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Categories We Die For: Ameliorating Gender in Analytic Feminist Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Eloy LaBrada
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Extract

What it is to be gendered remains a disputed topic in feminist philosophy, not to mention in the quotidian struggle over gender categories as they are lived and questioned outside the academy. In this paper I want to explore what contemporary work in analytic feminist philosophy can tell us about how the “categories we live by,” or the categories that organize our social lives and constitute our identities, can sometimes render life unlivable because of their restrictive or oppressive effects (Kapusta; Ásta Sveinsdóttir, “Metaphysics”; Butler, Undoing 4 and Notes). The phrase “categories we die for” captures this ambiguity. On the one hand, many of us have died, and continue to, for gender categories that we couldn't, or refused to, live up to. Think of the violence done in the name of normative and regulatory gender ideals to gender nonconformists—those who do not find a place in gender binarism (“man/woman”) or sexual dimorphism (“male/female”). Queer populations continue to be vulnerable to marginalization, pathologization, and aggression for not doing their gender, sex, or sexuality “correctly” (i.e., heteronormatively or cisnormatively). In this sense, social categories and norms can ruin lives, and we ought to argue against their restrictive regulation. On the other hand, we are also willing to stand behind, defend, and even sacrifice ourselves for gender categories that promise to make life more livable, flexible, and sustainable for those we cherish (Kapusta; Butler, Undoing). When we fight for the recognition of categories like “genderqueer,” “trans∗,” and “agender” we seem to be saying that these are categories worth dying for (a further issue, we will see, is whether binary gender categories like “man” and “woman” per se are worth dying for, or whether the effort to make these existing categories more inclusive is). The contemporary struggle to expand the compass of gender terms and concepts, to expand the sense of the livable, seeks to make categories more inclusive. When we mobilize for trans∗ inclusiveness, gender variance, intersex visibility, and more, we are fighting for categories to be protected, in law and in life. So, to speak of “categories we are dying for,” as I will, implies both a punitive sense (“categories due to which many of us die”) and a positive sense (“categories worth dying for”). Depending on their uses and effects, gender categories can make or break one's life.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 449 - 459
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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