Das Margherita-von-Brentano-Zentrum präsentiert im Wintersemester 2025-26 erneut Projekte und Neuerscheinungen aus dem Bereich der Geschlechterforschung der Freien Universität Berlin.
Alle Interessierten sind herzlich dazu eingeladen, Lunch mitzubringen und mitzudiskutieren!
Esther Neuhann (Institut für Philosophie):
Gender Identity and Personhood
My talk has the aim to show that a certain otherwise philosophically attractive conception of personhood is gendered in a problematic way. Personhood, in my view, is not a given but rather an achievement. Being a person essentially means being an individual with concrete abilities to act in the world, rather than a fully indetermined human. A person could, for example, have the specific ability to play volleyball well. As we can see from this example, determining one’s personhood involves culturally appropriating one’s body in a certain way (by volleyball training, for example). However, it seems that in many theories of the person, the first layer of individuation is – implicitly or explicitly – necessarily seen as one’s identification with a recognized gender. Roughly, a child isn’t first interested in volleyball, but first identifies as a boy and can only then be a boy who is interested in volleyball. This is problematic because not everyone identifies with a (mainstream) gender, not everyone’s gender is recognized by others and gender roles are not egalitarian. I end by suggesting the direction in which a novel understanding of embodied personhood should go.
Online Teilnahme: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=mf9fabee075182d31c6b6840d67e73116
