Ásta (2018), Oxford University Press, Studies in Feminist Philosophy (hardback ISBN 9780190256791; paperback ISBN 9780190256807; 160 pp.) — DOI-10.1093/oso/9780190256791.001.0001
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the works filling out
the record’s coverage of social ontology under the topic ADR-017 added;
ADR-017 names Ásta, with Hacking and Haslanger, as the social-construction
work a narrower word than social-ontology could not have held. The request
asked whether the book is open access. It is not.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read and no
NOTE is filed. What follows is only what the publisher and the chapter
metadata say.
What the publisher says. The description opens: “We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them?” The theory “centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful?” and “The main idea is that social categories are conferred upon people.” It offers “an account of just what social construction is and how it works”.
Contents (OUP’s titles; pages from Crossref):
- Introduction: Social Categories (1–6)
- 1 The Conferralist Framework (7–33)
- 2 Social Construction as Social Significance (34–53)
- 3 Sex and Gender: From Beauvoir to Butler (54–69)
- 4 Conferralism about Sex and Gender (70–92)
- 5 Conferralism about Other Social Categories (93–113)
- 6 Identity as Social Location (114–126)
- Conclusion: Categories We Live By: Systematicity and Oppression (127–128)
Where it sits. On the same ground as Haslanger (LIT-480), with a different answer: Haslanger defines gender and race by position in a hierarchy, and by the description this book defines social categories by conferral. Ritchie (LIT-486) reinterprets Ásta’s conferralism, from her 2011 and 2015 papers rather than this book, as a node in a social structure whose occupation requires a conferred status; on Ritchie’s taxonomy the categories this book is about are feature social groups, kinds rather than organised wholes. Nothing seen bears on the group-agency or group-mind works.
Topic. social-ontology is primary: what social categories are and how
one comes to belong to them. metaphysics holds the account of construction
as social significance. self holds chapter 6, Identity as
Social Location, which by its title concerns social identity; that tag rests
on the title alone. No word in the vocabulary names sex, gender, race or
feminist philosophy as such; the primary subject is held, so filing is not
blocked.
No instruction for machine-learning practice appears in what was seen, so nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.
What a reading should check.
- What conferral is: whose attitudes confer, and what is conferred (constraints and enablements, by Ritchie’s quotation of the 2015 paper).
- How chapter 2’s “social construction as social significance” relates to Haslanger’s constitutive construction and to Ritchie’s constitutive dependence.
- Whether conferralism treats groups formed by conferral as able to act.