Source
Sally Haslanger (2000), “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?”, Noûs 34(1):31–55, LIT-480, read in full in NOTE-394. Page numbers are the journal’s.
What was actually shown
The method (pp. 32–35). “What is gender?” has three readings. Conceptual: what our concept is. Descriptive: what kind our usage tracks. Analytical: what concept serves our legitimate purposes. The paper’s project is analytical, linked to the descriptive claim that gender and race talk tracks social kinds “typically obscured by the manifest content” of everyday concepts (p. 34). Appropriating an ordinary term is warranted when its central functions remain (p. 35, n. 6) and the politics are acceptable, a condition the paper leaves general.
The definitions.
- Woman (p. 42). S is a woman iff (i) S is regularly observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction; (ii) having them marks S, within the dominant ideology, as someone who ought to occupy positions that are in fact subordinate; (iii) satisfying (i) and (ii) plays a role in S’s systematic subordination along some dimension. Man is the privileged counterpart. One can function as a woman in a context without being one (pp. 42–43).
- Racialized group (p. 44). Parallel, with features presumed in a context to show ancestral links to a region, and subordination or privilege. Italians, Germans and the Irish have been racialized in the US and are not now (p. 45). Note 17 lists four qualifications.
- Gender and ethnicity (pp. 45, 50–51) are the non-hierarchical genera, so a just society’s categories can be described in the same terms.
Two objections answered by the project’s values. Commonality: women share a kind of position, sexually marked subordination, whose content varies (p. 45). Normativity: choosing which facts matter on explicit values is “both inevitable and important” (p. 46).
The conclusion (pp. 51–52). Gender and race are real and social, not chosen, hierarchical as we know them, and contingent. “The world itself can’t tell us what gender is” (p. 52).
What could have come out otherwise. Little, by design. The definitions are stipulated and defended by their purpose. The one claim that could fail is the descriptive one, and the paper does not put it to a test.
What this does not say
- That this is what “woman” means. The author is “less committed to saying that this is what gender is and what race is, than to saying that these are important categories that a feminist antiracist theory needs” (p. 52).
- That every female is a woman. Non-oppressed females, if any, are not women in this sense, and the paper accepts it: “It is part of the project of feminism to bring about a day when there are no more women” (p. 46).
- That the empirical premises are shown. That there are no racial genes and that classification differs between Brazil and the US are given as “matters of established fact” without citation (p. 43).
- That oppression or “dominant ideology” is analysed. Both are placeholders (pp. 39–40; n. 14).
- That it handles intersectional categories as categories. Only the content of a position varies with race and class (p. 39).
- That trans women are covered. Ritchie’s n. 30 (LIT-486) reports Jenkins’s charge that this account excludes them. NOTE-394 does not examine it, and neither does this document.
Connections
- Ritchie 2018 (LIT-486, THEORY-575) reads these definitions as identifying women with a node in a structure of subordination, with the marker as a requirement on occupiers. On her terms these are feature social groups, kinds, not organised wholes.
- Ásta (LIT-491, unread) is the rival account of the same categories: conferred constraints and enablements.
- Epstein’s survey (LIT-487, THEORY-487) distinguishes what grounds a category from what anchors it. Haslanger’s definitions say what grounds being a woman; the dominant ideology is the anchor. The placement is the record’s.
- Durkheim (LIT-484, THEORY-648). Both locate a category’s reality in social relations rather than individuals’ properties (NOTE-394).
- No bearing on the group-agency strand: nothing here treats a gender or a race as an agent.