Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories [Paperback]

We are women, we are men. We are refugees, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they constructed? This book addresses these questions and offers a bold, new theory of social categories.We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them??sta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful? In a careful, probing investigation, she reveals how social categories are created and sustained and demonstrates their tendency to oppress through examples from current events. To this end, she offers an account of just what social construction is and how it works in a range of examples that problematize the categories of sex, gender, and race in particular. The main idea is that social categories are conferred upon people. ?sta introduces a 'conferralist' framework in order to articulate a theory of social meaning, social construction, and most importantly, of the construction of sex, gender, race, disability, and other social categories.Introduction: Social CategoriesChapter 1: The Conferralist FrameworkChapter 2: Social Construction as Social SignificanceChapter 3: Sex and Gender: From Beauvoir to ButlerChapter 4: Conferralism about Sex and GenderChapter 5: Conferralism about Other Social CategoriesChapter 6: Identity as Social LocationConclusion: Categories We Live By: Systematicity and OppressionBibliographyIndex?stais Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She works mainly in metaphysics, feministlĨ