This Autumn I read Katharine Jenkins’ book Ontology and Oppression. The ideas and approaches taken by Jenkins resonated with me, and I find myself consciously or subconsciously applying them in many contexts beyond those she studies. I therefore thought it was worth a quick blog post to summarise the key ideas, in case others find them helpful and to recommend you also read Jenkins’ work if you do.
Jenkins studies the ontology of “social kinds” from a pluralist perspective – that there can be many different definitions of social kinds of the same name, e.g. ‘woman’, ‘Black’ – and that several of them can be useful and/or the right tool to understand the world in the right circumstances. After a general theoretical introduction, she focuses on gender and race to find examples of such kinds, but the idea is clearly applicable much more broadly.
Jenkins begins by describing her “Constraints and Enablements” framework, arguing that what it means to be a member of a social kind is at least partly determined by being subject to certain social constraints and enablements, which Jenkins classifies in certain ways. These can be imposed on you by (some subset of) society or can even be self-imposed through self-identification as a member of a given social kind. Jenkins defines two types of wrong that can come about as a result of being considered a member of a given social kind, ‘ontic injustice’, where the constraints and enablements constitute a ‘wrong’, and a proper subclass, ‘ontic oppression’, where the constraints and enablements additionally “steer individuals in this kind towards exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural domination, violence and/or communicative curtailment”. She argues that a pluralist framework can be valuable as a philosophical tool for liberation, and studies how intersectionality arises naturally in her approach.
The race and gender kinds Jenkins studies, she classifies as ‘hegemonic kinds’, ‘interpersonal kinds’ and ‘identity kinds’. I find this classification compelling for wanting to really understand power structures and help people rather than simply shout about identity politics from the sidelines – a form of intervention that sadly characterises much of the ‘debate’ in ‘culture wars’ at the moment. It also provides a useful toolbox to understand how a social kind (e.g. ‘Black’, ‘woman’) can be both hegemonically oppressive and yet corresponding interpersonal and identity kinds can sometimes serve an emancipatory function.
Ultimately, Jenkins’ description allows us to break away from some of the more ridiculous lines of argument we’ve seen in recent years, trying to ‘define away’ issues. At the end of the book, Jenkins takes aim at the ‘ontology-first approach’: the idea that one should first settle ‘the’ meaning of a social kind, e.g. ‘what is a woman?’ and from that apply appropriate (in this case gendered) social practices. This approach, so widespread in society, Jenkins shows does not fit with her framework. She challenges us to ask: what do we actually want to change about society? And from that, to understand what kinds make sense to talk about, and in what context, and how.
Thinking 