The concept of gender has been the battleground of scientific and political speculations for a long time. On the one hand, some accounts contended that gender is a biological feature, while on the other hand some scholars maintained that gender is a socio-cultural construct (e.g., Butler, 1990; Risman, 2004). Some of the questions that animated the debate on gender over history are: how many genders are there? Is gender rooted in our biological asset? Are gender and sex the same thing? All of these questions entwine one more crucial, and often overlooked interrogative. How is it possible for a concept to be the purview of so many disagreements and conceptual redefinitions? The question that this paper addresses is therefore not which specific account of gender is preferable. Rather, the main question we will address is how and why is even possible to disagree on how gender should be considered. To provide partial answers to these questions, we suggest that gender/sex (van Anders, 2015; Fausto-Sterling, 2019) is an illustrative example of politicized concepts. We show that no concepts are political in themselves; instead, some concepts are subjected to a process involving a progressive detachment from their supposed concrete referent (i.e., abstractness), a tension to generalizability (i.e., abstraction), a partial indeterminacy (i.e., vagueness), and the possibility of being contested (i.e., contestability). All of these features differentially contribute to what we call the politicization of a concept. In short, we will claim that in order to politicize a concept, a possible strategy is to evidence its more abstract facets, without denying its more embodied and perceptual components (Borghi et al., 2019). So, we will first outline how gender has been treated in psychological and philosophical discussions, to evidence its essentially contestable character thereby showing how it became a politicized concept. Then we will review some of the most influential accounts of political concepts, arguing that currently they need to be integrated with more sophisticated distinctions (e.g., Koselleck, 2004). The notions gained from the analyses of some of the most important accounts of political concepts in social sciences and philosophy will allow us to implement a more dynamic approach to political concepts. Specifically, when translated into the cognitive science framework, these reflections will help us clarifying some crucial aspects of the nature of politicized concepts. Bridging together social and cognitive sciences, we will show how politicized concepts are abstract concepts, or better abstract conceptualizations.
General sociolinguistics, social semiotics and semiotics of culture – ex pluribus unum? Forty years after Language as Social Semiotic
