ABSTRACT
Despite their critiques of specific (male) standpoints, ‘second wave’ feminists were implicitly realist in so far as they maintained that sociocultural phenomena such as gender are ultimately rooted in the material reality of human sexual dimorphism and reproduction. In this chapter, Caroline New introduces and employs a number of critical realist concepts – most prominently its distinction between the ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ dimensions of knowledge, its theorisation of emergence/ontological stratification, and its understanding of causality/causal explanation – to defend the distinction which these feminists made between sex and gender. As such, New argues – in direct opposition to much ‘third wave’ feminist and gender studies work – that sexual difference is a real, extra-discursive property of human beings, and that male and female bodies have different causal powers and properties.
