Week 8, 11 June - Katherine Jenkins (Glasgow): Ephemeral Women: On structural injustice and “being real”

This talk explores the ways in which structural injustice can give rise to a particular kind of vexed relationship with reality. I argue that members of the oppressed groups frequently find that the way the world seems to them is not reflected in collective practices (I focus here on the case of women in the face of widespread sexual violence), and that this experience is philosophically interesting. It can, I suggest, give rise to a felt sense of dislocation from the world, or of not being quite “real”, and I consider what this feeling might tell us about the metaphysics of gender under structural injustice. To help me explore this, I turn to fiction, specifically to not–quite–human feminised figures that are found in speculative fiction generally and in the film Blade Runner 2049 in particular. Whilst the film received some criticism for its portrayal of women, I argue that a feminist reading is available. On this reading, the film’s treatment of some of its feminised figures in fact captures important truths about the vexed relationship with reality that women come to have under structural injustice.