Personhood is a matter of degree, not as an all-or-nothing affair, something evenly distributed around the species. W e see it as something that slaves typically have less of than their masters . Their ability to make the slave think of his or her pain as fated and even somehow deserved, something to be borne rather than resisted.
Personhood is a sense arising from how we are drawn into a wide social unit... our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull.
Personhood is not some mysterious property that we grant to beings under special circumstances, or that it doesn’t exist at all except for in the eye of the beholder, or that it’s an emergent property of special states of matter. It’s that personhood now means “You are not a non-person.”
Personhood is not limited to people, but is instead a widely available (in fact, universally available) category, flimsy, subscendent and spectral, and the very doubt and paranoia that Descartes was trying to eliminate are in fact default to personhood. Being concerned that I might not be a person were a basic condition of being one
Personhood is not limited to people (since rats can feel regret, bees can hesitate, etc.) and rather than constantly revising personhood to fit only humans, it makes more sense to see personhood as not too difficult to achieve, a spectral category that can apply to all such beings.
Personhood is, in postmodern thought, not a set of metaphysical or ontological qualities but the discursive result of our inhabiting a culture.