This document summarizes Michael Root's review of Sally Haslanger's book "Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique". The review discusses how Haslanger argues that gender and race are socially constructed categories that systematically disadvantage and subordinate some groups. While gender and race are real and have material consequences, their meanings are defined by social norms and power structures rather than biology. Haslanger uses semantic externalism to argue that the meanings of terms like "man", "woman", "Black", and "White" are determined by experts, not ordinary usage or intuitions.

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Resisting Reality: Social Construction and
Social Critique
MICHAEL ROOT
Sally Haslanger’s Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique is a col-
lection of 13 essays (written between 1993 and 2011, all but one previously pub-
lished).1
The collection is divided into three parts, labelled ‘Social Construction’,
‘Gender and Race’ and ‘Language & Knowledge’. The essays share a theme (gender
and race are socially constructed but nevertheless real), a philosophical perspective
(semantic externalism) and a commitment to social change (ending sexism and
racism).
Gender, according to Haslanger, is the social meaning of sex (2012: 39–42), while
race the social meaning of (geographical) ancestry (what Haslanger calls ‘color’)
(2012: 185–6). While nature divides us by colour and sex, we divide ourselves by
race and gender. While gender and race are real, their reality is of our making, the
result of our social norms and practices rather than our biology, and to the extent
these are unjust, so too are gender and race, the categories and differences we create
and help to sustain.
Though the social meanings of gender and race vary across cultures, as well as
within each social class, according to Haslanger, they everywhere include subordin-
ation, differences in power and privilege based on (actual or imagined) differences
between people of different sexes or ancestry. If categories like man and woman
(gender) or Black and White (race) have essences, comparative privilege is part of
the essence of each. Haslanger writes: ‘In those societies where being (or presumed to
be) female does not result in subordination along any dimension, there are no women’
(2012: 9). In those societies, there might be people who differ in colour (ancestry) but
none who differ in race, people who differ in primary and secondary sex character-
istics but none who differ in gender.
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1 Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. By Sally Haslanger. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012. viii þ 490 pp. £60.00 cloth, £22.50/US$35 paper.
critical notices | 563

2. Non-hierarchical ancestral groups are possible but not races, and non-hierarchical
sex groups are possible but not genders. She writes, ‘on my view to eliminate color
hierarchies is to eliminate race’ (2012: 9). As a result, race and gender should be
resisted. While we might be able to develop more just categories based on colour
(ancestry) or sex, they would not be races or genders; their meaning would be very
different.
Race and gender, Haslanger says (2012: 184), are lived through the body. In order
to resist the reality of gender and race, a man needs to change how he thinks about his
body but also retrain it. Being a man, he has learned to walk or sit as men are expected
to. To resist, he has to change his image of himself but also how he situates himself in
space or (literally) reaches out to others.
The body, according to Haslanger, is a marker not an intrinsic feature of race and
gender. ‘To have a race,’ she writes, ‘is not to have a certain kind of body or ancestry’
(2012: 7). What matters is not a person’s body or ancestry but the body or ancestry
she is imagined to have. As a result, two people could have the same sex or colour
(ancestry) and have a different gender or race, and neither a person’s gender nor her
race supervene on her underlying biology (neither her anatomy nor ancestry).
In Parts One and Two of the book, Haslanger discusses a number of prominent
accounts of gender (MacKinnon 1987) (Butler 1990) and race (Appiah 1992) and
explains where she agrees or disagrees with each. She maintains, for example, that a
feminist account of gender should not rely on anti-realism, the unreality of human
categories or types, as many do, for though gender is not natural, it is nevertheless real
(2012: 148–9). Moreover, she maintains that though race is not a natural kind (has no
underlying biological reality), it is not a myth or illusion, for members of a racial
group can be unified by properties that play a causal role in the structure of the world
even if these properties are not biological (2012: 300–2), and racial terms can have
meanings even if not those ordinary people think they do.
In Part Three, she argues that the meanings of race and gender terms are not fixed
by how we commonly think about gender or race (they are not in the head), any more
than the meaning ‘gold’ is determined by how we commonly think about gold
(Putnam 1975). According to Haslanger, the meaning of kind terms, including
terms for gender and race, are their reference and fixed by (causal) contact or point-
ing, though refined by the theoretical understanding of experts. As a result, most that
ordinary people think or say about gender or race can be mistaken, and were experts
to say, as Haslanger does, that if women were not subordinated to men, there would
be no women, they would not be changing the subject or kidding around but would
mean by ‘women’ what we do.
The (semantic externalist) account Haslanger gives of gender and race is theoretical
and, as a result, should be not evaluated by our ordinary intuitions anymore than a
theoretical account of gold or water should (2012: 394–98 and 382–3). Her goal, she
tells us, is not to capture the ordinary meaning of race or gender but identify the
legitimate purpose, how the category should be used if used at all (2012: 366).
Haslanger calls her realism a ‘minimal realism’, for though, on her view, gender
and race enter into true and false statements about people, individual people do not
have Aristotelian (objectual) essences; types or kinds have real definitions but indi-
viduals do not (2012: 110–2 and 453–55). I, for example, might have had a different
sex and Nelson Mandela a different colour (ancestry). Gender and race, however, are
projectable (enter into law-like generalizations), and whether a person is a woman or
564 | critical notices

3. Black is independent of whether we think so. Moreover, having a race makes a dif-
ference; being White rather than Black has a variety of measurable (physical, psycho-
logical, social and political) consequences. Not only do terms like ‘Black’ or ‘White’
have a meaning, they also have a punch; they are used to help or hurt, to lift us up or
take us down.
According to racial eliminativists (2012: 299–301), since most of our thoughts
about race are mistaken, neither ‘Black’ nor ‘White’ refer to anything, and talk
about races is no different than talk about phlogiston or worries about witches,
much ado about nothing. Haslanger opposes eliminativism. Whatever their political
intentions, eliminativists rob us of a tool in the campaign for racial justice. How can
we say that Black and Whites are not treated equally if the terms ‘Black’ and ‘White’
have no meaning? For Haslanger, races are objective types and the people picked out
by terms like ‘Whites’ or ‘Blacks’ form a real (somewhat unified) group and share a
social position even if not an underlying biology. Experts can spell out the unity
(bond) but experts in social rather than biological theory, with a prescriptive and
not simply descriptive understanding of the type or category (2012: 304–5).
Haslanger’s account of the meaning of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ is novel and provocative,
but her explanation of how a social theorist is able to spell out or understand the
reality of the type (when the ordinary person and biologist is not) is short and in need
of more argument or development.
In her discussion of race, Haslanger focuses on ‘White’ and ‘Black’, but of course
there are more races in the USA than two, and questions about how many more and
how the races differ from ethnicities raise doubts about the meaning or usefulness of
racial categories and labels. Some readers might wonder whether her remarks about
race would be as apt if she had talked less about ‘White’ and ‘Black’ and more about
other official US racial categories and, in particular, ‘Asian’, but her discussion of the
differences between Blacks and Whites (in the USA) is informed and insightful.
Haslanger’s social constructionism, as she explains in Part One (2102: 113–38), is
similar to Ian Hacking’s (Hacking 1999) and draws on his account of interactive
kinds, how language can create reality or, to use his words, ‘make up’ people. She
argues, however, that his account is lacking in three respects. First, it takes social
construction to be a causal process and ignores how social arrangements can define
(constitute) objects and kinds rather than simply cause them to be. Second, it explains
how a gender or race can become part of our self-understanding but not how we can
come to be a man or White without thinking or identifying ourselves as one (I needn’t
identify myself as a White man, according to Haslanger, in order to occupy that
gender or racial position). Third, it assumes that socially constructed kinds can’t
have essences. Like most social constructionists, Hacking assumes that since race
has no underlying biological reality (Whites, for example, don’t share a gene) race
can’t be real in the sense that gold and water are. Haslanger, for reasons she gives in
Part Three (2012: 365–80) disagrees.
In most of Haslanger’s book, both gender and race are (to use Hacking’s term)
debunked (their inevitability challenged). Neither is due to nature; both are sustained
by power, the authority of some over others; both are invidious and neither should be
conserved. However, in one chapter (previously unpublished), on the future of gen-
ders and races (2012: 248–72), Haslanger suggests that gender can be radically
rethought, but race cannot be. We can imagine a meaning of sex based not on sub-
ordination but a real difference between males and females in reproductive capacity
critical notices | 565

4. (2012: 254); however, we cannot radically rethink race and imagine a meaning of
colour based not on domination but a real difference between ancestral groups in
biological capacity.
We could recognize an important biological difference between males and females
but not treat it as a reason for some people to dominate others, but there is no
important biological difference between colours (ancestral groups) to recognize and,
as a result, no reason to radically rethink rather then simply resist race. In asking us to
resist race, Haslanger is not calling for ‘color blindness’ since to address the injustice
of the current practice of racialization, colour has to continue to be noted as long as
racial inequalities persist.
Though Haslanger recommends different futures for gender and race, she says little
about their different pasts. The term ‘race’, (taken to mean people of common descent)
did not appear in English until the later part of the 16th century (Banton 1998), and,
during the age of exploration and colonization, the term primarily served the interests
of European imperialism. People were grouped and ranked by (imagined) origin and
members of higher races took themselves to be the rightful rulers of lower ones. The
term ‘gender’ has a different history, more recent and academic and introduced to
question rather than facilitate the subordination of people based on their biological
differences (Meade and Weiser-Hanks 2006). Before gender there was only sex, and
social as well as biological differences between males and females were discussed using
the same term. If both ‘woman’ and ‘female’ were used, they were used interchange-
ably. Recently, gender came to be distinguished from sex (more or less in the way
Haslanger does) by scholars and activists to explain how sex differences came to play
social roles and became a basis or rationale for subordination. While ‘race’ was coined
as part of an effort to dominate some groups of people, ‘gender’ is used as part of an
effort to free others.
Haslanger’s account of sex and gender differs in a number of interesting respects
from one given by other prominent feminists; many, as Haslanger notes (2012: 183–
218), question any distinction between sex and gender and often use the terms
‘woman’ and ‘female’ or ‘man’ and ‘male’ interchangeably. They maintain that sex
is no more natural than gender; both, they argue, are social, each constructed and
neither is any more found or discovered in nature than the other (Fausto-Sterling
2000). On their view, both sex and gender are invented even if the social meaning
of sex and gender are somewhat different. According to Haslanger, each has a social
meaning (2012: 184–5), but the biological facts of sex (anatomical, reproductive and
chromosomal differences) amount to a natural difference between males and females.
Biology makes us male or female and, in this respect sex, on Haslanger’s view, is
natural even if gender is not; even though a line between the natural and social is
difficult to draw, on Haslanger’s view, there is one.
According to Haslanger, though we have social reasons to draw the biological
distinctions we do, social reasons to distinguish males from females, this does not
imply that the difference between the sexes is social; the distinction between males and
females might be socially conditioned, but the biological differences between them are
natural (2012: 189).
Haslanger does not discuss the argument most commonly given for the sociality of
sex, the argument from intersexuality (Dreger 2000), (Fausto-Sterling 1993). The term
‘intersexed’ is used to describe individuals born with a reproductive anatomy or sex
566 | critical notices

5. chromosomes that do not fit the usual definition of male or female (genitals in be-
tween the usual male and female types or cells with XX and cells with XY chromo-
some). In these cases, sex is graded or continuous rather than discrete or dichotomous,
and if the intersexed are to fit the usual definition of male or female, we rather than
nature have to make them do so. Moreover, anomalies aside, differences between us in
primary or secondary sex characteristics (facial hair as well as sex hormones) are
graded, not sharp. If biological variation (nature) is continuous but divided by us
into units, e.g. sexes or species, genders or races, these units are not in but imposed on
nature, not found but made. In this important respect at least, sex and gender are no
different, one category no less socially constructed than the other.
The constructionist’s argument that sex is no more natural or less social than gender
is similar to one of John Locke’s against real essences (Locke 1689). According to
Locke, the existence of ‘monsters, changelings, strange issues of human birth’ show
that living things do not divide up ‘neatly’ into categories with sharp boundaries; any
lines between them are the result of how we think or talk about them and not the way
they really are. Neither sex nor gender, Locke would say, has a real essence and neither
is any less nominal than the other. Haslanger does not discuss arguments (either past or
present) against the naturalness of sex; I would have liked her to.
Haslanger does not discuss how sex and colour differ in importance in medicine.
Both are used as descriptive as well as analytic variables in epidemiology (in studies of
variations in morbidity and mortality in particular) and in clinical practice (in the choice
of medical treatment). But colour is always a proxy for some more causally relevant
medical trait (e.g. the presence or absence of the sickle cell gene or genes affecting drug
metabolism), while sex is a medically relevant trait on its own. While people of any
colour can suffer from any disease, people of any sex cannot. Prostate cancer is a male
disease in a way that sickle anaemia is not a black one. Haslanger’s essays are more
about how gender and race are similar than how sex and colour are different (pages
248–72 are notable exceptions); while what she writes about the first is interesting and
important, I would have been pleased had she written more about the other.
Resisting Reality is a philosophical rather than personal tale, a book of ideas rather
than an autobiography, but in a few places the writing becomes more personal. In the
first pages of her introduction (2012: 3–4) Haslanger tells how, as a child moving
from Connecticut to Louisiana, race became something to learn about and, soon after,
resist. In a chapter on interracial adoption (2012: 158–82), she draws on her own
experiences as a mother of two Black children to argue that the formation in children
of a healthy identity does not require contact with biological relatives. In a chapter on
mixed race as a racial identity (2012: 273–97), she draws on an experience with her
son to explain how the racial identity of a White parent of a Black child can shift even
if not fully change. The personal stories add a great deal to the book; they enable us to
understand how race is lived rather than simply talked about. Haslanger’s book is
both enlightening and moving and should be read by anyone who thinks hard about
race and gender or has personally felt their importance.
Philosophy Department,
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis MN 55455
rootx001@umn.edu
critical notices | 567

6. References
Appiah, Kwame A. 1992. In My Father’s House. New York: Oxford University Press.
Banton, Michael P. 1998. Racial Theories, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dreger, Domurat Alice. 2000. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1993. The five sexes: why male and females are not enough. The
Sciences 33: 20–24.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of
Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.
Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Haslanger, Sally 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Locke, John. 1689. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Clarendon Edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
MacKinnon, Catherine. 1987. Feminism Unmodified. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Meade, Teresa and Merry Weiser-Hanks, eds. 2006. A Companion to Gender History.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Putnam, Hilary. 1973. Meaning and reference. The Journal of Philosophy 70: 699–711.
Luck, Value and Commitment
CHRISTINE MCKINNON
Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams contains
versions of papers presented at a conference entitled Themes from the Ethics of
Bernard Williams held at the University of Leeds in the summer of 2009.1
As the
book’s title suggests, it does not pretend to provide systematic or definitive expositions
of Williams’s work. Instead, the articles collectively illustrate just how wide-ranging
and deep Williams’s influence has been, even among those philosophers who disagree
fundamentally with some of his claims and who admit to finding some of his argu-
ments less than persuasive.
The volume contains an introduction by the editors and 11 papers, arranged across
five sections, the first three of which reflect central themes in Williams’s work. The
section ‘Ethical Theory’ includes a paper by Brad Hooker (‘Theory versus Anti-
Theory in Ethics’) in which he challenges arguments (including some of Williams’s)
for the ‘anti-theory’ position in ethics and a paper by Philip Pettit (‘The Inescapability
of Consequentialism’) that targets Williams’s objections to consequentialism in
Analysis Reviews Vol 73 | Number 3 | July 2013 | pp. 568–576 doi:10.1093/analys/ant048
ß The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
1 Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams, by Ulrike
Heuer and Gerald Lang. Oxford University Press, 2012. x þ 338 pp. £40.00.
568 | critical notices

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