Sources and References

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, 2009). Introductions to Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.
• Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–531.
• Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). “Introduction: Gender Ideology and the Fear of Destruction.”
• bell hooks, “Conversation,” in Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (Routledge, 2010).
• Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Do Sex Hormones Really Exist? (Gender Becomes Chemical),” in Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (Basic Books, 2000).
• Kathryn Sophia Belle, “Simone de Beauvoir and the Race/Gender Analogy in The Second Sex Revisited,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
• Talia Mae Bettcher, “What Is Trans Philosophy?” Hypatia 34, no. 4 (2019): 644–667.
• Talia Mae Bettcher, “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority,” in You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Stephanie Julia Kapusta, “Misgendering and Its Moral Contestability,” Hypatia 31, no. 3 (2016): 502–519.
• Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak, “He/She/They/Ze,” Ergo 5, no. 14 (2018).
• Robin Dembroff, “Why Be Nonbinary?” Aeon (2018).
• Robin Dembroff, “Reimagining Transgender,” in Trans Philosophy: Meaning and Mattering (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
• Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–254.
• Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” GLQ 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 387–422.
• Hil Malatino, “Queer Monsters,” in Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
• Katherine Jenkins, “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman,” Ethics 126, no. 2 (2016): 394–421.
• Maria Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 186–219.
• Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Women, Climate Change Impacts, and Collective Action,” Hypatia 29, no. 3 (2014): 599–616.
• Andrea Long Chu, Females (Verso, 2019; expanded ed. 2025).
• Sam Shpall, “Incels and Warrior Masculinity,” Hypatia (2025).
• Florence Ashley, “Genderfucking as Critical Legal Methodology,” McGill Law Journal 69, no. 2 (2024).
• Rhea Ashley Hoskin, “Can Femme Be Theory? Exploring the Epistemological and Methodological Possibilities of Femme,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 25, no. 1 (2021).
• Don Kulick, “The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes,” American Anthropologist 99, no. 3 (1997): 574–585.
• Shantell Powell, “A Time for Dolls” (2024).
• Bernard Saladin D’Anglure, “The ‘Third Gender’ of the Inuit,” Diogenes 52, no. 4 (2005): 134–144.
• Andrea J. Pitts, “Gloria E. Anzaldua and Crip Futurity in the Americas” (2022).
• Kim Q. Hall, “Queer Ethics” (2022).
• pattrice jones, “Fighting Cocks: Ecofeminism Versus Sexualized Violence,” in Sister Species: Women, Animals, and Social Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2011).
• Frances Nesbitt Oppel, Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman (University of Virginia Press, 2005).
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender,” “Feminist Philosophy,” and “Continental Feminism.”

Chapter 1: What Is Gender? Foundational Frameworks

1.1 The Sex/Gender Distinction and Its Origins

The question What is gender? has animated feminist philosophy since the mid-twentieth century. Before feminist interventions, Western thought largely treated the categories “man” and “woman” as natural, timeless, and exhaustive. Feminist philosophers challenged this assumption by drawing a distinction between sex (性别/生物性别) — the cluster of anatomical, chromosomal, and hormonal features associated with maleness and femaleness — and gender (社会性别) — the social meanings, roles, expectations, and identities that cultures construct around sexed bodies. The distinction was first formalized in the clinical literature on transsexuality by psychologist Robert Stoller in the 1960s, but it was feminists of the second wave who transformed it into a powerful analytical tool: if femininity is not biology but culture, then oppression based on gender can be challenged and changed.

1.2 Simone de Beauvoir: “One Is Not Born, but Rather Becomes, a Woman”

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is the single most important origin-point for philosophical feminism. Its most famous sentence — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — encapsulates the existentialist (存在主义) argument that existence precedes essence (存在先于本质). There is no pre-given feminine nature; rather, a person is made into a “woman” through a lifetime of conditioning, education, and social pressure.

1.2.1 Woman as Other

In her Introduction to Volume 1, Beauvoir poses the question: What is a woman? Drawing on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, she argues that woman has been constituted as the Other (他者) in relation to man, who occupies the position of the Subject (主体). Unlike other oppressed groups — the colonized, the proletariat — women have no independent history, no separate territory, and no prior state of solidarity from which to launch a revolt. Woman is defined not by what she is in herself, but by her relation to man: she is the inessential over against the essential.

1.2.2 Becoming a Woman

In the Introduction to Volume 2, Beauvoir traces how femininity is produced through childhood socialization, education, myths, and institutions. The biological facts of the female body — menstruation, pregnancy, lactation — do not in themselves determine women’s subordination; it is the meanings that patriarchal culture attaches to those facts that do the work. Beauvoir’s analysis thus opens the door to the later constructivist tradition: if womanhood is made, it can be made otherwise.

1.2.3 Race and the Gender Analogy

Kathryn Sophia Belle’s reassessment of The Second Sex highlights Beauvoir’s use of a race/gender analogy. Beauvoir compares the situation of women to that of Black Americans to illustrate structures of Othering, but Belle argues that this analogy, while illuminating in some respects, risks flattening the distinct experiences of racialized women and reproducing a universalized (white) subject of feminism. Belle’s critique anticipates the intersectional turn that bell hooks and others would develop.

1.3 bell hooks: Feminism from the Margins

bell hooks defines feminism (女性主义) not as a movement of women against men, but as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” This definition deliberately shifts the target from individual men to systemic structures, and it insists that feminism is for everybody — including men, who are themselves damaged by patriarchal norms.

hooks introduces her approach through dialogue and conversation, modelling a pedagogy of critical thinking (批判性思维) that is accessible to those outside the academy. Her key contributions to the course include:

• Intersectionality (交叉性): hooks argues that gender oppression cannot be understood apart from race and class. The mainstream feminist movement of the 1960s-70s was largely shaped by white, middle-class women whose concerns — workplace discrimination, reproductive autonomy — did not capture the experiences of Black women, working-class women, or women in the Global South.
• White supremacist capitalist patriarchy (白人至上主义资本主义父权制): hooks identifies this compound structure as the interlocking system against which feminism must struggle. The phrase insists that sexism, racism, and economic exploitation are not separate axes but a single, mutually reinforcing matrix.
• Engaged pedagogy (参与式教育): hooks views the classroom as a site of liberation, where honest dialogue across difference can transform both teacher and student.

1.4 Judith Butler: Gender Ideology and the Fear of Destruction

In Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), Butler confronts the global rise of anti-gender ideology movements (反性别意识形态运动). These movements — spanning right-wing populism, religious fundamentalism, and authoritarian nationalism — treat “gender” as a dangerous ideology threatening the family, tradition, and civilization itself.

Butler introduces the concept of the phantasm (幻象): a psychosocial phenomenon in which intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions. “Gender” functions as a phantasm when it is made to stand for everything conservative movements fear — feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive justice, bodily autonomy — and is then attacked as a single, monstrous threat. The phantasm collapses distinct political struggles into one amorphous enemy, enabling authoritarian mobilization.

Butler argues that underlying the global war against “gender ideology” is a yearning for the restoration of a mythic patriarchal order in the face of existential despair. The book calls for broad coalition among all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice — feminists, queer and trans activists, anti-racists, and democratic movements — on the grounds that the attack on “gender” is ultimately an attack on radical democracy itself.

Chapter 2: Sex, Hormones, and Biology

2.1 Fausto-Sterling and the Social Construction of Biological Sex

If Beauvoir challenged the naturalness of gender, Anne Fausto-Sterling challenges the naturalness of sex. In “Do Sex Hormones Really Exist? (Gender Becomes Chemical),” a chapter of her landmark Sexing the Body (2000), Fausto-Sterling argues that the very category of “sex hormones” is a product of gendered assumptions embedded in the history of endocrinology.

2.1.1 The Historical Argument

Fausto-Sterling traces the history of how certain steroid molecules came to be called sex hormones (性激素). In the early twentieth century, scientists discovered that both estrogen and testosterone are present in all human bodies regardless of sex. These molecules perform a vast array of functions: they affect the liver, muscles, bones, brain, cardiovascular system, and virtually every tissue — not only the reproductive organs. They are, in a meaningful sense, growth hormones (生长激素), not sex hormones.

Yet when the scientific community convened to standardize hormone nomenclature, they chose to label estrogen as the “female sex hormone” and testosterone as the “male sex hormone.” Fausto-Sterling argues that this decision was driven not by the biochemistry itself but by the social norms of the scientific milieu: researchers assumed a strict sexual dimorphism and projected it onto molecules that do not respect that binary.

2.1.2 Consequences for Gender Essentialism

The labelling of hormones as sex-specific has had profound consequences. Today, many studies on so-called essential gender differences (性别差异) rely on “sex hormone” levels as evidence of innate sexual dimorphism. Fausto-Sterling’s analysis undermines this reasoning at its root: if the classification itself is socially constructed, then studies built upon it cannot serve as evidence for a natural gender binary.

2.1.3 Intersex and the Continuum of Sex

Fausto-Sterling’s broader project in Sexing the Body includes her well-known argument that biological sex exists on a continuum rather than as a binary. Intersex variations — in chromosomes, gonads, hormones, and genitalia — demonstrate that human bodies do not always sort neatly into “male” and “female.” The insistence on a strict binary often leads to non-consensual medical interventions on intersex infants, a practice that Hil Malatino’s work on queer embodiment (Chapter 5) examines in detail.

Chapter 3: Language, Misgendering, and Gendered Words

3.1 Kapusta on Misgendering

Stephanie Julia Kapusta’s “Misgendering and Its Moral Contestability” (2016) offers a systematic philosophical analysis of the harms of misgendering (错误性别指称) — the practice of using gender terms (pronouns, titles, gendered language) that do not accord with a person’s gender identity.

3.1.1 Three Dimensions of Harm

Kapusta identifies three interlocking harms that misgendering inflicts on transgender persons:

1. Diminished self-respect (自尊受损): Persistent misgendering communicates that a person’s self-understanding is not worthy of recognition, eroding their sense of worth.
2. Discursive deprivation: Misgendering limits the linguistic resources available to trans people for articulating and asserting their own gender, effectively silencing them within the very terms of social interaction.
3. Microaggressive psychological harm (微侵犯): Even when unintentional, repeated misgendering functions as a microaggression — a cumulative pattern of slights that produces measurable psychological distress.

3.1.2 Semantic Contestability

Kapusta further argues that the concept “woman” is semantically contestable (语义可争议的). Because gender categories exhibit resemblance/dissemblance structures — overlapping but non-identical clusters of traits — they inevitably produce vague and borderline cases (including transgender and intersex persons). Whether such cases are included in or excluded from the category “woman” depends on background metaphysical, ethical, or political assumptions. This semantic contestability means that any deployment of the term “woman” that excludes trans women is not merely a neutral description but a morally loaded act.

3.1.3 Critique of Feminist Definitions

Kapusta examines two prominent feminist characterizations of “woman” and finds that both suffer from serious defects when applied to transgender women’s social contexts: they either exclude at least some transgender women outright, or they implicitly foster hierarchies among women that marginalize transgender women. She concludes that the moral contestability of gendered language should function as a standing reminder of the provisionality and revisability of our gender categories.

3.2 Dembroff and Wodak: He/She/They/Ze

Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak’s “He/She/They/Ze” (2018) extends the analysis of gendered language from the ethics of misgendering to a broader critique of the pronoun system itself.

3.2.1 The Moderate Claim

Dembroff and Wodak first defend a moderate claim: we have a negative duty not to use binary gender-specific pronouns (he/she) to refer to genderqueer (酷儿性别/非常规性别) individuals. They support this through an argument by analogy: just as it is a grave wrong to refer to a trans woman with the pronoun “he,” so it is wrong to impose binary pronouns on someone who identifies outside the binary.

3.2.2 The Radical Claim

More provocatively, they defend a radical claim: we have a negative duty not to use any gender-specific pronouns to refer to anyone, regardless of their gender identity. Three arguments support this position:

1. Inegalitarianism and risk: Binary pronouns presuppose a two-gender system and distribute linguistic recognition unequally. Those whose gender does not fit the binary bear disproportionate risk of misgendering.
2. Invasion of privacy: Gendered pronouns force individuals to disclose or perform their gender identity in every utterance, even when gender is irrelevant to the communicative context.
3. Essentialist reinforcement: The habitual use of “he” and “she” transmits and normalizes essentialist (本质主义) beliefs about gender — the idea that gender is a natural, immutable, binary property of persons.

Dembroff and Wodak propose that English should move toward a pronoun system like those of languages with no gender-specific third-person pronouns (e.g., Turkish, Finnish), adopting gender-neutral pronouns such as “they” or “ze” for everyone.

Chapter 4: Trans Philosophy — Identity and First-Person Authority

4.1 Bettcher: What Is Trans Philosophy?

Talia Mae Bettcher’s “What Is Trans Philosophy?” (2019) addresses a foundational question: what distinguishes trans philosophy (跨性别哲学) as a field? Bettcher argues that trans philosophy is philosophical work that is accountable to and illuminative of transgender experiences, histories, cultural production, and politics. It is not merely the study of trans phenomena by any scholar, but the coming to academic voice of trans people themselves — a distinction Bettcher draws from Susan Stryker’s foundational work in trans studies.

4.1.1 Philosophy’s Other

Bettcher positions trans philosophy in relation to Judith Butler’s notion of “philosophy’s Other” — the philosophical work done outside the boundaries of professional, institutional philosophy. Trans studies has largely grown from this Other: from activism, personal testimony, art, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Trans philosophy therefore operates at the intersection of professional philosophy and a broader intellectual tradition that philosophy has historically marginalized.

4.1.2 Three Questions for Philosophy in a Multidisciplinary Context

Placing philosophy within the multidisciplinary field of trans studies raises three questions:

1. What does philosophy have to offer? Conceptual analysis, argument evaluation, and normative reasoning.
2. What grounds philosophical claims about the world? Philosophy typically does not rely on empirical data, so trans philosophy must justify its claims through careful engagement with lived experience and testimony.
3. What is the relation between philosophy and “the literature”? Trans philosophy must take seriously the existing corpus of trans studies rather than reinventing it from within the disciplinary assumptions of philosophy.

4.2 Bettcher: Trans Identities and First-Person Authority

In “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority” (2009), Bettcher tackles one of the most contested questions in the philosophy of gender: Who has the authority to determine a person’s gender?

4.2.1 The Problem with Epistemic Authority

Bettcher rejects the view that first-person authority over gender is merely epistemic (认识论的) — that is, grounded in privileged self-knowledge. The epistemic account holds that trans people know their gender better than others because they have introspective access to their inner states. But Bettcher argues that this account is fragile: it can always be undermined by appeals to self-deception, denial, or wishful thinking. If first-person authority is only as strong as one’s claim to self-knowledge, it offers no reliable protection.

4.2.2 Ethical First-Person Authority

Instead, Bettcher proposes Ethical First-Person Authority (伦理第一人称权威): certain self-regarding utterances carry authority not because they cannot be false, but because they represent an agent taking responsibility for a desire, commitment, or identity of their own. To deny or ignore such an utterance is to undermine the person’s autonomy (自主性) and is therefore unethical. The authority is not epistemic but normative: it is wrong to override it, not because the person cannot be mistaken, but because overriding it violates their status as a self-determining agent.

4.2.3 Existential Identity

Bettcher distinguishes between metaphysical identity (形而上学身份) — what one is in some objective sense — and existential identity (存在主义身份) — who one is in terms of what one cares about, stands for, and is moved by. It is over existential identity, she argues, that persons have first-person authority. The question “What gender are you?” is not best understood as a question about one’s metaphysical classification, but about one’s existential orientation — one’s self-conception, values, and commitments.

4.3 Jenkins: Amelioration and Inclusion

Katherine Jenkins’s “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman” (2016) engages directly with the ameliorative (改良主义的) approach to gender concepts developed by Sally Haslanger.

4.3.1 Haslanger’s Ameliorative Analysis

Haslanger proposes that the concept “woman” should be defined by reference to social subordination: S is a woman iff S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.) and is “marked” as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

This definition is “ameliorative” because it is designed to serve feminist political aims — identifying and combating gender-based oppression — rather than merely describing ordinary usage.

4.3.2 The Inclusion Problem

Jenkins argues that Haslanger’s definition produces an inclusion problem (包容问题): it either excludes at least some trans women (who may not be “marked” for subordination in the way Haslanger describes) or implicitly creates hierarchies among women, placing trans women in a marginal position.

4.3.3 The Twin-Concepts Solution

Jenkins’s solution is to propose two target concepts of “woman” that are equally necessary for feminist aims:

1. Gender as class: a concept defined by patterns of social subordination, capturing the structural dimension of gender (close to Haslanger’s definition).
2. Gender as identity: a concept defined by an individual’s internal sense of gender, capturing the subjective dimension.

Both concepts are needed because feminism has both structural and experiential concerns. The class concept identifies the system of oppression; the identity concept ensures that all women — including trans women — are recognized as full participants in feminist solidarity.

Chapter 5: Trans Embodiment — Monsters and Rage

5.1 Stryker: Performing Transgender Rage

Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (1994) is one of the founding texts of trans studies (跨性别研究). Originally performed as a spoken-word piece at the 1993 “Rage Across the Disciplines” conference, it is a hybrid of autobiography, theory, literary criticism, and lyrical rage.

5.1.1 The Frankenstein Metaphor

Stryker’s title refers to the scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which the monster first speaks back to its creator. Stryker turns this literary moment into a metaphor (隐喻) for the critical encounter between a radicalized transgender subjectivity and the normalizing intent of medical science. Just as Victor Frankenstein assembled his creature from dead matter and then recoiled from it in horror, so modern medicine has constructed the transsexual body through hormones and surgery and then pathologized the result. Stryker speaks back — not as a grateful patient, but as a creature who has found her own voice.

5.1.2 Transgender Rage as Political Affect

Transgender rage (跨性别愤怒) is not private or pathological; it is a political affect (情感). It emerges from the interstices of discursive practices — from the gap between the language that names and organizes bodies and the material bodies that exceed that language. Stryker argues that rage arises when a subject must, for the sake of continued survival, take up practices that precipitate exclusion from a “naturalized order of existence” that claims to be the only possible basis for being a subject. Trans rage is thus structurally analogous to the fury of any subject who is constituted as monstrous by the very norms that claim to define humanity.

5.1.3 From Shame to Solidarity

Stryker’s key theoretical move is to transform shame, fear, and despair — affects typically imposed on trans people — into sources of political agency. The essay demonstrates that trans politics, like queer politics, entails recognizing that certain emotions are not merely personal: they are social and political, produced by structures of power, and capable of fuelling resistance.

5.2 Barad: TransMaterialities

Karen Barad’s “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings” (2015) brings the resources of quantum physics (量子物理学) and new materialism (新唯物主义) to bear on questions of trans embodiment.

5.2.1 The Radically Deconstructive Nature of Nature

Barad’s central argument is that nature itself is radically deconstructive, queer, and trans. Drawing on quantum field theory, Barad shows that matter is never static: every particle is in constant flux, a field of virtual possibilities that continuously materialize and dematerialize. The electron, for example, does not have a fixed identity; it is a dynamic process of intra-action (内在互动) with its environment. Barad uses this physics to challenge naturalistic arguments for fixed gender: if nature itself is indeterminate and mutable at the most fundamental level, then appeals to “nature” to ground a stable gender binary are philosophically incoherent.

5.2.2 Monstrosity and Self-Birth

Extending Stryker’s use of Frankenstein, Barad adopts the monster as a figure for agency, empowerment, and self-birth. The monster is not a failed copy of the natural but a genuinely new form of being — one that challenges the very distinction between natural and unnatural. Barad argues that trans embodiment enacts this same challenge: trans bodies are not deviations from a norm but expressions of matter’s inherent capacity for transformation.

5.2.3 Queer Alliance with Nature

Barad’s essay draws on a dizzying range of phenomena — lightning, primordial ooze, frogs that change sex, bioelectricity — to argue for “queer alliance with nature’s nonessentialist nature.” The political implication is that queer and trans politics need not be anti-nature; they can claim nature as an ally precisely because nature resists the fixity that conservative politics demands of it.

5.3 Malatino: Queer Monsters

Hil Malatino’s “Queer Monsters” (from Queer Embodiment, 2019) extends the figure of the monster from trans theory into intersex experience, producing a broader account of queer embodiment (酷儿身体性).

5.3.1 Monstrosity and Medical Violence

Malatino traces how intersex bodies have been constituted as “monstrous” — as anomalous embodiments requiring medical correction. The history of intersex management involves non-consensual surgeries on infants and children, performed in the name of normalizing bodies to fit the binary. Malatino argues that contesting this pathologization is both a matter of medical reform and a fundamental human-rights issue.

5.3.2 Undoing the Binary

Trans and intersex people, Malatino argues, offer new ways of living and desiring through their “becomings,” creatively and permanently undoing the binaries of man/woman and male/female. The monster, far from being a figure of horror, becomes a figure of coalition (联盟) — a site where trans, intersex, queer, disabled, and racialized subjects can find common ground in their shared refusal of the humanist norm.

5.3.3 Decolonial Perspectives

Malatino articulates queer and trans theory with continental philosophy (大陆哲学) and a racially conscious decolonial perspective. The insistence on a strict gender binary, Malatino argues, is not a universal human phenomenon but a product of European modernity and colonialism — a point that connects directly to the work of Maria Lugones (Chapter 6).

Chapter 6: Colonialism, Indigeneity, and Gender

6.1 Lugones: The Coloniality of Gender

Maria Lugones’s “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (2007) is a foundational text of decolonial feminism (去殖民女性主义). Lugones argues that the modern Western gender system — with its strict binary of man/woman, its compulsory heterosexuality, and its patriarchal family structure — is not a universal human phenomenon but a product of European colonial modernity.

6.1.1 Quijano and the Coloniality of Power

Lugones builds on Anibal Quijano’s concept of the coloniality of power (权力殖民性): the idea that colonial structures of domination did not end with formal decolonization but persist in the organization of knowledge, labour, and social relations. However, she argues that Quijano’s framework is inadequate to gender because it treats sex/gender as defined by patriarchal and heterosexual contestations over “sexual access” — a paradoxically Eurocentric understanding.

6.1.2 The Light Side and the Dark Side

Lugones introduces a model of the colonial/modern gender system as having two sides:

• The light side: the gender system as it applies to European/white subjects — bourgeois femininity and masculinity, heterosexual complementarity, the public/private distinction.
• The dark side: the gender system as it applies to colonized, racialized subjects — dehumanization, hypersexualization, the denial of gender altogether. Colonized people were often not recognized as “men” and “women” in the European sense but were treated as genderless animals or labour-units.

This dual structure means that the gender oppression experienced by colonized women is fundamentally different from — and cannot be assimilated to — the gender oppression experienced by European women. Decolonial feminism must therefore begin not from the experience of white women but from the intersection of gender, race, and coloniality.

6.1.3 Recovering Indigenous Gender Systems

Lugones calls for recovering the gender systems that existed in colonized societies before European contact — systems that were often non-binary, non-hierarchical, and not organized around compulsory heterosexuality. The goal is not nostalgia but political imagination: if gender has been otherwise, it can be otherwise again.

6.2 D’Anglure: The “Third Gender” of the Inuit

Bernard Saladin D’Anglure’s “The ‘Third Gender’ of the Inuit” (2005) provides an ethnographic case study that illustrates Lugones’s theoretical claims. D’Anglure documents the Inuit practice of sipiniq — the assignment of a gender identity to a child based on dreams, visions, or the identity of a deceased relative, rather than on the child’s anatomical sex. A child identified as sipiniq might be raised in the social role of a gender different from their anatomical sex, or might occupy a fluid position between genders.

This practice challenges the assumption that a strict two-gender system is natural or universal. Among the Inuit, gender is understood as relational, spiritual, and flexible — a social assignment that can be revised rather than a biological destiny. D’Anglure’s work connects to Lugones’s argument that non-binary gender systems existed prior to colonialism and were disrupted by European imposition of the binary.

6.3 Whyte: Indigenous Women, Climate Change, and Collective Action

Kyle Powys Whyte’s “Indigenous Women, Climate Change Impacts, and Collective Action” (2014) examines the intersection of indigeneity (原住民性), gender, and environmental justice.

6.3.1 Collective Continuance

Whyte introduces the concept of collective continuance (集体延续): the ongoing patterns of community life — responsibilities, relationships, practices — that indigenous peoples rely upon for living lives closely connected to the earth. Climate change threatens collective continuance by altering the ecological contexts in which these systems of responsibilities are meaningful: when species shift their ranges, when water sources dry up, when seasonal patterns change, the web of responsibilities that structures community life is disrupted.

6.3.2 Indigenous Women and Climate Vulnerability

Within this framework, indigenous women face distinctive harms. Many indigenous women take seriously specific responsibilities within their communities — responsibilities related to food, water, health, and ceremony — that expose them disproportionately to climate impacts. Yet these same responsibilities also motivate indigenous women to take on leadership positions in climate adaptation and mitigation efforts.

6.3.3 Political Implications

Whyte argues that non-indigenous parties have political responsibilities to support distinctly indigenous efforts at climate adaptation — not by imposing external solutions, but by recognizing indigenous sovereignty and supporting indigenous-led initiatives. This framing connects gender, indigeneity, and environmental justice in a way that resists the tendency to treat these as separate issues.

Chapter 7: Performativity and Gender Constitution

7.1 Butler: Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988)

Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988) is one of the most influential essays in the history of feminist philosophy. It introduces the concept of gender performativity (性别操演性) that Butler would develop further in Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993).

7.1.1 Gender as Doing, Not Being

Butler’s central claim is that gender is not a noun but a verb — not a being but a doing. Gender is “an identity tenuously constituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” We do not have a gender in the way we have a liver; we perform gender through daily acts — gestures, movements, styles of dress, speech patterns, postures — that, through their repetition over time, produce the appearance of a stable gender identity.

7.1.2 Performance vs. Expression

A crucial distinction: Butler is not saying that gender is a theatrical performance one can simply put on or take off at will. Rather, gender is performative (操演性的) in the technical sense derived from J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory: it is constituted in and through the very acts that are said to “express” it. There is no pre-existing gender identity that the acts express; the acts themselves bring the identity into being. The illusion of a stable inner gender is produced retroactively by the regularity of the performance.

7.1.3 Cultural Compulsion and Social Sanction

If gender is constituted through repetition, why do people overwhelmingly repeat the same gendered acts? Butler argues that cultures develop taboos (禁忌) and punishments for alternative gender presentations and sexualities to maintain heterosexuality and specific gender roles as “natural.” The compulsion is social rather than biological: individuals are disciplined into gender conformity through ridicule, violence, exclusion, and institutional pressure. This means that while people might theoretically perform different gender acts, there are powerful structural reasons why most do not.

7.1.4 Possibilities for Subversion

If gender is not natural but constituted through repetition, then transformation is possible through subversive repetition (颠覆性重复). Because the relation between gendered acts and gender identity is arbitrary — there is no necessary connection between a given act and a given identity — different kinds of repetition can disrupt the illusion of naturalness. Drag, gender nonconformity, and other practices of gender trouble expose the constructed character of all gender by performing it in unexpected ways.

7.1.5 Phenomenological Roots

Butler’s essay draws explicitly on phenomenological philosophy, particularly the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. From Merleau-Ponty, Butler takes the idea that the body is not a passive object but an active agent that constitutes meaning through its engagement with the world. From Beauvoir, Butler takes the claim that one becomes a woman — and radicalizes it: if becoming is an ongoing, never-completed process, then there is no moment at which one has definitively become a woman (or a man). Gender is always in process, always being reconstituted.

7.2 Kulick: The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes

Don Kulick’s “The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes” (1997) provides an ethnographic counterpoint to Butler’s theoretical framework. Kulick studies travestis — individuals assigned male at birth who adopt feminine names, pronouns, clothing, hairstyles, and body modifications (including hormone use and silicone injections) but who do not identify as women.

Kulick argues that the Brazilian gender system in which travestis operate is organized not around the European binary of male/female but around a distinction between those who penetrate and those who are penetrated in sexual encounters. In this system, gender is constituted through sexual practice rather than anatomy or identity. Kulick’s study demonstrates the cultural specificity of gender systems and cautions against universalizing any single framework — whether binary or non-binary.

Chapter 8: Masculinity, Incels, and Gendered Violence

8.1 Shpall: Incels and Warrior Masculinity

Sam Shpall’s “Incels and Warrior Masculinity” (2025) brings philosophical analysis to bear on the phenomenon of incel (非自愿独身者) ideology — the online subculture of “involuntary celibates” who blame women and society for their inability to find sexual or romantic partners, and who sometimes embrace or incite violence.

8.1.1 Beyond Objectification and Entitlement

Shpall argues that existing feminist frameworks — particularly those centred on objectification (物化) and entitlement (权利感) — capture important dimensions of incel ideology but miss something crucial. Incels do not merely objectify women or feel entitled to sex; they are also consumed by intense self-loathing (自我厌恶). The incel worldview is defined as much by hatred of the self as by hatred of women.

8.1.2 Warrior Masculinity

To explain this self-loathing, Shpall appeals to the concept of warrior masculinity (武士男性气质) — the ideal, deeply embedded in Western culture, that a “real man” is physically dominant, sexually successful, emotionally stoic, and willing to use violence. Shpall draws on Tom Digby’s analysis of the intersection of heterosexuality and militaristic cultural programming.

Incels internalize warrior-masculine ideals but perceive themselves as failing to live up to them. This produces shame (羞耻): the painful sense that one is fundamentally inadequate. But the very same masculine ideals that make shame inevitable also demand its repression — showing vulnerability would compound the emasculation. The result is a vicious cycle: shame is generated by warrior-masculine standards, repressed by those same standards, and then expressed as rage directed outward (toward women, toward “Chads,” toward society) and inward (toward the self).

8.1.3 Breaking the Cycle

Shpall suggests that it is difficult to break this cycle from within the confines of attachment to warrior masculinity. The therapeutic and political task is to make alternative masculinities available and liveable — masculinities that do not equate manhood with dominance, sexual conquest, and emotional suppression. This connects to broader feminist arguments about the harms of rigid gender norms to men as well as women.

8.2 Chu: Females

Andrea Long Chu’s Females (2019; expanded edition 2025) is a deliberately provocative work that resists easy classification. Part essay, part polemic, part autobiography, it offers a theory of femaleness (女性性) that challenges both mainstream feminism and trans-affirming orthodoxies.

8.2.1 Femaleness as Universal Condition

Chu’s central thesis: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” By “female,” Chu does not mean an anatomical or genetic characteristic. She defines femaleness as “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” To be female is to be constituted by heteronomy (他律) — the experience of being subject to another’s will. In psychoanalytic terms, it is castration; in Kantian terms, it is the loss of autonomy.

8.2.2 Desire and Self-Negation

Chu argues that desire is fundamentally passive and receptive: to desire is to be shaped by what one desires, to make room within oneself for an external force. This passivity is what she calls “femaleness.” It is universal — everyone experiences it — and it is universally resented, because it contradicts the fantasy of sovereign selfhood. All politics, including feminist politics, is a rebellion against this condition.

8.2.3 Provocation as Method

Chu’s provocations — her approving citations of radical feminist Valerie Solanas, her refusal to affirm a neat narrative of trans liberation — are methodologically deliberate. By refusing to be a “good” trans subject, Chu forces readers to confront uncomfortable questions about desire, agency, and the limits of identity politics. Whether one agrees with Chu’s claims, Females functions as a philosophical destabilizer: it unsettles every comfortable position, including those of its own allies.

Chapter 9: Nonbinary and Beyond — Reimagining Gender

9.1 Dembroff: Why Be Nonbinary?

Robin Dembroff’s “Why Be Nonbinary?” (2018) addresses the question: what is at stake, philosophically and politically, in identifying as nonbinary (非二元性别)?

9.1.1 Against Psychological and Presentational Accounts

Dembroff argues that the category “nonbinary” should not be understood in terms of gender presentation (性别表达) (how one looks or dresses) or psychological states (心理状态) (how one feels internally). Such accounts are either too narrow (excluding nonbinary people who present in conventionally gendered ways) or too broad (including anyone who deviates from gender stereotypes). Instead, nonbinary identity should be understood in terms of how its members are politically situated with respect to the binary expectations of Western gender ideology.

9.1.2 Critical Gender Kinds

Dembroff introduces the concept of critical gender kinds (批判性性别类型): groups whose members collectively resist dominant gender ideology. Nonbinary people constitute a critical gender kind because they refuse exclusive categorization as either “man” or “woman,” thereby challenging the assumption that the binary is exhaustive.

9.1.3 Ontological Oppression

Dembroff develops the concept of ontological oppression (本体论压迫): oppression that arises when social kinds operating in a given context unjustly constrain the behaviours, concepts, or affects of certain groups. The binary gender system ontologically oppresses nonbinary persons by refusing to recognize their existence — not merely by treating them badly, but by failing to provide the conceptual resources for them to be what they are.

9.2 Dembroff: Reimagining Transgender

In “Reimagining Transgender” (2024), Dembroff argues that the terms “transgender” and “cisgender” are not merely descriptive labels but do important conceptual labour: they highlight who is penalized for their unwillingness to live by the rules of gender and who is advantaged by those penalties.

9.2.1 Beyond Identity and Nonconformity

Dembroff suggests that existing descriptions of “transgender” — either as an identity (an inner sense of gender that differs from one’s assigned sex) or as the full spectrum of gender nonconformity — do not align with the conceptual work we ask “transgender” to do. What matters is not inner feeling or outward presentation but self-directed gender nonconformity that is heavily penalized: the choice to live in ways that violate dominant gender norms despite knowing the social costs.

9.2.2 Political Stakes

This reconceptualization has political stakes: it centres the experiences of those who bear the heaviest penalties for gender nonconformity — disproportionately trans women of colour, trans people in poverty, and trans people in the Global South — rather than those whose nonconformity is relatively tolerated.

9.3 Ashley: Genderfucking as Critical Legal Methodology

Florence Ashley’s “Genderfucking as Critical Legal Methodology” (2024) proposes genderfucking (性别颠覆) as a framework for legal analysis.

9.3.1 Definition

Genderfucking is defined by its focus on the needs and experiences of those who deliberately resist, disrupt, and destabilize gender norms. It is not a personal style but an analytical methodology — a way of reading law, policy, and social practice through the lens of those who “fuck with” gender.

9.3.2 Emancipation over Recognition

What makes genderfucking critical (in the sense of critical legal studies) is its commitment to emancipation (解放) rather than recognition (承认). Mainstream trans-rights advocacy has often pursued inclusion within existing legal frameworks: the right to change one’s legal gender marker, the right to access gendered spaces. Genderfucking challenges the legitimacy of these frameworks themselves, asking why the state should have the power to define and police gender categories at all.

9.3.3 A Politics of Messiness

Ashley adopts a “politics of messiness” that resists the demand for clean, legible gender categories. The law wants gender to be neat — M or F, binary and stable. Genderfucking insists that gender is messy, and that legal and political frameworks must be rebuilt to accommodate this messiness rather than forcing people into categories that do not fit them.

9.3.4 Material Realities over Bare Identities

Because of its emancipatory aspirations, genderfucking privileges material realities (物质现实) and needs over bare identities. It asks not “Who are you?” but “What do you need?” — shifting the focus from identity-based recognition to the concrete conditions of people’s lives.

9.4 Hoskin: Can Femme Be Theory?

Rhea Ashley Hoskin’s “Can Femme Be Theory?” (2021) explores the epistemological and methodological possibilities of femme (女性气质理论) as a theoretical framework. Hoskin argues that femme — a term originating in lesbian and queer communities to describe a feminine gender expression that is deliberate, defiant, and non-normative — can serve as more than a personal identity. It can function as a critical lens for analysing how femininity is devalued across gender, sexuality, and culture. The concept of femmephobia (女性气质恐惧) — the systemic devaluation of femininity — connects femme theory to broader questions about why femininity is denigrated even within feminist and queer spaces.

Chapter 10: Ecofeminism and Intersectional Futures

10.1 pattrice jones: Ecofeminism and Animal Liberation

pattrice jones’s “Fighting Cocks: Ecofeminism Versus Sexualized Violence” (2011) exemplifies the ecofeminist (生态女性主义) commitment to analysing the interconnections between different forms of domination — gender, species, race, sexuality.

10.1.1 The Social Construction of Gender Through Animals

jones argues that cockfighting is not merely animal cruelty; it is a site where masculinity (男性气质) is socially constructed through the exploitation of animals. Roosters are made to embody a caricature of aggressive, dominant manhood — they are bred, trained, and forced to fight in rituals that celebrate and reproduce violent masculinity. The gendered exploitation of roosters is thus a case study in how gender is constructed via animals — a psychosocial process that injures both people and animals.

10.1.2 Intersections of Oppression

jones extends this analysis to show that similar processes of social construction by way of animals occur in relation to race and sexual orientation. The domination of animals and the domination of marginalized human groups are not parallel but interlocking: they rely on the same logic of naturalized hierarchy, the same techniques of dehumanization, the same affective economies of violence and control.

10.1.3 Ecofeminist Ethics

The ecofeminist framework insists that gender justice cannot be achieved in isolation from environmental justice and animal liberation. As long as the domination of nature is used to justify the domination of women, and the domination of women is used to justify the domination of nature, neither form of oppression can be overcome on its own.

10.2 Intersectional Futures

The readings in this course converge on a shared insight: gender cannot be understood in isolation. Every chapter has demonstrated that gender is entangled with race (Beauvoir, Belle, hooks, Lugones), class (hooks, Whyte), colonialism (Lugones, D’Anglure, Malatino), sexuality (Butler, Dembroff, Ashley), embodiment (Fausto-Sterling, Stryker, Barad, Malatino), language (Kapusta, Dembroff and Wodak), law (Ashley), ecology (Whyte, jones), and desire (Chu).

10.2.1 From Intersectionality to Coalition

The concept of intersectionality (交叉性) — first named by Kimberle Crenshaw and developed by hooks, Lugones, and others — is not merely an analytical tool; it is a call to political practice. If oppressions are interlocking, then liberation struggles must be coalitional. Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? makes this argument at the global level: the attack on “gender ideology” is simultaneously an attack on feminism, queer and trans rights, anti-racism, and democracy. Resistance must therefore be equally broad.

10.2.2 Queer Ethics and Gender Liberation

Kim Q. Hall’s work on queer ethics (酷儿伦理) offers a framework for thinking about what liberation might look like. Queer ethics is not a set of rules but an orientation — a commitment to remaining open to the unexpected, the non-normative, the messy. It refuses the demand for clean categories and stable identities, insisting instead on the value of ambiguity, fluidity, and vulnerability.

10.2.3 Gender as Ongoing Project

If there is a single lesson that unifies the diverse readings of this course, it is that gender is not a fact but an ongoing project — a set of practices, institutions, norms, and relations that are continuously made and remade. Beauvoir showed that one becomes a woman; Butler showed that the becoming is never complete; Lugones showed that the terms of becoming are colonial; Dembroff and Ashley showed that the project can be reimagined from the ground up. The task of feminist, queer, and trans philosophy is not to arrive at a final answer to the question “What is gender?” but to keep the question open — to ensure that the ways we live gender remain subject to critique, transformation, and care.