Philosophy and Gender: Audrey Dubauskas

 In Patricia Collins's article, "It's All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation",  she discusses how the imagined  traditional family ideal is the embodiment of intersectionality within the United States. Intersectionality is the theory that the overlap or combination of social identities, such as gender and race, contributes to systematic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual. The term "family values" or "family ideal" is a type of intersectionality used in the United States, especially in politics. The common idealized family is a heterosexual couple who produce their own biological children; this type of family has a basic  authority structure with the father at the head of the table, making the money. The traditional family ideal constitutes power as an ideological construction and as a principle of social construction. Family ties into intersectionality partly due to how it consists of the relationship b...

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Swiss philosopher during the 18th century, and heavily inspired the French Revolution. Even though he viewed men and women equal, Rousseau believed that women needed to be subordinate to men. Rousseau thought that education should focus on the development of moral traits, instead of facts and figures. The traits that women should obtain are the abilities to attract and keep husbands, manage the household and obey authority. For the 18th century, I believe that  his so-called "prescriptions of education" was based on the social constructs of how women should behave. During this time period, women depended on men for basic necessities, such as shelter and food.  A majority of women did not have jobs or earn money; therefore, they worked in the house and took care of the family, while the men were earning money. Rousseau's ideals for women's education aligns with gender roles during this time.  Today, Rousseau's philosophy of education fo...

 Many cultures have a variation on gender categories for social functions and roles. Although they consider humans as only having two sexes, they believe some humans express their gender in three. In Canada, the Inuit culture recognizes three genders for religious and cultural reasons. A Canadian anthropologist, Bernard Saladin d"Anglure, theorizes that the Inuit third gender is the practice of raising a portion of biological females to dress and act like boys, while a portion of boys are raised to dress and act like girls. D'Anglure believes that the two reasons for gender-swapping are due to economical reasons and "cosmological" reasons. Economically, some children are raised as an opposite gender when there is a gender imbalance in a family. The family will want an equal number of males and females to perform duties associated with the gender. For example, a biological boy may be raised as a girl if the family needs more help with cooking and cleaning. Cosmologica...

Question 1 Response:  Society uses the terms gender and sex interchangeably. However, sex is the technical term to refer to the sex that is chromosomally assigned at birth. Gender is how human beings identitfiy themselves. If a human being is a male chromosomally and female morphologically, then they are considered a male. On the other hand, if the person considers their gender to be female, then they are female. Although being female morphologically means having female form, sex is determined by chromosomes.  There could be sex sub-categories made; however, there are only XY chromosomes and XX chromosomes. When deciding sex chromosomally, there are only two possibilities.  Question 2 Response: When we see someone or meet someone, we assign a gender to someone. According to psychologists, Kessler and McKenna, this is called gender attribution, and we often do this without awareness.   It is possible to meet or interact with someone without performing a gender attribu...

In order to have students open up in the dorms and classrooms, teachers and community assistants have always asked for personal information, such as where we're from, our major, and a couple fun facts. It wasn't until this past year that my teachers and community assistant started asking about preferred pronouns. Originally, I thought there was nothing wrong with asking about preferred pronouns because the intention is to have everyone be comfortable with how they are addressed by the staff of the school. However, after reading Dembroff and Wodak's article "He/She/Ze/They", I realized how intrusive asking about someone's preferred pronoun can be.  No one wants be offensive by accidentally using the wrong pronoun, but asking about someone's preferred pronoun can be a violation of privacy. I agree with Dembroff and Wodak's Moderate Claim of having a duty to not use binary gender-specific pronouns when referring to those who do not want to use he or  she....