21 October 2024, 10.30am - 12.00 pm
Classroom 22 (Cendana), Yale-NUS College
Feminism can be broadly conceived as the project to achieve women’s liberation from gender-based oppression. This project, however, faces a potential wrinkle: Do feminists need a definition of “woman”, as a social kind, to make sense of their movement’s goals and ends? I contend that they do not. I respond to this “Inclusion Problem” by drawing on the concept of emptiness from the Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhist philosophy to develop an account of gender titled the Relational Account, which states that gender kinds do not exist, and are just loci of social relations. I ultimately argue that the Relational Account overcomes the Inclusion Problem by deflating its significance, and that we can still motivate feminist action and do important explanatory work without having to admit the existence of gender categories.
Zachary Loh ‘24 is a recently graduated philosophy major with an interest in aesthetics, feminist philosophy, and meta-ethics. Aside from being one of the main caretakers of an elderly canine relative at home, they are also currently an editorial intern at the Social Sciences department of World Scientific Publishing.