The Entrapment Behind Social "Categories"

 

    When beginning the reading of Asta's book, Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race and Other Social Categories, I was introduced to the metaphysics of social categories from a feminist analytic metaphysics perspective. 

    As opposed to the reading of Butler’s book, Beyond the Binary, I frequently found myself researching certain words and topics to try to better understand what I was reading. For example, I learned that metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space through the use of the Oxford Dictionary. 

    Asta’s book focuses on the question of what a social category is and why it has come to exist in our present-day society. Asta uses metaphysics to explain social categories as a feminist. She does this by giving a theory of the social properties of the individuals that define these categories. I felt as though her want to define social categories has gone against what I have learned throughout this class, which is that these categories such as “women” or “queer” cannot be defined or set into stone. 

    In the first chapter, Asta explains her idea that the social properties of individuals are conferred properties.  After researching what exactly a “conferred property” consisted of, I found out that conferred is the process of giving (something, such as a property or characteristic) to someone or something. This made me think of the implication that society categorizes people in varying ways. We place people into certain groups and do not offer them the possibility of escape. This reminds me of a sociological theory of deviance, known as labeling theory. This idea depicts that people come to identify and behave in ways that reflect how others label them.

    The act of classification does more harm than good, granting certain people’s lives as more important than others. For example, women recieve 82 cents to every dollar men make for performing the same duties. Placing a human into the category of a "woman" thereby lessens their ability to earn the same amount as their male counterparts. This is one of many instances which prove the downfall of placing a label on a person.

    Asta speaks of communal acts of conferring in which individuals are placed and the classification of individuals through institutional acts of conferring. I believe doing so furthers social stereotypes because doing so literally divides people, placing varying expectations upon each of them. In order to further our society, we must join together instead of further dividing the population based on issues of gender, race, sex, etc.