Sally Haslanger

Quick Facts

• American philosopher born in 1955.
• Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at MIT.
• Works in social ontology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, metaphysics, epistemology, and ideology critique.
• Best known for social construction, ameliorative analysis, and accounts of race and gender as social positions.
• Main book: Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (2012).
• Also known for connecting analytic philosophy with feminist and anti-racist social theory.

The Big Question

How can race and gender be made by social life and still be real enough to harm people?

Haslanger asks what social categories are, how they get built, how they stay in place, and what concepts we need if we want to understand injustice clearly.

In One Minute

Sally Haslanger argues that social construction does not mean "fake." Money is socially made, but bills still have to be paid. A job title is socially made, but it can decide who has authority. Race and gender work in a similar way. They are not biological essences, but they are real social positions created by practices, institutions, and expectations.

Her best-known method is ameliorative analysis. This means asking what a concept should do for us. Instead of asking only "What do people usually mean by woman, man, race, or gender?", Haslanger asks, "What concepts help us explain and fight sexism and racism?"

This made her central to feminist metaphysics and social ontology. Metaphysics asks what kinds of things exist. Social ontology asks what kinds of social things exist: money, marriage, citizenship, race, gender, offices, and roles.

What They Taught

Haslanger taught that social categories can be socially made and still be objective features of the world we live in. "Objective" here does not mean independent of human beings. It means not up to one person's opinion. One person cannot make a dollar worthless by rejecting money. One person cannot escape racial hierarchy by rejecting race.

This is why she rejects two easy answers. One answer says race and gender are natural kinds, fixed by biology. Haslanger thinks that is wrong. Bodies matter, but biology does not sort people into social ranks by itself. The other answer says race and gender are illusions because they are socially constructed. She thinks that is also wrong. Social practices can make categories real in everyday life.

Her account is political from the start. She is not mainly trying to record ordinary dictionary meanings. She wants concepts that reveal injustice. In "Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?", she argues that feminists and anti-racist theorists need categories that show how bodies and ancestry get interpreted inside systems of power.

Her early account of gender treats it as a social position tied to sex-marked hierarchy. A person is positioned as a woman, in this critical sense, when they are treated as subordinate because others read or imagine their body as female. A person is positioned as a man when they are treated as privileged because others read or imagine their body as male. This is not meant to reduce gender to personal identity. It is meant to explain a system that distributes power, work, respect, danger, and authority.

Her account of race is parallel. Race is not a biological essence that determines intelligence, virtue, culture, or ability. It is a social position connected to interpreted ancestry, appearance, and history. In the United States, racial positioning can affect housing, schooling, policing, medical treatment, employment, safety, and political voice. Race is real because those patterns are real.

Haslanger also changed philosophical method. She distinguishes different projects. A descriptive project asks how people actually use a word. A conceptual project asks what people think they mean. An ameliorative project asks what concept we should use for a purpose. If the purpose is criticizing injustice, the best concept may improve on ordinary speech rather than copy it.

Social practices do much of the work in her later writing. A social practice is a repeated pattern of action, interpretation, and material arrangement. Hiring interviews, police stops, classroom discussions, medical forms, bathrooms, and clothing norms are all possible examples. Practices shape how people see one another, and those ways of seeing keep the practices going.

Ideology is the glue. For Haslanger, ideology is not just a set of stated beliefs. It is a pattern of habits, feelings, assumptions, and responses that makes a social order feel normal. A manager may sincerely say hiring is merit-based while still treating one accent as "professional" and another as "rough."

The title Resisting Reality captures the point. We should not deny social reality just because it is constructed. We should understand it well enough to resist the unjust parts.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Social construction: a thing is socially constructed when social practices help make it what it is. Example: money is paper, metal, or data, but it counts as money only because institutions and shared practices treat it that way.

• Social ontology: the study of what social things are. Example: it asks what makes someone a professor, a citizen, a spouse, a prisoner, or a member of a racialized group.

• Ameliorative analysis: defining or revising a concept by asking what job it should do. Example: a legal definition of harassment should help identify harmful workplace behavior, not merely repeat old habits about what workers tolerated.

• Social position: a place in a social structure with attached advantages, burdens, expectations, and risks. Example: two people may have the same talent, but one is read as naturally authoritative while the other is read as aggressive.

• Gender as hierarchy: gender names a social position tied to how sexed bodies are interpreted and ranked. Example: care work may be treated as women's natural duty rather than skilled labor.

• Race as hierarchy: race names a social position tied to interpreted ancestry and appearance within racialized power. Example: a name, hairstyle, neighborhood, or skin color can change how employers, police, or doctors respond.

• Ideology: shared habits of thought and response that make a social order seem natural. Example: if people assume a mother should leave work for a sick child but a father is "helping" when he does the same, ideology is shaping expectations.

• Structural explanation: explaining a pattern by looking at roles, institutions, incentives, and practices, not just individual choices. Example: a workplace may reproduce inequality without anyone openly wanting that result.

Major Works

• Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (2012): her major collection. It argues that race and gender are socially constructed positions in structures of social relations, then connects that view to ideology, objectivity, language, and method.

• "Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?" (2000): the classic essay where she presents ameliorative analysis. It asks what race and gender concepts we should use to expose sexism and racism.

• "Social Construction: Myth and Reality": clarifies what social construction can mean. It rejects the lazy idea that "constructed" means unreal, while warning that not every appeal to construction explains much.

• "A Social Constructionist Analysis of Race": develops her account of race as a social position rather than a biological essence. It tries to explain why racial categories are false as biology but real as social organization.

• "What Is a Social Practice?" (2018): shifts attention from categories to practices. It explains how practices coordinate action, shape agents, stabilize meanings, and open paths for change.

• Critical Theory and Practice (2017): a short work based on her Spinoza lectures. It connects ideology, material practices, and social critique, asking how theory can help identify points where unjust social life can be changed.

Why It Matters

Haslanger matters because she gives a clear answer to a common confusion. If race and gender are socially constructed, why do they have such force? Her answer is that construction is often exactly what gives them force. Institutions, habits, meanings, and material arrangements distribute real goods and harms.

She also helped make metaphysics politically useful. Questions like "What exists?" and "What is a category?" matter when the category is woman, man, Black, white, disabled, citizen, migrant, worker, or parent.

Her method also matters beyond race and gender. Ameliorative analysis is now used in debates about disability, sexuality, misogyny, ignorance, autonomy, and social identity. The basic lesson is simple: when a concept is part of social struggle, philosophy should ask what the concept is for.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Haslanger is central to feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and contemporary social ontology. She belongs to analytic philosophy, but she uses its tools to study social power rather than only abstract puzzles.

Supporters value her work because it avoids a false choice. Race and gender are not natural essences, but they are not nothing. This gives feminists and anti-racist philosophers a way to talk about real oppression without treating hierarchy as biological destiny.

Her work is often read near Judith Butler, Miranda Fricker, Charles Mills, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Butler stresses performativity and norms. Fricker studies credibility and interpretation. Mills studies racial power and white ignorance. Appiah is useful as a contrast: Haslanger agrees that race is not biological, but insists that racialized social positions are real.

Critics often focus on her early definitions of gender and race. Some worry that defining gender through subordination and privilege makes oppression too central. It can seem to leave less room for identity, agency, culture, joy, or positive belonging. Katharine Jenkins argues that gender theory should also account for lived gender identity, especially trans experience. Mari Mikkola argues that Haslanger's early account can produce counterintuitive cases.

Another criticism targets her method. If philosophers ask what concepts we should use, who decides the goal? Haslanger's answer is that social philosophy is already value-laden. The better approach is to state the purpose openly: explain injustice, expose the practices that keep it going, and make change easier to imagine.

Related Pages

• Feminist Philosophy
• Philosophy of Race
• Analytic Philosophy
• Miranda Fricker
• Judith Butler
• Charles Mills
• Kwame Anthony Appiah