Ways to Be Concerned in Philosophical Gender Studies

Constructions of Gender are represented principally as social, cultural, and political constructions — frequently in opposition to what was before argued as the biological definition of the category of Sex. All of these included gender identities, roles and responsibilities; gender relations and subject positions; gender hegemonies and ideological systems such as patriarchy; or structural interactions such as gender micro politics (Gender is sometimes regarded as a political ambition with the potential for developing individual and social transformation in the state of Gender); and Gender as a conceptualisation of ontology created for political and methodological purposes. So, as a form of reality concerning the collection, privation and negotiation of power between the sexes, it has become a firm ontology in a change request not completed or concluded; but a feature of a state of being ongoing and involved; a perpetual state. In other words, Gender mainstreaming can be viewed as extending knowledge-making or epistemology into institutional/individual practice.

Studies believe and show how uncertain this system is on two peculiarities: a current cultural niche with binary models and the reality of Gender, leading to emerging four ways to be concerned with Gender in Philosophy:

• Review of Gender within discourse investigation
• Review of gender essentialism
• Analysis of how gender notions work
• Study how Gender is relevant to intersubjective verification

Thus, Gender Study is a theoretical construct that can summarise or reconstruct Gender inside research discussions, ideologies, methods, institutions and social structures. It includes an analytical category or variable that can clarify and describe how the state of being gendered is ‘taken up, regularised, and maintained.

In Doing Gender (which usually advances on permanently establishing a dual system of two sexes), we examine membership differences in prevailing gender kinds as Gender classifications. Thus, Gender classifications would be concerned with facts about gender kind membership.

Gender Classification could be fulfilled in three dimensions:

• Gender Paradigm Definition: The gender Paradigm consolidates Gender as enactments lodged in social structures, ideologies and discourses, as constituents of identities, as social performances and interactions.
• Ontology of Gender: The way of conceptualising the nature of reality or being of Gender.
• Epistemology of Gender: Epistemology is a ‘theory of knowledge (that) should therefore concern the laws and commands by which one determines whether and whereby social phenomena of Gender can be apprehended, and how its knowledge can be displayed’ or created.

Contemporaneous gender discussions could be split into four main categories, which will be discussed more in the following sections:

1. Essentialism accounts (Witt’s view)
2. Social-based versions (Haslanger’s view)
3. Identity-based reports (Bettcher’s view)
4. Historical-based statements (Bach’s view)

1-   Essentialism Account

“Essentialism” presents individuals as concerning “essential” properties of a particular gender-related class of human beings. On the one hand, alleged class members who do not possess such properties should not be counted as actual members; on the other, accepting people who lack those properties as members of the class amounts to falsifying the claim that the properties are essential.

A further essentialism assumption is that belonging to one Gender is determined by nature or even a fact of human nature (and, hence, part of human beings). This latter hypothesis adds to the normativity of gender models, the constraint to follow one of them: if belonging to Gender is an essential part of being human, nobody can escape Gender altogether. In this context, “Doing gender” (which thrives on continually establishing a dual order of two sexes) must be appended to sex essentialism.

This belief means that males and females are born with distinctively diverse natures restricted biologically rather than culturally. It includes an equation of Gender and Sex. Constructionists often use the term pejoratively, which will be discussed further. Still, strategic essentialism is a common activist strategy and biological essentialism facades in the persistence of some feminists that the physical details of sexual differentiation do have entailments. It sometimes includes the belief in biological determinism in which gay people are born gay, and there is a peculiar ‘gay sensibility.

Besides, some claim that generics are the most basic way cognitive generalisations are signified. The use of generics seems to stimulate essentialist positions regularly. The category is taken to be indoctrinated in an essence, which means that members of the class are assumed to share something that causally trains their demonstration of specific properties. Acceptance generic view causes to infer that any arbitrarily chosen member of that category is provided with the generic predicate’s parcel. It seems that the essentialist views observed in association with the use of bare plurals as cases of generics could also be defined as existential presuppositions (and accommodations thereof). The category is presupposed to “exist” as a category and, therefore, to have an essence; the receiver is essentially invited to share such a background assumption. Insofar as a particular class is supposed to exist and be causally indoctrinated.

In this context, one may wonder, for example, whether a woman’s failure to demonstrate specific properties belonging to the feminine gender (for example, behaving like a woman) or a woman experiencing surgery to change her Sex is to be logically considered as graded indications of the same kind of process.  Some have argued that the attribution of a homogeneous identity to a wide range of people in different cultures and histories throughout the world and time would be a naïve essentialism or politically-motivated strategic essentialism ignoring differences within it. While there might be other ways of rejecting Gender Essentialism, the anti-essentialist stance is not without obstacles.

2-   Social-based accounts

The central idea of Haslanger’s dual representation of woman and man is this: Gender is a social construction that privileges some and disadvantages others based on hypotheses about biological Sex. In this view, there is no particular inherent property or characteristic that all women or men, etc., have in common.

Social position accounts describe Gender with external factors. An individual’s Gender is a subject of how other people respond to them, treat them, etc. More particularly, many social position accounts describe Gender in terms of the socially material (dis)advantage forced on individuals based on shared norms and premises about Sexed Bodies.

Nevertheless, Haslanger’s view – and other comparable social position accounts – meets what Katharine Jenkins (2016) names an ‘exclusion problem’. This concern concludes that social position accounts, and more broadly, any view that explains what it is to be a woman, or a man,

or genderqueer, in terms of “how other people treat, react, and respond to them”, will have the same problem: Difficulty in explaining cases in which others do not recognise a woman as a woman; or genderqueer as genderqueer, and so forth. Such “exclusion problems” suggest that social position accounts are metaphysically inadequate – they do not fully explain the reality of Gender or what it is to be a woman because they define Gender in external terms. These theories do not sufficiently describe who should count as women (or men, genderqueer people, etc.).  They do not give us necessary and sufficient conditions for what it is to be a woman (or non-binary, a man, etc.).

The social constructionist approach to Gender pushes the gender-in-context position further. Here, Gender emerges within social interactions as a negotiated declaration of identity. Gender is not something that one performs throughout development. Instead, it is practised continuously in social interactions large and small—viewing Gender as a verb as a practice helps us understand why gender systems are difficult to root out or change.

3-   Identity-Based Accounts

In contrast to social position accounts, according to which Gender is explained by external features, internalist reports explain Gender, at least in part, via internal components.

What Gender you determine how you feel about yourself and how you are inclined to behave. In this view, gender identity is not innate, essential, or independent of socially constructed norms about gendered behaviour. Jennifer McKitrick claims: You are a woman in a particular context, for example, just if you have a cluster of behavioural dispositions coded as feminine. A striking feature of many internalist views is a strong emphasis on gender identity. Talia Bettcher says it is a ‘passionate self-identification which fundamentally structures a person’s experience and behaviour. Some believe that gender identity is a type of ‘internal map’: a pattern of responses, both conscious and unconscious, that guide social behaviour.

We form gender identities in response to (contingent, socially constructed) gender norms, behaviours, and socialisation, and one’s Sex does not determine how one forms gender identity. In response to these contingent social features, one can form a gender identity that is more typically found in those with different reproductive glands; in distinctive gender identity. Thus, gender identity is to be a crucial part. It does not mean that more public aspects of Gender are unimportant. Bettcher, for example, emphasises the importance of ‘living’ as a woman. Jenkins stresses the importance of gender roles. Both Bettcher and Jenkins argue that we should use our term ‘woman’ to refer to all and only people who identify as women (or who have a female gender identity, to use Jenkins’ terminology). For example, it is questionable that all cognitively disabled women have a sense of gender identity discussed.

Elizabeth Barnes argues that: “Denying womanhood to cognitively disabled women seems like a gross injustice, especially since cognitively disabled women are particularly vulnerable to gendered abuse. We would deny that women without specific cognitive capacities deserve the label ‘women’ precisely because their cognitive capacities differ from typical. In effect, we would be saying, because of their disabilities, that cognitively disabled women are not women but are merely female. It is not unlike how we attribute Sex but not gender to non-human animals. Nor is the type of gender identity referred to in these conversations the same as the sense of gender identity that psychologists often studied – a type of sex-based identification that appears to form in early childhood. Not all trans women, for example, form a female gender identity in this particular sense. The primary worry is that it is tough to characterise any internally felt sense of Gender, which all and only the women share (or the men, or the genderqueer people, etc.).” So here, the distinction between “woman” and “female”, “man” and “masculinity” are concerned.

4-   Historical Account

Achieving unity in this view is possible through a shared historical lineage of cultural reproduction with past binary models of Gender.

The main ingredients of a historical kind are as below:

1. The reality of a model
2. New members generated in cooperation with the model
3. The interaction with earlier models (or members) produces the latest members to follow past member(s)

Steps 2–3 happen when there is a series of reproductions or lineages.

The unity of Gender arises from the shared reproductive history of each lineage. The conception of continuity amongst members is accomplished by a lineage of reproduction that has endured adequately “intact” over time and has evaded merging, extinction or noteworthy branching-off. Nevertheless, this conclusion is reported at too nimbly.

Understandably, people seeking to free themselves from gender models attempt to shift the biology of reproduction from nature to culture: taking it all to be a cultural matter removes from gender models any possible biological legitimization. For instance, technological development can convert biological capacities into cultural preferences. More complex technological interventions make it possible to reconstruct intercourse with artificial insemination or let a woman host an embryo that she is not the genetic mother. Furthermore, fetuses can now survive after a specified minimum fecundation time and develop outside the mother’s womb. All these new techniques open the door to choices that were not “naturally” possible. The clear distinction between what is done using technology and what would follow according to “nature” implies that we face a decision between a technology-guided and a nature-guided line of control on each event. It is conceivable to see the nature/culture distinction as a perpetual line between two poles.

Theodore Bach, stating a historical account of Gender, speaks about “Social Kinds of Human” and challenges with which Terms we should refer to historical, contemporary, proposed, and new social kinds of humans? Should we then call these mind-independent kinds “men” and “women?” Or should we call them something else?