Abstract
Is there anything that members of each binary category of gender have in common? Even many non-essentialists find the lack of unity within a gender worrying as it undermines the basis for a common political agenda for women. One promising proposal for achieving unity is by means of a shared historical lineage of cultural reproduction with past binary models of gender (e.g. Bach in Ethics 122:231–272, 2012). I demonstrate how such an account is likely to take on board different binary and also non-binary systems of gender. This implies that all individuals construed as members of the category, “women” are in fact not members of the same historical kind after all! I then consider different possible means of modifying the account but conclude negatively: the problem runs deeper than has been appreciated thus far.
Highlights
Most of us live in a culture in which gender is understood as a binary matter: you are either a woman or a man; you are either a girl or a boy
A promising way of explaining how gender can be variably expressed while members still belong to the same Kind is to take gender as a serial collective (Young 1994) or a historical kind (Bach 2012), such that individuals are connected through a chain of cultural reproduction
My current diagnosis is that the representation problem should not be fixed by sacrificing a plausible explanatory story of gender that takes gender to be a historical kind
Summary
Most of us live in a culture in which gender is understood as a binary matter: you are either a woman or a man; you are either a girl or a boy. A promising way of explaining how gender can be variably expressed while members still belong to the same Kind is to take gender as a serial collective (Young 1994) or a historical kind (Bach 2012), such that individuals are connected through a chain of cultural reproduction. With so many properties being gendered, it is quite natural to think of gender as a social kind, providing some grounds for inductive generalizations and generics (Bach 2012, 2016; Mallon 2016). Note that this conception of social kinds is not necessarily essentialist. There are individuals within each culture who constitute exceptions to most predominant gender norms of that culture, such as the Queen of England (Mikkola 2009).
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