Published in 2021
432 pages
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.
What is this book about?
Material Girls presents a timely and opinionated critique of the culturally influential theory that we each have an inner feeling about our sex called a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our actual biological sex. It makes a clear and humane feminist case for retaining the ability to discuss material reality about biological sex in a range of important contexts, including female-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection. It investigates the intellectual history of gender identity, showing how the concept is linked to a misguided philosophical picture which broadly rejects science and conflates facts about intersex people with facts about trans people. Material Girls concludes with a positive vision for the future, of collaboration between feminists and trans activists, detailing how they could work together to achieve some of their political aims.
