Categories We Live by: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories By Ásta

In Categories We Live By, Ásta defends a general framework of the metaphysics of social categories like women, Asian, and refugee. The book builds on Ásta’s earlier work developing a conferralist account of social categories while expanding it in significant ways. Her aim is to show ‘the conferralist framework can be used to make sense of any social category’ (4). The book defends a view that is a major contribution to feminist metaphysics and social ontology. More generally, it also encourages us to reflect on the interplay between appearance, reality, and normativity. Social categories or social kinds are classes ‘defined by a unifying property’ (2, n. 1). Ásta divides social categories into two sorts – those that are institutional (e.g., married person, registered voter) and those that are communal (e.g., man, lesbian). Both involve conferring social properties on individuals through speech acts, other actions, and explicit or implicit attitudes...