“What makes a woman?”
This question isn’t precisely the one that has been agitating American society of late. When in her nomination hearings Senator Marsha Blackburn wanted to put now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the spot, she asked her for a “definition” of a woman, a question that, in a legal context, might have different answers in different contexts. The question is contested, though, not because of edge cases that make hard definitions difficult, but because of a deeper anxiety about identity, about what makes a woman. Are all women born to that estate? Is womanhood something that must be achieved? Or is it something women have thrust upon them?
Womanhood is not the only identity that prompts such questions; we ask them, regularly, about race, class, nationality, religion—indeed, about our humanity itself. Wherever we draw lines between this identity and that, inevitably we wonder how one winds up on this side of the line or that. And, in the modern era, we often ask these questions by means of fantasies of transformation. A book like The Island of Dr. Moreau, for example, forces us to confront the question of what makes us human beings rather than animals—but also the ways in which we ourselves have undergone a similar transformation, in our evolutionary history and in the process of acculturation to civilization.
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