Module 1: Introduction — Why Sex Categories Are Complicated

This course examines some of the deepest theoretical and practical questions about gender, with a central emphasis on the relationship between gender — understood as a psycho-socio-cultural category — and biological sex, understood in terms of how we classify human beings anatomically and physiologically. At first glance, the relationship between the biological domain of sex and the socio-cultural domain of gender might seem transparent: “masculine” and “feminine” map neatly onto “male” and “female.” What turns out to be far more surprising, and what will occupy us throughout twelve modules, is just how complicated those relationships really are. As we will see, the distinctions between sex and gender, and between biology and culture, are neither tidy nor intuitive. One of the abiding lessons of this course is that there is no biology without society — and vice versa.

The course is distinctive in its thoroughgoing focus on sex as a biological category, rather than on ethical questions surrounding sexual activity or orientation. While those topics are important, they rest on assumptions about biological sex categories that deserve scrutiny in their own right. The primary philosophical mode of the course is accordingly metaphysical: we are asking what sex categories fundamentally are, not just what we should or should not do in relation to them. The readings are drawn from primary texts across philosophy, religion, the social and life sciences, and literary theory, spanning ancient Athens to the twenty-first century.

What Makes Sex Categories Complicated?

Even before examining the biology, it is worth noticing how philosophically complex the very idea of a category is. The American novelist Cormac McCarthy captures this with characteristic economy through a scene in which a traveller and a hog-herder debate whether an animal with unusual feet qualifies as a hog. The debate is as old as Aristotle: what specific features entitle an individual to membership in a particular kind? Must a hog have cloven hooves? Or is it enough that it lack mulefeet? This puzzle — about the necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership — is not merely academic; it goes to the heart of how we classify sexed bodies.

Michel Foucault drew attention to the opposite danger by quoting Jorge Luis Borges’s imaginary “certain Chinese encyclopedia,” which divides animals into categories including “belonging to the Emperor,” “embalmed,” “frenzied,” “drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,” and “that from a long way off look like flies.” Foucault comments that what strikes us about this taxonomy is “the stark impossibility of thinking that” — the categories are not mutually exclusive, and most of them do the work only of very particular, ad hoc contexts. The lesson for sex classification is pointed: the categories male and female are themselves composed of several sub-categories — genetics, hormones, gonadal tissue, primary anatomical sex traits such as penises and vaginas, secondary anatomical sex traits such as square jaws and wide hips, reproductive functions, and more. Most people are uncontroversially male or female in most of these respects simultaneously. But this overlap has led us to forget that these sub-categories do not always align.

The case of South African runner Caster Semenya is instructive: she has XY chromosomes but female morphology because her tissues are not responsive to androgens. Our traditional binary sex categories struggle to classify someone like Semenya precisely because they conflate a collection of loosely related but distinct biological properties as though they always co-occur. To ask which single biological criterion should “arbitrate” sex in such cases is already to expose the complexity beneath the surface of the two-stick-figure bathroom door.

The Uses of Sex Categories

Sex categories are not deployed neutrally. Among chickens raised for egg production, only females are kept; male chicks are culled. Among dairy cattle, male calves are slaughtered for veal. These uses of sex classification are obviously tied to reproductive biology. When we extend such classification to humans — determining bathroom access, sport category eligibility, or legal identity — we are elevating what may be a very specific biological context into an overarching taxonomic scheme. Part of the critical work of this course is to ask, for any proposed sex or gender classification: what work is this category doing? Is a distinction useful for sexual reproduction the right basis for sorting people into bathrooms, hospitals, or sports competitions? And if male and female are themselves orthogonal collections of traits, which sub-category should be authoritative when they conflict?

Questions for Reflection

• What difference do a hog’s feet make to whether it counts as a hog? Are there analogous “essential” features for being counted male or female — does an animal have to have a penis to count as male?
• Name some uses to which sex and gender categories are put. Are they inevitable, or do they vary from culture to culture?
• If a human being is male in one respect (chromosomally) and female in another (hormonally or morphologically), ought we to count them as male or female? Which sex sub-category should be the arbiter?

Module 2: Methodology and Terminology — Foucault’s Method; Kessler and McKenna on Gender Attribution

Foucault’s Genealogical Method

It is arguably impossible to undertake the study of sex and gender without engaging Michel Foucault (1926–1984), the great French philosopher and social scientist. While his three-volume History of Sexuality (1976) is primarily concerned with the activity of sex rather than sexual taxonomy, the methodological stance it adopts informs much of what we will do in this course. Foucault’s approach is genealogical rather than epistemological: he does not primarily ask whether particular claims about sex are true, but rather how specific forms of discourse arise, and what — apart from truth — leads people to engage in those forms of discourse.

To understand this, we need to appreciate Foucault’s concept of discursive practice: any habitual means of conveying meaning, whether linguistic (like a newspaper column) or non-linguistic (like shaking hands). Foucault’s hypothesis is that all social practices reflect the nature of the society in which they are produced, and in particular the power relations within that society — often unconsciously and unintentionally. By analyzing discursive practices, Foucault seeks to uncover the ideological workings of power that such practices both reflect and reproduce. The Marxist concept of ideology lurks behind this: a set of ideas, particular to a political system, that informs people’s thoughts and actions without their being aware of it. On the Marxist account, ideology is the water in which we swim.

In History of Sexuality, Foucault focuses on the “repressive hypothesis” — the widely held belief that human beings were sexually more open until the early seventeenth century, after which sexuality came to be repressed by colonial and later Victorian society. Foucault is notably uninterested in whether this hypothesis is historically true. What interests him is why people propound it. What practical reason might post-Victorians have for narrating the history of sexuality in this way? For Foucault, the question is not “Are we repressed?” but “Why do we say that we are repressed?”

Foucault poses three “serious doubts” about the repressive hypothesis. The historical doubt asks whether sexual repression is truly an established historical fact. The historico-theoretical doubt asks whether power in our societies really operates primarily through repression rather than through prescription and incentive. The landscape architect analogy is instructive: she can confine people to a particular area of a park either by erecting fences and “do not enter” signs, or just as effectively by installing benches, bridges, and attractive ponds. Repression and prohibition are not the only means of exercising power. The historico-political doubt asks whether the critics who declaim against sexual repression are genuinely resisting the system of power that produced that repression — or whether they are, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, part of that very same system of power. Reading Foucault requires attention to his tone of ironic detachment; he often paraphrases received views in order to subject them to scrutiny, not to advocate for them.

Kessler and McKenna on Gender Attribution

Where Foucault addresses the activity of sex, Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna address sex and gender as taxonomies. People often use “sex” and “gender” interchangeably, or distinguish them as biological versus socio-cultural. Kessler and McKenna adopt a third approach: they reserve “sex” for the activity and use “gender” for the taxonomy, whether biological or socio-cultural. This makes “gender” a very rich term that encompasses what others call both sex and gender.

Their guiding question is: “How, in any interaction, is a sense of the reality of a world of two, and only two, genders constructed?” Gender attribution is their term for the decision we make about a person’s gender when we first encounter them. We perform gender attributions constantly and automatically — mentally ticking off “he,” “she” as we walk down the street — and only become consciously aware of the process when we encounter difficulty. Kessler and McKenna argue that, even in easy, uncontroversial attributions, none of the cues we use are “always and without exception true of only one gender.” Gender attribution is therefore always a decision, not merely an inspection. In making that decision across countless interactions, we collectively construct a binary world of “two, and only two, genders.”

Kessler and McKenna distinguish several related concepts, each definable in relation to gender attribution:

• Gender assignment: a special case of gender attribution made once, at birth, usually based on genitals alone.
• Gender reassignment (more precisely, gender reconstruction): a correction to a perceived gender assignment error, as in the case of intersex infants. This is a diagnostic, not a surgical, process.
• Gender identity: the gender with which an individual identifies — self-gender-attribution. Crucially, the only way to discern gender identity is to ask the person themselves, and even that is a fraught exercise.
• Gender-role identity: how a person feels about and participates in the behaviours, feelings, and expressions seen as appropriate for their gender. Kessler and McKenna emphasize the importance of distinguishing this from gender identity: being ambivalent about one’s gender role does not entail having a gender identity problem.
• Gender role: a set of prescriptions and proscriptions for behaviour based on one’s gender. While gender roles vary across cultures, the dichotomy of gender roles does not.

Questions for Reflection

• Is it possible to meet or interact with someone without performing a gender attribution? Have you ever done so?
• In what sense is gender attribution “primary,” according to Kessler and McKenna?
• Why does Foucault suggest that critics of discursive practices may in fact reproduce rather than challenge the systems of power those practices serve?
• Can you think of examples — besides landscape architecture — in which power is exerted through incentives and prescriptions rather than prohibitions?

Module 3: Aristotelian and Judeo-Christian Accounts of Sex — Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Generation of Animals; Augustine

Why Read Aristotle on Sex?

The great Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was wrong about many things, and he has been dead for a long time. Why, then, bother reading him on biological sex? The answer is twofold. First, his texts reveal how dramatically our ideas about sex and gender vary across societies and historical periods. Second, and more importantly, these texts are not mere curiosities from antiquity; they continue to exercise a very real influence through their impact on Judeo-Christian (and Islamic) thought. Medieval scholars from all three traditions drew upon Aristotelian philosophy in their theological interpretations of scripture. As we will see in this module, Aristotle is a key source for Augustine’s claim that men are made more perfectly in God’s image than women — an idea whose influence is still felt in contemporary religious practice.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Book X, Chapter 9)

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality; indeed, the discipline takes its name from this work by Aristotle. In Book X, Chapter 9, Aristotle attempts to explain how males and females, though radically different in appearance and function, can belong to the same species. On Aristotle’s account, species are differentiated from one another by contrarieties of form — differences in essential properties, or what Aristotle calls the essence of a thing (its definition, what makes it the kind of thing it is). Essential properties are those without which a thing would be a different kind of thing altogether. Accidental properties, by contrast, make no difference to kind: whether a horse is pale or dark does not change what it is.

The male/female distinction poses a special problem. Like feathered versus featherless, it distinguishes two large groups. But unlike feathered versus featherless, it does not distinguish between species — males and females of the same species reproduce together and share a common essence. Aristotle’s solution is elegant but carries significant implications: male and female is a contrariety of matter, not form. It is an accidental property, like being pale or dark. Metaphysically, then, there is for Aristotle no more difference between a man and a woman than between a pale man and a dark man. They are the same kind of thing.

Aristotle’s Generation of Animals (Book IV)

Generation of Animals is Aristotle’s account of sexual reproduction and the origin of sex differences. Having established in the Metaphysics that males and females share the same form, Aristotle faces the challenge of explaining why they manifest such striking and consistent physical differences within species. He surveys three ancient explanatory accounts. Anaxagoras proposed that the sex of offspring is determined by which testicle the sperm originates from. Empedocles attributed sex determination to womb temperature — a cold womb producing females, a warm womb males. Democritus of Abdera posited a battle between male and female semen in which one “prevails” over the other.

Aristotle agrees with Empedocles that heat plays a role, but argues Empedocles’s account is too simplistic: male and female fraternal twins are produced simultaneously in the same womb. He retains Empedocles’s emphasis on heat while incorporating Democritus’s notion of prevailing, producing a richer account of prenatal sexual development. For Aristotle, the process by which semen forms is called concoction — a kind of distillation in which unconcocted blood is reduced by bodily heat into seminal fluid. Only males generate sufficient heat to concoct blood into semen capable of transmitting the formal principle to offspring. His evidence for men’s superior heat is characteristically observational and pre-scientific: women bleed for a week each month, which he takes to show that their bodies are not hot enough to fully concoct that blood.

Offspring who resemble the father are the result of his semen prevailing perfectly over the female reproductive fluid. Offspring who fail to resemble the father — whether by being female, disabled, or otherwise different — result from the father’s semen prevailing imperfectly. Female offspring, on this account, result from a failure of the formal principle to fully assert itself. This is where Aristotle’s internal inconsistency becomes apparent: in the Metaphysics, males and females share the same form and differ only in matter. Yet in Generation of Animals, female semen is described as formless matter. The female comes to be understood as an under-realized male — a creature whose form is deficient relative to the paternal ideal. (As we shall see in Module 10, this idea of female as “underperforming male” persisted into early modern anatomy.)

Genesis 1 and 2: The Documentary Hypothesis

The biblical book of Genesis contains not one but two distinct creation accounts, a fact that becomes apparent on careful reading. In Genesis 1, God creates the world in an orderly progression — plants, then animals, then humans — and creates men and women simultaneously, both in his image, charged together with the care of the earth. In Genesis 2, creation is more ad hoc: God creates Adam, then plants, then a series of animals as potential helpers for Adam, and only when none proves suitable does he fashion Eve from Adam’s rib. In Genesis 1, form is paramount — humans are made in God’s image — while in Genesis 2, matter is foregrounded: Adam is made from dust, Eve from a rib. Genesis 1 is egalitarian; Genesis 2 places Adam in explicit authority over Eve, who is created to assist him and whom he names, just as he names the animals.

The most likely explanation for this inconsistency is the Documentary Hypothesis (also called the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis): the Torah was composed from at least four distinct strands of authorship. The older J-strand (c. 950 BCE), named for its use of “Yahweh,” is the source of Genesis 2’s vivid, ad hoc narrative — a product of ancient nomadic culture with a personal, occasionally fallible God. The more philosophically sophisticated P-strand (c. 450 BCE), the Priestly strand, produced Genesis 1’s orderly, abstract creation account. The coexistence of these two strands within the same text is evidence that even sacred religious writings are shaped by the cultures and historical moments of their composition.

Augustine: A Medieval Synthesis

St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), working before the Documentary Hypothesis had been formulated, could not explain the tension between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as a matter of different authorial sources. Instead, he attempted a philosophical reconciliation, seeking to harmonize Genesis 1’s claim that both men and women are made in God’s image with the Apostle Paul’s instruction that women should cover their heads (while men should not). Paul’s reasoning itself draws on Genesis 2 — man is made directly in God’s image; woman is made from man, and thus reflects man rather than God.

Augustine’s solution draws on Aristotle. He argues that humans are made in God’s image not bodily but rationally: our capacity for reason is what makes us like God. Both men and women are rational and hence both reflect God’s image. However, Augustine contends, we most resemble God when we use our intellect to contemplate eternal, elevated things rather than mundane, practical concerns. A woman’s bodily nature, he argues, more naturally disposes her to attend to the lower and quotidian, thereby freeing men for higher contemplation. This gendered division of cognitive labour actually originates with Aristotle, who argued that the higher species are divided into sexes precisely so that the higher functions of the species can be performed by the sex best equipped for them. Woman, on Augustine’s account, thus does not reflect God directly on her own; she reflects man. Hence, she is enjoined to cover her head — a sign of humility — while man, as a direct image of God, is prohibited from doing so.

The relevance of all this to contemporary life is more than historical. In many churches around the world, men remove their hats while women wear hats or veils. This practice embeds, within a simple gendered ritual, a tension spanning ancient Greek philosophy, two distinct periods of Judaic authorship, and centuries of Christian theology.

Questions for Reflection

• What are the main differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2? How do they exemplify the broader differences between the J-strand and P-strand?
• Aristotle thinks that differences between male parents and their offspring require more explanation than similarities. Why? Do scientists in other fields exhibit a similar asymmetry in their puzzlement?
• Augustine states but does not explain how a woman’s bodily nature suits her better for lower matters than for higher ones. What defence might he offer if pressed?
• Can you think of a religious tradition besides those discussed here in which similar tensions appear concerning the roles of men and women?

Module 4: The “Second Sex” — Beauvoir; Freud; Irigaray

The Default Human

When we hear the word “hockey,” we typically imagine men’s hockey. When we say “doctor,” we often still feel the need to add “lady doctor” to specify a woman. Until 2010, researchers calculated maximum heart rate using a formula derived from studies on male subjects, simply assuming it would apply equally to women. It turned out not to — the formula was wrong, and potentially dangerous, for women. Similarly, automotive crash test dummies were male-sized until recently, meaning decades of safety data was calibrated to male bodies. These are not isolated curiosities but manifestations of a broad cultural tendency: the male is treated as the default, standard human being, and the female as a “special case.”

This module examines three distinct theoretical accounts of that tendency, moving from Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist analysis to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic account to Luce Irigaray’s provocative inversion of Freud.

Simone de Beauvoir: Woman as “the Other”

The question that launches Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is: “Are there even women?” The question seems absurd at first — of course there are women. But Beauvoir is concerned not merely with whether women exist but with whether “woman” is a genuine ontological category, a real kind of thing in the world. Drawing on the medieval debate between realists (who held that universal types, like “horse,” are real) and nominalists (who held that only individual things are real, and type-terms are convenient fictions), Beauvoir approaches “woman” with suspicion. She observes that we are “exhorted to be women, stay women, become women” in a way we are never exhorted to be or stay horses. If membership in a natural kind requires no active effort or exhortation, then “woman” is not a neutral species term — it is a social role that must be actively produced and sustained.

Beauvoir’s central claim is that man is treated as the One and woman as the Other. The One/Other distinction is, on her account, a primordial feature of how groups form identity: “No group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself.” Men occupy the centre; women are the bias, the deviation, the peculiarity requiring explanation. What is remarkable about women’s othering is its permanence. Ethnic and economic minorities are occasionally othered, but historically they have often existed as independent groups before subordination, and they retain the memory of former freedom. Women have no such prior history of independence. Moreover, unlike factory workers who stand shoulder to shoulder and develop a group identity, women are isolated within the private sphere, living beside men rather than other women. This dissipation prevents female solidarity; women, unlike proletarians, have no “We.”

Beauvoir accepts that, in their current situation, women display fewer capacities than men — but this is the situation’s doing, not nature’s. The appropriate response is not contentment with an expanded range of possibilities within the current constraints, but the expansion of existence “into an indefinitely open future.” Her existentialist ethics holds that human beings have an obligation to transcend their current situation, to keep making themselves rather than settling into things. When one is responsible for one’s own stagnation, it is a moral failing; when others are responsible, it is oppression.

Sigmund Freud: The Girl as Research Subject

In “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925), Freud candidly admits that in his earlier work he focused on boys’ psychosexual development, simply assuming his conclusions could be extrapolated to girls. In this late work, he acknowledges the possibility that development proceeds differently for girls. In his account of male development, the Oedipal stage ends when the boy, seeing the female body and noting the absence of a penis, fears castration and withdraws from his desire for the mother. Normal male development thus includes a narcissistic interest in the genitals.

For girls, Freud argues, the sight of the male penis triggers penis envy and the realization that they have already been “castrated.” This discovery leads the girl to replace her mother with her father as the object of affection, and sets in train a different developmental trajectory. What is conspicuous about both accounts is that neither of the explanatory mechanisms involves the discovery of the vulva. For Freud, the vagina is not a distinct sexual organ but rather the absence of one. He never allows for the possibility that a girl might be pleased by what she has, or that a boy might experience vulva-envy. Despite Freud’s expressed intention to study girls on their own terms, his analysis remains relentlessly male-centred: both male and female development is explained with reference to the penis as the standard human genital. By Beauvoir’s terms, woman remains the Other even in Freud’s most careful analysis of her psychology.

Luce Irigaray: Écriture Féminine

Feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, in “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1985), develops the method of écriture féminine first pioneered by her colleague Hélène Cixous. The argument is that conventional linguistic expression is in fact masculine expression — men and women think and communicate differently, and feminine modes have been systematically effaced. Écriture féminine seeks to develop a distinctively feminine language derived from female embodiment.

Irigaray explicitly inverts Freud. Where Freud traces the consequences of having or not having a penis, Irigaray traces the consequences of having or not having a vagina. At the heart of the difference, for Irigaray, is female sexual self-sufficiency compared to male insufficiency. A male, to achieve sexual pleasure, requires something else — another body, or an inanimate object — to touch his penis. The female’s two vaginal lips are always in contact; women therefore experience a continuous, diffuse, low-level pleasure, while male pleasure is sporadic and binary. This structural difference, Irigaray argues, produces two entirely different modes of being in the world: a male, touch-dependent, visually-oriented mode, and a female, self-sufficient, plural mode. In treating the vagina as superior and contemplating men’s lack rather than women’s lack, Irigaray inverts the One/Other opposition — situating woman as the One. Yet she cautions that simply reversing the hierarchy risks replicating the same binaristic logic that produced women’s oppression in the first place. “To view the world as One and Other,” she writes, “is already, necessarily, to view the world in a masculine way.”

Questions for Reflection

• Beauvoir argues that the fact that we are urged to remain women shows that “woman” is a constructed role, not a neutral species term. Could a similar argument be made about “man”? About terms relating to ethnicity or disability?
• According to Irigaray, what traits and behaviours do women derive from having two lips always touching? Which, if any, do you consider plausible?
• Unlike Beauvoir, who emphasizes socio-cultural factors, both Freud and Irigaray strongly emphasize embodiment. Which approach do you favour? Does either exclude particular groups?

Module 5: The Third Sex — Plato’s Symposium; 19th-Century Sexology

Is Two a Magic Number?

The two-sex model is so ubiquitous that it permeates even our metaphors in electronics and plumbing, where connectors are described as “male” and “female.” Yet biology offers immediate counterexamples. Papaya trees come in three sexes — male, female, and hermaphroditic. Some species of harvester ants have three sexes, including two phenotypically male types whose reproductive capacities differ fundamentally. Some lichens and fungi have thousands of mating types. The prevalence of biological diversity across species should prompt us to ask: why assume exactly two sexes for humans?

This module traces two historical proposals for a third human sex — one playful and one deadly serious — and their influence on the history of psychology and sexology.

Plato’s Symposium: Aristophanes’s Myth

Plato’s Symposium (c. 385–380 BCE) is a dialogue in which Athenian intellectuals take turns elaborating accounts of the origin and nature of love. When the comic playwright Aristophanes takes his turn, he offers an extraordinary myth. Originally, human beings were round barrel-like creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces. There were then three sexes: the sun people were double-males; the earth people were double-females; and the moon people were hermaphrodites, composed of a male half and a female half. These powerful creatures threatened the gods, so Zeus split them in half. Since then, each half-person has yearned for their other half — that yearning is what we call love.

On Aristophanes’s account, the sun men (split into two men each) desire other men; the earth women desire other women; and the moon people (split into a man and a woman) desire the opposite sex. Sexual desire, on this model, combines both an anatomical component and a component related to the nature of desire. Notice that the account is strikingly homonormative: two of the three original sexes were homosexual, and heterosexual desire is characterized as hermaphroditic — and even slightly diminished. “Adulterers generally come of that sex,” Aristophanes says of the former moon people. This makes Plato’s Symposium one of the few ancient texts that treats same-sex desire not as exceptional but as a majority form of human erotic experience.

It is worth noting that Plato may have intended this account satirically, placing it in the mouth of Aristophanes — the playwright who had famously ridiculed Plato’s teacher Socrates. Whether Plato endorsed the myth or was mocking its author, it captivated people’s imaginations for centuries.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and 19th-Century Sexology

While Aristophanes’s myth was probably not intended as scientific, German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) proposed a genuine scientific theory of a third sex. Ulrichs was himself homosexual and sought a biological explanation for same-sex desire. Inspired by the Aristophanic myth, he divided all human beings into three sexes: male dionians and female dionians (cisgender heterosexuals) and uranians — an umbrella category encompassing anyone who did not fit neatly into the two dionian categories, including homosexuals, bisexuals, intersex people, and transgender people.

Ulrichs’s core hypothesis was that same-sex desire is explicable by hidden, deeper biological characters — what he called “germs” — already present at the embryonic stage. A man who desires men does so because he has an interior female nature; it is, as it were, his inner female that is attracted to other men. All sexual attraction, for Ulrichs, is at bottom attraction to the “opposite” sex; same-sex desire is merely opposite-sex desire occurring at a deeper biological level. These inner natures are somatic — physical, not psychological. Ulrichs believed that beneath the skin, many people combine sexual traits in complex ways: one might be 100% female externally but only 80% female internally, with the remaining 20% expressing itself in various attractions and behaviours.

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), deeply influenced by Ulrichs, rejected the three-sex model in favour of a continuum with a plurality of “sexual intermediaries” — an approach that in some respects anticipated Alfred Kinsey’s famous rating scale. Freud, by contrast, dismissed both Ulrichs and Hirschfeld and developed a psychological rather than somatic account of sexual desire, one grounded in childhood development rather than innate biology. He regarded same-sex desire not as a third sex but as the consequence of improper psychosexual development in childhood.

Questions for Reflection

• Why do you think Aristophanes treats heterosexuality as “common” while praising male same-sex love? Where does female desire fit into his account?
• Is it more liberating to regard sexual orientation as innate or as something that develops over time? Why?
• Each of the models examined in this module — Aristophanes, Ulrichs, Freud — draws a link between sex as a biological category and sexual desire. Does it make sense to connect them?

Module 6: The Third Gender — Inuit Third Gender (Saladin d’Anglure); Hijras of India (Nanda)

Sex Versus Gender

In the previous module we considered models that posit three human sexes — biological categories. This module shifts the frame to gender — the psychosocial functions and roles that particular cultures associate with biological sex. We examine two distinct cultures, from the Canadian Arctic and South Asia, each of which recognizes a third gender while maintaining a two-sex biological framework. The comparison illuminates how powerfully gender, rather than biology, organizes social life.

The Inuit Third Gender

Canadian anthropologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, an expert on Inuit culture and shamanism, argues that other anthropologists have wrongly treated Inuit society as recognizing only two genders. The influential French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, for instance, held that all societies oscillate between two poles, individual and communal, and overlooked or dismissed Inuit gender complexity. Saladin d’Anglure contends that the male-female binary in Inuit culture is itself mediated by a third gender expressed through transvestism.

He identifies two broad motivations for gender-swapping among the Inuit. The first is economic: in families with a gender imbalance — all boys or all girls — one child may be raised as the opposite gender to perform that gender’s labour. In an all-girl family, a daughter might be raised as a son to help with hunting; in an all-boy family, a son might be raised as a daughter to help with clothing manufacture. The second motivation is cosmological, rooted in Inuit spirituality: a deceased ancestor may appear in a dream to a couple expecting a child, interpreted as the ancestor’s wish to return to life through the child. The child is then raised according to the ancestor’s gender, regardless of biological sex.

Saladin d’Anglure also traces this third gender through two Inuit myths. In one, a “strange man” adopts female gender roles, insisting “I can’t hunt! I am like a woman,” and even gives birth (by supernatural intervention) to a baby whale, who then assists the community’s hunting. In another, Itijjuaq, a biological female incapable of performing female-gendered tasks, acquires magical healing powers through communication with deceased grandparents and attains a status more typical of a great man than a woman.

A striking feature connecting both myths — and connecting the Inuit third gender to broader spiritual life — is their association with shamanism. Saladin d’Anglure reports a higher incidence of shamanism among those raised as the opposite gender. His explanation is that those who straddle genders thereby acquire the capacity to straddle all boundaries: between the human world and the animal world, between the living and the dead.

The Hijras of India

Serena Nanda’s account of India’s hijras introduces a strikingly different cultural context for a third gender. Hijras are a religious community of ascetics devoted to the worship of the mother goddess Bahuchara Mata; in that capacity, they perform ritual roles at weddings and births, believed to confer fertility. Simultaneously, many hijras come from impoverished backgrounds and adopt hijra identity partly because it provides entry into a supportive community with economic possibilities — including both ritual income and, for some, sex work.

Nanda notes an inherent tension: in their religious role, hijras are supposed to be asexual, yet sex work is a significant source of income for many. Beyond religion and economics, Nanda identifies gender identity (or gender-role identity) and sexual orientation as further factors in hijra identity. Some of her interviewees became hijras from a deep desire to occupy female gender roles; others did so to escape ridicule for being too “feminine.” Some became hijras because of an orientation toward men, including a desire for romantic love that is often de-emphasized in traditional arranged marriages.

Nanda is candid about the methodological challenges: hijras are extremely cautious with outsiders, making data collection difficult. She also acknowledges the limits of English vocabulary to express hijra identity — gender categories are so culturally embedded that translation is inherently fraught. The temptation to label hijras using North American terms like “transgender” risks effacing important cultural differences; the equal and opposite risk is exoticization.

Questions for Reflection

• Is the Inuit “third gender” really a third gender? What about hijras? What criteria should determine whether something counts as a third gender?
• How do economic and cosmological reasons for the third gender interact in Inuit culture? In Indian culture?
• How much of your own concept of gender is shaped by the language(s) you speak?

Module 7: Intersex — Fausto-Sterling’s Five Sexes; Kessler; Feder

How Many Human Sexes Are There?

Having considered proposals for three human sexes, this module pushes the question further. In 1993, Brown University biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling provocatively proposed that human sex categories should include not two but five sexes: male, female, male pseudohermaphrodite, female pseudohermaphrodite, and true hermaphrodite. The argument was grounded in the empirically documented incidence of intersex conditions within human populations — biological variations in which one or more markers of sex differ from what is typical for either standard category.

The biological markers of sex include genotype (chromosomes) and phenotype (observable physical traits), where phenotype encompasses the appearance and function of both internal and external reproductive organs, secondary sex traits, and production of and response to sex hormones. In all of these categories, human beings occur in more than two varieties. Fausto-Sterling’s initial critics attacked her both for denying sexual dimorphism and, paradoxically, for oversimplifying: in fact, there are so many distinct intersex conditions that even five categories may be insufficient to capture the full biological complexity.

The Continuum View

Seven years after her 1993 article, Fausto-Sterling co-authored an influential study (Blackless et al., 2000) that surveyed the incidence of various intersex conditions in North American live births. The study contrasts reality with absolute dimorphism, which it characterizes as a “Platonic ideal not actually achieved in the natural world.” In place of that ideal, Blackless et al recommend understanding human sexual variation as occurring on a bimodal continuum, with “complete maleness” and “complete femaleness” at either end. On this model, approximately 1.7% of the population deviates from the Platonic ideal in some biological respect.

Leonard Sax (2002) challenged this estimate, arguing that the Blackless et al definition of “intersex” — any deviation from the Platonic ideal at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal level — is not clinically useful. A definition should include only those conditions in which the phenotype is unclassifiable as either male or female, or where chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex. By Sax’s stricter definition, only about 0.02% of live births would count as intersex. Crucially, the disagreement between Blackless et al and Sax rests less on data than on terminology. Both agree that the bimodal curves overlap; they disagree about how much overlap to designate as “intersex.” What is most important for the continuum view is simply that the two bell curves have overlapping tails — regardless of how narrow or wide that overlap is.

Kessler: The Medical Construction of Sex

Suzanne Kessler, returning from Module 2’s discussion of gender attribution, reported in 1990 on interviews with six New York-area pediatric intersex specialists. Her central finding is that cultural factors routinely outweigh biological ones in clinicians’ judgments about intersex infants, but that clinicians themselves are not adequately aware of the weight of those cultural factors. While medical science by the time of her research allowed ready identification of chromosomal and hormonal sex, clinicians often privileged aesthetic and cultural factors — especially penis size — over biology. Kessler identifies three factors at the foundation of contemporary attitudes toward intersex: advances in surgical technique and endocrinology that make genital reconstruction possible; the feminist-influenced de-emphasis on reproduction as women’s primary function, making gonadal tissue less central to sex determination; and the Freud-derived developmental psychological emphasis on gender identity as fluid and distinct from biological sex.

The key figure behind the clinical treatment protocols that dominated Kessler’s period of study was American psychologist John Money. Money, building on Freudian developmental psychology in the context of early sex reassignment surgeries on transsexuals, argued that gender identity is malleable until approximately 18 months of age. An intersex infant could be successfully constructed as either male or female — regardless of chromosomal sex — provided that parents had no doubt about the child’s assigned sex, genitals were reconstructed to match the assigned gender as soon as possible, appropriate hormones were administered at puberty, and the patient was kept informed with age-appropriate information.

The Reimer case in Canada illustrates both the appeal and the catastrophic limits of Money’s theory. Bruce Reimer suffered a botched circumcision that irreparably damaged his penis. Money counselled surgical reassignment and raising Bruce as a girl — Brenda. For years, Money cited the case as evidence of gender identity’s malleability. However, during puberty, Reimer ceased to identify as female and eventually transitioned back to male. His lifelong depression and eventual suicide are widely regarded as consequences of the gender reconstruction.

Kessler’s most troubling finding is the clinicians’ general tendency to mislead parents and patients, using simplifications to convince families that their children “really are” the reassigned sex. This approach, rooted in Money and Ehrhardt’s insistence that parents must be completely convinced of the child’s sex for proper gender identity development, is profoundly at odds with principles of informed consent.

Feder and Karkazis: Intersex or DSD?

In the early 2000s, intersex activists and clinicians collaborated to produce new treatment guidelines requiring honest communication with patients and parents, and generally deferring surgical options until patients are old enough to decide for themselves. This collaboration also produced a nomenclature controversy that divided the intersex community. For decades, “intersex” had served both as a clinical term and as a marker of identity and solidarity. Many clinicians and parents found the term distressing, as it suggested their children were neither fully male nor fully female. Some intersex people also found the term stigmatizing.

The preferred clinical replacement, disorders of sexual development (DSD), was opposed by many long-time activists and scholars because it pathologizes what many regard as difference rather than disorder. Feder and Karkazis, despite their long history of critiquing the medicalization of intersex, ultimately favour DSD: by decoupling clinical nomenclature from identity categories, it focuses on patient well-being rather than gender, and may allow intersex to be treated as a medical category like any other — rather than as one that uniquely justifies treatment protocols that violate standard bioethical principles.

Questions for Reflection

• What other physical variations occur within human populations? Which are pathologized, and which are not? Why?
• During the period Kessler documents, clinicians regarded normalizing surgery as more humane than sending children into the world with atypical anatomical features. What do you think? Which alternative better embodies the injunction “First, do no harm”?
• Which terminology do you think is most apt: “intersex” or “DSD”? If neither is adequate, what alternative might you propose?

Module 8: Trans Issues — Califia’s Trans History; Mastroeni’s Theological Critique

Identity and Terminology

Transgender has become an umbrella term for a range of identities that in one way or another resist the gender binary. In broadest terms, to be transgender is for one’s gender identity to fail to “match” one’s gender assignment or phenotypic sex — either because one identifies as the “opposite” sex or because one’s gender identity defies binaristic classification altogether. Importantly, transgenderism is grounded in gender identity, not sexual orientation: trans people can be straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, or asexual, just as cisgender people can. Societal norms that equate being “really” trans with heterosexuality (e.g., “real women are attracted to men”) are simply mistaken.

The term cisgender — meaning “on this side of” from the Latin prefix cis, contrasting with trans meaning “across” — has been introduced by trans scholars and activists to describe people whose gender identity accords with their gender assignment. This terminological innovation owes a debt to Beauvoir’s diagnosis of the One/Other problem: it is intended to remind cisgender people of their privilege and to resist treating transgender people as the exceptional “special case.”

Earlier, “transsexual” was the standard term for someone who identified as the gender opposite to their sex at birth and sought medical interventions — hormones and sex reassignment surgery (SRS). More recently, many trans people have challenged the inappropriate emphasis others often place on their medical histories. Whether or not someone has undergone SRS is deeply personal, and it is not a criterion for being “really” trans. For many, the shift from “transsexual” to “transgender” resists this inappropriate focus on medical procedure. For others, “transgender” better captures identities that straddle or transcend the gender binary altogether — including those who use gender-neutral pronouns, or who describe themselves as genderqueer or agender.

Califia and Trans Memoirs

Patrick Califia’s overview of memoirs by three twentieth-century trans pioneers — Christine Jorgensen, Mario Martino, and Jan Morris — reveals several common threads. None of the figures described made their decisions lightly. The process of identifying as trans and ultimately obtaining SRS was neither quick nor easy, and this bears emphasizing given popular media representations of sex reassignment as a capricious, quick decision. All three narratives feature doctors playing gatekeeping roles far beyond prescribing hormones or performing surgery: they also pronounced on the “true gender” of the patient, a pronouncement that was in practice a prerequisite for care.

At the same time, there are significant differences between the three stories. Jorgensen presents a stereotypically feminine identity post-transition; Martino is stereotypically masculine; Morris has a more fluid, nuanced understanding of gender that resists binary characterization. These differences illustrate the range of experiences and gender-role identities that exist within the trans community. The narratives also document the evolving roles of key medical figures — Krafft-Ebing, Harry Benjamin, and John Money — whose theories shaped clinical attitudes toward trans people, often in ways that imposed significant psychological burdens on their patients.

Mastroeni: The Principle of Stewardship

Catholic theologian Mastroeni argues that SRS is morally impermissible on theological and metaphysical grounds, offering a reply to a fellow Catholic theologian, John Dedek, who had argued the opposite. Dedek invoked the principle of totality: the parts of the body exist for the total well-being of the individual, understood somatically, personally, and socially. If SRS would improve a person’s overall well-being, the principle of totality justifies it.

Mastroeni counters that another principle — the principle of stewardship — is equally important and constrains the application of totality. On this view, the body is held in stewardship, as it were on loan from God; before making any alteration, one must ensure the body will not be left in worse condition than God loaned it. The analogy is an apartment: even if you have no use for the stove, you cannot remove it — the landlord put it there for a reason. God gave us our sexual organs for reproduction; removing or altering them violates our stewardship.

Mastroeni attributes the tendency to favour SRS to dualism — the view, associated with Descartes, that the human being is composed of two distinct, heterogeneous components: mind and body. Dualists regard the mind as the self; hence, any alteration of the body in service of the mind serves the self. By contrast, Mastroeni advocates integrism — the view that mind and body are two inseparable aspects of the very same thing. On the integrist view, if the mind and body are unified, there is no sense in which someone can be “a woman trapped in a man’s body”: the body you have is part of the person you are, and there is no space for opposition between self and body. The ethical consequence is that SRS represents, in Mastroeni’s words, “a massive assault on the integrity of the body.”

One important counter-question Mastroeni leaves unanswered: even if we accept integrism — even if the body is part of the self — does it follow that changing the self in ways that better accord with one’s gender identity is impermissible? People continuously reshape their selves through experience, education, and choice. The integrist premise does not obviously rule out the possibility that such reshaping might sometimes, for some people, involve significant bodily changes.

Questions for Reflection

• How compelling is Mastroeni’s case that dualism leads to both metaphysical and moral errors? Is there a way to understand being trans that does not rest on a dualistic metaphysics?
• Mastroeni attributes to human bodies the purpose of reproduction. Do you think human beings or their bodies have intrinsic purposes? From where do those purposes derive?
• Why do some people adjudge trans people “not really trans” based on their sexual orientation or medical history? Do we make similar judgments about other groups?

Module 9: Biodeterminism — Darwin’s Sexual Selection; Clark’s Universality of Sex Roles

Biology as Destiny

Many of the preceding modules have gestured, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, toward the idea that human gender — perhaps including human genders themselves — is socially constructed. This module examines two forceful expressions of the opposite view: biodeterminism, the position that human behaviour is best understood as the result of innate biological tendencies. The familiar expression “biology is destiny” captures the core idea. Biodeterminists explain differences between masculine and feminine gender roles not as products of culture but as expressions of underlying biological nature. The position can be descriptive (women tend toward caring professions because they are naturally more nurturing) or normative (women should pursue caring professions because they are naturally more nurturing). Both the descriptive and normative forms are biodeterministic.

Darwin: The Evolution of Sex

Darwin’s most celebrated contribution to evolutionary theory — natural selection — describes how chance variations that improve an organism’s fitness become established in populations over time. But natural selection alone cannot account for traits that actively reduce fitness by making their bearers more vulnerable to predators, such as the bright red plumage of male cardinals or the spectacular tail feathers of peacocks. The explanation, Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871), lies in a second mechanism: sexual selection.

Sexual selection depends on the success of certain individuals over others of the same sex in relation to reproduction. It operates through two mechanisms: competition among members of the same sex to drive away rivals (explaining weapons like antlers), and competition among members of the same sex to attract mates (explaining ornaments like peacock tails). Since these mechanisms operate primarily among males competing for access to females, sexually selected traits tend to be predominantly male. Darwin generalizes that, across almost all sexually dimorphic species — mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects — the males are the wooers; they are armed with special weapons for fighting rivals, are stronger and larger than females, and are endowed with organs for vocal display and olfactory attraction.

Darwin’s feminist critics, notably Ruth Hubbard, argue that his description of typical male and female traits reflects Victorian English mores more than the facts of nature. His characterization of males as active, aggressive, and sexually appetitive, and females as passive and distinguished only by their aesthetic judgment, maps suspiciously closely onto the gender stereotypes of nineteenth-century England. The charges of cultural contamination are significant: Darwin himself acknowledged, toward the end of Descent of Man, that cultural preferences, if sustained across generations, would themselves modify populations through selective pairing — the mechanism exploited, perniciously, by eugenics programmes.

Clark: An Anthropological Case for Traditional Gender Roles

Stephen Clark draws on anthropological rather than zoological evidence to argue for biodeterminism about gender roles. He begins by acknowledging the stunning diversity of human life across cultures, then argues that despite this diversity, four features of gender roles are universal: (1) a gendered division of labour exists in all societies; (2) men and women serve complementary roles, with men dominating public/communal spheres and women dominating the domestic sphere; (3) every society features some form of female subordination to males; and (4) males and females express their cultures differently in grooming, attire, dance, athletics, and similar domains. For Clark, the persistence of these patterns across wildly varied cultures, despite human beings’ extraordinary adaptability, indicates that the patterns have a biological explanation.

Clark anticipates the objection based on matriarchal societies and dismisses it by distinguishing between matriarchal (women controlling the political sphere and property), matrilineal (kinship traced through the mother), and matrifocal (mothers as heads of family units) societies. He accepts that matrilineal and matrifocal societies exist but denies that any truly matriarchal society has ever existed. He further cites Israeli kibbutzim: even when communities explicitly committed to gender equality over several generations, traditional gender roles — particularly women preferring to raise their own children rather than participate in communal labour — re-emerged.

At the same time, Clark’s normative argument extends beyond the descriptive claim. He argues that feminist attempts to suppress traditional gender roles have already led to weakened family life, troubled sexual relationships, loss of a sense of womanly value, and psychological instability in both sexes. For Clark, while biology is not necessarily destiny in a deterministic sense, it ought to be respected as a guide to social arrangements.

Firestone: Biodeterminism and Technology

At the opposite end of the political spectrum from Clark, radical Marxist-feminist Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012) agreed that sexual dimorphism and the biological necessity of distinct gender roles lie at the heart of all human class and caste hierarchies. However, for Firestone, this is not a reason to accept sexism — it is a reason to use new reproductive technologies to liberate women from the burden of biological reproduction entirely. Once women are no longer required to bear children, she argued, they can develop their capacities as freely as men, ultimately ending gender roles and, with them, all class-based oppression.

Questions for Reflection

• Do you think Clark is correct in his estimation of the risks of sexual equality? Is the analogy between his argument and pre-Civil War arguments against emancipation apt?
• What varieties of human malleability — social, cultural, psychological, moral — might lead us to resist the full weight of the biodeterminist thesis?
• What do you think of Firestone’s technologically driven utopia? Is it possible? Desirable? Would it have the consequences she predicts?

Module 10: The One-Sex Model — Laqueur on Seeing-As; Historical Transition from One-Sex to Two-Sex

Gender Produces “Facts” about Sex

Modules 3 through 9 have largely explored the question of how biological sex produces, explains, or grounds gender. Module 10 reverses the arrow of explanation. For historian of science Thomas Laqueur, the “facts” about biological sex are themselves the result of sociocultural beliefs about gender. At first this seems implausible: isn’t our biological nature more fundamental and stable than culture? Laqueur agrees that the brute facts of biology are relatively stable across cultures. But, he argues, scientists do not trade in brute facts — they trade in interpretations of brute facts. And those interpretations are never culturally neutral.

Seeing Versus Seeing-As

To understand Laqueur’s argument, we need the philosophical distinction between seeing and seeing-as, a concept developed by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) in his Philosophical Investigations (1953). Wittgenstein’s famous “duck-rabbit” illustration — a drawing that one can see either as a duck or as a rabbit depending on how one orients one’s gaze — dramatizes how the same visual input can be genuinely perceived differently depending on the interpretive framework one brings. We see faces in clouds because we are evolutionarily “wired” to detect faces quickly; that wiring sometimes produces false positives. More significantly, seeing-as is shaped by training and cultural context. Walking through a museum of archaeological artifacts, you will recognize some objects as hammers or pots because you have been trained to do so; others remain opaque because you haven’t been.

Laqueur’s provocative claim is that all scientific seeing is seeing-as. Scientists — including sex scientists — see the world as they have been enculturated to see it. When early modern anatomists like Vesalius dissected female cadavers, they saw uterine tissue as “horns” and female internal genitalia as inverted penises, because they had been trained within an Aristotelian framework that treats female anatomy as isomorphic with male anatomy — only turned inward and less developed. Our cultural attitudes about gender, then, partially construct the biological “facts” we take ourselves to be observing.

The One-Sex View

Laqueur begins with a story about an innkeeper’s daughter, apparently comatose, who became pregnant. In 1752, Antoine Louis argued that the monk responsible must have known she was alive because she must have shown “demonstrative signs” during intercourse. In 1836, Michael Ryan disagreed, citing the case as evidence that women need not achieve orgasm to conceive. Laqueur attributes this eighty-year reversal to the historical shift from the one-sex model to the two-sex model.

Under the one-sex model, which dominated European medicine from Aristotle and Galen (129–c.216 CE) until the late eighteenth century, females were understood as essentially underdeveloped males. Female reproductive organs were regarded as identical to male organs, merely internal rather than external — inverted penises and internal testes. On this model, since male orgasm is necessary for conception (the male semen being the vehicle of form), female orgasm was similarly assumed necessary. This explains Louis’s insistence that the innkeeper’s daughter must have responded.

More broadly, under the one-sex framework, lack of resemblance, disability, and femaleness were all understood as failures, to varying degrees, to approximate the single reproductive ideal — the able-bodied male who resembles his father. As Laqueur reads Aristotle: femaleness is not a distinct kind of being but a failure of the formal principle to fully actualize.

The Rise of the Two-Sex Model

By the nineteenth century, the one-sex model had given way to what Laqueur calls “a new model of radical dimorphism, of biological divergence.” Three features characterized the shift: male and female bodies came to be regarded as radically heterogeneous; biologists began to attribute gendered character even to cells (anabolic cells were seen as passive, female; catabolic cells as active, male); and biology — especially the sexed body — came to be regarded as the stable, distinct foundation for cultural phenomena rather than being enmeshed in them.

Laqueur is skeptical of the third feature: he regards the claim that biology now provides a neutral, culturally independent foundation as itself a cultural claim. His strongest argument for this position is chronological: the attitudinal changes toward the sexes preceded the supporting biological evidence by decades. “The reevaluation of pleasure,” he observes, “occurred more than a century before reproductive physiology could come to its support with any kind of deserved authority.” If the biological evidence came after the cultural shift, what drove the shift?

Laqueur attributes the move to two historical forces. The first is epistemological: the Enlightenment abandoned the Aristotelian assumption that all parts of the universe fit together in a single hierarchical order, clearing conceptual space for the idea of genuine dimorphism. The second is political: the rise of equality as an ideal — crystallized in the revolutions of the eighteenth century — made biological hierarchies untenable. Paradoxically, Laqueur argues, it was egalitarianism that generated the two-sex model. Where Clark (Module 9) suggested that sexual dimorphism explains female subordination, Laqueur sees the reverse: the political demand for equality produced the idea of dimorphism as a way to ground difference without hierarchy.

Questions for Reflection

• Laqueur argues that doctors and scientists first ignored sex differences, then exaggerated them. Can you think of contemporary scientific domains in which a similar pendulum swing has occurred?
• Is Laqueur’s claim that all scientific seeing is seeing-as compatible with the notion of scientific progress? Can we maintain a notion of progress even if scientific theories are always culturally inflected?
• If the reevaluation of sexual pleasure preceded the biological evidence for sexual dimorphism, what does this suggest about the direction of causation between cultural belief and scientific theory?

Module 11: Difference and Equality — Rousseau on Women’s Education; Wollstonecraft’s Vindication

Equality and Its Complexities

Module 10 argued that egalitarian thinking lies at the foundation of the two-sex model. This module examines two eighteenth-century thinkers who grappled directly with what equality between the sexes means — and notably disagreed about it. Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) championed political egalitarianism while arguing that women ought to be subordinate to men. English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) argued, in reply, that women’s apparent inferiority was the product not of nature but of systematic deprivation of education.

Rousseau: Difference Without Inferiority?

In Emilius; or, A New System of Education (1762), Rousseau devotes four books to the education of boys (personified as Emile) and one to the education of girls (personified as Sophia). He begins with the claim that “in everything which does not regard sex, woman is the same as man,” but that in things relating to sex, women are radically different. The heuristic he proposes is baldly biodeterministic: when we observe similarities between men and women, we attribute them to the species; when we observe differences, we attribute them to sex. This method assumes from the outset that all differences are natural rather than socialized.

For Rousseau, the sex act itself reveals the essential character of male and female: men are “active and strong,” possessing “power and will,” while women are “passive and weak” and make “little resistance.” Women’s sexual attractiveness, on his account, resides in their weakness; their role is to inflame male desire by resisting just enough that the man must exert himself to prevail. Rousseau’s account of women’s social role is similarly organized around the reproductive economy: the continued survival of the family requires that women not only bear children but hold the family together through patience, tenderness, and moral integrity. A man must be absolutely certain his children are his own; therefore women must not merely be faithful but appear faithful, without any shadow of doubt.

Rousseau’s educational prescriptions follow from this role analysis. Girls should be trained to be charming and pleasing to men — to cultivate their beauty, to listen and laugh at men’s jokes, to create a loving home environment. Where boys are asked “To what purpose are you talking?”, girls are asked “How will your discourse be received?” Boys are trained in moral reasoning and abstract speculation; girls are trained in practical matters and taught to defer to authority on morality and religion. Girls should be subject to restraint from a very young age since women’s lives will require restraint throughout. Accustoming them early makes the condition less onerous as adults.

Rousseau insists he is not describing women as inferior to men — only as different and appropriately evaluated by different standards. Male and female virtues complement each other; they are “different but equal.” Yet from a contemporary vantage point, it is difficult to see the educational programme he prescribes as anything other than a systematic training in dependence and subordination. Rousseau’s own historical situatedness — his unexamined assumption that the gender roles he describes are natural rather than culturally imposed — is exactly the kind of thing that Laqueur’s analysis (Module 10) would predict.

Wollstonecraft: “Behold the Effect of Ignorance!”

Mary Wollstonecraft’s reply to Rousseau in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is at bottom theological. If women have souls, they must be held to the same moral standard as men — God’s single standard of virtue. God gave human beings the capacity for rational thought precisely so that they could make correct moral judgements. It must be possible for women to use that capacity; otherwise, God’s creation would be flawed.

Wollstonecraft attributes women’s apparent follies, caprices, and vices not to nature but to the systematic deprivation of proper education: “Behold… the natural effect of ignorance!” She draws an illuminating analogy between women and soldiers: like women, soldiers are sent into the world without foundational theoretical education, trained only in superficial knowledge through happenstance rather than systemic instruction. The result, in both cases, is vanity, superficiality, and blind obedience to authority. This, Wollstonecraft argues, is evidence that it is not women’s biological sex but the manner in which they are educated that produces these traits. Men educated the same way produce the same results.

Wollstonecraft argues that Rousseau’s women are childlike because men have made them so, systematically infantilizing women to better govern them. This she condemns as unphilosophical. Contrary to Rousseau, she argues that women ought not to aspire to “innocence” — that term, appropriate for children, merely describes weakness in adults. The goal of education, for man or woman, should be to “co-operate with the Supreme Being,” by strengthening the body and forming the heart through reason. All writers on women’s education to date, she charges, have contributed to a “false refinement” that has drawn women away from their natural realm of reason.

Towards the end of her argument, Wollstonecraft turns to marriage. Love, she argues, is no basis for a durable marriage: love is a passing emotion, and when it fades (as it inevitably does), the wife who was trained only to seek love will seek it from another man. Marriage should be based on deep friendship between equals. Wollstonecraft acknowledges that even if equally educated, women might turn out to be inferior to men — but if they have souls, the same standard of virtue applies regardless of capacity. God’s virtue has one eternal standard.

A Long Journey

The Rousseau-Wollstonecraft exchange illuminates the incompleteness of every age’s egalitarianism. Rousseau championed the equality of all men while consigning women to subordination. Wollstonecraft argued powerfully for women’s equal moral status while expressing views about Muslims and the Chinese that would strike us as bigoted today. Neither thinker could have extended their analysis to LGBTQ equality — the concepts were not yet available. The equality project, Dea suggests, is a long journey in which each small step puts us further ahead; every champion of equality cannot see beyond the horizons of their own time and culture.

Questions for Reflection

• Rousseau argues that women, not men, are to blame for educating girls to be vain, since it is primarily women who educate girls. Do you agree?
• In Rousseau’s time, was it genuinely in the interest of girls to be educated in the way he proposes? What about today?
• Compare Beauvoir’s warning against contentment with Wollstonecraft’s comments on love. What do they have in common?
• Can Wollstonecraft’s argument for a single standard of virtue be adapted to have force for non-Judeo-Christian religious traditions, or for atheists?

Module 12: Sex/Gender as a Social Construction — Hacking on Social Construction; Bordo on Femininity and Bodies

Social Construction: A Through-Line

Each module of this course has, in one way or another, entertained a social constructivist hypothesis about sex or gender. Borges’s strange encyclopedia hinted that our taxonomies might be arbitrary. Foucault argued that both sexual repression and the very idea of sexual repression are outgrowths of power systems. Kessler and McKenna showed that the gender binary is not simply noticed but actively constructed through attribution. Beauvoir argued that “woman” is made, not born. Modules 5 through 8 made the two-sex/two-gender account seem far from inevitable. Module 9 offered biodeterministic rejoinders. Module 10 showed that even the scientific “facts” about biological sex reflect cultural beliefs about gender. Module 11 documented how the ideal of equality was itself shaped by those cultural constraints.

This final module asks: what exactly does it mean to say that something is socially constructed? Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking offers a systematic answer, and feminist theorist Susan Bordo provides a vivid demonstration of social construction’s effects on women’s bodies.

Hacking: The Social Construction of What?

In The Social Construction of What? (1999), Hacking intervened in the “science wars” — a polarized debate between scientific realists, who regard scientific claims as objective representations of reality, and post-modernist critics, who argued that scientific “facts” are socially constructed. Hacking’s approach is characteristically pragmatic: rather than asking what social construction means, he asks what social construction claims do — what work they are trying to accomplish.

Hacking observes that social construction claims are widely deployed in political and academic discourse about race, gender, culture, and science. Their appeal lies in what he calls a liberatory dimension: to claim that something is socially constructed is to say that the status quo with respect to that thing is not inevitable. It could change if the right social and historical conditions came into being. However, he cautions that this liberatory power is not uniform: claiming anorexia nervosa is socially constructed does little to help people suffering from it. Social construction theses are liberating chiefly for those already on the way to being liberated.

Grades of Commitment

Hacking distinguishes three main degrees of social construction claims about any X:

1. X need not have existed, or need not be as it is — X is not inevitable.
2. X is bad as it is.
3. We would be better off if X were done away with, or radically transformed.

Each higher grade entails all lower grades, but not vice versa. The first-grade claim is the most foundational and in some respects the most radical: it only gets made about things that appear inevitable. We do not bother claiming that IKEA need not have existed, because it is obvious. Thus Hacking adds a preliminary grade:

0. In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears inevitable.

Within this framework, Hacking sketches a range of grades from merely historical observation to revolutionary demand: Historical, Ironic, Reformist, Unmasking, Rebellious, Revolutionary. These grades correspond to different feminist stances toward gender. The least radical feminist position simply notes that gender roles are not inevitable (historical). More radical feminists urge the unmasking of the ideological functions gender serves (reformist and unmasking). The most radical position, following Judith Butler, challenges the inevitability not merely of gender roles but of the sex/gender distinction itself: “Perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender,” Butler writes, “with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”

Objects of Social Construction

Hacking further distinguishes three kinds of things that social construction claims can be about: objects (items in the world, whether material like rocks or immaterial like gender relations), ideas (conceptions, beliefs, theories, and classifications), and elevator words (high-level abstractions like “facts,” “truth,” and “reality” that quickly raise the level of discourse). These two dimensions — grade of commitment and type of object — are orthogonal: knowing that a claim is about, say, an idea does not tell you how strong a claim it is. Mapping any social construction claim onto the resulting matrix allows one to assess both what is being claimed and how strongly it is being claimed.

Hacking introduces the concept of a matrix to describe the social setting within which ideas operate. Ideas are embedded in networks of institutions, texts, legal entities, and material infrastructure. Classifications within that matrix affect the people classified: a woman classified as a “single mother” is aware of that classification; it shapes how she sees herself, what services she uses, with whom she socializes. As the individuals in a classification change in response to being classified, the classification itself must adjust — Hacking calls this the looping effect of human kinds: individuals and their classifications co-construct each other over time.

Bordo: Constructing the Female Body

While Hacking theorizes social construction at an abstract level, feminist theorist Susan Bordo demonstrates it concretely in “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Bordo’s striking opening claim is that the body — what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to it — is “a medium of culture… a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed.” This is not merely metaphorical. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of culture being continuously “made body,” Bordo argues that cultural norms are inscribed in the flesh in ways that place them “beyond the grasp of consciousness.” Compare the bodies of 1930s Hollywood stars with today’s celebrities: where old leading men were lean and gangly, today’s are sculpted and muscular; where old leading ladies were curvaceous, today’s are extraordinarily thin. These are not changes in the species — they are changes in culture that have produced changes in actual bodies.

Bordo’s central argument is that women’s bodies are especially docile in Foucault’s sense: subjected to habituation, regulation, and regimentation that can undermine conscious values. Women are spending more time than ever on the management and discipline of their bodies even as professional and political possibilities seem to be expanding. Bordo worries this intensification of body regimens may function as an anti-feminist backlash, distracting and subverting women, and reasserting traditional gender configurations just as increased power comes within reach.

To analyze the mechanisms of this inscription, Bordo turns to three historically localized female disorders: hysteria (prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), agoraphobia (prevalent in the postwar period), and anorexia nervosa (a disorder of the late twentieth century and beyond). She finds two striking features in all three: first, each disorder reads as a caricature or parody of the dominant feminine ideal of its period; second, each disorder simultaneously enacts resistance to dominant feminine norms and capitulation to them.

Late-nineteenth-century femininity was characterized by emotionality and fragility; the hysteric exaggerates these traits to grotesque excess in wild mood swings, anaesthesias, and muteness. The postwar ideal required women to return to the home; the agoraphobic takes this to a paralyzing extreme, refusing to leave it at all. Contemporary culture praises the woman who “eats like a bird”; the anorexic pursues this ideal until it threatens her life. In each case, the disordered woman’s body is not simply pathological but symbolically meaningful, a text in which the ideological construction of femininity for that era can be read.

Yet these disorders also constitute, Bordo argues, a form of embodied protest — unconscious, inchoate, and counterproductive, but protest nonetheless. The agoraphobic, in her refusal to leave the house, seems to retort to demands for female domestic service: “You want dependency? I’ll give you dependency!” The anorexic pursues feminine ideals to the point where their destructive potential becomes visible to all. But this protest is tragically self-defeating: because it deploys the language of femininity itself to protest femininity’s conditions, the protest reproduces rather than transforms what is being protested. As Bordo writes, “the pathologies of female protest function, paradoxically, as if in collusion with the cultural conditions that produce them.”

Conclusion: Sex and Gender Never Simple

Working through Hacking and Bordo returns us to where the course began. Foucault urged us to consider the mechanisms lurking behind discursive practices and the power relations they serve. Hacking and Bordo force us to examine both the sources and the applications of social construction claims about sex and gender. The course’s central moral, as Dea articulates it, is that sex and gender claims and practices are never as simple as they might initially appear. Sorting the human world into two tidy boxes — a pink one and a blue one — risks effacing the real complexity of human sexuality and gender. Entertaining the social constructivist hypothesis, even provisionally, “allows us to question the inevitability of binaristic categories in a way that clears a space for the real-life untidiness of sex and gender.” And perhaps, if we are fortunate, it makes us a little more humble and kind in the process.

Questions for Reflection

• Bordo sees a tragic necessity in the resistance and capitulation of female disorders. Would Irigaray agree? Why or why not?
• Can you think of historically localized disorders attending upon groups other than middle-class white women — groups defined by race, class, or sexuality? Do those disorders admit of Bordo’s style of analysis?
• How sympathetic are you to social construction theses as they apply to sex, gender, womanhood, manhood, femininity, and masculinity? On your view, how much of our gendered reality is socially constructed?