On Being at Home in Ourselves and the World

Love, Sex, Gender, and Justice

Abstract

Introduction
Helga Varden’s Sex, Love, & Gender: A Kantian Theory (2020) is a rigorous, beautiful, and
transformative book, which does vital work not only in fully developing how Kant’s complex
understandings of desire, reflection, and relationality should inform our understanding of his
arguments about sex and love but also in positioning these Kantian arguments as absolutely
critical resources to contemporary debates about gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual
(in)justice. Rarely is a book so comprehensive, so coherent, and so grounded in a vulnerability
we rarely find in philosophy; rarely does it so radically expand the resources we have for dealing
with what seems like a familiar problem in such a well-read figure. The literature on Kant and
sex is extensive, and yet this book absolutely revolutionizes the kinds of questions we can ask
about Kant on sex, love, and gender.
Beyond its attendance to essential questions about love, sex, gender, and the
phenomenology of human embodiment, Varden’s book makes several key methodological
moves. First, she offers a rigorous defense of a “bottom up” approach to Kant, which allows
theorists (largely, and not coincidentally, women theorists) to square the sorts of non-ideal
experiences with which she is concerned in this book with the systemic features of Kant’s
practical philosophy. This is not, as she argues, to decenter freedom in his philosophical
project, but to read in a direction that allows these questions to “surface” in our lived,
embodied, human experience of freedom. Varden’s Kant, then, is an ideal Kant who is
concerned with non-ideal dilemmas, desires, and experiences; he is a reconstructed Kant,
whose ample resources for theorizing human experience, morality, teleology, and justice are
no longer hampered by his own sexist, homophobic, and cisist preoccupations. There are
critical resources here for those drawing on Kant to address a range of non-ideal questions
that are beyond the scope of this project.

Second, Varden opens with a lineage of both Kantian scholarship by women and
feminist Kant scholarship, demonstrating the rich and varied ways that Kant scholarship has
been transformed over the past four decades by the influx of women into the field, and revealing
Kant scholarship as a site of (perhaps surprising) feminist philosophical innovation. For me,
this is both resonant and comforting. I came to Kant because it was, at the time, the only
seminar taught by a woman in my graduate department, and as such, was the only seminar in
which I was not harassed, belittled, or silenced. Writing about Kant not only allowed me to
work with a woman advisor; he provided cover for pursuing questions about love, sex, gender,
and race that were not understood as “philosophical” within my graduate department, at least
at the time I took them up. Varden’s book articulates my own sense of Kant scholarship as a
gateway into feminist philosophy, as a rare space in mainstream philosophical scholarship that
passes, if you will, a kind of philosophical Bechdel test. My engagement with Varden’s book
is oriented through this gratitude, and through the sense of belonging that is at the center
of Varden’s project here: an attendance to the ways that women belong in Kant scholarship,
that non-ideal questions of love, sex and gender belong in Kantian philosophy, and that the
experiences, desires, and traumas of women and LGBTQIA people belong in philosophical
inquiries into what it is to be human.
Accordingly, I begin by tracing Varden’s argument through a central theme of the book:
that one way to think about problems of love, sex, and gender, from both a phenomenological
and a political perspective, is to tend to the importance of being at home with oneself, in the
world, and with others. I explore how this framework allows Varden to develop a distinctly and
innovatively Kantian account of our sexually loving and gendered selves, and their implications
both for questions of virtue and morality, and for questions of justice. I then consider the ways
that Varden’s analysis provides us with much needed resources to think about how inhabiting
a self-defensive stance in the face of oppression may violate our duties to resist our own
oppression. Finally, having traced the arguments at the heart of the book, I turn to two puzzles
in Varden’s account of the just state: her understanding of sexual consent, and her defense of
the state’s right to restrict abortion.