About

This thesis will argue that Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of difference offers solutions to the “standoff between radical feminism and trans* feminism” today [1], enabling understandings of gender as performative and sociopolitically instituted, while also being tied to material, sexed bodies. My existential account of sex and gender will thereby avoid the metaphysical and biological gender essentialisms fuelling contemporary trans exclusion, while upholding the corporeality of trans bodies.

My account will first need to remedy Heidegger’s suppression of sexuate difference, challenging its defence by Jacques Derrida. Derrida contends that Heidegger’s account of sex and gender reflects Heidegger’s “deconstructive” attention to difference. In Heidegger’s argument that humans are fundamentally and “ontologically” sexually neutral [2], Derrida identifies a path to overcoming binary sex, freeing individual expression [3][4]. For Luce Irigaray and Mahon O’Brien, Heidegger instead homogenises sexuate difference, elevating the male as “model” for humanity [5][4]. Analysing a shared human Being for universal conditions of truth and language, Heidegger excludes sex and gender as derivative of his “ontological” analysis. He can then universalise from a presupposed, “ontic” account of Western masculine Being, homogenising sexuation and calling for the “absorption” of female into male [6].

Rectifying Heidegger’s “monosexuality” [7], I will support Irigaray’s argument that sexuate difference is constitutive of being human, questioning whether an ontological sexuation can facilitate different ontic expressions of sex and gender. I will then explore how this rehabilitated Heideggerian ontology challenges gender “essentialism”, supporting trans autonomy. I will argue that gender self-identification respects human “potentiality” and “facticity”, without undermining the “factuality” of the body or privilege. Critically rereading Heidegger’s “doctrine of ontological historicity”, I will further argue that concepts of sex and gender evolve as they are reflected in communal practices, calling for adherence to Hubert Dreyfus’ call to propagate the marginalised within contingent structures of meaning [8].

Bibliography:

 [1] Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).
[2] Derrida, Jacques (1983), “Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference”, Research in Phenomenology, 13(1): 65-83. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1163/156916483X00043 on 08 December 2023.
[3] Derrida, Jacques, Geschlecht III, Bennington, Geoffrey, Chenoweth, Katie, and Therezo, Rodrigo (eds.), Chenoweth, Katie, and Therezo, Rodrigo (trans.) (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020).
[4] Glendinning, Simon (2022), “Existence in its Sexual Being”, Paragraphs, 45(3): 285-301. Retrieved from https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/para.2022.0405 on 20 December 2023.
[5] Irigaray, Luce, Krell, David Farrell and O’Brien, Mahon, in Irigaray, Luce (ed.), Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
[6] Heidegger, Martin, “Language in the Poem”, in Heidegger, Martin, On the way to language, Hertz, Peter D. (trans.) (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1982).
[7] Preciado, Paul B., (2023), “Paul Preciado on Binaries, Barbie, and Adapting Virginia Woolf”, interviewed by Williams, Connor, Interview Magazine, 23 October 2023. Retrieved from https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/paul-preciado-on-binaries-barbie-and-adapting-virginia-woolf-for-the-screen on 21 December 2023.
[8] Dreyfus, Hubert, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics”, in Wrathall, Mark A. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).