A basic tenet of feminism is that women as a group face systematic and non-accidental forms of social injustice. Hence, feminism has typically been understood as the political movement to end the sexist and patriarchal oppression of women. One possible way to understand “woman” in this claim is to take it as a sex term: “woman” picks out human females and being a human female depends on some biological and anatomical features. In the past, and still, feminists have conventionally understood the term ‘woman’ in another way: not as a sex term, but as a gender term—a term whose meaning depends on some social and cultural factors and conditions. What those factors and conditions specifically are has generated much debate since the onset of second-wave feminism. Nevertheless, an idea emerged that feminism is politically and theoretically organized around the gender concept woman. The story goes (though simplifying significantly): since genders and gender roles depend on social factors and it is the social realm that feminism aims to alter, it became commonplace to treat woman as the concept around which feminist politics and theory is organized, and the term “woman” as picking out the group that makes up feminism’s subject matter. This focus on social gender, rather than biological sex, should then facilitate meeting important explanatory and normative demands. Politically effective feminist theory should elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women, i.e., provide social explanations of gendered oppression and injustice. Emancipatory feminism should also be able to defend feminism’s critical claims about injustice and put forward future visions of just human relationships, i.e. ground normative claims about how things should be and justify feminist action on behalf of women as a group.
This original sex/gender distinction enabled feminist theorists to do much needed emancipatory and explanatory work. It showed vividly that behavioral traits and typical gender roles are socially founded, not biologically necessitated. And this facilitated thinking about how our social lives should change to end gendered oppression. However, since the 1980s onward, this focus on the concept woman and on the question “what is it to be a woman?” have generated intractable debates. For one, cultural and social diversity along with intersectionality of oppression suggest that there is no unified group of women to be singled out as feminism’s subject matter because there is no uniform experience of womanhood. Just think of very divergent experiences of being a working-class woman and a parent of small children in comparison to a child-free middle-class woman with social and economic privileges that poor women exploited by the labor market lack. Answering the question “what is it to be a woman?” has proven elusive, and this is said to undermine the needed grounds to justify political organizing and solidarity. How can we ground normative demands of emancipatory feminism, like make claims on behalf of women as a group and explain what is wrongful about certain social arrangements, if there is no such group? If the “woman-question” is unanswerable, feminism allegedly faces an impasse because the needed normative and political grounding for it as a movement is missing. That is, politically it seems that a conception of woman and an account of what it is to be a woman are needed to elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women, to justify feminist critical claims about extant states of affairs, and to ground a vision of a feminist future.
It is against this backdrop that articulating a thick notion of woman became one key concern of feminist philosophy from the late 1990s onward. Still, despite extensive literature, there is precious little agreement on the definitions of woman and gender. My view is that the above explanatory and normative demands can be satisfied without focusing on gender and without trying to provide an answer to the “woman-question”. Hence, I advocate for a paradigm shift in focus away from feminist philosophy that takes woman as its organizing notion. Instead, I argue elsewhere, feminist philosophical analyses of injustice should be reframed in humanist terms. In short, social injustice is not damaging to women qua gendered beings, but qua human beings. This might suggest that we must start by defining what it is to be human. And one might think that we need to provide a normatively thick understanding since we are thinking about social injustices. For instance, Martha Nussbaum’s well-known capabilities approach echoes this sort of humanist thinking. Nussbaum explicitly seeks to define human being as a normative ethical concept to explicate treatments that are impermissible. Bluntly, the idea is to define human being by appealing to some values and norms, which makes certain capabilities definitive of humanity (e.g. capacities for language and rational thought might be viewed as plausible candidates). The worry with such a strategy though is that the values and norms appealed to will typically persuade only those who antecedently agree that they are the values and norms defining humanity. By contrast, to define human being in a genuinely inclusive manner we might appeal to some human universals, like biological or genetic traits. But, as Louise Antony holds, the traits that putatively have a claim to being such universals have no self-evident normative or ethical import in themselves. So, the prospects of cashing out human being in a way that can ground feminist ethical and political claims seems unpromising because “our” understanding of humanity will either be too normative or not normative enough.
To sidestep these worries about defining human being, I focus directly on dehumanization: how it is that certain acts or ways of treating others conceivably dehumanize and what this tells us about sexist and patriarchal damage to women. For me, rape is a paradigm case of dehumanization, where making this judgement does not first require that we define human being—or so I hold. Looking at the phenomenon of grave sexualized violence (particularly during wartime) can help us develop a general understanding of dehumanization to do explanatory and justificatory work. In short, my view is: an act or a treatment is dehumanizing if and only if it is an indefensible setback to some of our legitimate human welfare interests, where this setback constitutes a moral injury. Through case-studies of wartime sexualized violence, I argue, we can see that this practice depends on viewing women as subjects with life plans and aspirations. The practice precisely aims to thwart those welfare interests that makes the achievement of such plans and aspirations possible. As a result, dehumanization for me encompasses a kind of paradox: to set back someone’s welfare interests, one must recognize the other as having those interests. For legitimate human interests to be violable, it is a necessary precondition to acknowledge these interests as being those of someone. I may be treated in dehumanizing ways, which underpins the oppression that I face; but this does not turn on others taking me as something rather than someone. Precisely because I take instances of contemporary social injustice to work via setbacks to human welfare interests, I advance a sort of humanist feminist.
This understanding of dehumanization can do several things. It can tell us how and why patriarchy damages women by singling out dehumanizing treatments: we can use the definition to identify patriarchal harms and explain why they are wrongful (i.e. they involve indefensible setbacks to legitimate human welfare interests). The notion grounds critiques of the status quo that sustains dehumanization and helps us frame theories of resistance to the treatments and acts singled out. It offers feminist visions of just human relationships thereby highlighting what needs to change: if what goes wrong with certain ways of treating others is that they are dehumanizing, this generates prima facie moral prohibitions against those treatments. Through the lens of dehumanization, we can gain a glimpse of a just future as being one where those designated as “woman” can avoid dehumanizing interest-violations that trade on sexism and patriarchy. In other words, my notion of dehumanization has both the above social theoretical and normative import: it can be used to single out treatments that are damaging to women—and members of all genders – as well as to frame positive responses to such treatments. Neither a thick conception of woman nor of gender plays a pivotal role in meeting these demands. Justice is not about what women qua gendered beings are prevented from achieving. The barriers that dehumanization sets up prevent us from achieving something qua human beings, and being designated as “woman,” “man,” or “trans*” figures in the social explanations of those barriers and what shape they take.
One might wonder why is this a variety of feminism—isn’t this simply humanism? For me, a just feminist future would be one where sexist and patriarchal barriers faced by those designated as “woman” have been removed. But a just future involves more: the removal of those barriers that prevent trans* people, gender non-conforming, and even cis-men from avoiding interest-violations that are grounded in sexism and patriarchy. Thereby, feminism on my view is not only about women; it is about all individuals facing dehumanizing treatments due to sexist and patriarchal social injustices. So, the humanist feminism on offer does not reject the basic tenet of feminism that women as a group face systematic and non-accidental forms of injustice. It simply highlights that women are not alone in having their lives so infringed. Sexist and patriarchal social injustices then do not pose problems just for women; they pose problems for humanity. And therefore, feminism is for everyone.
Mari Mikkola
Mari Mikkola is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Metaphysics at the University of Amsterdam. Her areas of expertise are in feminist philosophy, particularly feminist metaphysics, social ontology, and pornography debates in philosophy. Mikkola's current work deals with philosophical methodology, and prejudicial speech.
