Feminist Metaphysics Feminist Philosophy Collection Editor Elizabeth Potter Alice Andrews Quigley Professor of Women’s Studies, Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA Over the past 40 years, philosophy has become a vital arena for feminists. Recent feminist work has challenged canonical claims about the role of women and has developed new methods of analysis and critique, and in doing so has reinvigorated central areas of philosophy. The Feminist Philosophy Collection presents new work representative of feminist contributions to the six most significant areas of philosophy: Feminist Ethics and Political and Social Philosophy; Feminist Philosophy of Religion; Feminist Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art; Feminist Metaphysics; Feminist History of Philosophy; and Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Feminist work in some fields, notably ethics and social theory, has been going on for four decades, while feminist philosophy of art and aesthetics, as well as feminist metaphysics, are still young. Thus, some volumes will contain essays that build upon established feminist work as they explore new territory, while others break exciting new ground. Charlotte Witt Editor Feminist Metaphysics Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self 123 Editor Prof. Charlotte Witt University of New Hampshire Durham, NH, USA [email protected] ISBN 978-90-481-3782-4 e-ISBN 978-90-481-3783-1 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3783-1 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Cover illustration: Nancy Spero, “Black and the Red III”, 1994 (detail). Handprinted and printed collage on paper. 22 panels, 50×245 cm each. Installation view, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. Private collection. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. Photo by David Reynolds. The work of Nancy Spero (b.1926), artist, activist and feminist, has focused on diverse historical, mythical and contemporary cultural representations of women since the 1970’s. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the contributors to this volume for making the project so fun and rewarding. Although I was convinced that the time had come for a collected volume of essays in feminist metaphysics, I did not really know what to expect. It was truly exciting to see the range and quality of work being done in feminist meta- physics, and to see the many points of contact with analytic metaphysics, continental philosophy, and with earlier feminist philosophy. I am also grateful to the Center for the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire and the College of Liberal Arts for their support of the final stages of this project. Thanks also to Elizabeth Potter and Ingrid van Laarhoven for their wise words of editorial advice. Finally, I would like to thank Brenda Emands, who did a wonderful job copy editing the manuscript with great care and interest. v Contents 1 Introduction .............................. 1 Charlotte Witt Part I The Ontology of Sex and Gender 2 What Is Gender Essentialism? .................... 11 Charlotte Witt 3 Different Women. Gender and the Realism-Nominalism Debate ................................. 27 Natalie Stoljar 4 The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender ................. 47 Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir 5 Ontological Commitments, Sex and Gender ............ 67 Mari Mikkola 6 Metaphors of Being a ........................ 85 Marilyn Frye Part II Persons and Subjectivity 7 The Metaphysics of Relational Autonomy .............. 99 Jules Holroyd 8 Beauvoir on the Allure of Self-Objectification ........... 117 Nancy Bauer 9 A Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Types, Styles and Persons .............................. 131 Sara Heinämaa Part III Power, Ideology and Reality 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience .......... 159 Marianne Janack vii viii Contents 11 Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground ............. 179 Sally Haslanger 12 Experience and Knowledge: The Case of Sexual Abuse Memories ............................ 209 Linda Martín Alcoff Index ..................................... 225 Contributors Linda Martín Alcoff Hunter College, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY 10036, USA, [email protected] Nancy Bauer Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA, [email protected] Marilyn Frye Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, [email protected] Sally Haslanger Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02115, USA, [email protected] Sara Heinämaa Academy of Finland, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Helsinki, Finland, [email protected].fi Jules Holroyd Cardiff University, UK, [email protected] Marianne Janack Hamilton College, Clinton, NY 13323, USA, [email protected] Mari Mikkola Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, [email protected] Natalie Stoljar McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada H2X 3P8, [email protected] Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA, [email protected] Charlotte Witt University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, USA, [email protected] ix About the Author Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (Cornell 1996), Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield 2003), Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford, 2006), and Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, co-edited with Eva Feder Kittay (2006). www.alcoff.com Nancy Bauer is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Tufts University, where she teaches courses in feminist philosophy, philosophy and film, phe- nomenology and existentialism, philosophy of the ordinary, and ethics. She is the author of Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (Columbia University Press 2001) and is presently finishing up a book called How to Do Things with Pornography, which is a meditation on contemporary philosophy’s powers to criti- cize the culture from which it springs. Most of her writing is concerned in one way or another with the attenuation of philosophy’s social relevance in the wake of its professionalization in the twentieth century. Marilyn Frye is a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, where she has been a member of the Philosophy Department since 1974. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1969. She is the author of two col- lections of essays in feminist philosophy: The Politics of Reality (1983) and Willful Virgin (1992). For the past two decades she has been working out ideas about the ontology of social categories with a view to relieving perplexity and skepticism about gender and racial categories. Sally Haslanger is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and is Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Her primary interests are in metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy (espe- cially Aristotle) and social/political philosophy, with a focus on feminist and race theory. She has co-edited three books: Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays with Charlotte Witt (Cornell University Press 2005); Theorizing Feminisms with Elizabeth Hackett (Oxford University Press 2005); and Persistence with Roxanne Marie Kurtz (MIT Press 2006). She co-edits the Symposia on Gender, xi xii About the Author Race and Philosophy, a web publication, with Robert Gooding-Williams, Ishani Maitra, Ronald Sundstrom and Cynthia Willett. Sara Heinämaa is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University and Senior Lecturer of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She is presently working as Academy Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and leads a research group, European Rationality in the Break from Modernity, financed by the Academy of Finland. Heinämaa’s expertise is in phe- nomenology and existential philosophy, and her work is focused on the problems of percpetion, embodiment, personhood, and intersubjectivity. She is the author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (Rowman & Littlefield 2003) and two other volumes on the phenomenology of the body. She has also pub- lished widely on Beauvoir and Irigaray, and is the co-editor of two volumes in history of the philosophy of mind, Consciousness (Springer 2007) and Psychology and Philosophy (Springer 2008). At the moment she is finishing three chapters on mortality and futurity for a volume on Birth, Death, and the Feminine (Indiana, forthcoming 2010). Jules Holroyd has recently taken up a position as Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff, UK, having undertaken a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. In her research, she has focused on the notions of autonomy, political liberty, free will and moral responsibility. She is in particular interested in the concern, often expressed by feminists, to examine the kinds of social relationships that may be relevant to, or constitutive of, these notions. She is also working on the relationship between punitive