Feminist perspectives on sex and gender
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008)
Abstract
Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry (around 12 000 words in length) outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender.Author's Profile
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Citations of this work
Evaluating Arguments for the Sex/Gender Distinction.Tomas Bogardus - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (3):873-892.
Moral Constraints on Gender Concepts.N. G. Laskowski - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (1):39-51.
Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle.E. Diaz-Leon - 2016 - Hypatia 31 (2):245-258.
Doing Ontology and Doing Justice: What Feminist Philosophy Can Teach Us About Meta-Metaphysics.Mari Mikkola - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (7-8):780-805.
References found in this work
Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique.Sally Haslanger - 2012 - Oxford University Press.