Social Constructs (or, 'What is A Woman, Really?')

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial.Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent.

Biological Sex is a social construct

I recently tweeted, as an aside, that biological sex is a social construct, and the backlash and attacks were swift, incredulous and heavily reliant upon very basic biology. There is a common perce…

Gender Performativity | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Gender | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression. In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation. Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.

Feminine Panic: Who Gets to Own Masculine Narratives? - Unwinnable

The panic serves control, not preservation.

The problem isn’t that the women are unattractive.

Misogyny masquerading as social critique.

Sharing Knowledge Openly: Author Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Feminist Science

Open science is an increasingly important movement in contemporary social science. Many funders have begun to mandate open practices, newer journals like Socius are open access, and preprint servers have increased readership of paywalled articles. Feminist scholars have written about the values and pitfalls of open research. In this paper, we put those ideas in conversation with each other and empirical data on open-access publishing to develop a feminist framework for thinking about feminist knowledge, data, publishing, and audience. Using a survey of 19,462 social scientists, linked with their entire Web of Science publication history from 2000 to 2023 and all papers posted to SocArXiv, we replicate past work showing that articles by women are less likely to be some types of open access. We extend these findings to scholars of color and feminist scholarship, while also demonstrating a few surprising null results for all three groups.

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

An engaging exploration of what it means to be asexual in a world that’s obsessed with sexual att...

Social Constructs | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Feminism | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology