Gender and Reification: reading Sally Haslanger as a Marxist-feminist

Tue 10, 11:20-11:50 am PDT

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This presentation will argue that a social position account of gender cannot succeed in articulating the relationship between the construction of gendered individuals and the practices and political efforts required to eliminate gendered oppression if it conceives of gender as an individual property. In this presentation, I will reconstruct Haslanger’s account of gender using reification as a critical tool from the Marxist philosophical tradition, in the work of György Lukacs. I will argue that we should build a dual view of theoretical tools that examine both reified gender categories as well as the material structures and relations from which they emerge, and that this dual analysis allows us to restore the intuitive link between feminist metaphysical inquiry and feminist praxis.

Sally Haslanger’s work has set a template for much of the contemporary philosophy of gender, in attempting to tie together the descriptive analysis of the world in the tradition of post-Quinean metaphysics with a critical, ameliorative attitude which extends this programme to social reality and its description in social theory. A central component of this project is her ‘social position’ account of gender, as a kind constituted through relations of systematic subordination and privilege on the basis of one’s role in reproduction.

However, a number of objections to Haslanger’s account seem to stem from the use of this underlying ontological structure. In accepting Haslanger’s effort to produce an operative analysis of gender in thoroughly political terms, we face difficulties in understanding how to relate the account of gender which emerges to the kinds of actions that eliminate the subordinated position described, given, for example, Haslanger suggests that we ought to eliminate women categorised as such in her account. Second, in presenting ‘woman’ as a kind to which people are members of based on their social position, Haslanger’s account leaves the possibility of individuals being problematically excluded from a category around which their political recognition and personal identity is organised, an objection generally called the particularity argument.

Both the political and ontological difficulties of conceptualising social kinds such as ‘woman’ could be resolved by the application of reification as a tool from Marxist philosophy. Reification describes the phenomenon whereby a social relation between people assumes the appearance of a property of an object. Applying this to a social position account of gender, we would proceed from an analysis of womanhood as manifest, reified property of individuals to the operative social relations that have given rise to this property. Rearcticulating the account in this way directly connects Haslanger’s descriptive analysis to the materialist feminist politics that inspired her project, while avoiding the unintuitive political imperatives that it has produced.

Discussion

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2 thoughts on “Gender and Reification: reading Sally Haslanger as a Marxist-feminist”

Habgood-Coote, Joshua says:

3 years ago at 4 h 35 min

Thanks Michael – so much to think about here!

I want to I guess ask a really basic question: how should I be thinking about what *reification* is? I thought that reification was roughly to do with views about some group being made true of that group, in a really simple case like people living up to a stereotype about a group they are perceived to belong to in order to get along. (I don’t know the Butler passage but that seems like it’s going on there).

I guess why I’m confused about this is that I was thinking that if you wanted to add reification into Haslanger’s picture of gender, there would be a tendency for manifest concepts to become operative concepts (via social construction), whereas the interesting bit of your presentation was about this gap between operative and manifest concepts, and how the former can mask the latter. So I didn’t quite see how you can get that gap if you’re deploying the idea of reification.

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1. Davin, Michael says:
  
  3 years ago at 9 h 25 min
  
  Hey Josh, thanks for the comment! I unfortunately had to cut a lot out about what you actually *do* with this analysis once you have it, but I’m sure it will come up in discussion. As for the specific question – there are a couple of different aspects. First, the account of what reification is might be even less normatively loaded than as you present it, I might simply characterise it as ‘the relational and dynamic character of a phenomenon being made objectual and permanent’. For gender, that absolutely looks like an epistemic framework that assigns to social phenomena essential or biological phenomena, but I think it’s totally expected that there remains a gap between the generative phenomena – whatever set of social relations – and the explanation and conceptual toolset we end up with. The gap I generally believe is stable, and the general success of reified bodies of knowledge (bourgeois economics, manifest understandings of sex/gender) seems to back that up. You’re absolutely preempting where I want to take this though, which is to integrate Ian Hacking’s dynamic nominalism and looping effects into a more dynamic ontology of genders.
  
  As for the second part, I think tacitly what I end up doing is asserting that the existence of beliefs about gender that look like their manifest concepts is part of the operative relations that we need to take into account in our ontology. If you want to take up both the ‘material’ and ‘critical’ aspects as I broadly think we want to, then the use of reification is explaining how that gap emerges and becomes stable. The tools that Lukács offers for how to go about dispelling it the twinned ideas of standpoint and praxis, and broadly I agree those are the right ones! Super happy to talk through what that actually means in the Q&A