Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:38:12.268Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Modeling Gender as a Multidimensional Sorites Paradox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2021

Rory W. Collins Open the ORCID record for Rory W. Collins [Opens in a new window]
Rory W. Collins*
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury, 20 Kirkwood Ave, Ilam, Christchurch8041, New Zealand
*
Corresponding author. rorycollins97@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Gender is both indeterminate and multifaceted: many individuals do not fit neatly into accepted gender categories, and a vast number of characteristics are relevant to determining a person's gender. This article demonstrates how these two features, taken together, enable gender to be modeled as a multidimensional sorites paradox. After discussing the diverse terminology used to describe gender, I extend Helen Daly's research into sex classifications in the Olympics and show how varying testosterone levels can be represented using a sorites argument. The most appropriate way of addressing the paradox that results, I propose, is to employ fuzzy logic. I then move beyond physiological characteristics and consider how gender portrayals in reality television shows align with Judith Butler's notion of performativity, thereby revealing gender to be composed of numerous criteria. Following this, I explore how various elements of gender can each be modeled as individual sorites paradoxes such that the overall concept forms a multidimensional paradox. Resolving this dilemma through fuzzy logic provides a novel framework for interpreting gender membership.

Type
Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Spring 2021 , pp. 302 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alderson, David. 2014. Acting straight: Reality TV, gender self-consciousness and forms of capital. New Formations 83: 7–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Susan M., and Woods, Katie. 2019. Reality television and the doing of hyperauthentic masculinities. Journal of Men's Studies 27 (2): 149–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aristotle. 1941a. Metaphysics. Trans. Ross, W. D.. In The basic works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon, Richard. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Aristotle. 1941b. Nicomachean ethics. Trans. Ross, W. D.. In The basic works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon, Richard. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1993. The second sex. Trans. Parshley, H. M.. New York: Everyman's Library.Google Scholar
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2012. Trans women and the meaning of “woman.” In The philosophy of sex: Contemporary readings, 6th ed., ed. Power, Nicholas, Halwani, Raja, and Soble, Alan. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Blumenfeld, Remy, and Hay, Gavin, producers. 2004. There's something about Miriam. London: Brighter Pictures.Google Scholar
Burkitt, Ian. 1999. Bodies of thought: Embodiment, identity and modernity. London: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Collins, Rory. 2018. On the borders of vagueness and the vagueness of borders. Vassar College Journal of Philosophy 5: 30–44.Google Scholar
Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). 2019. Semenya, ASA and IAAF: Executive summary. https://www.tas-cas.org/en/general-information/news-detail/article/semenya-asa-and-iaaf-executive-summary.html.Google Scholar
Cralley, Elizabeth L., and Ruscher, Janet B.. 2005. Lady, girl, female, or woman: Sexism and cognitive biases predict use of gender-biased nouns. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 24 (3): 300–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daly, Helen L. 2011. Vagueness and borderline cases. PhD dissertation, University of Arizona.Google Scholar
Daly, Helen L. 2015. Sex, vagueness, and the Olympics. Hypatia 30 (4): 708–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daly, Helen L. 2017. Modelling sex/gender. Think 46 (16): 79–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1988. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press.Google Scholar
Dreger, Alice Domurat. 2000. Hermaphrodites and the medical invention of sex. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Durant, Will. 1927. The story of philosophy: The lives and opinions of the greater philosophers. London: Ernest Benn.Google Scholar
Endicott, Timothy A. O. 2000. Vagueness in law. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Goguen, J. A. 1969. The logic of inexact concepts. Synthese 19 (3–4): 325–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haack, Susan. 1979. Do we need “fuzzy logic”? International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 11: 437–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hájek, Petr. 1999. Ten questions and one problem on fuzzy logic. Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 96: 157–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Jacob. 1996. Are lesbians women? Hypatia 11 (2): 94–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herbig, Friedo J. W. 2014. The phronesis of conservation criminology phraseology: A genealogical and dialectical narrative. Phronimon 15 (2): 1–17.Google Scholar
Heyman, Gail D., and Giles, Jessica W.. 2006. Gender and psychological essentialism. Enfance 58 (3): 293–310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hird, Myra J. 2006. Animal transex. Australian Feminist Studies 21 (49): 35–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyde, Dominic. 2008. Vagueness, logic and ontology. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). 2018. Eligibility regulations for the female classification (athletes with differences of sex development). https://www.iaaf.org/news/press-release/eligibility-regulations-for-female-classifica.Google Scholar
International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). 2019. CAS upholds IAAF's female eligibility regulations. https://www.iaaf.org/news/press-release/cas-female-eligibility-regulations.Google Scholar
Jagose, Annemarie. 1996. Queer theory: An introduction. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Keas, Michael N. 2018. Systematizing the epistemic virtues. Synthese 195 (6): 2761–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keefe, Rosanna. 1998. Vagueness by numbers. Mind 107 (427): 565–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keefe, Rosanna. 2000. Theories of vagueness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kelly, Howard A. 1895. “Female” or woman. American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children 31 (3): 394–94.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1977. Objectivity, value judgment, and theory choice. In The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kutner, Nancy G., and Brogan, Donna. 1974. An investigation of sex-related slang vocabulary and sex-role orientation among male and female university students. Journal of Marriage and Family 36 (3) 474–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacFarlane, John. 2010. Fuzzy epistemicism. In Cuts and clouds: Vagueness, its nature, and its logic, ed. Dietz, Richard and Moruzzi, Sebastiano. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marra, Vincenzo. 2014. The problem of artificial precision in theories of vagueness: A note on the rôle of maximal consistency. Erkenntnis 79 (5): 1015–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mikkola, Mari. 2019. Feminist perspectives on sex and gender. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Fall 2019 ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/feminism-gender/.Google Scholar
Naidu, Maheshvari. 2008. Inscribing the female body: Fuzzy gender and goddess in a South Indian Saiva marriage myth. Journal for the Study of Religion 21 (1): 19–35.Google Scholar
Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Sylvia. 2009. Female-men, male-women, and others: Constructing and negotiating gender among the Baganda of Uganda. Journal of Eastern African Studies 3 (2): 367–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicholas, Lucy. 2019. Queer ethics and fostering positive mindsets toward non-binary gender, genderqueer, and gender ambiguity. International Journal of Transgenderism 20 (2–3): 169–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nolan, Daniel. 1999. Is fertility virtuous in its own right? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (2): 265–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nowakowski, Alexandra C. H. 2019. The salt without the girl: Negotiating embodied identity as an agender person with cystic fibrosis. In “Gender and Identity,” special issue of Social Sciences 8 (3): 1–18.Google Scholar
Potts, Annie. 2001. The body without orgasm: Becoming erotic with Deleuze and Guattari. International Journal of Critical Psychology 1 (3): 140–64.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. O. 1951. Two dogmas of empiricism. Philosophical Review 60 (1): 20–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Safire, William. 2007. Woman vs. female. New York Times Magazine, March 18.Google Scholar
Sainsbury, R. M. 2009. Paradoxes, 3rd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunders, Karen. 2008. Queer intercorporeality: Bodily disruption of straight space. Master's thesis, University of Canterbury.Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas J. J. 2005. Vagueness as closeness. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (2): 157–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Nicholas J. J. 2008. Vagueness and degrees of truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Nicholas J. J. 2011. Fuzzy logic and higher-order vagueness. In Understanding vagueness: Logical, philosophical and linguistic perspectives, ed. Cintula, Petr, Fermüller, Christian G., Godo, Lluis, and Hájek, Petr. London: College Publications.Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas J. J. 2012. Measuring and modeling truth. American Philosophical Quarterly 49 (4): 345–56.Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas J. J. 2015. Fuzzy logics in theories of vagueness. In Handbook of mathematical fuzzy logic, vol. 3, ed. Cintula, Petr, Fermüller, Christian G., and Noguera, Carles. London: College Publications.Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas J. J. 2019. Problems of precision in fuzzy theories of vagueness and Bayesian epistemology. In Vagueness and rationality in language use and cognition, ed. Dietz, Richard. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.Google Scholar
Smothers, Thairin, producer. 2019. Whatcha unpackin? Season 11, episode 1, RuPauls's Drag Race. Los Angeles: World of Wonder Productions.Google Scholar
Sotirin, Patty. 2011. Becoming-woman. In Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts, 2nd ed., ed. Stivale, Charles J.. Durham, UK: Acumen.Google Scholar
Thornton, Edward. 2018. On lines of flight: A study of Deleuze and Guattari's concept. PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London.Google Scholar
Unger, Peter. 1979. There are no ordinary things. Synthese 41 (2): 117–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Brenda R. 2014. Trash talk: Gender as an analytic on reality television. In Reality gendervision: Sexuality and gender on transatlantic reality television, ed. Weber, Brenda R.. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Williamson, Timothy. 1994. Vagueness. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Windsor, Joshua. 2015. Desire lines: Deleuze and Guattari on molar lines, molecular lines, and lines of flight. New Zealand Sociology 30 (1): 156–71.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Trans. Anscombe, G. E. M.. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Young, Damon. 2016. Female vs. woman. Ebony 71 (5): 32–32.Google Scholar