The interaction between Wittgensteinian scholarship and feminist philosophy, broadly construed, has proved fruitful on multiple levels, particularly in the study of social phenomena and the interconnectedness between language and human practices. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s investigations into forms of life suggest their fundamentality and, at the very same time, their contingency; this provides a fertile terrain for work that emphasizes the depth and the possibility of transforming the social and linguistic matrix that shapes our ways of living. In this cluster, we put the later Wittgenstein’s perspective to use with the specific aim of illuminating aspects of social identities, in particular gender and sexual identities. This is an area that has, in recent times, seen a proliferation of studies, in parallel with the increasing complexity of the phenomena themselves: identity labels, in the case of both gender and sexual orientation, tend to multiply. On the one hand, this testifies to the increasingly nuanced understanding of the different aspects involved in these phenomena and the importance they may have in a person’s life, and on the other hand it signals that strong and traditionally defined sexual and gender identities are becoming somewhat outdated, to the extent that in some cases they are not even felt to be fundamental in people’s self-understanding.

One of the articles in this cluster focuses on sexual orientation in its examination of the case of bisexuality, and the other two concentrate on gender identity, focusing on the concept woman and on trans-inclusive approaches to gender concepts.

In “Bisexuality and Hermeneutical Injustice: Towards New Conceptual Tools,” Anna Boncompagni argues, after providing an overview of the specific forms of hermeneutical injustice faced by bisexual individuals, that the case of bisexuality shows some problematic aspects of the metaphor of “hermeneutical gaps” introduced by Miranda Fricker and generally adopted in the subsequent literature on the subject. In fact, while bisexuality shows the complexity of hermeneutical difficulties, which are not limited to the mere absence of words, the metaphor of the gap suggests that reality is “out there” independent of interpretation, and that language is ideally a sort of mirror that can be more or less apt to capture it. What gets lost in this picture is how relevant our conceptual apparatus is not only in the representation but also in the shaping of our very perception and understanding of social realities and personal identities. Boncompagni then proposes as an alternative conceptual tool the Wittgensteinian notion of hinges, a metaphor introduced in his later work, around 1950. Hinges are taken-for-granted certainties that, by remaining unchallenged, constitute the basis of our epistemic practices, define their contours, and make them possible, just as the hinges of a door allow it to work by staying put. Such a notion conveys simultaneously the fundamentality of our certainties and their deeply human nature: hinges are not foundations in the traditional sense, so much so that at least some of them are historically changeable. This notion, differently from that of hermeneutical gaps, helps us better understand the difficulties faced by bisexual individuals, caught in the interplay between a widespread binary social hinge that divides the human geography into the two categories of gay versus straight, and their own personal and vulnerable awareness about the possibility of being attracted to more than one gender. Moreover, as another Wittgensteinian metaphor shows—namely the image of the riverbed of thought—hinge-certainties themselves can slowly alter over time, just like the bed of a river that can gradually shift in response to the flow of the water.

It is not only the notion of hinges that proves interesting in addressing social identities. Indeed, one of Wittgenstein’s most famous conceptual innovations, the idea of family resemblances, is employed by Annalisa Coliva in combination with the notion of hinges in her paper, “More and Happier Women: On the Political Significance of Wittgenstein and Hinge Epistemology.” Coliva argues that the notion of family resemblances not only makes sense of our actual linguistic practices but also allows us to account for how linguistic use, and hence the meaning of our words, can change over time. In the context of feminist analyses of the concept woman, in particular, Coliva claims that a Wittgensteinian approach is better equipped to make room for more inclusivity than the Carnap-inspired approach propounded by Sally Haslanger in her proposal of a redefinition of woman based on subordination. Indeed, while the latter approach is typically top-down, as it was envisioned for scientific concepts with the goal of making them more precise in the service of building empirically testable theories, a Wittgensteinian approach is typically bottom-up: it urges philosophers to pay attention to the ordinary use of words rather than revising existing concepts or designing new ones. While both projects are anti-essentialist, they pursue their aims differently. Seeing woman as a family resemblance concept means dropping the requisite of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for meaning, which amounts to dropping the idea that in order to be considered a woman a person needs to possess a set of necessary and jointly sufficient traits. It is, instead, the way in which the concept is employed in different contexts that determines its meaning, with the corollary that such meaning can change over time. In addition, Coliva argues that present-day attempts to extend the application of the concept woman to be more inclusive may be made sense of in terms of a battle between a conservative hinge that sees gender as binary and coinciding with sex assigned at birth, and a progressive hinge according to which gender is determined by the way in which individuals self-identify.

The paper by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Constantine Sandis, “Reconceptualizing Gender (from the Stream of Life),” also proposes a Wittgensteinian understanding of the mutability of gender concepts that is rooted in the idea that our concepts alter with time in accordance with the practices within which they are embedded. To support their view and its general applicability, they offer a range of examples of actual changes in our linguistic and conceptual practices, some of which have also been discussed in the philosophy of language and, in some cases, in law regulations. For instance, the evolution of plant-based variants of items traditionally made from animal products (meat and dairy) has led to words such as “milk,” “burger,” “cheese,” or “sausage” being used to label vegan products, usually in combination with the adjectives “vegan,” “plant-based,” or the like. What, then, is the meaning of “burger” today? Isn’t it different from what it was some time ago? Or, to take a case that has a longer history: given that “almond milk” or “soya milk” have existed for quite some time, has the meaning of “milk” changed since the use of these labels has become widespread? It looks like, if there is a use for such labels that is generally understood, meanings have indeed shifted, and this quite independently of legal bans that are in effect in some countries. Another analogy is the use of “parent” to include “adoptive parent” (and the same for children). What it means to be a parent is not strictly determined by biology, although there are contexts in which what kind of parent a parent is, is important (consider transfusion or inherited illnesses, for instance). Moyal-Sharrock and Sandis’s point is not that in the case of gender things are exactly the same, but that thinking about these analogies helps us to overcome the essentialist picture of meaning as fixed, and helps us to see that concepts, including gender concepts, evolve alongside human practices and behavior. Inclusive gender concepts, therefore, as well as neologisms and inclusive pronouns, emerge from human practices in what Wittgenstein called the “stream of life.”

To conclude, while as authors of the three articles we employ different notions from Wittgenstein, or sometimes the same notions with slightly different interpretations, we all believe that his framework is extremely helpful in advancing our understanding of phenomena relating to sexual and gender identities, and that this is just one example of how his work might be put to use in a constructive and politically progressive way. Far from being inimical to social change, Wittgenstein’s philosophy offers tools that may in fact be conducive to it.