Ophelia Vedder

This article argues for the abolition of a core component of our hegemonic gender regime: compulsory sex-marking. Compulsory sex-marking refers to the social demand that individuals advertise, through conventional means, a binary sex status connected to a socially legible gender role. This linchpin of our hegemonic gender regime poses an unjustifiable threat to our autonomy. In what follows, I not only offer a novel account as to why we should embrace a critical component of gender abolition, but also argue that dismantling a core feature of our hegemonic gender regime is compatible with a trans-liberatory political project.

It is widely noted that our society faces widespread, unmet care needs. This problem is in part the result of a shortage of individuals—and, more specifically, of women—willing and available to perform care work. One solution to this crisis, touted by activists and policy makers alike, is to turn to the services offered by paid domestic workers such as housecleaners and nannies. I argue that we should reject this solution on the grounds that paid domestic work both relies on and replicates gender and race hierarchies. I make this argument by connecting contemporary discussion of the care crisis to historical concern about a “servant problem,” which, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, referred to an undersupply of employees willing to become paid domestic workers. I argue that we must reject contemporary discourses and policy solutions that replicate the old servant problem paradigm. The fight for justice for paid domestic workers, and the search for a solution to our current crisis in care, should not naturalize and encourage paid domestic work but rather work toward a radical reconfiguration of reproductive labor and the conditions under which it is performed.

While Susan Moller Okin found much to celebrate in Rawls's earlier articulation of his theory of justice, she worried that his later turn to political liberalism evacuated his theory of its feminist potential. Here, I argue that we need not be so pessimistic: some of the strongest arguments for pursuing certain feminist projects can and should be made from within a politically liberal framework. In advancing this claim, I develop Rawls's idea of primary goods—namely those goods that all citizens need qua citizens—as a key conceptual resource for arguing for the elimination of the gendered division of labor using public reason. Drawing on recent empirical literature, I point out that the gendered division of labor continues to distribute to women an unfair allocation of primary goods. I then advocate for a specific public policy, which I call Gender Egalitarian Daddy Quota—a parental leave policy that sets aside time specifically for fathers to encourage men and women to engage in childcare related leave-taking to similar extents—on the grounds that this policy would help secure a fairer distribution of primary goods, and thus is required as a matter of justice.