Feminist Metaphysics
Metaphysics seems to be one of the least relevant, most foreign, and inhospitable disciplines of philosophy in relation to feminist projects and concerns. Traditional metaphysicians have tried to answer questions about the basic structure of reality, about what kinds of beings exist, about the nature of time and causation, and they have probed difficulties like free will and determinism, the nature of universals and particulars and the like. None of these issues seems directly pertinent to feminism, and their abstract formulation and universalist perspective strike some feminists as deeply suspect. Nonetheless feminist metaphysics has emerged as a distinct and lively field in feminist theory. And there are important connections between feminist work on certain metaphysical issues and mainstream metaphysics.
Feminist metaphysics revolves around three core issues: essentialism and anti-essentialism about sex/gender, theories of the self or the subject, and realism versus social constructionism (a version of the realism/anti-realism controversy in mainstream philosophy). Each of these issues is central to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which is rightly seen as the primary intellectual source for twentieth-century developments in continental and analytic feminist theory. Beauvoir oriented her pioneering work toward ontology and essentialism by defining woman as the Other (in relation to man).
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