Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique

Sally Haslanger’s Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique is a collection of 13 essays (written between 1993 and 2011, all but one previously published).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.