Kant on sex and gender. Or: Is femininity only education?

Abstract

Much has been written about Kant’s misogyny. His remarks about the “Geschlechtscharaktere” (features of the sexes) have been interpreted as evidence of his negative attitude towards women. Most of these comments on “women’s nature” overlook the fact that Kant used the term “nature” differently, depending on the focus of each writing. Such a focus might be empirical, transcendental or pragmatic. In fact, Kant described “masculine” and “feminine” as social categories in the sense of twentieth-century gender concepts that assume a biological sex and a cultural or social gender. A small side-note on whether “femininity is only education or a natural disposition” illustrates Kant’s awareness of these categories and the importance of socio-cultural influences. In his opinion, both sexes can exceed both gender ideals, the feminine and the masculine, and thus present a distorted picture of the respective gender ideal – independently of the biological sex. I will show that Kant advocated a degree of freedom regarding gender identity and thus foreshadowed the gender theories developed in the late twentieth century, which are heteronormative but not essentialist.

Keywords

• gender
• sex
• heteronormativity
• heterosexual matrix
• essentialism
• kant
• butler