Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Feminist critiques of science show that systematic biases strongly influence what scientific communities find salient. Features of reality relevant to women, for instance, may be under-appreciated or disregarded because of bias. Many feminist analyses of values in science identify problems with salience and suggest better epistemologies. But overlooked in such analyses are important discussions about intellectual virtues and the role they play in determining salience. Intellectual virtues influence what we should find salient. They do this in part by managing the (...) emotions, which are cognitively involved in what we actually do find salient. One reason intellectual virtues do not factor more strongly in feminist epistemology is the mistaken assumption that they could not serve as explicit epistemic community standards for scientific inquiry. There are good reasons, however, to think in terms of community intellectual virtue and consequently, to advance explicit public standards of intellectual virtue for scientific research. To show how explicit public standards for intellectual virtue might improve reasoning in biased conditions, I analyze a striking oversight in several evolutionary immunological hypotheses concerning women's reproduction and sexuality. I conclude that feminist epistemology would benefit from greater consideration of intellectual virtues, particularly in connection with social epistemological insights. (shrink)

This article explores the historicism of feminist constructivism. It focuses on the work of Judith Butler, and explores how the idea of history and elements of temporality are used in her theory of materialization. It argues that the radical historicism implied in the Jamesonian request ‘Historicize!’ can become a self-defeating enterprise. The hypothesis is that historicism has been used as a kind of ‘black box’ in feminist constructivism. The article points out the way in which constructivists rely much too easily (...) on history as evidence, and talk about history as if it stands outside construction. This ambivalence in constructivist thought is prevalent. The article proposes that feminist theorists of materiality recognize the predominance of self-evident notions of historicity in constructivist theories and start practising a strategic forgetting of history. (shrink)

As neuroscience has gained an increased ability to enchant the general public, it has become more and more common to appeal to it as an authority on a wide variety of questions about how humans do and should act. This is especially apparent with the question of gender roles. The term ‘neurosexism’ has been coined to describe the phenomenon of using neuroscientific practices and results to promote sexist conclusions; its feminist response is called ‘neurofeminism’. Here, our aim is to survey (...) the phenomena of neurosexism and neurofeminism using a largely philosophical approach, incorporating concepts from the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, ethics, and feminist philosophy. First, we delineate how neuroscientific studies purporting to show sex brain differences may be prone to bias at a number of methodological levels – including the choice of categories to be studied, and the choice of tools for data gathering, analysis, and presentation. Then, we show how interpretations of such studies may wrongly assume the notion of ‘hard-wiring’. Furthermore, lack of attention to distinctions within philosophy of mind may result in a mistaken supposition that brain differences lead to mental and/or psychological and/or behavioral ones. It is not difficult to see how these forms of neurosexism, leading to claims of ‘hard-wired’ gender differences that map onto traditional and harmful gender stereotypes, raise ethical questions. We conclude by briefly considering one: are the harms caused by neurosexist studies and their interpretations outweighed by their potential benefits? (shrink)

When a child is born with ambiguousgenitalia it is declared a psychosocialemergency, and the policy first proposed byJohn Money andadapted by the American Academy of Pediatrics requires determination ofunderlying condition, selection of gender,surgical intervention, and a commitment by allparties to accept the ``real sex'' of thepatient, all no later than 18–24 months,preferably earlier. Ethicists have recentlyquestioned this protocol on several grounds:lack of medical necessity, violation ofinformed consent, uncertainty of standards ofsuccess, among others. This suggests that thefaults in the protocol can (...) be addressed andimproved. Through a rhetorical approachinformed by Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca, thedisciplinary pathologization and reconstructionof the body are explored as incidents ofconstraining rhetoric that enact theirpersuasion upon the body of intersexedchildren. This essay shows that thepresumptions, judgments, values, andpresuppositions brought by the physician to theidentification, diagnosis, and curativeprocedures create a network of constraints thatexclude alternative possibilities. The resultis a situation wherein parents, physicians, andintersexed patients have ``no choice'' but toaccept the medical treatment guidelines. (shrink)

The concept of sex selection for “family balancing” is based on the notion that a family is “balanced” when it includes children of “both genders.” Clinics that offer IVF for family balancing present it as an option for couples who “want to experience the joy of raising both a male and female child”. Families with at least one child of each gender are claimed to have gender diversity and to provide more enriching experiences to all family members. Some theorists call (...) these families “balanced”, while others acknowledge that such a term could be pejorative, implying that families with children of one gender are unbalanced and, thereby, lesser. These theorists... (shrink)

‘Gender disappointment’ is the feeling of sadness when a parent’s strong desire for a child of a certain sex is not realised. It is frequently mentioned as a reason behind parents’ pursuit of sex selection for social reasons. It also tends to be framed as a mental disorder on a range of platforms including the media, sex selection forums and among parents who have been interviewed about sex selection. Our aim in this paper is to investigate whether ‘gender disappointment’ represents (...) a unique diagnosis. We argue that ‘gender disappointment’ does not account for a unique, distinct category of mental illness, with distinct symptoms or therapy. That said, we recognise that parents’ distress is real and requires psychological treatment. We observe that this distress is rooted in gender essentialism, which can be addressed at both the individual and societal level. (shrink)

This special issue of History of the Humane Sciences intends to shed light on a series of psychopathological entities that do not target well defined conditions and experiences, but rather aim at delimiting zones of uncertainty that defy psychopathology’s order of things: mild diagnoses or subthreshold disorders, borderline conditions, culture bound syndromes, or ideas of dimensions and dimensionality. While these categories have come to play an increasingly central role in psychiatric and psychological thinking during the last 50 years, historians and (...) social scientists have had remarkably little to say about how they have been created, what they have been used for, and what kind of realities they have helped to shape. In this introductory article we propose the concept of ‘psychopathological fringes’ to refer to these categories that are located somewhere at the border of psychopathological classifications and refer to zones of conceptual underdetermination. The notion of fringes serves to highlight both the conceptually and the socially marginal nature of the conditions, personal identities, and worlds delimited by these categories. The fringes of psychopathology are zones of vagueness, of epistemic uncertainty, and moral ambiguity. This introduction proposes a first incursion in these zones. It suggests some of the reason why they might have had attracted little interest in the past and why they may be more salient recently. It follows some analytical clues that might help chart a way through it and proposes a map through the collection of articles included in this issue. (shrink)

This paper examines dominant arguments advocating for the procreative right to undergo sex selection for social reasons, based on gender preference. I present four of the most recognized and common justifications for sex selection: the argument from natural sex selection, the argument from procreative autonomy, the argument from family balancing, and the argument from children’s well-being. Together these represent the various means by which scholars aim to defend access to sex selection for social reasons as a legitimate procreative choice. In (...) response, I contend that these justifications are flawed and often inconsistent and therefore fail to vindicate the practice. (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century, biologists such as Oscar Riddle, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Frank Lillie, and Richard Goldschmidt all puzzled over the question of sexual difference, the distinction between male and female. They all offered competing explanations for the biological cause of this difference, and engaged in a fierce debate over the primacy of their respective theories. Riddle propounded a metabolic theory of sex dating from the late-nineteenth century suggesting that metabolism lay at the heart of sexual difference. (...) Thomas Hunt Morgan insisted on the priority of chromosomes, Frank Lillie emphasized the importance of hormones, while Richard Goldschmidt supported a mixed model involving both chromosomes and hormones. In this paper, I will illustrate how the older metabolic theory of sex was displaced when those who argued for the relatively newer theories of chromosomes and hormones gradually formed an alliance that accommodated each other and excluded the metabolic theory of sex. By doing so, proponents of chromosomes and hormones established their authority over the question of sexual difference as they laid the foundations for the new disciplines of genetics and endocrinology. Their debate raised urgent questions about what constituted sexual difference, and how scientists envisioned the plasticity and controllability of this difference. These theories also had immediate political and cultural consequences at the turn of the twentieth century, especially for the eugenic and feminist movements, both of which were heavily invested in knowledge of sex and its determination, ascertainment, and command. (shrink)

Despite a great deal of feminist work that has highlighted its social construction, menstruation seems a self-evidently “natural” bodily process. Yet, how menstruation is defined or what “counts” as menstruation is rarely questioned. Examining menstruation alongside technologies that alter it highlights these definitional questions. In this article, I examine menstrual suppression through an analysis of medical journal articles and FDA advisory committee transcripts, paired with websites used to market menstrual suppression to consumers. Across these contexts, new definitions of menstruation converged (...) on a distinction between bleeding that occurs when women are taking hormonal birth control and when they are not. The case of menstrual suppression birth control pills provides an opportunity to study the work of redefining a biological process understood as quintessentially natural and deeply significant for gendered embodiment, as well as a challenge to consider both the social and material construction of gendered bodies. (shrink)

Abstract: This essay explores recent trends and major issues related to gay and lesbian philosophy in ethics (including issues concerning the morality of homosexuality, the natural function of sex, and outing and coming out); religion (covering past and present debates about the status of homosexuality and how biblical and qur'anic passages have been interpreted by both sides of the debate); the law (especially a discussion of the debates surrounding sodomy laws, same-sex marriage and its impact on transsexuals, and whether the (...) law should be used to enforce morality); scientific research into the origins of homosexuality (including discussion of arguments against such research); and metaphysics (especially the question of whether homosexuality is socially constructed during particular times and in particular cultures, or whether sexual orientation is an essential trait cutting across times and cultures). (shrink)

: Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, Guenther argues that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while handing down a heritage of possibilities that one can—and must—make one's own. Guenther calls this structure of natality Being-from-others, modifying Heidegger's language of inheritance to suggest an ethical understanding of existence as the gift of the other.

Surgeries inevitably raise questions of bodily integrity: how the post-surgical body reframes (or does not reframe) its experiences of functionality to incorporate new features. Nevertheless, when we try to define or delimit the concept of bodily integrity, it becomes increasingly important to think about how the physical and social unease caused by some forms of surgeries sits alongside the more transformative potential of surgical bodily modification. This article focuses on aesthetic genital surgeries on infants with disorders of sex development (DSD, (...) previously termed ‘intersex’ conditions). Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Elizabeth Freeman on time, bodies and ‘chrononormativity’, this article excavates not only the temporalities that produce what I would term ‘chrono-abnormalities’ of sex development, but also the temporalized medical responses, including surgeries, which retrieve ‘abnormal’ bodies into more normative time-lines. My conclusion is that when DSD-affected individuals experience aesthetic genital surgeries as painful and full of social unease this is not necessarily because the pre-surgical body was the ‘natural’, ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ body prior to surgery. Instead, it is because these surgeries interrupt what Bourdieu would term a sense of corporeal ‘immersion into the forthcoming’; an immersion which, in his theory of time as social action, is intimately linked with social power and possibilities. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the medical conceptualization of gender identity in the United States has entered a “new regime of truth.” Drawing from a mixed-methods analysis of medical journals, I illuminate a shift in the locus of gender identity from external genitalia and pathologization of families to genes and brain structure and individualized self-conception. The sexed body itself has also undergone a transformation: Sex no longer resides solely in genitalia but has traveled to more visible parts of the (...) body, implicating racialized aesthetic ideals in its new formulation. The re-imagining of gender identity as genetically and neurologically inscribed and the expanding locus of sex correspond to an inversion of the relationship between gender identity and the sexed body as well as shifts in medical jurisdiction. Whereas psychiatrists in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s understood gender as stemming from genital sex, the less popular idea that gender identity precedes the sexed body has gained traction in recent decades. If gender identity once derived from the sexed body, the sexed body must now be brought into alignment with gender identity. The increasing legitimacy of self-defined gender identity, the expanding definition of racialized sex, and the inversion of the sex–gender identity relationship elevates the role of surgeons in producing racialized and sexed bodies. (shrink)

Feminist science studies scholars have documented the historical and cultural contingency of scientific knowledge production. It follows that political and social activism has impacted the practice of science today; however, little has been done to examine the current cultures of science in light of feminist critiques and activism. In this article, I argue that, although critiques have changed the cultures of science both directly and indirectly, fundamental epistemological questions have largely been ignored and neutralized through these policy reforms. I provide (...) an auto-ethnography of my doctoral work in a neuroscience program to a) demonstrate how the culture of science has incorporated critiques into its practices and b) identify how we might use these changes in scientific practices to advance feminist science agendas. I critically analyze three areas in current scientific practice in which I see obstacles and opportunities: 1) research ethics, 2) diversity of research subjects and scientists, and 3) identification of a project's significance for funding. I argue that an understanding of the complicated and changing cultures of science is necessary for future feminist interventions into the sciences that directly challenge science's claim to epistemic authority. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that disability disqualifies people from full participation in or recognition by society. This view is rooted in eugenic logic, which tells us that our world would be a better place if disability could be eliminated. In opposition to this position, I argue that that disability is inherent in the human condition and consider the bioethical question of why we might want to conserve rather than eliminate disability from our shared world. To do so, I draw together (...) an eclectic, rather than systematic, configuration of counter-eugenic arguments for conserving disability. The idea of preserving intact, keeping alive, and even encouraging to flourish denoted by conserve suggests that disabilities would be better understood as benefits rather than deficits. I present, then, a reading of disability as a potentially generative resource rather than unequivocally restrictive liability. In other words, what I consider here is the cultural and material contributions disability offers to the world. (shrink)

The indianist sumak kawsay had a special political and intellectual relevance in Ecuador in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Since then, the influence of its approaches —and those of the different branches of good living— has grown and formed synergies with other heterodox trends such as degrowth, feminist economics and deep ecology, among others. The global pandemic of covid-19 has highlighted the incompatibility of the capitalist system and the paradigms that sustain it with the life of the planet (...) and of people. This article reflects on the proposals that are emerging around the construction of a global sumak kawsay as an alternative to development and capitalism, showing the potentialities and weaknesses of this philosophy, worldview and way of life from a postmodern perspective. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

This article reexamines the evidence for the relationships between the Vestal virgins and their natal kin from the second century BC to the third century ad. It suggests that the bond between these priestesses and their families remained strong throughout this period and that, as a consequence, interpretations of the Vestals' position within Roman society that emphasize the severing of agnatic ties through their removal from patria potestas may be misguided. When placed in the broader social and legal context, the (...) ritual “capture” of these priestesses is shown to be a necessary feature of their priestly identity, which only marked the Vestals as extraordinary because of the unique intersection of religious and gender categories that characterized their office. Finally, the implications of these findings for the interpretation of Vestal virginity are discussed. (shrink)

The first part of this essay describes a symbiological approach to gender and sexuality; the second, a symbiological approach to world literatures and some examples of gender and sexuality in symbiological literatures. Both are intended to provide more intimate accounts of the Anthropocene than the typical big pictures of global warming and climate change. While grand and world-historical, to be sure, the Anthropocene also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. Both sex and gender should be understood as the (...) outcomes of developmental processes more or less stabilized by a wide variety of more or less variable factors in the loop of nature, culture, and technology. Understanding the nature of these processes and their social, biological, and technological causes is essential for comprehending the nature of gender, sex, and sexuality, and the extent to which these are mutable. The essay concludes with some reflections on love in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Despite the introduction of female bishops, women do not hold offices on equal terms with men in the Church of England, where conservative evangelical male clergy often reject the validity of women’s ordination. This article explores the gender values of such clergy, investigating how they are expressed and the factors that shape them. Data is drawn from semi-structured interviews and is interpreted with thematic narrative analysis. The themes were analyzed with theories on postfeminism, engaged orthodoxy and group schism. It is (...) argued that participants’ gender values are best understood as postfeminist and that the wider evangelical tradition, as well as a perceived change in Anglican identity with the onset of women’s ordination, shape their postfeminism. Moreover, whilst evangelical gender values possess the potential to foster greater gender equality within the Church of England, gender differentiation limits this possibility, a limitation that could be addressed by increasing participants’ engagement beyond the Church. (shrink)

This article argues that feminist theorists should conceive of the life sciences not only as a factual resource but also as a figural resource. It proposes that in shifting our conceptual orientation to biological science from fact to figure, feminists will be able to give theoretical life to scientific findings about the ways in which social environments and material habitats are processes integral to our development, growth, and social and political well-being. The figuration of ourselves as specifically biocultural creatures will (...) enable feminists to gain a stronger theoretical and analytic purchase on the ongoing mutual shaping of the biological and social dimensions of existence. This, in turn, will enable feminists to creatively re-imagine the fields and fora of feminist politics. (shrink)

One dimension of cognitive success concerns getting it right: having many true beliefs and no false ones. Another dimension of cognitive success concerns using the right concepts. For example, using a concept of a person that systematically excludes people of certain demographics from its extension is a sort of cognitive deficiency. This view, if correct, tasks inquirers with critically examining the concepts they are using and perhaps replacing those concepts with new and better ones. This task is often referred to (...) as “conceptual engineering”. However, so far it is unclear what exactly happens in cases of conceptual engineering. How does language change when we engineer a concept? This article offers an answer. I propose a view on which, when speakers assess the truth of propositions, they often rely on assumptions with regard to what is required for their truth. For example, when speakers assess whether unborn fetuses are people, they rely on assumptions with regard to what is required to be a person. Based on this idea, I develop a model of conceptual engineering according to which speakers “engineer concepts” when they change how they assess the truth of propositions. For example, speakers engineer the concept of a person when they change how they assess the truth of the proposition that unborn fetuses are people. (shrink)

The neuroscientific investigation of sex differences has an unsavoury past, in which scientific claims reinforced and legitimated gender roles in ways that were not scientifically justified. Feminist critics have recently argued that the current use of functional neuroimaging technology in sex differences research largely follows that tradition. These charges of ‘neurosexism’ have been countered with arguments that the research being done is informative and valuable and that an over-emphasis on the perils, rather than the promise, of such research threatens to (...) hinder scientific progress. To investigate the validity of these contrasting concerns, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigations of sex differences and citation practices were systematically examined. In line with the notion of neurosexism, the research was found to support the influence of false-positive claims of sex differences in the brain, to enable the proliferation of untested, stereotype-consistent functional interpretations, and to pay insufficient attention to the potential plasticity of sex differences in both brain and mind. This, it is argued, creates a literature biased toward the presentation of sex differences in the brain as extensive, functionally significant, and fixed—and therefore implicitly supportive of a gender essentialist perspective. It is suggested that taking feminist criticisms into account would bring about substantial improvement in the quality of the science, as well as a reduction in socially harmful consequences. (shrink)

Intersex—the fact of bodies neither typically male nor female, together with the grim history of its medical management—was a topic for feminist theory before there was such a thing as intersex activism. Indeed, critical academic scholarship about intersex supported the consciousness raising that made an intersex activist movement possible. Activist engagement, in turn, has expanded the understanding of the theorists whose work is responsive to that activism. Central to the thinking about intersex are the questions of identity and its limits (...) that are an important focus of the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, whose narrative suggests she had a condition associated with intersex. While her work largely predates intersex activism, it powerfully encapsulates the tensions displayed in contests over identity that have become central over the last 15 years, and furthermore offers insight into the challenges that lie ahead. (shrink)

From birth to 15 months infants and caregivers form a fundamentally intersubjective, dyadic unit within which the infant’s ability to recognize gender/sex in the world develops. Between about 18 and 36 months the infant accumulates an increasingly clear and subjective sense of self as female or male. We know little about how the precursors to gender/sex identity form during the intersubjective period, nor how they transform into an independent sense of self by 3 years of age. In this Theory and (...) Hypothesis article I offer a general framework for thinking about this problem. I propose that through repetition and patterning, the dyadic interactions in which infants and caregivers engage imbue the infant with an embodied, i.e., sensori-motor understanding of gender/sex. During this developmental period (which I label Phase 1) gender/sex is primarily an intersubjective project. From 15 to 18 months (which I label Phase 2) there are few reports of newly appearing gender/sex behavioral differences, and I hypothesize that this absence reflects a period of developmental instability during which there is a transition from gender/sex as primarily inter-subjective to gender/sex as primarily subjective. Beginning at 18 months (i.e., the start of Phase 3), a toddler’s subjective sense of self as having a gender/sex emerges, and it solidifies by 3 years of age. I propose a dynamic systems perspective to track how infants first assimilate gender/sex information during the intersubjective period (birth to 15 months); then explore what changes might occur during a hypothesized phase transition (15 to 18 months), and finally, review the emergence and initial stabilization of individual subjectivity-the period from 18 to 36 months. The critical questions explored focus on how to model and translate data from very different experimental disciplines, especially neuroscience, physiology, developmental psychology and cognitive development. I close by proposing the formation of a research consortium on gender/sex development during the first 3 years after birth. (shrink)

This article identifies the dominant public narrative of AIDS in Malawi through an analysis of qualitative interview data and policy and intervention materials. The public narrative creates distinctions between “risky” and “healthy” sex that organize HIV prevention efforts around moral categories, rather than relative risk. These distinctions oppose images of backward, ignorant villagers to the protective power of “love matches”. The analysis demonstrates that the public narrative and corresponding prevention efforts only make sense in connection with the patently false assumption (...) that love, heterosexuality, and modernity effectively protect individuals from HIV. This research brings to light the unspoken assumptions of modernity in the “charmed circle” of heteronormativity, as well as the need to consider the workings of heteronormativity in studies of modernization and globalization. Furthermore, it highlights individualistic and oversimplified analytic models currently directing HIV prevention efforts and points to potentially more effective strategies. (shrink)

This paper looks at the role nonhuman animals play in how we think about sex, gender, and sexuality in zoology and in society. In examining the history of ideas regarding a microscopic invertebrate species—rotifers—the paper explores how humans have projected aspects of their lives onto nonhuman animals and how they have extrapolated from nonhuman animals to human society. The paper emphasizes the intersections between knowledge about nonhuman animals and gender and sexuality politics.

In this article, I extend the feminist use of Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of memory and forgetting to consider the contemporary externalization of memory foregrounded by transgender experience. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals argues that memory is “burnt in” to the forgetful body as a necessary part of subject-formation and the requirements of a social order. Feminist philosophers have employed Nietzsche’s account to illuminate how gender, as memory, becomes embodied. While the account of the “burnt in” repetitions of gender allows (...) us to theorize processes of embodied identity on an individual level, analyzing gender today requires also accounting for how gender is externalized. I take up this question through the specific examples of identity documents and sex-segregated bathrooms. Returning to Nietzsche’s call to practice a resistant forgetting, I conclude by exploring the distinct strategies required to disrupt externalized memory. These strategies include contesting the use of past gender assignments in data collection and rewriting architectural reminders of gender. (shrink)

Gender is commonly thought of as dependent on sex even though there are occasional aberrations. Interviews with female-to-male trans people, however, suggest that sex and sex characteristics can be understood as expressions of gender. The expression of gender relies on both behavior and the appearance of the performer as male or female. When sex characteristics do not align with gender, behavior becomes more important to gender expression and interpretation. When sex characteristics become more congruent with gender, behavior becomes more fluid (...) and less important in asserting gender. Respondents also challenge traditional notions of sexual orientation by focusing less on the sex of the partner and more on the gender organization of the relationship. The relationship’s ability to validate the interviewee’s masculinity or maleness often takes precedence over the sex of the partner, helping to explain changing sexual orientation as female-to-male transsexual and transgendered people transition into men. (shrink)

RESUMEN El apetito rapaz de los conquistadores produjo sodomitas Indígenas en Abya Yala. Corrompió también sus entendimientos sobre vitalidad corporal. La violación convirtió una permeabilidad anal, que comunicaba varias formas de lo vital, en un acto de destitución socio-corporal. La permeabilidad carnal Indígena, y su transición, quedó signada como infrahumana. La colonialidad oculta esa condición infrahumana al confundir las movilidades transgéneros con todo tipo de disconformidad corporal. Al considerar la permeabilidad corporal como un índice de disidencia tanto cognitiva como sexual, (...) la modernidad configuró lo transgénero como un vínculo monstruoso entre la permeabilidad y el capacitismo. El legado de la colonialidad fusiona conceptualmente a los cuerpos infra y cuasi-humanos. Para desenredar esa confusión, este ensayo examina la materialidad ancestral de prácticas anales, ritos funerarios, y apariciones y danzas ceremoniales. Este materialismo decolonizante negocia la permeabilidad sobre el puente que se extiende entre, por un lado, las cosmologías Andinas y Mesoamericanas y, por otro, las corporalidades travesti y trans. Al introducir el marco de la colonialidad de lo transgénero, el ensayo coloca el pluralismo ontológico en el centro de los debates sobre los materialismos trans*. ABSTRACT The voracious lust of the conquest produced Indigenous sodomites in Abya Yala. Native peoples saw their understandings of bodily vitality interrupted. Rape turned anal permeability, which had once communicated various forms of life, into an act of bodily destitution. The permeability of Indigenous flesh, and its transition, was rendered non-human. Coloniality veils this infrahuman condition by mistaking transgender transitions for any nonconforming embodiment. By reading permeable bodies as gender nonconforming, modernity gives rise to monstrous and disabled embodiments. Thus, transgender emerges as the linchpin between ableism and permeability. The legacy of colonialism conflates near-human and infrahuman bodies. Moving away from this conflation, this writing examines the materiality of ancestral, nonwestern, anal practices, burial rites, ceremonial apparitions, and dances. This decolonizing materialism negotiates permeability over the bridge between, on the one hand, Mesoamerican and Andean cosmologies and, on the other, travesti and trans Latinx embodiments. Ultimately, the coloniarity of transgender framework that I develop centers ontological pluralism in the current conversations about trans* materialisms. (shrink)

Discussions in neuroethics to date have ignored an ever-increasing neuroscientific lilterature on sex differences in brains. If, indeed, there are significant differences in the brains of men versus women and in the brains of boys versus girls, the ethical and social implications loom very large. I argue that recent neuroscientific findings on sex-based brain differences have significant implications for theories of morality and for our understandings of the neuroscience of moral cognition and behavior.

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different (...) types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to provide an overview of the political and philosophical issues pertaining to asexuality. The first section, “What Is Asexuality?,” offers an account of asexuality. The second section, “Asexuality as a Unique Sexual Orientation,” argues that asexuality should be understood as a unique sexual orientation. The third section, “Asexuality and Oppression,” discusses the various forms of oppression facing asexual persons today. The fourth section, “The Goods of Asexuality,” articulates some goods that asexuality brings to human lives, (...) and we do this with an eye toward conceiving of asexuality as something other than a mere deficit. (shrink)

Spanish Translation of "He/She/They/Ze" (Ergo, 2018).

**No longer the current version available on SEP; see revised version by Sharon Crasnow** -/- Feminists have a number of distinct interests in, and perspectives on, science. The tools of science have been a crucial resource for understanding the nature, impact, and prospects for changing gender-based forms of oppression; in this spirit, feminists actively draw on, and contribute to, the research programs of a wide range of sciences. At the same time, feminists have identified the sciences as a source as (...) well as a locus of gender inequalities: the institutions of science have a long tradition of excluding women as practitioners; feminist critics of science find that women and gender (or, more broadly, issues of concern to women and sex/gender minorities) are routinely marginalized as subjects of scientific inquiry, or are treated in ways that reproduce gender-normative stereotypes; and, closing the circle, scientific authority has frequently served to rationalize the kinds of social roles and institutions that feminists call into question. -/- Feminist perspectives on science therefore reflect a broad spectrum of epistemic attitudes toward and appraisals of science. Some urge the reform of gender inequities in the institutions of science and call for attention to neglected questions with the aim of improving the sciences in their own terms; they do not challenge the standards and practices of the sciences they engage. Others pursue jointly critical and constructive programs of research that, to varying degrees, aim at transforming the methodologies, substantive content, framework assumptions, and epistemic ideals that animate the sciences. The content of these perspectives, and the degree to which they generate transformative critique, depends not only on the types of philosophical and political commitments that inform them but also on the nature of the sciences and subject domains on which they bear. Feminist perspectives have had greatest impact on sciences that deal with inherently gendered subjects—the social and human sciences—and, secondarily, on sciences that study subjects characterized in gendered terms, metaphorically or by analogy (projectively gendered subjects), chiefly the biological and life sciences. Feminist perspectives are relevant to sciences that deal with non-gendered subject matters, but perspectives vary substantially in content and in critical import depending on the sciences and the particular research programs they engage. (shrink)

Feminist metaphysics is simultaneously feminist theorizing and metaphysics. Part of feminist metaphysics concerns social ontology and considers such questions as, What is the nature of social kinds, such as genders? Feminist metaphysicians also consider whether gendered perspectives influence metaphysical theorizing; for example, have approaches to the nature of the self or free will been conducted from a masculinist perspective, and would a feminist perspective yield different theories? Some feminist metaphysicians develop metaphysical theories with the aim of furthering certain social goals, (...) such as gender equality. Despite these and other intriguing research projects, feminist metaphysics faces challenges from two flanks: one might argue that "feminist metaphysics" is not metaphysics, or one might argue that it is not feminist. Recently, Elizabeth Barnes has made the case that, since contemporary accounts of the nature of metaphysics focus primarily on the fundamental, they have the problematic implication that feminist metaphysics is not, properly speaking, metaphysics. However, less emphasis has been paid, of late, to the idea that major strands of feminist thought also problematize feminist metaphysics. I will briefly assess the metaphysician's case against feminist metaphysics in Section 2 of this chapter. Then, in Section 3, I will examine in more detail possible feminist concerns over metaphysics. In Section 4, I sketch a different conception of metaphysics that avoids both mainstream and feminist challenges to feminist metaphysics. (shrink)