Body, mind, and spirit Education, gender wars, and personal identity

The current ideological battle over gender has raised the question of personal identity anew. Following the critiques of feminist scholars such as Judith Butler, the view that gender is a social construct has gained some traction among postmodern scholars. It has also seen schools become battlegrounds over whether they are places where gender theory ought to be introduced. The idea that there are only male and female has been attacked for ignoring the LGBQTI+ community, some of whom argue that the binary classification of human beings belies the extent of possible genders and indeed, fails to recognise those who do not identify as either male or female. This returns us to the question of whether we are our bodies or our souls, understood as mind or consciousness. We make use of Locke’s account of personal identity to propose that the body cannot be reduced to a peripheral role in any account of personal identity. Gender theory is a form of idealism that draws from Hegel, but departs significantly from him, in which even the body is a construction. By examining the work of Butler, we argue against her view that the assignment of a sex forecloses other kinds of identification on the grounds that this denies our reality as physically embodied beings. We contend that her appropriation and reinterpretation of Hegel’s conception of desire leaves out its most important relational and transcendental aspects and so reduces self-consciousness and hence personal identity to a solipsist preoccupation with individual needs. We propose that the form of idealism represented by gender theory is not only incoherent, but fails to acknowledge the essentially embodied nature of human beings.

© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Steven A. Stolz; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.