Gender practice questions.

De Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' asserts, within the argument of The Second Sex, that

• womanhood is a situation produced by upbringing, myth and economic dependence
• female bodies acquire their reproductive functions only at the end of a long developmental process
• each woman decides at a definite moment of her life whether to accept or refuse the category
• the word woman picks out no group at all and should be dropped from social description

Answer: womanhood is a situation produced by upbringing, myth and economic dependence

The claim is about a social process, not a biological or a chosen one, which is why reading it as a thesis about bodies is the standard misreading; de Beauvoir does not deny sexed embodiment, she denies that it fixes what a woman is.

Which statement gives Butler's thesis that gender is performative?

• Gender is a costume that an agent selects each day and can discard at will
• Gender is an inner identity that a person's outward behaviour succeeds or fails to express
• Gender is constituted by the compelled repetition of stylised acts, and there is no identity behind them
• Gender is the cultural meaning that a society attaches to a body whose sex is taken as a brute biological fact

Answer: Gender is constituted by the compelled repetition of stylised acts, and there is no identity behind them

Performativity is not theatrical performance: the norms precede the subject and are enforced, so there is no chooser standing behind the acts. Describing gender as a cultural meaning laid over a brute biological sex restates the classical sex/gender distinction, which is precisely what Butler puts in question.

A court rejects a discrimination claim brought by Black women on the ground that the firm hires women into clerical posts and Black men into factory posts, so it discriminates neither by race nor by sex. Which concept names the flaw in that reasoning?

• Cultural imperialism, one of the faces of oppression
• Intersectionality, against single-axis analysis of harm
• Androcentrism, taking the male case as the human norm
• The recognition-redistribution dilemma in claims of justice

Answer: Intersectionality, against single-axis analysis of harm

Crenshaw's point is that a harm suffered at the intersection of two categories disappears when each axis is tested separately; the other three concepts describe real phenomena but none of them explains why the compound claim vanishes in the court's procedure.

A researcher argues that the under-representation of women in a profession is explained by hiring norms, expectations about care work and the way institutions sort people into roles, not by differences in aptitude. Her position is best described as

• gender essentialism, since she treats the professional role as suited to one sex
• an ethics of care, since she gives weight to relationships and responsiveness
• standpoint theory, since she treats the excluded position as epistemically privileged
• social constructionism about gender, since gender is treated as a social position

Answer: social constructionism about gender, since gender is treated as a social position

Constructionism locates gender in social practices and institutions rather than in traits carried by individuals; standpoint theory is a claim about knowledge produced from a social location, so it answers a different question even though the two often travel together.

In her critique of Kohlberg's stages of moral development, Gilligan argues that

• women reason about moral cases less consistently than men and reach a lower stage
• moral development is fixed by biology and cannot be altered by education
• an orientation to care and relationship was scored as immature by a justice-based scale
• the care orientation and the justice orientation are two names for one form of reasoning

Answer: an orientation to care and relationship was scored as immature by a justice-based scale

Gilligan's claim is about the measuring instrument, not about female incapacity: a scale built on impartial rules registers relational reasoning as a deficit. Treating care and justice as identical would dissolve the objection she is making.

Haslanger distinguishes asking what our gender concepts in fact mean from asking what concepts we would do best to use, given the purposes we have. The second, ameliorative question is

• an empirical survey of how speakers actually apply the words
• a normative question about which concept would serve legitimate aims, such as identifying and undoing injustice
• a historical inquiry into when the words entered the language
• a claim that ordinary speakers are mistaken about what they themselves believe, so that ordinary usage has to be corrected by philosophers

Answer: a normative question about which concept would serve legitimate aims, such as identifying and undoing injustice

The point of separating the questions is that a term may be revised for a purpose without anyone claiming to have discovered its hidden real meaning. Objections to a proposal on this approach have to engage the purposes, which is why the debate is conducted openly in normative terms.