Haslanger's mighty, seventeen-article collection is not merely an introduction to the subject of social construction (SC). Rather, it is a comprehensive reincarnation of the term with all its details sharpened, and its most important applications brought to the fore, designed to set straight social theorists and analytic philosophers across the board. It is careful, yet brave and bold: it takes the idea of social construction, which has been so overexposed as to become indiscernible, admits a deep investment and intellectual commitment to its political potential, and then rises to the challenge of defending it against both its detractors and its sloppy proponents and representatives. Haslanger's picture of SC is brought into focus through the paradigm lenses of race and gender.
The book is an impressionist voyage through society at large, casting light on its inner machinery, deploying analyses of knowledge, language, and ontology, guided by the keen eye of an established analytic philosopher to tackle questions of family, race, gender, ideology, and policy. Though the work spans two decades, it feels current, fresh, and adaptable. Haslanger's writing is lively, precise, and edgy, yet rounded by her personal stake in these issues. I have great respect for the biographical case studies that breathe life into the philosophy; they seem to reflect an intentional commitment to the phenomenological core of feminist philosophy, whilst obliging her to make strong, compelling arguments in order to house the examples within rigorous analytical philosophy.
In what follows, I offer brief summaries of the articles, which are arranged into three sections, dealing with social construction, gender and race, and language and knowledge. The title of the volume is deliberately ambiguous, but Haslanger communicates her desire for it to be interpreted along two lines: to encourage theorists to resist the idea that social constructionism in any way diminishes the present reality of social kinds, but also to ensure that our praxis is centred on resisting unjust social constructions.
The papers in the first section of the anthology provide vital groundwork for Haslanger's view of SC. She sets out to clarify and defend the contention that aspects of reality are socially constructed, and asks to what extent this impacts on our belief that the world is independent of us, i.e. has an objective reality. Haslanger wishes to reject and reach beyond the obvious conclusions of idealism or scepticism to engage with the complexities of the admission that many of the structures within which we lead our lives are produced and maintained by ourselves.
Chapter One takes as its subject the much-discussed androcentrism of traditional epistemology, notably the valorisation of objectivity. Haslanger argues (as a refinement to the work of Mackinnon) that objectivity functions as an epistemic norm which facilitates (sexual) objectification. Specifically, the norm of neutrality, whose paradigm is the procedure of drawing inferences based on observed regularities, permits the entrenchment of socially-constructed norms. In other words, ‘the norm of aperspectivity […] functions to mask the power of the objectifier’ (70). And since we ‘aren't responsible for things' natures, so morality has no foothold’.
In Chapter Two, Haslanger explores the extent to which the social-construction of reality impacts on the extent to which we believe that the world is independent of us: i.e. has an objective reality. Idealism and scepticism are rejected as conclusions in favour of providing a theoretical framework for embracing the independent realities of socially constructed objects and relations. Chapter Three focusses on the advantages of her ‘debunking’ project within social constructionism compared with Ian Hacking's; Haslanger argues that her version of social constructionism is better able to characterise and deconstruct race and gender than is his. Chapter Four confronts the tension between feminist theory and metaphysics: taking on the claim that metaphysics is either irrelevant to feminism, or is politically objectionable (due to, e.g. androcentrism). Haslanger sees this view (as espoused by, e.g. Judith Butler) as misguided, and re-emphasises that it is possible (and correct) to accept social construction without being cornered into anti-realism about social kinds. Metaphysics has the potential to clarify and unmask these distinctions, and can and should be put to good political use.
Chapter Five is one of the most interesting and memorable essays in the collection. Haslanger argues against David Velleman, who claims that it is morally wrong to deprive a child of ongoing contact with their biological parents, since this is an important part of identity formation. She admits from the start that ‘the moral standing of families like mine is at issue’ (159); Haslanger is an adoptive parent, and her personal touches strengthen and enliven her arguments. What follows is a carefully reasoned and impassioned case for disrupting the archaic, alienating hegemony of the family.
Chapter Six is the only previously-unpublished essay, and Haslanger takes the opportunity to draw out the finer details of her brand of social constructionism – a variety that is primed for discussion of gender and race – and to demonstrate that social constructionism need not be positioned against realism, objectivism about kinds, and naturalism. Rather, it can (and should, says Haslanger) work in conjunction with these philosophical commitments, and instead be more usefully defined through its commitment to uncovering the ‘levers for social change’ (184).
The chapters of section two articulate Haslanger's intuitive and much-cited definitions of race and gender. In Chapter Seven, she neatly sidesteps the minefield of essentialism and provides pragmatic conceptions of gender and race that are confidently and clearly stated in terms of privilege and oppression, capturing the oppressors' presumptions as to how people should be marked for oppression on the basis of presumed bodily features. For Haslanger, race and gender are the ‘social meanings’ of colour and sex, respectively. She succeeds in establishing race and gender as socially-constructed kinds, yet simultaneously destabilises these kinds through explicating their moral underpinnings in patterns of domination and subjugation, and their contingency.
In Chapter Eight, a political distinction is drawn between race and gender. Haslanger argues that sex, in its relation to reproductive function, may require differential treatment even in a just, future world, but race, being founded on colour, should expect no correlate. This is not to underestimate the reality of race as the current social meaning of colour in the current context; Haslanger does not recommend that we ignore or minimise the role of race and racialisation in the current world. But ‘after the revolution’ we should demand a world without races, even as we accept that there will still be sexed-bodies requiring differential treatment (for medical and reproductive reasons) in order to guarantee equality.
In Chapter Nine, the definition of race as the social meaning of colour is put to work in the specific case study of transracial adoption. As a white adoptive parent to black adopted children, Haslanger explores the idea that both parent and child adopt ‘mixed’ racial identities, and argues that although a post-racial world should be worked towards, until then ‘the best I can do is to navigate the racial spaces of my life with maps that support and guide me in resisting racial domination and subordination, and to offer my children resources for constructing maps that will sustain them in the face of it’ (296).
Chapter Ten is used to further refine the social constructionist account of race in the previous chapters. Specifically, Haslanger rejects racial eliminativism (c.f. Appiah) and racial naturalism (that is, the belief that race tracks legitimate biological kinds, and that acting differentially in light of these natural divisions is essential for racial justice). Chapter Eleven draws the distinction between individual and institutional oppression, and makes the case for prioritising structural injustices, as they form the existential core of oppression simpliciter. Taking racism as a paradigm, Haslanger offers a definition of oppression which turns on the way in which institutions (e.g. child welfare policies) non-accidentally create, perpetuate, and exacerbate unjust disadvantages to groups, thereby morally wronging that group.
Section three of the volume draws on the groundwork of the first two sections and launches into metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language with the rigour and detail for which Haslanger's work has gained notoriety. Chapter Twelve is especially important in clarifying the most useful role of feminist theory in mainstream epistemology. Avoiding the dead horse of the irredeemable androcentrism of traditional epistemology, Haslanger finds a more subtle angle, and instead focusses on arguing that if pragmatic, normative epistemology is given priority over a priori reflection about knowledge claims, then the contribution of feminist theory is obvious and profound. For then we consider the knowledge community as a whole, and begin to ask what work knowledge is doing in service of that community.
Chapter Thirteen draws a number of important semantic distinctions between the terminology of socially-constructed kinds. Haslanger emphasises that her conceptions of the social kinds race and gender stem from a normative position regarding social justice, and are therefore intended to be part of an ameliorative (or revisionary), rather than a merely conceptual or descriptive, project. Drawing on the definitions in Chapter Two, conceptual analyses focus on the manifest concept in question: what language-users take the concept to be. Descriptive analyses focus on the operative concept in question: the paradigm functional role of the concept. By contrast, ameliorative analyses uncover the target concept: the legitimate concept, i.e. that which we should be employing, given our moral commitments. Haslanger encourages philosophers to be attentive to the gap between the manifest and operative concepts of (e.g.) race and gender, and to discover and build from the target concept as a way of ‘unmasking ideology’. Chapter Fourteen continues in this vein, warning against the fog of ideology, and encourages suspicion with regard to intuitions, particularly where those intuitions are found to scaffold a political hegemony.
Chapter Fifteen explores the idea that the co-existence of multiple ‘social milieus’ seems to imply a moral or political stalemate of ‘milieu relativism’ about particular truths. Haslanger recommends that we adjudicate on the basis of how epistemically sound the practices of a given milieu are: e.g. the extent of the commitment to free speech and internal critique. In that case, ideology critique is not just ‘a matter of changing beliefs, but of creating social spaces that disrupt dominant schemas’ (427). Chapter Sixteen is an exploratory, rather than argument-focussed, piece, which emphasises the importance of cross-pollination within the sub-disciplines of philosophy. She focusses on the way in which the interplay of moral philosophy and the philosophy of language can guide our analysis of the meaning of race terms.
The final article in the volume, Chapter Seventeen, explores the way in which ideology informs the generalisations we make. Working through generics, essences, and implications, Haslanger arrives at a way of understanding social kinds as being the result of ‘discursive identity construction’, a close cousin of Hacking's ‘looping’ between the natural and social. Her recipe for overcoming the limitations and damage caused by politically problematic (and-or false) generics is to recommend that we ‘promote norms and standards for contesting ideology that are more democratic and alert to the muting (and deafening) effect of hegemony’ (475). The hope is that with such standards in place, we are able to ‘reject generics that support false claims about generic essences’ (ibid.).
In the introduction to this volume, Haslanger admits that she toyed with the idea of constructing an extended monograph to present her arguments, rather than a collection of articles. It seems to me that this may have been preferable in ensuring that justice is done to the inter-related body of ideas. There is a good deal of repetition within the book, as the content of articles and the core ideas overlap one another, as might be expected when one collects two decades' worth of substantive, standalone articles. Whether or not the repetition impacts on the reading experience depends on how the book is used. To my view, this volume lends itself to use as a reference book for philosophers and social theorists, or a set text for undergraduates or graduates studying social construction. As it is, sometimes one loses the wood for the trees due to minimal signposting, and the introduction – an interesting piece of writing in its own right – is an invaluable aid in framing and linking the arguments throughout the book.
It would have been interesting to see Haslanger's analysis explicitly deployed against objects, concepts, and methodologies within science, where social construction has such great potential for unmasking ideology and influencing practice and discourse. As it is, her survey of social construction as an imperative in resisting and understanding reality will undoubtedly serve as a springboard for this and other substantial philosophical projects in the coming years. On its own though, it is a ground-breaking work that at once closes vital lacunae in the canon of analytic philosophy and of feminist theory, whilst troubling our conception of reality in a way that raises a new wave of important questions.
