Katharine Jenkins

The way society is organized means that we all get made into members of various types of people, such as judges, wives, or women. These 'human social kinds' may be brought into being by oppressive social arrangements, and people may suffer oppression in virtue of being made into a member of a certain human social kind; this much is obvious. In Ontology and Oppression, Katharine Jenkins goes further, arguing that we should pay attention to the ways in which the very fact of being made into a member of a certain human social kind can be oppressive. She supplies three conceptual tools needed to understand this phenomenon. The first tool is an analysis of this general form of wrong, termed 'ontic injustice'. The second tool is an account of 'ontic oppression', a kind of ontic injustice in which the wrong amounts to a form of oppression, in the sense of being structural and pervasive. The third tool is a pluralist account of race and gender kinds, according to which there is no single social kind that corresponds to a gender category such as 'woman', but rather, various social kinds, each of which is explanatory for different purposes. Jenkins argues that it would be a mistake to make the claim that race and gender kinds as such are ontically oppressive: some are, but others are not, and some are even conducive to emancipation. This analysis has benefits for anti-oppressive social movements, including efforts towards trans liberation. It enables us to understand the wrong that can be involved in the construction of race and gender kinds whilst also recognizing how people can reasonably value being members of these kinds and highlights the importance of working to change race and gender kinds for the better.

This chapter uses John Searle’s account of institutional reality to offer an interpretation of two of Catharine MacKinnon’s claims about pornography. The first is that it subordinates women; the second is that it wrongly constructs women’s natures. The chapter argues that these claims about the harms of misogynistic pornography can profitably be understood in terms of the collective intentional imposition of a status function that defines “females” as subpersons for male use. The chapter advocates a broad interpretation of the subordination and constructionist claims that applies to a range of media besides misogynistic pornography, both sexual and nonsexual. Finally, the chapter suggests that the importance of the subordination and constructionist claims as interpreted here does not rest on their being shown to be constitutive rather than causal.

This paper replies to comments on Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality given by Talia Mae Bettcher, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, and Camisha Russell. In response to Bettcher, it discusses the relationship between those approaches to social ontology that focus primarily on explanatory kinds and those that focus primarily on ordinary discourse, and the choice of terms to refer to gender kinds. In response to Khalidi, it discusses pluralism and hybridism about social kinds, the applicability of ontic injustice to social kinds that are not represented, and the role of values in investigating social kinds. In response to Russell, it discusses the individual and collective dimensions of identity claims about race and gender, and the relationship between the more applied and more abstract portions of Ontology and Oppression.

This paper offers a philosophical contribution to ongoing attempts to reckon with the apparently sexist and racist nature of many canonical operas, using the case study of Puccini’s Turandot and drawing on the work of feminist philosopher Andrea Dworkin. I outline a possible response to apparently racist and sexist operas that (following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of ‘reparative reading’) I call ‘reparative staging’. This consists of creating a production of an opera that exploits the existing features of the score and libretto to offer an anti-oppressive and hopeful version of the story. Through a detailed discussion of how a reparative staging of Turandot could be approached, which takes inspiration from Dworkin’s analysis of rape culture, I seek to commend reparative staging to opera performance makers as one useful tool among many. Specifically, I argue that reparative staging has significant power to prevent the harms that people rightly worry may result from performing racist and sexist operas; that it need not come at an artistic cost; and that it is available in some surprising cases. My discussion also demonstrates that the philosophical literature on responding to morally troubling art is enriched by paying attention to ‘works for performance’ (artworks—such as operas—that are intended to be performed on multiple occasions).

The way society is organised means that we all get made into members of various types of people, such as judges, wives, or women. These ‘human social kinds’ may be brought into being by oppressive social arrangements, and people may suffer oppression in virtue of being made into a member of a certain human social kind. This book argues that we should pay attention to the ways in which the very fact of being made into a member of a certain human social kind can be oppressive in and of itself. For example, someone who becomes a wife under circumstances where husbands have unjust powers over their wives has suffered a wrong, even if her husband never in fact exercises these powers. The book argues that social movements against racial and gendered oppression, including efforts to advance trans liberation, must get to grips with this phenomenon, and it supplies the conceptual tools needed to do so. The first tool is an analysis of this general form of wrong, termed ‘ontic injustice’. The second tool is an account of ‘ontic oppression’, a particular kind of ontic injustice in which the wrong amounts to a form of oppression, in the sense of being structural and pervasive. The third tool is a pluralist account of race and gender kinds, according to which there is no single social kind that corresponds to a gender category such as ‘woman’, but, rather, there are various different social kinds, each of which is explanatory for different purposes.

To investigate the metaphysics of gender categories—categories like “woman,” “genderqueer,” and “man”—is to ask questions about what gender categories are and how they exist. This chapter offers a pluralist account of the metaphysics of gender categories, according to which there are several different varieties of gender categories. I begin by giving a brief overview of some feminist accounts of the metaphysics of gender categories and illustrating how certain moral and political considerations have been in play in these discussions as constraints on acceptable accounts of gender categories. I then present my pluralist account of gender categories and highlight some of its virtues. Finally, I assess how my pluralist account fares relative to the moral and political considerations identified earlier in the chapter. I argue that although the account does not fare well, we should in fact revise our understanding of what those considerations are and how they should constrain our accounts of gender categories. I then show that, on this revised understanding, my pluralist account emerges as a viable position.

Mari Mikkola’s Pornography: A Philosophical Introduction is a rich, thorough, and important book. With great skill and precision, Mikkola maps the conceptual terrain of pornography; summarises and assesses key debates in the existing literature; and contributes her own insights – chiefly, in my view, an appealing artefactual definition of pornography, and a strong case for a methodological commitment to discussing pornography in a way that is grounded in empirical reality. The result is much more than the promised ‘introduction’: it is a key critical study that will, I am sure, play a major role in shaping future debates on this topic. I focus on a brief part of the book where Mikkola offers a critique of a paper of mine on pornography and social ontology. In short, I think Mikkola’s critique is correct, and I’ll attempt a re-working of the argument I made in that paper which, I hope, avoids the problems she identifies.

One challenge in providing an adequate definition of physical disability is unifying the heterogeneous bodily conditions that count as disabilities. We examine recent proposals by Elizabeth Barnes (2016), and Dana Howard and Sean Aas (2018), and show how this debate has reached an impasse. Barnes’ account struggles to deliver principled unification of the category of disability, whilst Howard and Aas’ account risks inappropriately sidelining the body. We argue that this impasse can be broken using a novel concept: marginalised functioning. Marginalised functioning concerns the relationship between a person’s bodily capacities and their social world: specifically, their ability to function in line with the default norms about how people can typically physically function that influence the structuring of social space. We argue that attending to marginalised functioning allows us to develop, not one, but three different models of disability, all of which—whilst having different strengths and weaknesses—unify the category of disability without sidelining the body.

In this paper, I aim to shed some light on what rape myths are and what we can do about them. I start by giving a brief overview of some common rape myths. I then use two philosophical tools to offer a perspective on rape myths. First, I show that we can usefully see rape myths as an example of what Miranda Fricker has termed ‘epistemic injustice’, which is a type of wrong that concerns our role as knowers. Then, I show that it is important to recognise that rape myths are instances of misogyny. This word is of course a more familiar one, but I'll be drawing on a specific philosophical account of what misogyny is, developed by Kate Manne, that I think is useful here. Finally, I briefly consider some upshots of these claims.

In this article, I identify a distinctive form of injustice—ontic injustice—in which an individual is wronged by the very fact of being socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind. To be a member of a certain social kind is, at least in part, to be subject to certain social constraints and enablements, and these constraints and enablements can be wrongful to the individual who is subjected to them, in the sense that they inflict a moral injury. The concept of ontic injustice is valuable in three main ways: it draws our attention to the role played by social kinds in enacting wrongful constraints and enablements; it clarifies our options for developing accounts of the ontology of particular social kinds, such as gender kinds; and, along with the related concept of ‘ontic oppression’, it helps us to understand and respond to oppression.

The conferralist account of social properties that Ásta develops and defends in Categories We Live By is persuasive in many ways. Conferralism could however do better, by its own lights, at handling the phenomenon of intersectionality. This paper first suggests a friendly amendment to the schema for conferrals that Asta offers. This helps to explain the difficulty concerning intersectionality. Finally, the paper suggests a way of developing the conferralist account that would resolve this difficulty.

Quayshawn Spencer argues for radical racial pluralism, the position that there is a plurality of natures and realities for race in the United States. In this paper, I raise two difficulties for Spencer’s argument. The first is targeted narrowly at his response to a potential objection to his argument, and the second is a more general difficulty to do with how the argument handles the social consequences of the authoritative categorization of people. Although the second difficulty is more serious than the first, neither is insurmountable. I then sketch an alternative argument for radical racial pluralism, one that would be likely to succeed in the event that Spencer’s argument turned out to fail. Considering these two contrasting routes to radical racial pluralism highlights the fact that radical racial pluralism is a rather more modest metametaphysical position than it may have initially appeared to be. In virtue of this, I suggest that we should develop and assess a more radically pluralist metametaphysical account of race, which I term ‘ultra-radical racial pluralism’.

Although the concept of gender identity plays a prominent role in campaigns for trans rights, it is not well understood, and common definitions suffer from a problematic circularity. This paper undertakes an ameliorative inquiry into the concept of gender identity, taking as a starting point the ways in which trans rights movements seek to use the concept. First, I set out six desiderata that a target concept of gender identity should meet. I then consider three analytic accounts of gender identity: the dispositional account, the self-identification account, and the norm-relevancy account. I argue that only the norm-relevancy account can meet all six desiderata. Finally, I defend the norm-relevancy account from three objections: that it is cis-normative, that it has problematic implications regarding trans women, and that it entails that some people do not have the gender identity they take themselves to have.

Feminist analyses of gender concepts must avoid the inclusion problem, the fault of marginalizing or excluding some prima facie women. Sally Haslanger’s ‘ameliorative’ analysis of gender concepts seeks to do so by defining woman by reference to subordination. I argue that Haslanger’s analysis problematically marginalizes trans women, thereby failing to avoid the inclusion problem. I propose an improved ameliorative analysis that ensures the inclusion of trans women. This analysis yields ‘twin’ target concepts of woman, one concerning gender as class and the other concerning gender as identity, both of which I hold to be equally necessary for feminist aims

This article argues that rape myths and domestic abuse myths constitute hermeneutical injustices. Drawing on empirical research, I show that the prevalence of these myths makes victims of rape and of domestic abuse less likely to apply those terms to their experiences. Using Sally Haslanger's distinction between manifest and operative concepts, I argue that in these cases, myths mean that victims hold a problematic operative concept, or working understanding, which prevents them from identifying their experience as one of rape or of domestic abuse. Since victims in this situation lack the conceptual resources needed to render their experience sufficiently intelligible, they are suffering a form of hermeneutical injustice. Attending to this distinctive case sheds new light not only on the functioning of social myths of this kind but on the nature of hermeneutical injustice itself, since the case of the victim who accepts myths is importantly different from other cases of hermeneutical injustice discussed in the literature to date. In practical terms, this analysis supports calls for juries in rape trials to be warned about rape myths at the start of the trial, and may have implications for calls for statutory Sex and Relationships Education in schools.