.
Drawing on Ian Hacking's work, Haslanger has referred to this as
"discursive" construction:



> 
> 
> *Discursive construction:* something is discursively
> constructed just in case it is (to a significant extent) the way it is
> because of what is attributed to it or how it is classified.
> (Haslanger 1995: 99) 
> 
> 
> 



Admittedly, the idea here is quite vague (e.g., how much is "a
significant extent"?). However, social construction in this
sense is ubiquitous. Each of us is socially constructed in this sense
because we are (to a significant extent) the individuals we are today
as a result of what has been attributed and self-attributed to us. For
example, being classified as able-bodied females from birth has
profoundly affected the paths available to us in life and the sort of
persons we have become.



Note, however, that to say that an entity is "discursively
constructed" is not to say that language or discourse brings a
material object into existence *de novo*. Rather something in
existence comes to have--partly as a result of having been
categorized in a certain way--a set of features that qualify it
as a member of a certain kind or
 sort.[4]
 Someone's having been categorized as a female at birth (and
consistently since then) has been a factor in how she has been viewed
and treated; these views and treatments have, in turn, played an
important causal role in her becoming gendered as a woman. For
example, let us suppose for current purposes that being gendered as a
woman is to occupy in one's social context a broad role
associated with female reproductive capacities. It is through a
process of socialization--being viewed and treated as a
girl--that she learned, and eventually internalized, what the
"proper" role for females is and how to mark herself as
occupying it. So she learned that girls only eat so much, only play
such games, only wear certain clothes. Whether or not she accepts
these norms, negotiating them was the process by which she became a
woman; but discourse didn't bring her into existence.



It would appear that gender (in different senses) is both an
idea-construction and an object-construction. Gender is an
idea-construction because the classification men/women is the
contingent result of historical events and forces. As we saw above,
the everyday distinction between males and females leaves out the
intersexed population that might have been given its own sex/gender
category. Arguably, in fact, some cultures have divided bodies into
three sexual/reproductive groups. At the same time the classifications
'woman' and 'man' are what Hacking calls
"interactive kinds": gender classifications occur within a
complex matrix of institutions and practices, and being classified as
a woman (or not), or a man (or not), or third, fourth, fifth
sex/gender or not, has a profound effect on an individual. Such
classification will have a material effect on one's social
position as well as affect one's experience and
self-understanding. In this sense, women and men--concrete
individuals--are constructed as gendered kinds of people, i.e.,
we are each object constructions (see Asta Sveinsdottir
2015 for further details).


### 2.3 Construction and Constitution



There is yet a further sense in which something might be a social
construction. So far we've been focusing on social causation: to
say that something is socially constructed is to say that it is caused
to be a certain way, and the causal process involves social factors,
e.g., social forces were largely responsible for my coming to have the
idea of a husband, and social forces were largely responsible for
there being husbands. But often when theorists argue that something is
a social construction the point is not about causation. Rather, the
point is to distinguish social kinds from physical kinds. In the case
of gender, the point is that gender is not a classification scheme
based simply on anatomical or biological differences, but marks social
differences between individuals. Gender, as opposed to sex, is not
about testicles and ovaries, the penis and the uterus, but about a
system of social categories (see, e.g., Haslanger 1993, 2000b; also
Wittig 1992; Delphy 1984; MacKinnon 1989).



Consider, for example, the category of landlords. To be a landlord one
must be located within a broad system of social and economic relations
which includes tenants, private property, and the like. It might be
that all and only landlords have a mole behind their left ear. But
even if this were the case, having this physical mark is not what it
is to be a landlord. Similarly, one might want to draw a distinction
between sex and gender, sex being an anatomical distinction based on
locally salient sexual/reproductive differences (see Asta
Sveinsdottir 2011 for an alternative conception), and gender
being a distinction between the social/political positions of those
with bodies marked as of different sexes. One could allow that the
categories of sex and gender interact (so concerns with distinctions
between bodies will influence social divisions and vice versa); but
even to be clear how they interact, we should differentiate them. With
this distinction between sex and gender in hand, it is possible that
some males are women and some females are men. Because, on this
conception, one is a female by virtue of some (variable) set of
anatomical features, and one is a woman by virtue of one's
position within a social and economic system, the sex/gender
distinction gives us some (at least preliminary) resources for
including trans\* people within our conceptual framework (see further
Bettcher 2014).



In considering this form of social construction, or we might call it
social constitution, it is important to note that social kinds cannot
be equated with things that have social causes. Sociobiologists claim
that some social phenomena have biological causes; some feminists
claim that anatomical phenomena have social causes, e.g., the gap in
average height and strength differences between men and women in a
particular context depends on, among other things, gender norms in
that context concerning food and
 exercise.[5]
 As Ruth Hubbard explains,



> 
> 
> ...we live in dynamic interaction with our environment. Sex
> differences are socially constructed because being raised as a girl or
> a boy produces biological as well as social differences. Society
> defines the sex-appropriate behavior to which each of us learns to
> conform, and our behavior affects our bones, muscles, sense organs,
> nerves, brain, lungs, circulation, everything. In this way society
> constructs us as biologically, as well as socially, gendered people.
> (Hubbard 1990: 138) 
> 
> 
> 



It is also significant that not all social kinds are obviously social.
Sometimes it is assumed that the conditions for membership in a kind
concern only or primarily biological or physical facts. Pointing out
that this is wrong can have important consequences. For example, the
idea that whether or not a person is white is not simply a matter of
their physical features, but concerns their position in a social
matrix, has been politically significant, and to many surprising. How
should we construe the constructionist project of arguing that a
particular kind is a social kind? What could be interesting or radical
about such a project?



Suppose Sally says "I am a white woman". What does this
mean? Suppose we pose these questions to someone who is not a
philosopher, someone not familiar with the academic social
constructionist literature. A likely response will involve mention of
her physical features: reproductive organs, skin color, etc. The
gender and race constructionists will reject this response and will
argue that what makes the claim apt concerns the social relations in
which she stands. On this construal, the important social
constructionist import in Beauvoir's claim that "one is
not born but rather becomes a woman", (Beauvoir 1949) is not
that one is caused to be feminine by social forces; rather, the
important insight was that being a woman is not an anatomical matter
but a social matter.



Because being a woman is a social matter, if we allow that social
phenomena are highly variable across time, cultures, groups, then this
also allows us to recognize that the specific details of it is to be a
woman will differ depending on one's race, ethnicity, class,
etc. Sally's being a woman occurs in a context in which she is
also white and privileged; her actual social position will therefore
be affected by multiple factors simultaneously. She learned the norms
of WASP womanhood, not Black womanhood. And even if she rejected many
of those norms, she benefits from the fact that they are broadly
accepted.



The social constructionist's goal is often to challenge the
appearance of inevitability of the category in question; as things are
arranged now, there are men and women, and people of different races.
But if social conditions changed substantially, there would be no men
and women, and no people of different races. It would be possible,
then, to do away with the conceptual frameworks that we currently use.
But an important first step is to make the category visible as a
social as opposed to physical category. This sometimes requires a
rather radical change in our thinking.



It is worth keeping in mind, also, that constitutive social
constructionist projects offer a metaphysics of the category in
question, i.e., an answer to the question what the nature of the
category is. Causal constructionist projects do not do that, but
rather cast light on the ways in which social practices are implicated
as the causes or effects of phenomena (Asta Sveinsdottir
2015).



Considerable amount of recent work has focused on the metaphysics of
social kinds and social properties more generally (Frye 2011; Mikkola
2006, 2011; Stoljar 2011; Asta Sveinsdottir 2011; Witt
2011a,c). There has also been a lot of attention given to accounts of
gender. We turn to that now.


### 2.4 The Construction of Gender



While the question of what gender is has always been a central
question for feminism and feminist theory, it has received increased
attention in recent years. We will discuss why an account of gender is
important for feminist theory and point out how any theorizing is
always situated in a political landscape that is both spatially and
temporally bounded. The examples we will use are two recent book
length treatments of gender, by Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt;
both offer accounts of the metaphysics of gender, i.e., of the nature
of gender categories. We will also mention in passing some other
recent accounts, but for a fuller discussion of gender see Mikkola
2016a. 



The aim of feminism is, in the most general terms, to end the
oppression of women. The goal of feminist theory is, therefore, to
theorize how women are oppressed and how we can work towards ending
it. But what is this group *women*? Whose oppression is the
movement aiming to end? For articulating the various ways in which
women are oppressed, there is a need for a working definition of what
it is to be a woman (for a contrary view see Mikkola 2016b). But the
various accounts of the different dimensions (social, economical,
psychological, etc.) of the oppression of women may in fact call for
different accounts of gender. It is, therefore, not always clear that
seemingly incompatible accounts of gender are in fact incompatible.
They may in fact often be answering different questions. 



Let's go back to Simone de Beauvoir's words, "One is
not born a woman, but rather becomes one". On this picture, one
is born biologically female or male and slowly becomes socialized into
a woman or man. What is the relationship between sex and gender here?
The slogan used by feminists since the seventies, as mentioned before,
is *gender is the social meaning of sex* and gender is thought
to be a social construction.



Sally Haslanger embraces the slogan *gender is the social meaning
of sex* and the conception of gender that she offers is to do
justice to that slogans (Haslanger 2012). While she discusses many
ways something can be socially constructed, a central conception of
social construction she is aiming to articulate is one that makes
sense of that slogan. Here is her account of gender (Haslanger 2012:
234):



> 
> 
> *S* is a woman if and only if
> 
> 
> 1. *S* is regularly and for the most part observed or imagined
> to have certain bodily features presumed to be evidence of a
> female's biological role in reproduction;
> 2. that *S* has these features marks *S* within the
> dominant ideology of *S*'s society as someone who ought to
> occupy certain kinds of social position that are in fact subordinate
> (and so motivates and justifies *S* occupying such a position);
> and
> 3. the fact that *S* satisfies (i) and (ii) plays a role in
> *S*'s systematic subordination, that is, along some
> dimension, *S*'s social position is oppressive, and
> *S*'s satisfying (i) and (ii) plays a role in that
> dimension of subordination.
> 
> 
> 
> *S* is a man if and only if
> 
> 
> 1. *S* is regularly and for the most part observed or imagined
> to have certain bodily features presumed to be evidence of a
> male's biological role in reproduction;
> 2. that *S* has these features marks *S* within the
> dominant ideology of *S*'s society as someone who ought to
> occupy certain kinds of social position that are in fact privileged
> (and so motivates and justifies *S*'s occupying such a
> position); and
> 3. the fact that *S* satisfies (i) and (ii) plays a role in
> *S*'s systematic privilege, that is, along some dimension,
> *S*'s social position is privileged, and *S*'s
> satisfying (i) and (ii) plays a role in that dimension of privilege.
> 
> 
> 



Genders are socially constructed constitutively. To be of a gender is
to have a place in a hierarchical structure and genders are
constituted by the hierarchical power relations. So here we have an
account of constitutive construction: genders are social statuses
constituted by hierarchical power relations. How does this do justice
to the aforementioned slogan? To be of a certain gender is to be taken
to have bodily features presumed to be evidence of a role in
biological reproduction and occupy a hierarchical social position
because of that.



Haslanger's account of the social construction of gender is an
answer to the question what type of thing genders are, how they are
created and maintained. According to her account, genders are social
statuses within a hierarchical social structure and not, for example,
biological categories. On her view, when offering a theory of
something, be it gender or something else, we always have to ask what
we want the theory for: what questions is the theory supposed to
answer, what bring to light? And a theory is always a child of its
maker, and their time and place, and is offered in the context of the
conversations and political and activist struggles that are taking
place then. For instance, Haslanger first articulated her theory of
gender in 1995-1996, and wanted to give an account that
didn't define women in terms of some intrinsic (biological or
psychological) trait, but rather, in the materialist feminist
tradition, considered women to be a social class. The aim was to
highlight certain structural injustices we are all party to, but not
to give an account of gender to settle all questions regarding gender.
A structural account differs in aims from one that has as its central
target to capture people's own conceptions of their experience.
For critical engagements with Haslanger's theory, it is helpful
to begin with Mills 2014, Jones 2014, Haslanger 2014, Mikkola 2016a,
and Bettcher 2012.



Charlotte Witt offers an account of gender in her recent book, *The
Metaphysics of Gender* (2011c) that draws on Aristotle as well as
feminist theory. The chief aim of Witt's account is to give a
metaphysics of gender that can elucidate the centrality of gender in
our lived experience and she develops a framework to make sense of
that centrality. Her claim is that as a matter of fact, in western
late-capitalist societies like the United States, gender is
*uniessential* to social individuals. Let us flesh this out
(here we draw on Asta Sveinsdottir 2012). 



First, for a function to be uniessential to an entity is for it to
unify and organize all the parts of that individual into the whole
that is the individual. For example, the time-telling function unifies
and organizes all the tiny metal parts (hands, spring, gears, etc)
into the whole which is the watch itself. Similarly, the sheltering
function unifies and organizes all the planks of a wooden house into
the entity that is the house itself.



Gender, understood in this way, is a function that organizes all the
parts of a social individual into the social individual it is. The
parts in question are all the other social roles the social individual
occupies: parent, friend, professor, child, colleague, etc. Gender
(man, woman) is a *mega social role* that unifies all the other
social roles into the agent that is the social individual. Being a
woman, a parent, etc, is to occupy a social position, with which come
norms of behavior. The social individual is the entity that occupies
all these social positions, the bearer of these social properties, if
you will.



The social individual is distinct from the *human organism* and
the *person* because the social individual stands in social
relations essentially, but human organisms and persons do so only
accidentally. Similarly, the person is distinct from the human
organism and the social individual because the person has the capacity
to take a first person perspective on itself essentially, but the
human organism and the social individual only have that accidentally.
Finally, the human organism has certain biological features
essentially, but the person and the social individual does so only
accidentally. For critical engagements with Witt's theory, it is
helpful to begin with Cudd 2012, Mikkola 2012, and Asta
Sveinsdottir 2012.



There are a number of other recent accounts of gender. We mention some
here briefly. For a fuller discussion, see Mikkola 2016a.



Natalie Stoljar (1995) argues that the concept of gender is a cluster
concept. There are no features that all and only women share; rather
the concept of woman stands for a cluster of features and one can be a
woman in virtue of having one or more of these features. Linda Alcoff
(2006) argues that gender is a position in a network of social and
cultural institutions and ideologies. The gender position one occupies
is defined by the possibilities one has with regard to biological
reproduction. Asta Sveinsdottir (2011, 2013) offers a
radically contextual account of gender, on which gender is a
*conferred* social status. In different contexts different
features serve as base features for the conferral of gender (role in
biological reproduction, sexual role, self-identification, etc.).
Theodore Bach (2012)
argues that genders are natural kinds with a historical essence. To be
a woman, on his view, is to be produced in the right way, have the
right lineage. A woman has the right lineage if she is the product of
"ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system
replicates women" (Bach 2012: 271). Jennifer McKitrick (2015)
argues that gender is a dispositional property. One is of a certain
gender just in case one is disposed to behave in certain ways in
certain situations. Following Haslanger 2012, Katharine Jenkins (2016)
gives an ameliorative account of gender, but one in which there are
two target concepts: gender as class and gender as identity.



It is important to keep in mind when approaching the literature on
gender that different theorists have different aims in mind when
offering a theory of gender, and different phenomena that the accounts
are to capture. Some want to capture something about lived experience,
others highlight certain dimensions of injustice. For instance, while
gender is a social position for both Witt and Haslanger, in our brief
discussion we see that they are focused on different things in
developing their accounts. Witt is focused on the centrality of gender
and gender norms in our lived experience; Haslanger on structural
gender oppression. Also, some theorists approach gender by giving an
account of the (or a) concept of gender, others how certain words get
used. Still others offer a real definition, a definition of the
phenomenon itself, as opposed to a concept of it, or words used to
refer to it. Yet others focus on gender identity. How all these
projects are related and whether they do conflict may not be evident
at first glance.


## 3. Relations



The previous section outlined ways in which feminists have
problematized the idea that particular categories are
"natural". Similarly, feminists have problematized the
idea that particular categories are intrinsic or non-relational. The
critical charge, stated very generally, is that dominant frameworks
for representing the world, especially the social world, purport to
classify things on the basis of intrinsic properties when in fact the
classifications are crucially dependent on relational
 properties.[6]



There are two forms of this critique, and correspondingly, two kinds
of response. On the first form, the charge is that dominant frameworks
misrepresent their subject matter by ignoring important relational
aspects of what they purport to be talking about. For example,
feminists have long charged that philosophical conceptions of the
self, e.g., the conception of the independent rational self-regulator,
are framed in atomistic terms, ignoring our inevitable and valuable
dependence on each other. In response, feminists have urged us to
recognize and revalue the complexity of subjectivity not addressed in
models of rational agency, and to incorporate in our understanding of
the self facts about the realities of human dependence and
interdependence for which women have been primarily responsible
(Meyers 1997; Kittay 1999; Stoljar 2015; Willett et al. 2016).



The second form of such critique also alleges that the dominant
frameworks misrepresent their subject matter by obscuring what's
relational. However, the goal is not to capture and revalue the
background relations as in the first form of this critique, but to
challenge them. In the cases in question, the charge is that although
the system of classification appears to be sorting individuals on the
basis of intrinsic properties, in fact there are invidious relations
that are being masked by these appearances (Flax 1986: 199-202).
Just as there are reasons why dominant frameworks construct myths
about what's natural to justify subordinating practices,
likewise they construct myths about what's intrinsic.



Consider again Beauvoir's claim that "He is the Subject,
he is the Absolute--she is the Other". Part of what is at
stake in Beauvoir's conception of women as Other is the idea
that our conceptions of gender and of the self are implicitly
relational, e.g., although it may seem that we can define what it is
to be a woman without reference to men, in fact we cannot (Wittig
1992; MacKinnon 1989; Haslanger 1993). For Beauvoir, very roughly,
women are those positioned as "Absolute Other", i.e., as
"Other" in relation to a group counting as
"Subject" where the relation between these two groups
never reverses so the "Other" becomes
"Subject" (Beauvoir [1949] 1989: xxii, also
xv-xxxiv). So, to be a woman is to stand in a complex set of
social (and hierarchical) relations to men (*mutatis mutandis*
for men). And to be a Subject is to stand in a complex set of social
relations to some group of Others. For a nuanced recent account of
Beauvoir's view of subjectification and objectification's
role in that see Bauer 2011.



These particular claims of Beauvoir's are, of course,
controversial and would need further argument to be made plausible;
but the claims are less important than the general idea that
relations, especially social relations, are sometimes obscured by our
ordinary frameworks for thinking of things. This is of special
interest to feminists (and antiracists) for reasons linked to those we
have for questioning the representation of a category as
"natural". Begin with a background assumption that social
life cannot help but accommodate what's "natural".
We then can contribute to some category's appearing
"natural" by supposing that the basis for membership in
the category is intrinsic (thus obscuring the social relations that
are the real basis for membership). In this context, pressure to
change or abolish the category seems unreasonable.



These critiques raised invite us to ask: how should we
re-conceptualize the self and other parts of our social ontology? What
is the relation between intrinsicness and naturalness? On what basis
can we claim that one framework is "masking" another?


## 4. Dualisms



In the previous section we outlined a project of
"uncovering" relations in apparently non-relational
frameworks. In the sort of cases we had in mind what's
"uncovered" are concrete social relations, e.g., relations
of sexual subordination. However, Beauvoir's claims about
Subject and Other point to additional insights not yet explored.



In saying that "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute--She
is the Other", part of Beauvoir's point is that although
it may appear that our distinction between subjects and non-subjects
is a purely descriptive demarcation of a specific category of
substances (selves), in fact, the distinction in use is normative and
non-substantive. Begin with the issue of substances: one of the
traditional characteristics of substances is that substances do not
have opposites, i.e., there is no opposite of horse (non-horse does
not count as an opposite). This is in contrast to many qualities:
long/short, inside/outside, loud/quiet. One way of explicating
Beauvoir's suggestion is that once we look at the conditions for
subjecthood, we see that there is an opposite to being a subject:
subjects are, for example, free and autonomous persons, and the
opposite of a free and autonomous person is someone unfree, in her
terms, someone condemned to immanence. Moreover, it is not only the
case that being a subject has an opposite, but that the opposition in
question carries normative weight--so much so that the devalued
side of the opposition (the Other) is denied reality in its own terms:
what it is to be Other just is to be opposite to the Subject.



Again the feminist project is one of unmasking certain ordinary
assumptions about our classifications of things: the category of
Subject is not--ontologically speaking--what it may seem.
More specifically, categories that appear to be descriptive may in
fact be functioning normatively; and categories that appear to be
substantive, may in fact be functioning as one end of a qualitative
spectrum. Although Beauvoir's example has us focus on the notion
of a subject or self; feminists have explored the same form of
argument with other notions, notably, sex, gender, and race.



There are two significant consequences of this sort of analysis.
First, with substances, it is standardly supposed that you are a
member of the kind or not and there is no middle ground: you are a
horse or you aren't. (Because there is no opposite or contrary
to horse, the only negative option a contradictory.) Again we can
contrast this with other opposites: there is a middle ground between
long/short, inside/outside, loud/quiet; and some things avoid the
opposition altogether, e.g., my coffee mug is neither loud nor quiet.
Casting a category as substantial, then, limits the available
categories for classification. For example, suppose we understand
'male' substantively. If males are a substance kind, then
everything is either male or not-male, with no middle-ground. But if,
in practice, 'not-male' actually functions as a way of
picking out females, then it would seem that everything must be either
male or female, and there can be no space for genuine categories of
people who are intersexed, or other-sexed, or for refusing to sex
people at all. One strategy, then, for undermining the idea that a
category is substantival is to highlight the multiplicity of
individuals and categories "in between" the primary
category and its implicit opposite. Category proliferation--the
generation of a continuum or genuinely "mixed"
categories--can loosen the grip of substantival assumptions
(Butler 1987; Lugones 1994; Haraway 1988; Zack 1995).



Second, in the case of substance kinds, those things that are not in
the kind don't themselves form a kind of their own. They are
what's "left over". The class of all things that are
not-horses includes computers, stars, dust, basketballs, people, etc.
So, if we elide 'not man' and 'woman', then
women are not read as a kind. As Marilyn Frye puts it,



> 
> 
> When woman is defined as not-man, she is cast into the infinite
> undifferentiated plenum...[this partly explains why] many men can
> so naturally speak in parallel constructions of their cars and their
> women, and say things like, "It's my house, my wife, and
> my money, and the government can't tell me what to do about any
> of it". It also illuminates the fact that women are so easily
> associated with disorder, chaos, irrationality, and
> impurity....There are no categories in not-man; it is a buzzing
> booming confusion. (Frye 1996: 1000) 
> 
> 
> 



Frye's strategy is not to challenge the substantive status of
the man-kind by proliferation, but to challenge its hegemony in the
space of persons. So she proposes the construction of a woman-kind
that is defined in its own terms, not simply by opposition to men (see
Schor & Weed 1994). She argues, among other things, that this will
require a recognition of real differences not only between men and
women, but among
 women.[7]



This barely scratches the surface of feminist discussion of the
dualisms that guide our thinking, both in philosophy and common sense.
These include mind/body, reason/emotion (Jaggar 1989; Scheman 1993;
Rooney 1993, 1994; Campbell 1998), nature/culture (Ortner 1972; Butler
1993), freedom/necessity (Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000; Hirschmann
2003; Holroyd 2011), agent/patient (Meyers 2004a,b). However, it does,
hopefully, provide some introduction to the feminist issues that arise
in thinking about classification, substances, dichotomy, and the
potential political import of ontology and the prime importance of the
question of value ladenness and attention to ideology in feminist
theorizing (Alcoff 2011; Haslanger 2011; Janack 2011).


## 5. Overarching Themes



There are a couple of over-arching questions that are worth raising
now with a (brief) overview in place. The outline offered here
suggests that in a number of different ways feminists are keen to
"unmask" or "uncover" or
"demythologize" certain aspects of our ordinary (and
philosophical) thinking. Where ordinarily we take ourselves to be
dealing with an ontology of substances, natural things, intrinsic
properties, we're in fact dealing with an ontology of social
things, relations, and non-substantive (and often normative) kinds.
But what is the relationship between these sorts of
"unmasking" projects and projects that count as part of
"mainstream" philosophy, or more specifically,
"mainstream" metaphysics? So much analytic metaphysics
consists in "reconstructions" of our ordinary concepts; a
significant amount of it is unabashedly "revisionary". So
along those lines, feminist metaphysics would seem to fit right in.
Clearly feminist metaphysics differs from the mainstream in its
subject matter and background assumptions, in particular in its focus
on the possible value ladenness of our concepts, categories and
theories, and its attention to the potential harms of justificatory
ideologies. But are there more substantial differences? Is feminist
metaphysics just "mainstream" metaphysics directed at
different issues, or is there a deep difference? And if there is a
deep difference, what exactly is it? Barnes and Mikkola have recently
charged that certain prevalent conceptions of metaphysics in
non-feminist circles even rule out feminist metaphysics. The charge is
that prevalent conceptions of metaphysics in mainstream metaphysics
take metaphysics to be concerned with the basic structure of reality
and what is "fundamental", where it is assumed that social
reality cannot be fundamental or basic (Barnes 2014, forthcoming;
Mikkola forthcoming). Jonathan Schaffer and Ted Sider have engaged
with these charges (Schaffer forthcoming; Sider forthcoming),
attempting to show that their respective metametaphysical theories
allow room for feminist metaphysics and metaphysics of the social more
generally.