Skip to main content
The Australian National University
School of Philosophy
ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences
School of Philosophy ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences
 School of Philosophy

School of Philosophy

  • Home
  • People
  • Events
    • Event series
    • Conferences
      • Past conferences
    • Past events
  • News
    • Audio/Video Recordings
  • Research
  • Study with us
    • Prizes and scholarships
  • Visit us
  • Contact us
 Centres & Projects

Centres & Projects

  • Centre for Consciousness
  • Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory
  • Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences
  • Humanising Machine Intelligence
 Related Sites

Related Sites

  • Research School of Social Sciences
  • ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences

Centre for Consciousness

Related Sites

Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory

Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences

School of Philosophy

Administrator

Breadcrumb

HomeUpcoming EventsGender Abolitionism, Gender Transitioning, and Nonbinary Identities - Holly Lawford-Smith (uMelb)
Gender abolitionism, gender transitioning, and nonbinary identities - Holly Lawford-Smith (uMelb)

MSPT Seminar (17/09/2018): Holly Lawford-Smith (uMelb)

Gender abolitionism, gender transitioning, and nonbinary identities

Here is a plausible view: gender is a cage. Or to be more precise, it’s two cages: ‘man’ and ‘woman’. The cages trap people with the biological sex ‘male’ and ‘female’. Those of the male sex are trapped as men, those of the female sex are trapped as women. Gender roles come along with stereotypes and fixed expectations about behaviour, and these constrain the ways that people can present themselves, and can behave–at least without fear of censure. It would be bad enough if our current gender system only trapped people into roles that were ‘equal but different’. But it does more than that; it traps people into roles that are unequal. The ‘man’ class of people oppresses the ‘woman’ class of people. Bad science is wheeled in to justify this inequality, and violence and other forms of social policing work to maintain it. If genders are cages, then surely we want to let people out. But there’s a question about what we should be aiming for in terms of ending gendered oppression (the ideal) and how we should get there (the best transitional pathway). Should we open the doors to the cages, so that people can move freely between them, but leave the cages themselves in place? Should we make the cages bigger, so that people have a lot more room to move around inside them? Or should we dismantle the cages, so there are no more gender roles at all, just males and females free to do and be whatever they like? In this paper I'll consider these three pathways and their comparative tradeoffs, arguing that the worst pathway is to merely open the cage doors, while which is the best pathway depends on resolving an empirical question about the resilience of the gender binary in its current form.

 

 

Date & time

  • Mon 17 Sep 2018, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location

Room 2.02 Sir Roland Wilson Building, ANU

Speakers

  • Holly Lawford-Smith (uMelb)

Event Series

MSPT seminars

Contact

  •  Oliver Rawle
     Send email
Back to topicon-arrow-up-solid
The Australian National University
 
APRU
IARU
 
edX
Group of Eight Member

Acknowledgement of Country

The Australian National University acknowledges, celebrates and pays our respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people of the Canberra region and to all First Nations Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and work, and whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history.


Contact ANUCopyrightDisclaimerPrivacyFreedom of Information

+61 2 6125 5111 The Australian National University, Canberra

TEQSA Provider ID: PRV12002 (Australian University) CRICOS Provider Code: 00120C ABN: 52 234 063 906