"Feminist Philosophy and Essentialism "

19th & 20th July 2012, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Senatssaal, Humboldt-Universität Main Building (Unter den Linden 6), Berlin

Would you be the same individual if you were gendered differently? The workshop asks this and related questions with a special emphasis on Charlotte Witt’s recent book The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011). According to Witt, most ordinary social agents find the answer to the above question to be an obvious ‘No!’ and they have no difficulties providing an intuitive answer. By contrast, most academics working on philosophical issues to do with gender and feminism find the answer neither obvious nor easy. What generates such divergent views and why are ordinary agents so secure in their gender ascriptions? In her book, Witt provides an articulation of this and what it might mean to think that gender is essential to an individual.

Arguing for a version of gender essentialism is contentious. Essentialism about gender is usually understood in two ways and feminist theorists commonly consider both to be untenable. Classificatory gender essentialism takes there to be some feature or property that is essential to all members of women’s (and men’s) social kinds and that binds the kind together. Individual gender essentialism takes the property of being a woman/ man to be that, which makes an individual the individual they are. Witt argues for a version of individual essentialism – but one that differs significantly from the usual Kripkean identity essentialism. On the latter view, we start by examining existing individuals and ask which properties are necessary to the individual and make it that individual. Witt’s Aristotelian-inspired uniessentialism asks: what unifies and organizes some aggregate of disparate parts into an individual? Which property functions to explain why a new, unified individual exists to begin with? And Witt argues that with respect to social individuals – those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically – this function is served by the social role of gender, or being a woman/ man. In so doing, gender is the principle of normative unity that organizes, unifies and determines social individuals’ various social roles. This makes gender (in a sense) constitutive of who we are.

The workshop interrogates Witt’s view, considers alternatives to it and discusses the role of gender essentialism in feminist philosophy.

Toutes les infos : http://blog.hu-berlin.de/feminist_philosophy/essentialism/

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The Metaphysics of Gender (Charlotte Witt ) is a book about gender essentialism: What it is and why it might be true. It opens with the question: What is gender essentialism? The first chapter distinguishes between essentialism about kinds of individuals (e.g. women and men as groups) and essentialism about individuals (e.g. you and me). Successive
chapters introduce the ingredients for a theory of gender essentialism about individuals, called uniessentialism. Gender uniessentialism claims that a social individual's gender is uniessential to that individual. It is modeled on Aristotle's essentialism in which the form or essence of an individual is the principle of unity of that individual. For example, the form or essence of an artifact, like a house, is what unifies the material parts of the house into a new individual (over and above a sum of parts). Since an individual's gender is a social role (or set of social norms), the kind of unity in question is not the unity of material parts, as it is in the artifact example. Instead, the central claim of gender uniessentialism is that an individual's gender provides that individual with a principle of normative unity-a principle that orders and organizes all of that individual's other social roles. An important ingredient in gender uniessentialism concerns exactly which individuals are at issue-human organisms, persons, or social individuals? The Metaphysics of Gender argues that a social individual's gender is uniessential to it. Gender uniessentialism expresses the centrality of gender in our lived experiences and explores the social normativity of gender in a way that is useful for feminist theory and politics.

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/?ci=9780199740406&view=usa