Charlotte Witt, “The Metaphysics of Gender” (Oxford University Press, 2011)
New Books in Philosophy
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The Social Construction Argument Doesn't Work
There was a debate going on in feminism about over the topic of gender essentialism. Elizabeth Spellman wrote a very influential book that talked about how Caucasian women's ways of thinking about feminism were excluded, say women of color. I was looking at these discussions and it seemed to me that since gender is a social category, you couldn't have an essential feature or feature because there's just too much variability. So my first thought about this was that the social construction argument didn't work.
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