Another aim of feminist metaphysics has been to provide a basis for feminist activism by explaining what unites women as a group.[4] These accounts have historically centered on cisgender women, but philosophers such as Gayle Salamon,[5]Talia Mae Bettcher[6] and Robin Dembroff[7] have sought to further explain the genders of transgender and non-binary people.
Later theorists would challenge the commitment to the pre-social existence of sex, arguing that sex is socially constructed as well as gender.[8][9] For Monique Wittig, the division of bodies into sexes is the product of a heterosexual society.[11]
There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is
oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society.[12]
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In This Sex Which is Not One (1977), Luce Irigaray seeks to create a psychoanalytic narrative that incorporates Lacanian ideas while challenging its phallocentric elements.[14] Irigaray contends that women can cultivate a sense of identity and sexuality without needing to conform to phallic ideals, and that the female body is multifaceted and constantly evolving.[14]
Performativity
Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity can be seen as a means to show "the ways in which reified and naturalized conceptions of gender might be understood as constituted and, hence, capable of being constituted differently."[15]: 520 Butler uses the phenomenological theory of acts espoused by Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and George Herbert Mead, which seeks to explain the mundane way in which "social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign."[15]: 519
On Butler's hypothesis, the performative aspect of gender is perhaps most obvious in drag performance, which offers a rudimentary understanding of gender binaries in its emphasis on gender performance. Butler understands drag cannot be regarded as an example of subjective or singular identity, where "there is a 'one' who is prior to gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender decides with deliberation which gender it will be today".[16]: 21 Consequently, drag should not be considered the honest expression of its performer's intent. Rather, Butler suggests that what is performed "can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility".[16]: 24
According to Butler, gender performance is subversive because it is "the kind of effect that resists calculation", which is to say that signification is multiplicitous, that the subject is unable to control it, and so subversion is always occurring and always unpredictable.[16]: 29 Rosalyn Diprose lends a hard-line Foucauldian interpretation to her understanding of gender performance's political reach, as one's identity "is built on the invasion of the self by the gestures of others, who, by referring to other others, are already social beings".[17] Diprose implies that the individual's will, and the individual performance, is always subject to the dominant discourse of an Other (or Others), so as to restrict the transgressive potential of performance to the inscription of simply another dominant discourse.[17]
Female energy
Feminist theologian Mary Daly proposed in her remarkable work Gyn/Ecology (1978) the existence of a feminine nature that should be defended against "male barrenness".[18] "Since female energy is essentially biophilic", she writes, "the female spirit/body is the primary target in this perpetual war of aggression against life. Gyn/Ecology is the reclaiming of life-loving female energy."[19]
Janice Raymond had Daly as her advisor when writing The Transsexual Empire (1979), in which she states: "It is not hard to understand why transsexuals want to become lesbian-feminists. They indeed have discovered where strong female energy exists and want to capture it."[20]
Realism versus nominalism
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In the context of feminist metaphysics, the problem of universals led to a division between gender realists and gender nominalists. Elizabeth Spelman identified in the 1980s a predominance of realism in Western feminist theory, which she accused of overlooking the differences between women.[21]Nominalism has since become the hegemonic view.[21][22]
^Haslanger, Sally (March 2000). "Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?". Noûs. 34 (1): 31–55. doi:10.1111/0029-4624.00201. ISSN0029-4624.
^Daly, Mary (1978). Gyn-ecology: the metaethics of radical feminism. Boston: Beacon. p. 355. ISBN978-0-8070-1511-7.
^Raymond, Janice G. (1994). The transsexual empire: the making of the she-male. Athene series (Reissued with a new introduction on transgender, reprint ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. p. 110. ISBN978-0-8077-6272-1.
Battersby, Christine. The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1998. ISBN978-0-415-92035-3OCLC37742199
Howell, Nancy R. A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000. ISBN978-1-573-92653-9OCLC36713191
Raschke, Debrah. Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. ISBN978-1-575-91106-9OCLC63679917
Witt, Charlotte. Feminist Metaphysics Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. ISBN978-9-048-137831OCLC695386850
Schües, Christina, Dorothea Olkowski, and Helen Fielding. Time in Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. ISBN978-0-253-00160-3OCLC747431814