Philosophy of Race & Gender Authors & Ideas

Polhaus

• Hermeneutics: approach to better understanding the meaning of things by including context

• Lenses for understanding epistemic injustice

  • Social contract & ignorance

    • Privileged people are often unaware of the system of oppression and their contribution to it

    • Being in the know shares responsibility

  • Epistemic labor

    • The labor of marginalized communities is undervalued

  • Interdependence

    • Marginalized communities are often excluded from groups, positions of power, decision-making, etc.

    • This leads to a lack of trust in these systems

    • How can you know the people making decisions that affect you have your best interests at heart?

  • Degrees of change

    • How adaptable systems are

Kendi

Racial progress and racist progress are happening at the same time

Sullivan

Ontological expansiveness: White people view all spaces as able to be inhabited by them, and marginalized races do not get that privilege, but white people don’t recognize it is happening or that it is a privilege

Wilkerson

• Eight pillars make up the foundation of the caste system that upholds oppression and hierarchy

  • Divine will & the laws of nature

  • Heritability

  • Endogamy & the control of marriage and mating

  • Purity vs. pollution

  • Occupational hierarchy

  • Dehumanization & stigma

  • Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control

  • Inherent Superiority vs. Inherent Inferiority

Haslanger

• constructivist position on gender

• Gender is a socially constructed system

• Women are subordinated, men are privileged

• We need concepts that explain oppression, not ordinary language

Glasgow

• Racial anti-realism: race is not real, biologically or socially

• Spectrum idea of race: racial boundaries are based on groupings of similar phenotypes and these categories are projected into society

• Race and gender persist beyond social categories

  • Anti-constructivist view

Guillaumin

• Race is a sociohistorical, not biological, fact

• Naturalist false consciousness: social relationships that maintain power & oppression are mistaken as facts of nature, when really these relationships caused the “fact”

  • Race - There became a need for racial categories due to the spread of slavery requiring a visible “mark” of being a slave

  • Sex - Women were expected to take care of children, which enforced the idea that women are natural caregivers

• Sexage: system where women are appropriated based on sex

• Appropriation v. exploitation: exploitation abuses an individual’s labor, appropriation abuses an individual based on their identity

Ahmed

• equality/diversity policies try to hide inequalities from view

• Feminist labor is appropriated as evidence

Alcoff

• Horizons

• Anti-identity trend: identity is hard to theorize because it is messy and depends on context, and theories could threaten dominant groups

• Identity is visible, relational, and structuring

Polizzi

• Ontology of threat

• Dysappearing body

• Your identity and selfhood is shaped by others’ perceptions of it

Richardson

Videos and images of police violence feel necessary to hold the offenders accountable, but the spread of these desensitize people to the violence which hinders progress

Peabody

• Dress codes are mechanisms for social control and gender- and race-centered policing

• Gender and racial minorities are more likely to be policed through dress code

Hill

Black girls are adultified from a very young age and expected to be more mature and held to higher standards than boys or white girls

Kim

• Orientalist liberalism is a paradox where Asian Americans are included in white culture because they’re able to assimilate into mainstream society, but they are still excluded due to their race

• Conditional acceptance maintains the racial hierarchy and reinforces inverted epistemology–the group in power is ignorant of structural injustices while they view everyone else as “other”

• Orientalist liberalism creates shame, self-contempt, and shameability for the subjects

• Asian American self-making strategies are:

  • The lone Asian strategy

    • A form of shame repression where an Asian person avoids other Asian people and tries to belong in white groups

  • The twinkie collective

    • Maintaining an ironic disconnection from their Asian identity and having “perfected” their assimilation

      • “White-identified shamelessness”

  • Biculturalism & hybridity

    • Integrating cultural elements into your identity

Ortega

Hometactics: practices that allow people with multiple facets of their identity to find familiarity and comfort in their lives

Sheth

• Race is used to organize and control populations based on power

• things/people are labeled as unruly when they disrupt the political and/or societal order

• Race begins as a perceived threat

• Enframing: aspects of society that structure how people control the unruly

Steers-McCrum

• Traditional models of race are not adequate to understand the experience of Native Americans

• A black-white binary/spectrum is inaccurate

• Racism precedes race

• Being a member of a race is resisting settler colonialism, especially when it comes to Native Americans and the theft of their land

• Race needs a redefinition

Curtis

The Sameness Approach to feminism

• Men and women are equal in relevant respects, so they should be treated the same

• Ignores barriers to inequality

The Difference Approach to feminisn

• Men and women are different, and these differences should be valued

• Aims to elevate feminine values

• Still an unequal system

Haramia

The dominance approach to feminism

• The system is structured so that men are dominant and women are subordinate

• Unequal power is the source of injustice

• Targets the structures and systems that maintain power

Zuckerman & Morrissey

Misogyny is a system that reinforces gender norms and maintains the gender hierarchy

Butler

• Beauvoir

  • Gender is a project & cultural embodiment

  • The body takes up and interprets existing cultural definitions of gender/sex

• Wittig

  • Gender is a cultural construction, but still a choice

  • We choose it subconsciously

• Foucault

  • Rejects natural sex

• The cartesian ghost: the mind can exist independently of the body

  • Used to justify marginalization of trans people

• Gender is a performance

Cantu

• Trying to explain inequalities with cultural explanations is not accurate

• The explanations are structural: poverty, racism, institutions, etc.

• Machismo: phenomenon in Latinx culture that emphasizes traditional masculine values & upholds the patriarchy

• justifying inequalities with cultural explanations makes whiteness the norm and does not incentivize questioning that system

• Using culture as an analytical tool creates homogenization of people, and persists the myth that culture is static

• Drag is important to defy gender norms and the patriarchy!

Salomon

• Totemic objects: everyday objects given symbolic meaning based on context

• Ultra-thing: something socially real and powerful but not easily defined, fixed, or visible

  • Gender is an ultra-thing

• Letisha King’s gender expression was weaponized to justify her murder

Bettcher

• Dominant world: raced, sexed system

• Underworld: space where true identities and horizons can be acknowledged

• Ontological pluralism: plurality of selves

Rodriguez

Regulating sex work allows governments to establish bodies as inherently sexual and establish social hierarchies