The Social Meaning of Sex

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Feminist historians were interested in thinking about the different ways, over time and across culture, that im people of a particular sex live their lives. And so they wanted to think about not just the underlying sex, but the set of assumptions that shaped women's lives and that women then conformed to. The social meaning of a woman in the 20 first united states is very different tham the social meaning of woman in china in the third century. So i don't think so, because i think am, we're not talking about the same thing when we're talking about sex engender, y am. It's not just a matter of different vocabularies.

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it’s because those ways provide elegant predictive descriptions or because they serve a more subtle political purpose. To get at the true nature of reality, therefore, it’s important to think about which aspects of it are socially constructed, and why. I talk with Sally Haslanger about these issues, and the techniques we can use to understand the world and make it a better place.

Update (22 March): Our discussion here could have (and did) leave some listeners with the wrong impression of how Sally and I feel about trans rights -- we are entirely for them! My fault for not making things more clear during the conversation. So I have added a brief note during the podcast intro to make our position perfectly explicit. Thanks to everyone who commented.

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Sally Haslanger received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Ford Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among her awards are the Carus Lectureship, the Distinguished Woman Philosopher award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of several books, including Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique.

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