About this item
Evening StandardSunday Times Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex.Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir's statement that, 'One is not born, but rather becomes a woman' (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed) , to Judith Butler's claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection.
About the Author
Kathleen Stock is a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. She has published on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, and sexual objectification. She is currently the vice-president of the British Society of Aesthetics. In her monograph Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (2017) she examines the nature of fictional content. She has also written a book examining the UK Gender Recognition Act and trans self-identification. Stock has written one monograph and articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and has contributed several chapters to edited volumes. She edited Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (first edition 2007) and together with Katherine Thomson-Jones she edited New Waves in Aesthetics (2008) .She has given lectures at the University of York, the Aristotelian Society, the London Aesthetics Forum, the University of Wolverhampton, the American Society for Aesthetics, and other places.
