ABSTRACT

GENDER Gender has been the object of intense theorizing in American philosophy in recent decades. Initially developed by feminist theorists, the evolution of gender theory has been closely tied to the evolution of feminism. Feminist theory has faulted the philosophical tradition for failing to bring under critical scrutiny the gender binarism and the subordination of women that have dominated Western culture. Feminist theorists have argued that the tacit identification of human experience with male experience that has pervaded the philosophical tradition makes highly questionable its most central notions (rationality, objectivity, truth, virtue, and justice). Against a traditional metaphysics that separates mind from body and self from society, feminist theorists have tried to show the crucial significance of embodiment for our mental life, the constitutive dialectic between self and other, and the existence of a collective disciplining of actions and embodied identities according to gender norms. Against a traditional epistemology that tacitly identifies rationality with masculinity and emotionality with femininity, some feminist theorists have argued that reason and emotion are symbiotically related; and some standpoint theorists have argued that differently gendered perspectives can make distinct contributions to the acquisition of knowledge, its justification, and the achievement of objectivity. In the first two generations of Feminist Theory gender was conceptualized first as an essence grounded in biology and later as a construction grounded in social practices. In so-called

third-wave feminism many authors have contributed to the development of accounts of gender that try to dissolve the dichotomy between the biological and the social and to overcome the traditional debate between nature and nurture. In recent years Gender Theory has also broadened its scope and diversified its focus, producing abundant studies on masculinity as well as on femininity. The space in between gender dichotomies that challenges the male/female divide has also been investigated by Queer Theory. Gender and Queer Theory have been dominated by performative approaches which argue that gender is not only something we are, but also something we do. Gender and queer theorists have investigated the performative mechanisms of doing gender and have critically examined the norms that discipline and domesticate gender performance. The central focus of these investigations has been queering or transgressive gender performance, that is, performances of masculinity and femininity that problematize and destabilize gender dichotomies. Queer Theory constitutes an attempt to establish a strong link between academic research on gender and political activism. In this body of literature the performative insight that gender is something that we do leads to the critical insight that gender is also something we can undo and redo; and it is in this sense that Queer Studies claim to be critical interventions in gender politics that open up new possibilities for gender performance and call for the reconfiguration of gender boundaries. Especially influential here was the pioneer work of Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990). Butler

developed studies that show how our gender identities are constantly being negotiated in our performance and how gender lines are being performatively drawn and redrawn in these negotiations. She argued that our performance has the power of resignifying gender, that is, the critical and subversive potential of contesting gender norms, queering the gender line, and rearticulating gender categories. But on Butler’s view, although gender is something that we do, undo, and redo, it is not something that we simply make up, for our bodies (the agents of our gender performance) do matter. Butler and her followers have analyzed how our embodied performances signify gender and sexual orientation, articulating an account of how our gender and our sexuality are simultaneously disciplined by overlapping gender and sexual norms (a complex and heterogeneous normative framework called heteronormativity). The recent research on the intersection between gender and sexuality that has enriched Gender Theory should be put in the context of a more general interest in the intersectionality of identity. The recent literature in Gender Studies offers a wide range of explorations of how gender interacts with other identity categories such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. This research on the intersections of identity categories has resulted in fruitful collaborations between Gender Theory and theories that focus on other aspects of identity: especially, race theory, philosophy of ethnicity, oppression/ liberation theory, and gay/lesbian theory or sexuality studies. In recent years special attention has also been given to global issues concerning gender inequality and sexual oppression. Gender has been theorized at the global level by third-world feminism, which gives voice to the problems, concerns, and demands of women in non-Western contexts. This is a new, global stage of Feminism and Gender Theory which studies gender dynamics in global contexts and examines the problems afflicting women and gender/sexual minorities (GLBT people) around the world.