•  65
    We are living in times where there is considerable debate over what sex and gender are and who gets to be of what sex and what gender. These are questions that impact people’s lives greatly, some more than others. They are metaphysical questions, but they also concern what principles we should be guided by when allocating resources, services, and protections to people with potentially different needs. There are also methodological questions in the vicinity. In this essay, I draw on my work in Ca…Read more
  •  2
    The subject of this chapter is to what extent a feminist should embrace naturalist commitments. I characterize naturalism as involving two commitments: a rejection of normativity and a commitment to philosophy as a descriptive discipline consisting of empirical questions to be answered by empirical methods. I argue that a feminist should not be a naturalist about normativity, because feminists need to engage in an inherently normative enquiry. On the other hand, a naturalist move, wherein one of…Read more
  •  15
    The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field in feminist philosophy. The editors' introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions em…Read more
  •  38
    We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? Ásta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially me…Read more
  •  68
    Categories We Live By: Reply to Alcoff, Butler, and Roth
    European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 310-318. 2021.
    The author of Categories We Live By replies to critics Linda Martín Alcoff, Judith Butler, and Abraham Sesshu Roth.
  •  41
    Can Conferralism Account for Systemic Racism?
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (S1): 21-36. 2022.
    Conferralism about race is a version of social constructivism about race, where the agents of construction seem to be individual agents. However, an important aspect of racism is systemic or structural, and seemingly not about the behavior of individual agents. Can conferralism account for that? In this paper, I begin to address that question by focusing on recent criticism of conferralism by Linda Martín Alcoff and Aaron Griffith.
  •  131
    This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field in feminist philosophy. The editors' introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions em…Read more
  •  39
    Response to Critics
    Journal of Social Ontology 5 (2): 273-283. 2019.
    This is a response to the critical comments by Åsa Burman, Esa Díaz-León, Aaron Griffith, and Katharine Jenkins.
  •  86
    Précis: Categories We Live By
    Journal of Social Ontology 5 (2): 229-233. 2019.
    The project of Categories We Live By is to offer a metaphysics of social categories. The strategy is to give a theory of social properties of individuals. The main components of the theory are a conferralist framework for properties; an account of social meaning; and an account of social construction; accompanying is also an account of social identity. This theory can be applies to offer concrete conferralist proposals of categories such as sex, gender, race, disability, religion, and LGBTQ cate…Read more
  •  29
    Ideological Absorption and Countertechniques: Comments on Lindemann
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 17 (3). 2020.
    here.
  •  91
    The pull of social roles (review)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 57 (57): 118-119. 2012.
  •  88
    The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (review)
    Philosophical Review 127 (2): 247-251. 2015.
  •  15
    We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? Ásta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially me…Read more
  •  16
    Siding with Euthyphro: Response‐Dependence and Conferred Properties
    European Journal of Philosophy 18 (1): 108-125. 2010.
    I argue that a response‐dependence account of a concept can yield metaphysical results, and not merely epistemological or semantical results, which has been a prevalent view in the literature on response‐dependence. In particular, I show how one can argue for a conferralist account of a certain property by arguing that the concept of the property is response‐dependent, if certain assumptions are made.
  •  133
    Siding with euthyphro: Response-dependence and conferred properties
    European Journal of Philosophy 18 (1): 108-125. 2008.
    : I argue that a response‐dependence account of a concept can yield metaphysical results, and not merely epistemological or semantical results, which has been a prevalent view in the literature on response‐dependence. In particular, I show how one can argue for a conferralist account of a certain property by arguing that the concept of the property is response‐dependent, if certain assumptions are made
  •  276
    Social Construction
    Philosophy Compass 10 (12): 884-892. 2015.
    What is social construction? This essay offers a survey of the various ways in which something could be socially constructed and then addresses briefly the questions whether social constructionism involves an untenable anti-realism and what, if anything, unifies all social construction claims
  •  151
    Knowledge of essence: the conferralist story
    Philosophical Studies 166 (1): 21-32. 2013.
    Realist essentialists face a prima facie challenge in accounting for our knowledge of the essences of things, and in particular, in justifying our engaging in thought experiments to gain such knowledge. In contrast, conferralist essentialism has an attractive story to tell about how we gain knowledge of the essences of things, and how thought experiments are a justified method for gaining such knowledge. The conferralist story is told in this essay
  •  2417
    The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender
    In Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, Springer. pp. 47--65. 2011.
    In this chapter I offer an interpretation of Judith Butler’s metaphysics of sex and gender and situate it in the ontological landscape alongside what has long been the received view of sex and gender in the English speaking world, which owes its inspiration to the works of Simone de Beauvoir. I then offer a critique of Butler’s view, as interpreted, and subsequently an original account of sex and gender, according to which both are constructed—or conferred, as I would put it— albeit in different…Read more
  •  20
    Review of Anthony O'Hear, The Landscape of Humanity: Art, Culture, and Society (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (6). 2009.
  •  108
    Review of The Metaphysics of Gender by Charlotte Witt (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2012 (5). 2012.
    Review of Charlotte Witt's The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford 2011)
  •  293
    The Social Construction of Human Kinds
    Hypatia 28 (4): 716-732. 2013.
    Social construction theorists face a certain challenge to the effect that they confuse the epistemic and the metaphysical: surely our conceptions of something are influenced by social practices, but that doesn't show that the nature of the thing in question is so influenced. In this paper I take up this challenge and offer a general framework to support the claim that a human kind is socially constructed, when this is understood as a metaphysical claim and as a part of a social constructionist d…Read more
  •  199
    Essentiality conferred
    Philosophical Studies 140 (1). 2008.
    In this article I introduce a certain kind of anti-realist account of what makes a property essential to an object and defend it against likely objections. This account, which I call a ‘conferralist’ account, shares some of the attractive features of other anti-realist accounts, such as conventionalism and expressivism, but I believe, not their respective drawbacks.