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324 20 Sex, Gender, and Hermeneutics Georgia Warnke Introduction From almost the moment feminists and women’s studies scholars began to distinguish gender from sex, they also began to raise questions about the distinction. The original distinction was meant to absolve the biology of sex of the blame for women’s traditionally subordinate position in society. That position, feminists and scholars argued, stemmed not from nature or what they termed the sexed characteristics of female bodies but instead from nurture and gender, from the socially, culturally, and historically embedded views of and practices with regard to women. For example, it was a matter of biological sex that female human beings bore children, but a matter of gender roles and gender assumptions that women also bore the greater responsibility for raising them. Despite the apparent clarity of this distinction and, moreover, its efficacy in some struggles against sexism, at least one sort of question has arisen with regard to sex and two sets of questions with regard to gender . With regard to sex, the question is exactly what the term is meant to designate. Clearly not all female human beings possess the same bodies or capacities. Some have ovaries and some do not; some have the capacity to bear children and some do not. Some females are tall and slender, some small and curvy. With regard to gender, the first set of questions has to do with exclusion. When feminists and scholars refer to women’s gender, what do they actually designate? Do they implicitly refer only or primarily to the gender of white, middle-class heterosexual women? Do they fail to take account in their analyses of women of color, lesbians, or working-class women? The second set of questions has to do with overgeneralization . If feminists and scholars do not intend to exclude such women as women of color, lesbians, or working-class women, do they then suppose that the interests and concerns that white, middle-class, and heterosexual women possess stand in for the interests and concerns of all others? Do they suppose that the challenges the former face are also the challenges of the latter? 325 S E X , G E N D E R , A N D H E R M E N E U T I C S In acknowledging the importance of such questions, feminists and scholars emphasize what they call intersectionality. We cannot assume that either sex or gender marks a homogeneous category but, instead, must acknowledge the intersection of each with race and class, and indeed with nationality, age, ability, and a host of other characteristics. Furthermore , unfolded to its maximal extent, intersectionality raises yet another question. Must we not admit that gender and sex are so entwined with other features of identity that they actually contribute very little to the practical or theoretical examinations for which they are meant to pack a punch? If Mexican-American women are subject to discrimination , should we attribute this circumstance to their gender and/or sex or instead to their nationality, their language, and/or a racialized form of ethnicity? In her recent book, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, Linda Alcoff tries to answer some of these questions by examining the importance of sex and gender for feminist theory.1 Since part of her argument uses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, and since in this paper I want to appeal to Gadamer to make my own claims about the place of sex and gender in social inquiries, I begin with Alcoff.2 Alcoff’s Gadamer Alcoff’s interest in Gadamer centers on his account of what she calls situated reason as “an interpretive process involving the social location of the knower.”3 According to Alcoff, Gadamer’s view here takes its starting point in Heidegger’s recognition of a mode of understanding that is neither entirely practical—understanding, otherwise put, as knowing how to do something—nor entirely theoretical—understanding, otherwise put, as a disengaged knowing that something is or is not the case. Instead, Heidegger is most interested, Alcoff says, in a kind of reflectively practical knowledge. To use Heidegger’s hammer example, in reflectively practical knowledge we are neither simply using a hammer unreflectively nor examining it from a scientific position. Instead, we are “reflectively aware of it but as it exists in the context of our world.”4 “Our world” is the world we experience and in which we live, a world in which things have the meanings they...

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