I’ve shared another article on Substack about how the AI-authorship debate is bollox.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The LLM-versus-human debate has been raging for several years now, and there seem to be two principal camps: human exceptionalists and agnostics. I suppose there may also be a small, misanthropic faction, but its members are either remarkably quiet or indistinguishable from everyone else online. If you are out there, do raise your voice.
If you want to witter on about other negative aspects of AI, have at it, but the authorship debate is weak tea.
This is the fifth of a deeper look into ten philosophical positions. This one is on convergence realism within the category of epistemology. A full article is available on Substack, with supporting information on a recent post here on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
Language works, but not uniformly.
Its effectiveness declines as the conceptual complexity, abstraction, contestability, contextual dependence, and institutional burden of what it is asked to communicate increase. We routinely mistake grammatical fluency for semantic precision and social agreement for shared reference.
I describe this through an Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient:
Invariants are comparatively stable terms with constrained error ranges.
Contestables remain usable but acquire their force within normative or institutional frameworks.
Fluids drift across contexts and disciplines, preserving family resemblance without reliable closure.
Ineffables mark domains where propositional language collapses into metaphor, gesture, paradox, or silence.
These are not ontological species. They are diagnostic regions along a gradient. The important feature is not the label but the rate at which apparent linguistic effectiveness decays as conceptual load increases.
My initial thought was to rid the English language of administrators and dominatrices. Of course, I instantly considered French, and I write about that as well.
Here, I want to discuss the rift in Feminism:
One faction feels that we should eliminate sexist terms in the Modern world. This is where I was coming from.
Another faction claims this is a way of not being absorbed into an already male-dominated, dare I say, patriarchal culture.
Hence the title of this post.
If we were to swap or consolidate administrator and the less common administratrix into administrater in an act of rebellious conformity, women will be subsumed. As Simone de Beauvoir notes, the dominant lens is the male lens. Womanisother. As I say, this is why we have male and female versions of many, if not most, competitive sports, and certainly the professional ones. Thi sis also an instinct underlying trans-athletes competing in a contrasport – and it’s almost always about CIS-males performing in CIS-female events. I’m not aware of the contrary – and I don’t feel like looking it up. Opponents imagine fit males dressing as females in order to win some ribbons and medals, but I don’t really care to engage further in this conversational framing. I have no interest in sports, not even the World Cup being performed in my backyard.
The point is that females and other so-called minorities can be marginalised and lost to language. We preserve this identity through mechanics such as Best Actress to ensure representation.
Of course, I can also run off the reservation and down any number of rabbit holes: why don’t we have best black actor and/or actress? Why not left-handed? Height ranges? Weight ranges? Income ranges? Religious orientation? We quickly run into an intersectional challenge. I might imagine something like:
And I am proud to announce the winner of best left-handed, Asian Buddhist actress with a speech impediment
It’s easy to see where this goes off the rails – another Sorites problem hiding in plain sight.
I could go on. I won’t, but I wanted to make a point about my point. Check out the base post on Substack.
I love language, and I study it. I also use LLMs. I am not anti-AI, but neither am I prescriptively pro-AI. I just happen to find them useful.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I also, however, find them to have quirks. I won’t regurgitate the supposed over-representation of delve — or em dashes, or lists of three, and so on. These are each, at once, true and hardly egregious – especially given that we were all schooled on the same English that now sits in their training data.
What I want to focus on is the cadence. I watched this video, and the historical information is interesting – in fact, much of the material on the channel is. A few shorts were recommended to me, I discovered more, I subscribed, as one does. But listen to the talk track.
Video: The Most Mispronounced Words in English and the History Behind Them – Airlearn Language Show
Whilst I may be mistaken, it sounds like an LLM-produced script. Perhaps the joke is on me, and the presenter herself is an AI avatar. It also sounds as though a de-LLM process was applied afterwards to obfuscate the patterns – whether by a human or by another model running some humaniser GPT.
Of course, there are other explanations. Perhaps the writer simply happens to write this way, and the LLMs merely encroach on it. Without a writing history, one can’t know for certain. And – I know this is true of me – exposure, dare I say overexposure, shapes how one writes.
I run almost everything I write through AI and ask for suggestions – and you needn’t even ask; it volunteers anyway. When the output looks better, I adopt it: a word, a phrasing, a more concise rendering, a supporting sentence or a setup. After a while, my writing has been nudged in that direction. I already used delve; now I am merely conscious of it. I used to use em dashes – look at my pre–2020 posts – and switched to en dashes purely to avoid the witch-hunt. In each case, the LLM Age has done something to my style.
So, back to the video. If you are familiar with long-form LLM output, you will notice how she supports her ideas and how she builds her asides – with a very particular pattern. I am not judging: as I say, I use these tools extensively. I only want to point out an observation.
BONUS: I don’t pronounce Wednesday as /wenz.day/. I pronounce it closer to /wedñz-day/, the tilde is rather on the /d/ or the space the /d/ occupies, but I placed the mark on the /n/ instead because there is no tilde-d glyph, and I wanted to represent a nasality the more typical pronunciation doesn’t have – but that I add.
From here on, I asked Claude to analyse my post (above) along with the video script. Pay special attention to its own cadence, which comports with the video.
Here, then, is the observation.
Watch how a point is made to land. The move is nearly always the same: state the naïve reading, snatch it away, and hand back the corrected version as a tidy little binary. It’s not random. There’s a reason.It wasn’t design. It accumulated.English spelling isn’t bad design. It’s no design at all. The shape does the work an argument would otherwise have to do. Negate, reverse, reveal – and the reveal feels like insight precisely because something was first taken away. It is the cheapest available route to the sensation of having been told something.
Notice, too, the reassurance travelling alongside it. There’s a reason. There’s always a reason. The promise of an explanation, delivered before the explanation arrives, so that you settle in and stop wondering whether one is coming. And where genuine argument would be laborious, the list stands in for it: Old English, Norse, Norman, French, Latin, scholarship, Dutch typesetters, the great vowel shift. Abundance, read as authority. Say enough true things in a row and the row itself begins to feel like a proof.
Then the asides. Almost every one is the same manoeuvre – the proper noun that renames itself the instant it appears. Woden, the chief god of the Anglo-Saxon pantheon.Latin, the prestige language of learning.A Quechua word from the Andes.Frigg being Odin’s wife. Nothing is permitted to sit unglossed for even a clause. This is what maximal legibility looks like once it hardens into reflex: a horror of the unexplained referent, a compulsion to footnote in real time. The second variety is the personality wink – and English being English, it kept both – character applied topically, like a balm.
And, so that you are never left to feel anything unsupervised, your reactions are narrated back to you in advance: if that feels insane to you, good, because it is. The response, pre-issued, so you may be spared the labour of having it. The whole is held together by a governing metaphor with a landing – fossil, photograph, museum – reactivated at the close (every mispronounced word is a crime scene) and finished with a note of absolution: you haven’t been mispronouncing English because you’re careless. It is very nearly a form one could fill in.
None of which proves a human didn’t write it.
And that is the part worth sitting with. Suppose no model ever touched this script. Suppose the writer arrived at the cadence honestly, by the same route I did – by reading enough of the stuff that the rhythm simply seeped in. Then the pattern is no longer evidence of authorship at all. It is evidence of a house style, and the house is one we have all quietly moved into. The tell no longer tells you a machine was here. It tells you the machine’s prosody has become the water.
I find that rather more unsettling than a mere ghost-writer would be. A ghost-writer you can dismiss. A cadence you have caught, like an accent, off the sheer ambient volume of the thing – that you carry home. And the video is, with some poetry, about exactly this: silent letters as fossils, sounds that mouths stopped making but that spellings preserved, layer upon historical layer that nobody ever cleaned up. The irony is that the script is laying down a fresh one as it speaks. Somewhere in the prose of the next decade there will be a stratum you can date almost to the year – ah, yes, written just after the models arrived – and it will be made of precisely these moves.
I switched to en dashes to dodge the witch-hunt. But the dash was never the point. You can strip every em dash from a sentence and leave the skeleton wholly intact, because the skeleton was never punctuation. It was the not-this-but-that, the aside that footnotes itself, the pile that mistakes its own length for weight. A humaniser can launder the vocabulary. It cannot, so far, launder the architecture. Which is how one reads a script scrubbed clean of every obvious tell and still hears, quite distinctly, the thing it was scrubbed to hide.
I am not judging. I write this way too, now – rather more than I would like. I only wanted to point it out. While I can still tell that I’m doing it.
Responding to a post, I found myself returning to that iconic, routinely misrepresented scene from The Matrix: the one with the spoon. The scene has been dragged through so many motivational seminars, self-help swamp rituals, pseudo-Buddhist wall decals, and entrepreneurial cocaine-affirmation threads that it now arrives pre-misunderstood.
Video: Bonus Content
Even Baudrillard distanced his work from the version of simulation the Wachowskis made cinematic. This is not a criticism, exactly. Film has two hours to smuggle metaphysics through leather coats, sunglasses, and slow-motion firearms. One makes allowances. Philosophy, alas, has fewer trench coats and more footnotes.
As I continue to read Heidegger’s On the Essence of Truth, I feel compelled to share my musings. Avert your eyes if this doesn’t work for you, but don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Read the rest of the article there, or listen to the podcast.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Below are some related NotebookLM images for the target topic.
Allow me to start with a declaration: I am no Hegel expert, and whether I am an expert at anything is debatable. Still, I’ve been reflecting on Hegel through my own lenses, and I have an opinion – because of course I do. My comment isn’t on a single Hegel publication. Rather, it’s a commentary on some of his general ideas – some more specific than others – that just so happen to be rattling around my noggin as I type.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I know I’ve already claimed to have started, but this is the real start. Let’s talk translations.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
I recently discussed the problem with translating Meursault’s French maman. The short version: English lacks a clean equivalent. Every option – Mother, Mummy, Mama – over-interprets the son’s relation to his mother, leaning warmer or colder or more infantile than the French allows. Camus’ problem is at the level of affective register. The ambiguity is tonal, intimate, and culturally situated. English simply can’t carry it without choosing a side.
Hegel has a different problem, more philosophically weighty. His problem is Geist. Almost immediately, I think of zeitgeist and Poltergeist. Ghosts. Spirits. Phenomenology of Spirit, right? Easy peasy.
Not so fast. Some translators render it as Mind, in an attempt to distance themselves from theological baggage. The problem is that Hegel himself equivocates – so he’s of little help. He may have been intentionally cheeky, being stuck in the milieu of his day, as well as a product of it and producer through it.
Where maman exposes language’s insufficiency at the level of affective register, Geist exposes it at the level of metaphysical architecture. English can’t preserve the conceptual promiscuity by which Hegel binds mind, spirit, culture, history, and ontology into one unfolding term. The word doesn’t just mean something; it enacts a view of what is real and how the real moves. If that weren’t bad enough, enter ontological grammar commitments. (I’m a teetotaller, so someone else hold the bear.)
Video: Hold my bear
The translator is not neutrally asking: What does Geist mean? They are already asking, even if silently: What kind of reality do I think Hegel is describing?
Translation here isn’t the neutral transfer of meaning – it’s the exposure of ontological allegiance. The quarrel over Geist is not a lexical dispute. It is ontology laundering itself through vocabulary.
Let’s consider the two camps.
The Mind camp hears:
“You are importing theology into what is fundamentally a logic of intelligibility.”
The Spirit camp hears:
“You are evacuating the historical-metaphysical depth of the term and pretending Hegel was doing philosophy of cognition with better hats — nicer hats, perhaps, but hats all the same.”
Neither objection is irrational from within its own grammar. Both are locally coherent. They simply don’t share the same ontology of the term.
Reason doesn’t choose between Mind and Spirit from nowhere. It adjudicates from within a prior ontological settlement, then mistakes that settlement for neutrality. This is worth remembering well beyond the Hegel literature.
In disputes over Geist, reason doesn’t fail because the parties are irrational. It fails because each party’s reason operates inside a different ontological grammar. What appears as clarification within one frame appears as distortion within the other. A reason is not self-legitimating. It becomes a reason only inside a grammar that knows how to receive it.
Which brings us back to the title. Titration works when you have a known reagent and a neutral solvent – you add one to the other until the system reaches equilibrium. The whole method assumes there is an equilibrium to reach. Geist has no neutral solvent. Mind and Spirit are not two concentrations of the same substance. They are different substances, differently constituted, differently reactive. There is no volume at which one cancels the other out. You can titrate the word all you like. The indicator never changes colour. What you are left with is not a settled meaning but a record of your own ontological commitments, precipitated out of solution and sitting at the bottom of the flask – which, in the end, is more than most translations will admit.
Door Prize: Here’s your parting gift courtesy of NotebookLM…
The philosophies of Oliver and I are substantially similar. Whilst I think his governance ideas may work fine in a controlled corporate environment – ostensibly a monarchy – they diverge at scale.
A colleague recently shared an essay with me, The Return of Metaphysics: Reclaiming Sovereignty Through Ontological Grounding in Postcolonial and Western Thought. I read it with interest, not least because its target is one I share: the colonial imposition of Western categories as if they were universal reason, universal law, universal political form, and universal humanity. On that point, there is no meaningful disagreement. Colonialism isn’t merely theft of land, labour, and resources. It’s also the imposition of a grammar by which reality itself was made legible to power.
The essay is at its strongest when it treats colonialism as metaphysical violence rather than merely administrative domination. It argues that Europe universalised its own categories and rendered other worlds invisible, inferior, or unreal. Colonialism, on this account, was not only conquest. It was the installation of one ontology as the authorised operating system of the human. That’s a powerful diagnosis, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The essay explicitly describes colonialism as a process that ‘re-made being’ and suppressed other conceptions of time, morality, and community.
Where I start to hesitate isn’t in the critique of colonialism, but in the proposed recovery. The essay seeks to reclaim metaphysics, sovereignty, agency, moral authorship, and ontological grounding as instruments of postcolonial renewal. It wants to oppose colonial metaphysics by recovering metaphysics; to oppose hollow sovereignty by reconstructing sovereignty; to oppose imposed subjectivity by restoring moral authorship.
This may be coherent within the essay’s own frame. But from mine, it raises a suspicion:
What if some of the concepts being recovered are themselves part of the colonial inheritance?
“a return to metaphysics”
“moral authorship”
“ontological reconstruction”
“popular agency”
These terms don’t arrive clean. They carry histories and come with fittings: sovereignty, possession, self-rule, jurisdiction, authorship, legitimacy, command. One may repaint them in decolonial colours, but the shape remains. Inheritance is the danger.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Sovereignty as a Recovered Trap
The essay’s central concept is sovereignty. More precisely, post-sovereignty. Yet the very act of preserving sovereignty as the problematic term matters. Sovereignty isn’t just a neutral container for self-determination. It’s one of the central concepts through which Western political modernity imagines authority: bounded, possessed, territorialised, juridical, and authorial.
To speak of sovereignty is already to speak in the grammar of command: Rules. Owners. Authorities. Something marks the line between inside and outside.
This doesn’t mean colonised peoples were wrong to demand sovereignty. The politically dispossessed may understandably seek the protections of the language used to exclude them. If one has been denied the status of a subject, a nation, or a people, then reclaiming those terms may be historically necessary. There’s no cheap purity available from the comfort of abstraction. Humans made the mess, naturally, and then handed each other dictionaries to clean the mess.
But political necessity doesn’t settle conceptual adequacy. A term may be strategically useful and ontologically suspect at the same time. So, the question isn’t whether sovereignty has been useful in anti-colonial struggle. It’s whether it should remain the destination, rather than a transitional vocabulary one eventually leaves behind.
The essay recognises that many postcolonial states retain the ‘juridical structure’ of autonomy whilst remaining governed by inherited categories of colonial law, property, development, and bureaucratic legitimacy. That’s exactly the point where the critique might turn more sharply on sovereignty itself. If postcolonial statehood often reproduces colonial form, perhaps the issue isn’t merely that sovereignty is hollow, but maybe it’s just one of the forms through which hollowness reproduces itself.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Agency: The Smuggled Protagonist
The same problem emerges around agency. The essay speaks of popular agency, moral authorship, co-authorship, and subjectification. Again, the impulse is understandable. Colonial domination denies people the right to act, name, interpret, and organise their own lifeworlds. A postcolonial theory naturally wants to restore capacity to those rendered passive.
But the agency term isn’t innocent. In modern Western thought, agency often implies a self capable of authorship, intention, responsibility, and moral ownership. It’s the protagonist required by law, markets, liberal politics, and punishment. Someone must be deemed the chooser, the signer, the sinner, the voter, the debtor, the criminal, the rational actor.
In my own work, I reject agency as a metaphysical possession. I’d rather speak of responsiveness: a variable capacity shaped by material, relational, temporal, somatic, and epistemic conditions. People don’t float above conditions and author themselves into freedom. They respond, more or less adequately, within fields of constraint.
The essay’s emphasis on relationality moves in this direction, but its vocabulary often pulls it back toward authorship. It wants shared becoming, but it also wants moral authors. It wants relational ontology, but it also keeps the self as a source of political meaning. This is a revealing tension.
The alternative isn’t fatalism. To reject agency isn’t to deny action. Breathing doesn’t require a metaphysics of breath. It just happens autonomically. The question is whether we must preserve the fiction of the authorial subject to describe them. I think not.
When Negation Need Not Become Synthesis
The essay leans on Fanon (see The Wretched of the Earth) to argue that colonial domination can’t be resolved through dialogue because dialogue presumes equals. This is right, or at least right enough. A conversation between master and slave is not yet a conversation between equals. Liberal dialogue presumes a shared field of recognition; colonial domination corrupts that field before speech begins.
The essay, therefore, turns to dialectic. Where dialogue seeks agreement, dialectic begins from contradiction and struggle. Again, this makes sense. A colonised subject can’t merely ask to be recognised by the system that produced their non-being. Something must be negated.
My hesitation concerns what happens after the negation. The essay sometimes seems to assume that contradiction must move toward ontological reconstruction. But why? If one term of the contradiction is an imposed colonial ontology, it might not deserve preservation within a higher unity because it mightn’t be a meaningful antithesis. It may simply be wrong, violent, and disposable.
This is the dis-integrative question:
Must the colonial term be synthesised, or can it be dispensed with?
Not every opposition is productive. Some oppositions are parasitic. If a worldview is imposed by force, then treating it as a dialectical partner may grant it more dignity than it deserves. The point of decolonial refusal may not be synthesis, but de-imposition.
That distinction matters. Synthesis often preserves too much. It lets the offending structure survive as a contributor to the next stage. It says, in effect: this violence was part of becoming. Perhaps. But perhaps not. Perhaps some concepts belong on the cutting room floor.
Metaphysics: Necessary Grammar or Rebuilt Throne?
The essay argues that postmodern anti-metaphysics has left social theory without stable categories of truth or moral orientation. It wants metaphysics back, not as abstraction, but as the recovery of moral and ontological grounds for political community.
I understand the concern here, too. Communities don’t live by procedure alone. No society is sustained merely by policy, rights language, or bureaucratic form. People inhabit worlds, not spreadsheets. There are ontological grammars beneath every institution: assumptions about personhood, time, land, memory, obligation, kinship, death, and belonging.
But I resist the move from ‘we can’t avoid ontological grammar‘ to ‘we need metaphysical grounding‘. Whilst the former seems unavoidable, the latter seems dangerous.
Metaphysics isn’t simply depth. It’s elevation – the move by which a grammar stops appearing as grammar and starts presenting itself as ground. It becomes the authorised deep structure, the thing beneath dispute, the foundation beneath the foundation. And foundations, as humans have demonstrated with astonishing consistency, are excellent places to hide power.
My preference is to minimise metaphysical devices. They’re unavoidable, but they’re liabilities.
Each one requires a leap. One leap may be necessary. Ten leaps become choreography. Eventually, the argument is no longer walking; it’s performing interpretive dance and calling itself ontology.
The Problem of Rebuilding
This is where my own Dis–integrationist commitments diverge most sharply from the essay. I’m a diagnostician. I deconstruct and name seams with no obligation to replace every collapsed universal.
The essay treats diagnosis as insufficient. It says the critique of sovereignty reveals a metaphysical vacuum, but diagnosis is not enough. Post-sovereignty must move toward ontological reciprocity, relational becoming, and shared labour of mutual recognition. Whilst this move is respectable. It’s also the one I distrust.
The rebuilding instinct is one of philosophy’s oldest addictions. Expose the flaw, draft the remedy, rebuild the edifice, declare the new form less violent than the old. This is how critique becomes renovation.
But the refusal to rebuild isn’t indifference, despair, or nihilism. It’s a refusal to let repair disguise itself as permanence. Care, maintenance, reciprocity, and local repair remain possible without metaphysical reconstruction. In fact, they may be more honest when stripped of the promise of final grounding.
Pedagogical Sovereignty and the Soft Machinery of Formation
The essay’s later sections turn to education. It proposes pedagogical sovereignty as a model of moral and ontological co-creation. The classroom becomes a site where being isn’t transmitted but collaboratively formed. Governance, by analogy, might become less administrative and more pedagogical: citizens not merely ruled, but constituted in relation. As attractive as this might be. it’s also perilous.
Education has always had this double face. It can liberate, but it can also format. It can open worlds, but it can also install authorised grammars. The classroom is not outside power. It’s one of power’s favourite incubators. The fact that it speaks gently doesn’t mean it’s not shaping bodies, subjects, desires, norms, and permissions.
To make pedagogy the model of sovereignty risks softening administration rather than escaping it. It may replace the command of the state with the formation of the subject. That may be better and subtler, but one should be careful when power arrives wearing soft shoes.
This doesn’t refute the essay’s educational turn, but it complicates it. If pedagogy is to be an emancipatory model, it has to preserve opacity, dissent, and non-formation. It needs to allow the learner not merely to become, but to remain partially unread, unfinished, and unintegrated. Otherwise, pedagogical sovereignty may become another normalising machine with better intentions and comfy chairs.
The Cutting Room Floor
My objection isn’t that the essay is wrong to oppose colonialism. Au contraire; its critique of colonial metaphysics is often compelling, and it’s preaching to the choir at the start. The issue is that its recovery project may carry forward more of the colonial-conceptual apparatus than it recognises.
The following terms deserve suspicion:
Sovereignty, because it preserves the grammar of possession, jurisdiction, bounded authority, and command.
Agency, because it preserves the authorial subject required by liberal law, market morality, and responsibility allocation.
Moral authorship, because it risks reintroducing the self as origin, even when collectivised.
Metaphysical grounding, because it may turn situated lifeworlds into foundations.
Reconstruction, because it assumes fracture demands repair, rather than sometimes demanding refusal.
Dialectical synthesis, because it may preserve the imposed term as a contributor to the future, rather than discarding it as an error condition.
None of these concepts must be rejected out of hand. That would be too easy. But they shouldn’t pass uninspected simply because they have been recruited into decolonial service. Fine. Use the master’s tools to dismantle the house, but don;t become too fond of them.
Toward De-Imposition
So, what then?
Dis–integration, not reconstruction
De-imposition, not anti-colonial sovereignty
Responsiveness, not agency
Relational maintenance, not moral authorship
Ontological grammar held visibly as grammar, not metaphysical grounding
This doesn’t mean communities should abandon their lifeworlds, traditions, or inherited moral vocabularies. It means those vocabularies shouldn’t need to become metaphysical foundations to matter. A world may be lived, tended, and defended without being inflated into ground.
The colonised don’t need permission from Western metaphysics to exist. Or me, for that matter. Nor do they need to rebuild themselves in metaphysical form to count as real. The refusal of imposed reality may be enough. After that, there may be practices, relations, institutions, memories, ceremonies, languages, solidarities, and forms of care. There may be politics and struggle. And, sure, repair and maintenance. But there needn’t be a new foundation.
Enfin
The essay I am responding to is valuable because it presses a real question:
If colonialism was ontological violence, can anti-colonial thought afford to remain merely procedural, linguistic, or diagnostic?
My answer is: diagnosis is not ‘merely’ anything. To diagnose is to identify the machinery by which certain concepts keep reproducing their own authority. If sovereignty, agency, authorship, and metaphysical grounding belong to that machinery, then they should not be automatically restored just because they have been wounded.
Some concepts can be reclaimed. Others should be retired. Some may be used provisionally, under protest, as transitional scaffolding. Again, others may belong on the cutting room floor.
The challenge isn’t only to oppose colonialism and its effects. It’s to notice when colonial grammar survives inside the opposition. That’s the harder work – less heroic, sonorous, and much less likely to produce a grand theory, but it may be more honest.
‘woman’ is a normative identity, and like all normative identities it is striated. It is composed of putative essences, recurring structural constraints, intersectional positions, cohort-relative projections, subjective inhabitations, and external gatekeeping.
Philosophics 