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)

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.

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