Resisting Reality

Sally Haslanger is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, and directs the Women's and Gender Studies Program. She specializes in analytic metaphysics, epistemology and feminist theory, with an emphasis on questions concerning social ontology and social justice. She has co-edited three volumes: Persistence: Contemporary Readings (with Roxanne Marie Kurtz, 2006), Adoption Matters: Philosophical andFeminist Essays (with Charlotte Witt, 2005), and Theorizing Feminisms (with Elizabeth Hackett, 2005).

In this collection of previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory and on the resources of contemporary analytic philosophy to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. Explicating the workings of these interlocking structures provides tools for understanding and combatting social injustice.

Introduction ; I. Social Construction ; 1. "Social Construction: Myths and Reality" ; 2. "On Being Objective and Being Objectified." ; 3. "Ontology and Social Construction." ; 4. "Social Construction: The "Debunking" Project." ; 5. "Feminism and Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural." ; 6. "Family, Ancestry and Self: What is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties?" ; 7. "Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?" ; 8. "Future Genders? Future Races?" ; 9. "You Mixed? Racial Identity without Racial Biology." ; 10. "A Social Constructionist Analysis of Race" ; 11. "Oppressions: Racial and Other" ; III. Language and Knowledge ; 12. "What Knowledge Is and What It Ought To Be: Feminist Values and Normative Epistemology" ; 13. "What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds" ; 14. "What Good Are Our Intuitions? Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds" ; 15. "But Mom, Crop-Tops Are Cute!" ; 16. "Language, Politics and 'The Folk': Looking for the 'Meaning' of Race " ; 17. "Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground"