Gender and Intellectual Grandstanding

While intellectual grandstanding is a gender-neutral concept, it presents a practical level of diffi culty for women and feminist thinkers. This is the case on at least two fronts. First, men often get a pass for grandstanding, while women do not. Second, women are more often the target of grandstanders. Because grandstanding is often comparative, and women are seen as less rational than men, they are easier foils to use to build one’s own intellectual status. Seeing women as emotional, and thus irrational, occasions men to use them as props for intellectual grandstanding. And, when women have unwelcome things to say, accusing them of being overly emotional is a quick way to silence them. These phenomena, I’ll argue, are two sides of the same coin. Both are a result of the gendering of reason in the Western intellectual tradition. In what follows, I’ll look at just how this works.