Feminist Metaphysics

Although The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir inaugurated an exploration of the ontology of sex, gender and identity in the mid-twentieth century, the field of feminist metaphysics has been slow to develop. There are a number of explanations for this the more obvious relevance of ethics and political theory for feminism, the suspicion of some feminists working in the continental tradition towards metaphysics, and the assumption that metaphysical theories are ahistorical, fixed, and irrelevant to feminist concerns. A growing body of work in feminist metaphysics has succeeded in dispelling each of these presuppositions by showing that metaphysical questions are relevant to feminist philosophy (Frye, Witt, Haslanger) and that ontological questions need not be divorced from the changing social context in which they arise (Alcoff). Feminist Metaphysics will be a landmark volume in feminist philosophy because it is the first collection of papers devoted entirely to the field of feminist metaphysics.