ABSTRACT
Introduction: philosophical foundations for the practice of categorizing In this chapter I shall begin an investigation of the ways we categorize people, including ourselves, according to the kind of body we take them to have. These categorizations will prove to be fateful, having an enormous influence on how we can live our lives. Every society of which we know anything has categorized people as men and women. Based on the biological sex of the body, the distinctions of gender are loaded with practical and moral implications. I shall call this loading a ‘social construction’. I shall be exploring the ways in which the categories of gender, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, are socially constructed on the basis of the identification of bodies as ‘male’ and ‘female’, the biological distinctions of sex.
