Race and Gender: Philosophical Issues (PHIL30052)

In this subject students explore race and gender and their interconnection. Is race a biological category, a socially constructed category, or a pernicious fiction? Currently humans are divided into hierarchies along race and gender lines, but what would a just future look like: one in which race and gender have become history, or one in which your race or gender no longer marks you out for unequal treatment? Historically and currently, all settler-colonial countries racialize their First Nation peoples. Anti-racist movements, such as Black Lives Matter, aim to undo this structural racism, but would doing that be enough to fully address the justice claims of First Nation peoples? 

As well as exploring these fundamental questions about the social categories of race and gender, the subject also uses tools from philosophy of language and epistemology to explore application areas, including when if ever it is morally permissible to vandalize monuments, whether pornography subordinates and silences women, what hate speech is and what our response to it should be, and what white ignorance is and how to combat it.