The project: What are gender categories?

My dissertation, Genders as Genres, develops a dynamic and pluralist account of genders. I wanted to know in what way ‘genders as social groups’ exist and what it means for people to belong to such a gender. I develop the concept of Dynamic Categories for this purpose, using selected aspects of aesthetic genres as a model for the kind of categories to which genders belong.

Gender categories are difficult to understand. This is for several reasons. For example, every individual exceeds their social categorization, as they take on these categories in more and less concordant, subversive, or resistant ways. Gender is, in this way, very much both an individually personal take and a social positioning, that, again, interacts with larger structures. Moreover, gender categories are enmeshed with other dimensions of social categorization, such as racialization, in ways that changes the categorizations that individuals are then responding to in multiple ways. Another complexity is that gender categories stand out vis a vis other socio-cultural categories in how materiality—in the form of our characteristics, needs, and environment—seems to play a more active role in gender, without determining it. Finally, gender categories are contextually variable and historically developing, not just in what counts as, say, masculine, but also in what gender is about and which categories are enacted in a given socio-historical location at all.

In other words, the task was to conceptualize what, if anything, gender-categories are if we’re doing justice to real-life complexities such as individual uniqueness, ambivalence, location- and context-dependence, perspective-dependence, active materiality, as well as historical change of what gender is about.

From the point of view of Critical Theory, Socio-Cultural Theory, and Metaphysics, the PhD project asked ‘What does it mean to be of a particular gender?’, looking at critical essentialisms and anti-essentialisms in philosophy of gender. My core research results are published in my dissertation, in which I show the consistency and plausibility of the view that genders are similar to (aesthetic) genres in important ways: both are (what I call) Dynamic Categories, i.e., they are categories that emerge and transform in virtue of being realized differently and responsively by us embodied people. To develop genres as a model for genders, I draw on several aesthetic and sociological genre theories.

A monograph, The Genre Approach to Genders, is in progress with De Gruyter, making the results more accessible and further developing the concept. There, I say more about the details and potentials of realizing the similarities between genders and genres: e.g., for theorizing gender as analytically distinguishable yet enmeshed with other dynamic categories (such as race), for describing and explaining concrete gendered and non-gendered phenomena and contexts, or for approaching emancipatory change of gendering norms.

Institutions and Funding

PhD Project 2016 – 2021
ASCA / Philosophy, Universiteit van Amsterdam
NICA / AIHR PhD Research Fellowship
Supervisors:
Prof. dr. Beate Rössler & Prof. dr. Robin Celikates