This book examines contemporary structural social injustices from a feminist perspective. It asks: what makes oppression, discrimination, and domination wrongful? Is there a single wrongness-making feature of various social injustices that are due to social kind membership? Why is sexist oppression of women wrongful? What does the wrongfulness of patriarchal damage done to women consist in? In thinking about what normatively grounds social injustice, the book puts forward two related views. First, it argues for a paradigm shift in focus away from feminist philosophy that is organized around the gender concept woman, and towards feminist philosophy that is humanist. This is against the following theoretical backdrop: Politically effective feminism requires ways to elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women, and to articulate and defend feminism's critical claims. In order to meet these normative demands an influential theoretical outlook has emerged: for emancipatory purposes feminist philosophers should articulate a thick conception of the gender concept woman around which feminist philosophical work is organized. However, Part I of the book argues that we should resist this move, and that feminist philosophers should reframe their analyses of injustice in humanist terms. Second, the book spells out a humanist alternative to the more prevalent gender-focus in feminist philosophy. This hinges on a notion of dehumanization, which Part II of the book develops. The argued for understanding of dehumanization is used to explicate the wrongness-making feature of social injustices, both in general and of those due to patriarchy. Dehumanization is not another form of injustice-rather, it is that which makes forms of social injustice unjust. The book's second part then provides a regimentation of social injustice from a feminist perspective in order to spell out the specifics of the proposed humanist feminism, and to demonstrate how it improves some non-feminist analyses of injustice too.

Mari Mikkola is Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College and & Associate Professor, Faculty of Philosophy at University of Oxford. She works mainly on feminist philosophy, and specifically on feminist metaphysics, gender, and pornography. In addition, she has research interests in social ontology, broadly conceived.

Chapter 1: Dehumanization as the Wrong of Social Injustice
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Against the Gender Controversy
1.3. Going Beyond Gender: Humanist Feminism
1.4. Methodological Commitments
1.5. Structure of the Book
Part I: Against the Gender Controversy
Chapter 2: The Gender Controversy
2.1. Biological Determinism and Gender Terminology
2.2. Gender Construction
2.3. Uniformity of Gender
2.4. Sex Classification
2.5.Usefulness of the Sex/Gender Distinction
2.6. Women as a Social Kind
Chapter 3: Nominalist Responses to the Semantic and Ontological Puzzles
3.1. The 'Positive' Category of Women
3.2. Women as a Social Series
3.3. Unity, Normativity, and Oppression
3.4. Women as a Resemblance Class
3.4.1. Tenability of Gender Realism
3.4.2. Plausibility of Resemblance Nominalism
Chapter 4: Realist Responses to the Semantic and Ontological Puzzles
4.1. Women as FMP-Category
4.2. Social Subordination and Privilege as Marks of Gender
4.2.1. Ameliorative Analysis of woman
4.2.2. Benefits of the Revisionary Analysis
4.3. Gendered Social Identity as Positionality
4.4. Historical Essentialism
4.4.1. Gender as a Natural Kind
4.4.2. Feminist Politics and Historical Essentialism
4.5. Upshot of the Discussion
Chapter 5: Deflating the Puzzles
5.1. Deflating the Semantic Puzzle
5.2. Deflating the Ontological Puzzle
5.2.1. Conventionalism is Unintuitive
5.2.2. The Abolitionist Implication is Undesirable
5.2.3. The Trait/ Norm Covariance Model
5.2.4. Ontological Commitments, and the Trait/ Norm Covariance Model
5.3. The Gender Controversy Deflated
Part II: Normativity Anew
Chapter 6: Dehumanization
6.1. Introduction
6.2. Why Humanism
6.3. Rape as Dehumanizing
6.3.1. The Objectification Argument
6.3.2. The 'Soul Murder' Argument
6.4. Dehumanization in General
6.4.1. Our Legitimate Interests
6.4.2. Moral Injury
6.5. Dehumanization and Feminism
Chapter 7: Forms of Injustice and Emancipatory Social Theory
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Emancipatory Social Theory: Desiderata
7.3. Forms of Injustice
7.3.1. Discrimination
7.3.2. Domination
7.3.3. Oppression: A First-Stab
7.3.4. Oppression: A Second-Stab
Chapter 8: Contours of Injustice and Feminist Social Theory
8.1. Introduction
8.2. Contours of Injustice
8.3. Feminist Social Theory and Dehumanization
8.4. The Argument So Far
Chapter 9: Overcoming Dehumanization
9.1. Freedom
9.2. Human Flourishing
9.3. Equality
9.3.1. The Basic Picture
9.3.2. Objections and Clarifications
9.3.3. Democratic Equality
9.4. Humanist Feminism: Final Remarks
Bibliography