Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle

Abstract

What does woman mean? According to two competing views, it can be seen as a sex term or as a gender term. Recently, Jennifer Saul has put forward a contextualist view, according to which woman can have different meanings in different contexts. The main motivation for this view seems to involve moral and political considerations, namely, that this view can do justice to the claims of trans women. Unfortunately, Saul argues, on further reflection the contextualist view fails to do justice to those moral and political claims that motivated the view in the first place. In this article I argue that there is a version of the contextualist view that can indeed capture those moral and political aims, and in addition, I use this case to illustrate an important and more general claim, namely, that moral and political considerations can be relevant to the descriptive project of finding out what certain politically significant terms actually mean.

How Much Gender Is Too Much Gender?

“…We remain neutral on this debate, as we do not think any proposed semantics will escape the worries we here raise for gender-specific terms. For further reading on the semantics of gender terms, seeBettcher (2013),Saul (2012), andDiaz-Leon (2016).8 SeeDembroff & Wodak (2018). Again, we remain neutral here as to whether gender is best understood in terms of identity, biology, social position, or something else.…”

Trans Feminism: Recent Philosophical Developments

“…In such a case, claiming womanhood in a resistant way may, in part, be responsive to racial oppression rather than sexist oppression (or to both). Similarly, I claim, ‘woman’ can be claimed in resistance to abusive mainstream gender practices that give rise to the particular nature of trans oppression ().…”

“…I have argued that terms like ‘woman’ can be given different resistant deployments to different sort of oppression (, ). Consider, for example, that ‘woman’ has been used in highly racialized ways that either exclude women of color as central paradigms or marginalize them in other ways.…”

Contextualism and the Semantics of "Woman"

“…

Contextualist accounts of "woman," including Saul (2012), Diaz-Leon (2016), andIchikawa (2020), aim to capture the variability of the meaning of the term, and dojusticetotherightsoftranswomen.Iarguethat(i)thereisaninternaltension between a contextualist stance and the commitment to trans-inclusive language, andthat(ii)weshouldrecognizeandtacklethebroaderanddeepertheoreticaland practical difficulties implicit in the semantic debates, rather than collapsing them allintosemantics.Movingon,Isketchthreestrategiestohelpusadvancefeminist philosophicalendeavors,includinghowattendingtocontextualmatterscanleadus tofurtherreflectonthemeta-contextual,suchasourroleinshapingcontextsand whethertheworkingoflanguageisindicativeofalargeroppressivesocialstructure.

Itmightseemthatthat"woman"isasextermissimplycommonsense.ButasDembroff (2018)argues,thiscommonsensicalviewisdeeplyproblematic.

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