Stepping Out into the Sun: Exploring Western Ontology and the Limits to the Understanding of Gender
Written by Tuin T. O. Scheffer
Tuin is currently doing the Research Master’s in Modern History & International Relations at the RUG. She specialises in European Union affairs and policy formation.
Stepping Out into the Sun: Exploring Western Ontology and the Limits to the Understanding of Gender
Introduction
Imagine. An underground cave in which people are chained up, unable to move. They have been there since birth and do not know better. Behind them, a fire burns and between the fire and the prisoners, cloaked figures carry various objects that cast shadows on the wall. They have been there since birth and do not know better.
So, this being all they see, the prisoners equate the shadows with reality and assign meaning to them. One day, a prisoner is liberated. They stand and look around, but, having seen nothing but shadows their entire life, they are confused, scared, and in pain. When they are taken outside by force and shown the world as we know it, everything is new to them. But slowly they will grow accustomed to the light of the true world. Yet, upon returning to the cave to share this truth, their eyes will need to adjust back to the darkness. They will be ridiculed for this and not be believed when trying to tell the others of the world. The others, they have been there since birth and do not know better (Plato, 2012: 275-7).
This is the Allegory of the Cave as told in Plato’s Politeia VII (Plato, 2012). It tells us of the struggle in trying to expand our understandings while simultaneously encouraging us to do so because there is no other way of knowing what lies beyond. Therefore, it remains a vital tool for critiquing how ontologies can limit our fields of knowledge. And in my own life, I have wondered how the “shadows” we encounter everyday relate to, and possibly limit, the embodiment of the Self.
Growing up, I largely “condoned” my assigned gender, but I felt a profound sense of indifference towards it that I now recognise as a symptom of the “absent body” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2007). This refers to a state where the body is so well-integrated into its social environment that its gendered nature becomes transparent and unquestioned. This transparency, however, often masks a deeper somatic disconnect.
Somatics is oftentimes tossed around as a buzzword. And before I move to explore gender as a linguistic cave and the added value of using the grammar of animacy to move into the sunlight, it is necessary to define “somatics”. The word comes from the Greek “σώμα” meaning the “self as the physical body” and “σωματικός” meaning the “physical” in a more general sense. Therefore, somatic experiences are experiences of the body (Lester, 2017: 31).
As mentioned, this paper sets out to explore the Western conceptualisations of gender as a linguistic “cave”. Abram (1996) suggests that formalised literacy has decoupled language from the sensuous world, which restricts identities to two-dimensional shadows. By establishing a dialogue between Plato (2012), Kimmerer (2020), and Neimanis (2017), I argue that the embodiment of our Selves requires a transition from a grammar of objects to a grammar of animacy. This way we can re-imagine gender not as a fixed destination, but as an animated, somatic experience.
The Cave: Nouns as Shadows
How does the Western perception of gender as a binary fit into the Allegory of the Cave (Plato, 2012)? We can imagine society as the cave and its inhabitants as prisoners, where social networks chain us as effectively as iron because there is little choice but to live in the society we have been given. In this context, the shadows on the wall are projections of social conceptualisations and not biological truths. But we are told that shadows as “man” and “woman” constitute the entirety of reality.
Plumwood (1993: 2, 69) argues that this binary is a dualism stemming from the Western idealisation of and insistence on rationality. This framework creates blind spots that deny the complexity and fluidity of gender. By passing this fluid world in front of the fire, Western society translates it into enforceable, opposing depictions: Reason vs. Nature, Male vs. Female, Mind vs. Body.
As prisoners, people are conditioned to believe shadows are the only reality, limited by an epistemology of rule (Bookchin, 1982: 68-88) that treats difference not as a spectrum, but as a hierarchy of inferiority. By upholding fixed expectations about the performance of sex, sexuality, and gender, a system is created where certain performances are better than others (Devor, 2002). Within the cave, the naturalness of this binary is rarely questioned. Instead, it is presented as an essential determinant to an identity based on the reproductive sexed body (Chetkovich, 2019).
However, this "biological truth" is itself a shadow. As Ocobock and Lacy (2024) show, many gendered paradigms we adhere to today are 20th-century projections, not an ancient reality (Ocobock & Lacy, 2024; Lacy & Ocobock, 2023).
As referenced to in the introduction, this absent and binary body is characteristic of modern Western societies (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2007; Leder, 1990) as it is expected that gender and sex are the same. Prisoners, under the assumption that there is no other reality beyond the shadows they see, identify themselves with them. And as long as one’s internal somatic movements align with the “girl” and “boy” shadows on the wall, there is no need to address the limits they impose. This way the body becomes transparent and unfelt.
However, it is important to note that this should not be the case. There is a vital distinction between sex as a social status determined at birth based on genital appearance, and gender as a social status based on the performance of the Self (Devor, 2002). When people settle in their gender and sex as the same, they contribute to a distorted knowledge shaped in domination (Plumwood, 1993). This furthers the expectation of gender and sex congruency, which erases the experiences of those who do not fit. And to be “unnamable is to be socially invisible” (Devor, 2002: 9). If we feel no friction between our external and internal Selves, is that because we embody a perfect union between mind and body, or because rational language has silenced the body’s ability to speak?
The cloaked figures carrying the sculptures in Plato’s cave (Plato, 2012: 275) are, in this scenario, the structures of modern language. Abram (1996) finds that phonetic, literate cultures generate their own signs for the world surrounding them until speech becomes completely disconnecting from its surrounding world (Abram, 1996: 133-4). Modern languages, which largely use a grammar of objects, transform the vital processes of being into static nouns. When this is done with processes which are so fundamentally somatic, they are changed from a constantly evolving state of being into the simpler category of “things”. This robs them of the complexity that defines them and equates them to the things that are dead and unchanging (Kimmerer, 2020).
This way, by treating our genders as nouns, we objectify ourselves. Therefore Kimmerer (2020) introduces the grammar of animacy. In her work, the world is not divided according to the Man versus Nature dualism. Instead she observes the things that are living and thus changing, and the things that are created by man which are dead in the sense that they cannot change. This is a traditionally amerindian way of looking at the world. In Potawatomi, for example, the word for “bay” is “to be a bay”. This shift from a static noun to an active verb grants the water agency. This way it is no longer a geographical “thing” assigned a permanent form, but a vital participant in a global cycle.
This argument ties into Neimanis’ (2017: 4-9) on the liquidity of being. She argues that humans are, like everything on Earth, part of cycles. Short-term ones such as the symbiosis with plants where we breathe in oxygen and exhale the carbon dioxide needed for photosynthesis. But also long-term ones such as death letting matter return to the earth only to be processed back into nutrients. Following Neimanis’ (2017) logic, we are currently ourselves, but were parts of plants, animals, and rivers last week, to which we shall be returned in a few days.
When we expand these ideas to the language surrounding gender specifically, defining people as either “man” or “woman” denies our liquidity and our possibility for change, which is so definitive to somatic experiences (Neimanis, 2017). By referring to gender as a static noun, the same happens to our persons as to the bay. We objectify ourselves to a permanent form, rather than seeing ourselves as part of a much larger and complex process that simply cannot be one thing for our entire lives (Kimmerer, 2020). At the same time, the more we use these static nouns, because we lack anything more substantial, the more they become ingrained in our thinking and our expressions. A person described as “a woman” becomes just that. Slowly but surely, it becomes impossible to conceive any other reality; we become “chained” to the vocabulary we have inherited (Abram, 1996; Plumwood, 1993; Bookchin, 1982).
The Sunlight: Feeling Beyond the Label
Plato (2012) encourages us to explore beyond the limits of our knowledge. However, stepping out of the cave and into the sunlight is a blindingly complex and often painful process. Especially when, with no society outside of the cave, you have to return inside even after expanding your understanding of your Self and then have to live among others who continue to believe shadows are all there are. This can create a different, but no less profound, sense of isolation (Chetkovich, 2019; Devor, 2002). This makes it is easy to wonder whether the struggle for liberation and expansion of grammar is worth it.
The tension of an ill-fitting grammar of nouns on the embodiment of gender is most visible in contrast with those whose internal gendered Self aligns with their external sexed Self. My parents, blessedly supportive as they are, were initially confused as to why I needed to discuss gender at all. To them, gender is a secondary detail to personhood; a transparent and unimportant part of life. This reaction perfectly illustrates the absence of their bodies (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2007; Leder, 1990). In a world that matches the shadow of their assigned genders, their bodies remain transparent and recede into the background of their daily lives. From this position of transparency, it is easy to assume that the body is equally absent for everyone as the shadows on the wall perfectly capture the only reality worth discussing (Plato, 2012).
However, for those who feel conflicted towards these projected shadows we have to identify with, gender is not absent, but a source of near constant friction (Bennet, 2010). My own increasing awareness of the physical discomfort I feel inhabiting the category of “woman” makes the statement “currently, I am not a woman” a necessity. Because gender identity is not an inner noun, but an experienced sense of correctness in how we are perceived as we move through the world (Ashley, 2023).
When our somatic reality falls outside the borders of the shadow of “woman”, we experience frustration and discomfort. Expanding our understanding of gender is therefore not an abstraction of the mind, but an embodied practice (Chetkovich, 2019: 549). To accept being as a shadow without question should be discouraged, as true authenticity requires a commitment to the expression of the Self that matches an internal sense of being (Cleary, 2022; Chetkovich, 2019; Plato, 2012).
This journey into the sun requires unlearning internalised messages of shame. In the cave variance from the binary was historically described as sexual deviance (Devor, 2002: 9-11). To move instead towards self-acceptance, it is necessary to develop a critique of the conflation between sex and gender. This process gives the individual the power to actively decide whether to resist or conform to gender norms. As long one remains chained to the grammar of nouns, this true expression is impossible (Kimmerer, 2020; Chetkovich, 2019).
Kohn (2013) describes forest thoughts as instances of consciousness that exists regardless of the linguistic labels we try to impose upon it. By being able to speak the felt friction, we can attempt to move from the subconscious act of existing to the conscious act of living. Language has power. By naming the friction, we can speak a new reality into existence, turning a silent and condoned inhabitancy into an active, embodied presence (Devor, 2002: 9).
Bodies are, after all, inherently animate (Kimmerer, 2020; Neimanis, 2017). That creates a fundamental dissonance when we try to assign our bodies an inanimate, static function such as a fixed gender category. It is, therefore, valuable to ask if a “successful” gender assignment merely one where the body disappears from view? Is “condoning” being in a body a sign of harmony, or is it a sign that we have so deeply ingrained Western gender-dualism that we are no longer aware of its limits?
Leder (1990: 1) argues that the body is paradoxical. It is the ground of all experience, yet it often recedes from direct awareness because it is a complex harmony of different systems rather than a homogenous object. Western societies exploit this natural tendency towards self-concealment by promoting a lifestyle of disembodiment (Leder, 1990: 3). People are encouraged to dwell in the real of ideas, which allows the gendered bodies to remain unrecognised and anonymous.
As long as our animated bodies remain stuck in the grammar of objects associated with Western rationality (Kimmerer, 2020), our understanding of the Self thus remains incomplete (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2007; Leder, 1990). It creates a fundamental dissonance when we try to assign them an inanimate, static function. To move beyond the cave, we must acknowledge that the absent body is not the peak of human experience, but rather a blind spot created by a Western rationality that prefers its subjects to be fixed and two-dimensional (Chetkovich, 2012; Devor, 2002; Plumwood, 1993).
Re-Animating the Self: Kimmerer’s Grammar as Liberation
If the linguistic cave is built around the iron chains of nouns, then the way out is through the recovery of the verb. As established, Western languages largely operate within a grammar of objects, where the world is divided into humans versus discrete Others (Abram, 1996:131-4). Kimmerer (2020: 53-5) identifies this as the primary source of our alienation from the living world. In her view (2020: 57), the use of the pronoun “it” for living beings is a denial of life. And so, when we treat gender as a noun or static thing, we are essentially “it-ing” our own embodiment. By freeing ourselves from the noun, we are animating our gender, thus allowing us to see the Self not as a fixed object, but as a living and unfolding process.
In her work, Kimmerer (2020: 55-7) moves our focus from the “thing” to the “activity”. This aligns language with our active, somatic bodies. If we can accept, as Kimmerer suggests, the inherent animacy of a body of water as “being a bay”, we must extend that same grace to our own embodiment. Applying this to the Self, we move from the static noun “woman” to the active “I am being”. This “verbing” of the Self grants us the agency that the cave denies us, acknowledging that identity is an ongoing inhabitancy rather than a permanent assigned destination.
This agency is particularly relevant when we consider the temporal application of gender. If we define gender as “that which informs our societal expectations and duties” (West & Zimmerman, 1987), then it must also be acknowledged that over time all our genders change, and will continue to do so. Strong and Powis (2024) provide a cross-cultural perspective that validates this, noting that in many societies, gender is not a static lifelong assignment but a status that evolves alongside one’s lifecycle and social responsibilities. The role we assign to children is different than that which we assign to adults, which is different to that of the elderly (Halberstam, 2005). We do not expect a six-year-old girl to start a family, the same way that we do not expect a grown man to wet the bed or pick his nose. It may thus be concluded that our gender expressions are tied to our age. The fixed dualism Western societies subject their citizens to is, therefore, already a practical impossibility within its own structures. As Strong and Powis (2024) demonstrate, the Western insistence on a static, lifelong noun is an anthropological outlier; by “transing” across the lifespan from child to adult, the body proves that the binary shadow is a fabrication.
The physical reality of our bodies thus supports a linguistic shift regarding gender. As permeable, leaky, and fluid beings in an ever-changing relationship with the other fluid beings around us, there is little sense in forcing discussions about ourselves in a grammar that is unrepresentative of these experiences (Kimmerer, 2020; Neimanis, 2017: 1-5).
When we embrace this liquidity of being, the rigid binary of the cave automatically begins to dissolve. If our very cells are in a constant flux, then our identities can also not be truly static. By embracing this fact, we validate the experience of moving between different embodiments of the Self. As De Castro (1998) suggests, the body is not a fixed essence, but a perspective that one inhabits. Recognising gender as a fluid perspective, rather than a biological truth reduced in a shadow, then we can come to inhabit our bodies with a sense of reciprocity rather than condoning a cage.
The added value of this expanded language might be found in the poetics of dwelling (Ingold, 2000: 173-5). This argues against the Western tendency to first construct linguistic caves to then project them onto the world. In this restrictive view, gender is a structure we are born into and must inhabit regardless of how well the shadows fit our somatic experiences. By contrast, a perspective including the poetics of dwelling suggests that the world, and our Selves, are never finished. We do not live in a gender the same way as we live in an assigned sex. Instead we live our gender by continuously and consciously engaging with ourselves and the world around it (Kimmerer, 2020; Neimanis, 2017; Ingold, 2000: 179).
Applying this to the case at hand, we can move away from treating the body as a territory to be conquered or a static object to be categorised. To “dwell” in one’s gender is to recognise it as a place of construction and where the Self is constantly re-animated through interaction with others and its environment (Ingold, 2000: 188). This shifts the focus from what we are (noun) to how we are (verb). If we define gender through active engagement rather than social expectations, it stops it from being a shadow projected from behind us and becomes the very path we ourselves create by walking it.
As Snyder (2020) suggests, this form of dwelling requires an alliance with the body. We have to stop treating it as a biological machine to be governed by rational labels, but see it as a place of purpose, love, and freedom. By expanding our language to include the grammar of animacy (Kimmerer, 2020), we stop trying to fit into the socially constructed shadows of the cave and can instead create a society where we see one another as equals also passing through living, breathing, and evolving processes of becoming that are never fully finished, and instead always in progress.
Synthesis: The Potential of Liberation
Liberation, in this context, is not a final destination or a new noun to inhabit, but rather the transition from an state of condoning our bodies to a state of actively embodying them. And the potential for it can thus be found in the radical act of re-conceptualising the Self as an active process rather than a static category.
By considering Plato’s (2012) drive for truth together with Kimmerer’s (2020) grammar of animacy, we can begin reconcile the absent body (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2007; Leder, 1990) with the liquid body (Neimanis, 2017). But first, to bridge the gap between the cave and the sunlight, we must learn to use animated language that reflects the vibrancy of the world inside and out. Current Western linguistic tools can still reinforce certain aspects of the shadows when they continue to function as fixed and finished nouns (Ashley, 2023; Kimmerer, 2020: 52; Abram, 1996: 131). While today the language surrounding gender is increasingly varied, the Self is often still categorised into a self-contained and discrete noun.
To truly move into the sunlight, we require an embodied language (Johnson, 1995). In other words; to truly “verb” our existence our vocabulary must become more sensory than merely verbal (Leder, 1990). We must learn to read and express our bodies with the same respect with which Kimmerer (2020: 55) talks about the land.
Because true linguistic freedom comes from this shift. As Cleary (2022) argues through a Beauvoirian lens, we must resist the sedimentation of identity. When we stop objectifying our embodiment and begin "verbing" our gender, the mastery of Western rationality (Plumwood, 1993) loses its power to categorise and thus control us.
Gender is then no longer a biological or social shadow, but a living project of the Self (Cleary, 2022). In this state, the blind spots created by the gender binary are replaced with the somatic reality of life. This offers a path where the friction of gender non-conformity is socially embraced as a vital form of knowledge that expands the limits of the cave itself (Kohn, 2013; Plato, 2012; Devor, 2002).
However, it must be noted that this liberation is important to more people than those of us who feel ill at ease with their assigned gender. When we move away from the epistemology of rule (Bookchin, 1982) and towards a poetics of dwelling (Ingold, 2000), we transform the way we relate to others. By recognising that every person exists in a fluid sense (Neimanis, 2017), moving through a constant evolution of social gender roles and expectations (Halberstam, 2005; Strong & Powis, 2024), we can move towards a society that values the spectrum of this over the hierarchy the binary.
Liberation is the realisation that we do not have to settle for the shadows of just “man” or “woman” as they are projected upon the wall. Instead, we can step into the sun and speak ourselves into being, understanding our identities as vital instances of consciousness. As expansive as the trees and as fluid as the sea.
Conclusion
This paper explored Plato’s (2012) Allegory of the Cave as a metaphor for Western linguistic and ontological claims about gender. By critiquing its employed grammar of objects and the absent body using Kimmerer (2020), Leder (1990), Plumwood (1993), and Neimanis (2017), I have argued that the traditional gender binary acts as a two-dimensional shadow. This, in turn, is socially considered as the entire reality, which obscures the animate reality of the Self.
The literature and discussions on gender theory have in recent years sought a more fair understanding of the topic through the creation of new categories and so expanding the list of nouns applicable to identities. However, as this paper has shown, simply adding more sculptures to be carried past the fire does not free the prisoner, it simply diversifies the shadows. It has argued that true liberation and understanding of genders comes from shifting the focus from nouns to verbs. By applying Kimmerer’s (2020) grammar of animacy to the Self, we can move the debate from a struggle for the recognition of identity towards a new way of talking and knowing about gender, where it is reclaimed as an expression of embodiment rather than a projection of social assumptions (Cleary, 2022; Neimanis, 2017).
By bridging ancient philosophy with indigenous linguistics, this paper explored the ways in which the Western gender binary is wrong about historic understandings of personhood and limiting to the Self (Strong & Powis, 2024; Ocobock & Lacy, 2024). It attempted to put into words the friction felt by those whose somatic experiences do not match up with the shadows on the wall and so transform this discomfort into knowledge (Kohn, 2013). Still, a significant limitation remains. Our individual, internal adaptation of animated grammar does not immediately dismantle the societal usage of the structure of nouns. Western societies remain heavily invested in “it-ing” their citizens because reducing living beings into static objects makes them more easily governable (Plumwood, 1993).
Ultimately, the discomfort of inhabitancy is a signal of a deeper truth. To settle for an assigned gender without thought is to remain in a state of self-concealment. It leaves the body absent and colonised by the cave’s shadows. Yet even after stepping into the sunlight, returning to the cave with an expanded understanding is still one of the most essential steps for those of us using a grammar of animacy. Though the returning prisoner may face ridicule from those who remain bound to nouns, they carry an essential truth. We are not static things, but animate, fluid, and interconnected processes. By verbing our gender and standing in solidarity with the liquidity of others, we break the chains of the linguistic cave and encourage others to do the same. Together we can move beyond the binary, and finally step into the light of being.
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