Feminist Philosophy : oso

Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity

Sonia Kruks — 2013-01-24

Author:: Sonia Kruks
ISBN:: 9780195381443
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, History of Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195381443.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

Simone de Beauvoir is best known as the author of The Second Sex, but she was also the author of a vast array of other political and philosophical writings. Together, these provide a major contribution to political philosophy and theory that has so far been little explored. This book is a study of Beauvoir's political thinking. In addition to locating Beauvoir in her own intellectual and political context, it shows how Beauvoir's work still speaks to a host of issues that remain of concern today. She is an important interlocutor in debates about the values and dangers of humanism; about the strengths and limits of “ideal theory”; about how best to theorize power, identity, and oppression; about the limits to rationalism and the dangers of ethical purism; and about the place of emotions, such as the desire for revenge, in politics. In discussing her contributions to such debates, her work is put into conversation with many contemporary thinkers, including feminist and race theorists, and with historical figures in the liberal, Hegelian, and Marxist traditions. Beauvoir's political thinking emerges from her fundamental insights into the ambiguity of human existence. Combining phenomenological descriptions with structural analyses, she focuses on the tensions of human action as both free and materially constrained. To be human is to be an embodied subject, capable of free choice and yet contingent and physically vulnerable. It is also to be in the world among many other such existents, among whom interconnections may be both reciprocal and conflictual, involving both solidarity and oppression. Because such ambiguities are intrinsic to politics and are not subject to resolution, Beauvoir shows us that failure is a necessary part of political action and that we need to acknowledge this while also assuming responsibility for its outcomes.

Resisting Reality

Sally Haslanger — 2013-01-24

Author:: Sally Haslanger
ISBN:: 9780199892631
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199892631.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

Contemporary theorists use the term “social construction” with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly “natural” is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.

The Epistemology of Resistance

José Medina — 2013-01-24

Author:: José Medina
ISBN:: 9780199929023
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929023.001.0001
Published in print:: 2013
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways—from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other’s perspectives. Medina’s epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.

Speech and Harm

Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan — 2012-09-20

Author:: IshaniMaitraRutgers University, Newark and New BrunswickMary KateMcGowanWellesley College
ISBN:: 9780199236282
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199236282.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

Most liberal societies are deeply committed to a principle of free speech. At the same time, however, there is evidence that some kinds of speech are harmful in ways that are detrimental to important liberal values, such as social equality. Might a genuine commitment to free speech require that we legally permit speech even when it is harmful, and even when doing so is in conflict with our commitment to values like equality? Even if such speech is to be legally permitted, does our commitment to free speech allow us to provide material and institutional support to those who would contest such harmful speech? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, which kinds of speech are harmful in ways that merit response, either in the form of legal regulation or in some other form? This book explores these and related questions. Drawing on expertise in philosophy, sociology, political science, feminist theory, and legal theory, the chapters in this book investigate these themes and questions. By exploring various categories of speech (including pornography, hate speech, Holocaust denial literature, ‘Whites Only’ signs), and attending to the precise functioning of speech, the chapters shed light on these questions by clarifying the relationship between speech and harm. Understanding how speech functions can help us work out which kinds of speech are harmful, what those harms are, and how the speech in question brings them about. All of these issues are crucially important when it comes to deciding what ought to be done about allegedly harmful speech.

Out from the Shadows

Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson — 2012-05-24

Author:: Sharon L.CrasnowNorco CollegeAnita M.SupersonUniversity of Kentucky
ISBN:: 9780199855469
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199855469.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

Philosophy is by its very nature a critical discipline. Due to its critical nature, all philosophy is progressive, building on the lessons of the past, offering new ways of thinking about the present and the future. Recent debates within analytical philosophy have become very rigorous and fine-tuned, with great attention to detail, resulting in much progress. But social progress, the progress that feminists and other critical philosophers have made or are trying to make toward the goal of “better” knowledge, knowledge that is not only true but relevant for improving our lives, has been for the most part left out of traditional analytical philosophy. The effects of social progress can be tradition-changing at various levels, bringing traditional philosophy “out from the shadows.” The 18 papers (all but two previously unpublished) in this volume, spanning most areas of philosophy, address the social progress being made by analytical feminism in its attempt to bring traditional issues out from the shadows into the light of feminist critique. The volume represents current discussions on topics that have not been previously addressed by feminists, and further discussions on topics that feminists have already addressed but are here themselves critiqued.

Minimizing Marriage

Elizabeth Brake — 2012-05-24

Author:: Elizabeth Brake
ISBN:: 9780199774142
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199774142.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

Even in secular contexts, marriage retains sacramental connotations. Yet what is its moral significance? This book examines its morally salient features – promise, commitment, care, and contract – with surprising results. In Part One, “De-Moralizing Marriage,” essays on promise and commitment argue that we cannot promise to love and so wedding vows are (mostly) failed promises, and that marriage may be a poor commitment strategy. The book contends with philosophical defenses of marriage to argue that marriage has no inherent moral significance. Further, privileging marriage sustains amatonormative discrimination – discrimination against non-amorous or non-exclusive caring relationships such as friendships, adult care networks, or polyamorous groups. The discussion raises issues of independent interest for the moral philosopher such as the limits of promising and nature of commitment. The central argument of Part Two, “Democratizing Marriage,” is that liberal reasons for recognizing same-sex marriage also require recognition of polyamorists, polygamists, friends, urban tribes, and adult care networks. Political liberalism requires the disestablishment of monogamous amatonormative marriage. Under public reason, a liberal state must refrain from basing law solely on moral or religious doctrines; but only such doctrines could furnish reason for restricting marriage to male-female couples or romantic dyads. Restrictions on marriage should be minimized. But there is a strong rationale for minimal marriage: social supports for care are a matter of fundamental justice. Part Two responds to challenges posed by property division, polygyny, and parenting, builds on feminist, queer, and anti-racist critiques of marriage, and argues for the compatibility of liberalism and feminism.

Unpopular Privacy

Anita Allen — 2012-01-19

Author:: Anita Allen
ISBN:: 9780195141375
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, General
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195141375.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Can the government stick us with privacy we don't want? It can, it does, and according to this author, may need to do more of it. Privacy is a foundational good, she argues, a necessary tool in the liberty-lover’s kit for a successful life. A nation committed to personal freedom must be prepared to mandate inalienable, liberty-promoting privacies for its people, whether they eagerly embrace them or not. The eight chapters of this book are reflections on public regulation of privacy at home; isolation and confinement for punitive and health reasons; religious modesty attire; erotic nudity; workplace and professional confidentiality; racial privacy; online transactions; social networking; and the collection, use and storage of electronic data. Most books about privacy law focus on rules designed to protect popular forms of privacy. Popular privacy is the kind that people tend to want, believe they have a right to, and expect governments to secure. Typical North Americans and Europeans embrace privacy for home-life, telephone calls, e-mail, health records, and financial transactions. This unique book draws attention to unpopular privacy‐‐ privacies disvalued or disliked by their intended beneficiaries and targets—and the best reasons for imposing them. Examples of unwanted physical and informational privacies with which contemporary Americans have already lived? Start with laws designed to keep website operators from collecting personal information from children under 13 without parental consent; the anti-nudity laws that force strippers to wear pasties and thongs; the ‘Don't Ask Don't Tell’ rules that kept gays out of the US military; and the myriad employee and professional confidentiality rules‐‐ including insider trading laws-- that require strict silence about matters whose disclosure could earn us small fortunes. Conservative and progressive liberals agree that coercion and paternalism should be the exceptions rather than the rule. Better to educate, incentivize and nudge than to force. But what if people continue to make self-defeating bad choices? What are the exceptional circumstances that warrant coercion, and in particular, coercing privacy? When can government turn privacies into duties, especially duties of self-care? Early modern societies went wrong, imposing unequal conditions of forced modesty and confinement on women and others groups, giving privacy and imposed privacies a bad rap. But now may be a time for imposed privacies of another sort—imposed privacies that are liberating rather than dominating. A role for coercive and paternalistic regulation may be called for in view of the Great Privacy Give-Away. The public turns over vast amounts of personal information in exchange for the ease of online shopping, browsing and social networking, protected in some instances by little more than a pro forma privacy policy pasted on a home page. The public uploads and stores information ‘in the cloud,’ and have become more and more dependent upon electronic telecommunications and personal archiving exposed to public and private surveillance. Have they lost the taste for privacy? Do they fail to understand the implications of what is happening? This book offers insight into the ethical and political underpinnings of public policies mandating privacies that people may be indifferent to or despise. Privacy institutions and practices play a role in sustaining the capable free-agents presupposed by liberal democracy. Physical sanctuaries and data protection by law confers and preserve opportunities for making and acting on choices. Imposing privacy recognizes the extraordinary importance of dignity, reputation, confidential relationships, and preserving social, economic and political options throughout a lifetime.

The Metaphysics of Gender

Charlotte Witt — 2012-01-19

Author:: Charlotte Witt
ISBN:: 9780199740413
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199740413.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

This book is about gender essentialism: what it is and why it might be true. It opens with the question: What is gender essentialism? After distinguishing between essentialism about gender viewed as a kind and essentialism about gender in relation to individuals and their lived experiences, successive chapters introduce the ingredients for a theory of gender essentialism about individuals, called uniessentialism. Gender uniessentialism claims that a social individual's gender is uniessential to that individual. It is modeled on Aristotle's essentialism in which the form or essence of an individual is the principle of unity of that individual. For example, the form or essence of an artifact, like a house, is what unifies the material parts of the house into a new individual (over and above a sum of parts). Since an individual's gender is a social role (or set of social norms) the kind of unity in question is not the unity of material parts, as it is in the artifact example. Instead, the central claim of gender uniessentialism is that an individual's gender provides that individual with a principle of normative unity—a principle that orders and organizes all of that individual's other social roles. An important ingredient in gender uniessentialism concerns exactly which individuals are at issue—human organisms, persons, or social individuals? Given the view of gender as a social role the claim of gender essentialism can only be coherently expressed of social individuals. The book argues that a social individual's gender is uniessential to it.

Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment

Serene J. Khader — 2012-01-19

Author:: Serene J. Khader
ISBN:: 9780199777884
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199777884.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Women and other oppressed and deprived people sometimes collude with the forces that perpetuate injustice against them. Women’s acceptance of their lesser claim on household resources like food, their positive attitudes toward clitoridectemy and infibulation, their acquiescence to violence at the hands of their husbands, and their sometimes fatalistic attitudes toward their own poverty or suffering are all examples of “adaptive preferences,” wherein women participate in their own deprivation. This book offers a definition of adaptive preference and a moral framework for responding to adaptive preferences in development practice. The book defines adaptive preferences as deficits in the capacity to lead a flourishing human life that are causally related to deprivation and argues that public institutions should conduct deliberative interventions to transform the adaptive preferences of deprived people. It insists that people with adaptive preferences can experience value distortion, but it explains how this fact does not undermine those people’s claim to participate in designing development interventions that determine the course of their lives. The book claims that adaptive preference identification requires a commitment to moral universalism, but this commitment need not be incompatible with a respect for culturally variant conceptions of the good. She illustrates her arguments with examples from real-world development practice. Its deliberative perfectionist approach moves us beyond apparent impasses in the debates about internalized oppression and autonomous agency, relativism and universalism, and feminism and multiculturalism.

Loose Women, Lecherous Men

Linda LeMoncheck — 2011-10-03

Author:: Linda LeMoncheck
ISBN:: 9780195105568
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195105568.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book introduces a new way of thinking and talking about women's sexual pleasures, preferences, and desires. Using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, it discusses methods for mediating the tensions among apparently irreconcilable feminist perspectives on women's sexuality and shows how a feminist epistemology and ethic can advance the dialogue in women's sexuality across a broad political spectrum. The book argues that in order to capture the diversity and complexity of women's sexual experience, women's sexuality must be examined from two equally compelling perspectives: that of women's sexual oppression under conditions of individual and institutional male dominance; and that of women's sexual liberation, both in terms of each woman's pursuit of sexual agency and self-definition, and in terms of women's sexual liberation as a class. This book sheds crucial new light on such much-debated topics as promiscuity, adultery, sexual deviance, prostitution, pornography, sexual harassment, and sexual violence against women. The book supports a dialogue that encourages both women and men to take up a feminist perspective in exploring the meaning and value of sexuality in their lives.

Sexual Solipsism

Rae Langton — 2011-01-01

Author:: Rae Langton
ISBN:: 9780199247066
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199247066.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2011-01-01

This book collects together fifteen chapters on pornography and objectification. Arguments from uncontroversial liberal premises are shown to yield controversial feminist conclusions that pornography of a certain kind subordinates and silences women, and that women have rights against it. The arguments draw on speech act theory and pragmatics to show how such pornography may be speech that subordinates and silences. It subordinates if it is an illocution that ranks women, deprives women of powers, and legitimates violence and discrimination. It silences if it creates illocutionary disablement, preventing women's words having the intended illocutionary force. The chapters explore the idea that there is something solipsistic about pornography, in the way women are treated as things, and things are treated as women. They develop an understanding of the wider concept of objectification, which is itself shown to be solipsistic. Objectification is traditionally viewed in Kantian guise as the idea of treating someone as a thing, a mere instrument, and denying their autonomy. But it has unnoticed epistemological aspects. On a feminist conception of objectification, moral and epistemological features interact: for it is, partly, through a kind of self-fulfilling projection of beliefs and perceptions of women as subordinate that women are made subordinate and treated as things. Pornography can have an epistemological role here, shaping desires that guide wishful, oppressive belief, providing evidence confirming oppressive belief, suppressing counter-evidence, by silencing. Kant's moral philosophy threads through a number of chapters: his pessimism about some pathologies of sexual love; his optimism about love and friendship, which offer an escape route from solipsism.

Philosophy of Science after Feminism

Janet A. Kourany — 2011-01-01

Author:: Janet A. Kourany
ISBN:: 9780199732623
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732623.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-01-01

The goal of Philosophy of Science after Feminism is not only a (descriptively and normatively) more adequate philosophy of science than what we have now, but also a more socially engaged and socially responsible philosophy of science, one that can help to promote a more socially engaged and socially responsible science. Its main message is that philosophy of science needs to locate science within its wider societal context, ceasing to analyze science as if it existed in a social/political/economic vacuum; and correlatively, that philosophy of science needs to aim for a more comprehensive understanding of scientific rationality, one that integrates the ethical with the epistemic. Since feminists—feminist scientists and historians of science as well as feminist philosophers of science—have been pursuing this kind of philosophy of science in gender-related areas for three decades now, two chapters reflect on their contributions and derive from these reflections an “ideal of socially responsible science” that is further developed and defended in other chapters. The articulation of this ideal, it is made clear, is a central project of socially responsible philosophy of science. Other projects are also spelled out.

Toward a Humanist Justice

Debra Satz and Rob Reich — 2009-09-01

Author:: DebraSatzStanford Universityhttp://pgj.stanford.edu/people/debrasatz/RobReichStandord Universityhttp://www.stanford.edu/group/reichresearch/cgi-bin/site/
ISBN:: 9780195337396
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337396.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-09-01

The late Susan Moller Okin was a leading political theorist whose scholarship integrated political philosophy and issues of gender, the family, and culture. This volume stems from a conference on Okin's work and contains chapters by some of the top feminist and political philosophers working today. They are organized around a set of themes central to Okin's work, namely liberal theory, gender and the family, feminist and cultural differences, and global justice. Their aim is not to celebrate Okin's work but to constructively engage with it and further its goals.

The Moral Skeptic

Anita M. Superson — 2009-05-01

Author:: Anita M. Superson
ISBN:: 9780195376623
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195376623.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-05-01

This book challenges the traditional picture of the skeptic who asks, “Why be moral?” and demands a demonstration that acting in morally required ways is rationally required. It argues that we defeat the action skeptic, as well as the disposition skeptic, who denies that being morally disposed is rationally required, and the motive skeptic, who believes that merely going through the motions in acting morally is rationally permissible. It argues, against internalism, that we address the amoralist, who is not moved by moral reasons he recognizes. It argues for expanding the skeptic's position from self-interest to privilege, to include morally unjustified behavior typically directed against disenfranchised social groups. It argues for revising the traditional expected utility model of rationality to exclude desires deformed by patriarchy as ones it is not irrational to have. It defends the Interdependency Thesis, which assesses the rationality of moral dispositions and of actions interdependently, and allows us to fine tune the demands of the skeptic by not focusing on acts and dispositions in themselves, but on their interconnection. It defends the view that our rational assessments of agents should reflect the complex connection between the agent's reasons for adopting a moral disposition, and for having and acting from it, whether these cohere with her reasons for acting and for wanting to be a morally good person, and the justification for the moral theory or principles she endorses. Acts come in degrees of rationality, as measured by how they contribute to the agent's consistent life plan.

Self-Transformations

Cressida J. Heyes — 2007-09-01

Author:: Cressida J. Heyes
ISBN:: 9780195310535
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195310535.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

This book argues that we live in an age of somatic subjects, whose authentic identity must be represented through the body. When a perceived mismatch between inner self and outer form occurs, technologies can step in to change the flesh. Drawing on Wittgenstein's objections to the idea of a private language, and on Foucault's critical account of normalization, this book shows how we have been led to think of ourselves in this way, and suggests that breaking the hold of this picture of the self will be central to our freedom. How should we work on ourselves when so often the kind of self we are urged to be is itself a product of normalization? This question is answered through three case studies that analyze feminist interpretations of transgender politics, the allure of weight-loss dieting, and representations of cosmetic surgery patients. Mixing philosophical argument with personal narrative and analysis of popular culture, the book moves from engagement with Leslie Feinberg on trans liberation, to an auto-ethnography of Weight Watchers meetings, to a reading of Extreme Makeover, to the author's own practice of yoga. The book draws on philosophy, sociology, medicine, cultural studies, and psychology to suggest that these examples, in different ways, are connected to the picture of the somatic subject. Working on the self can both generate new skills and make us more docile; enhance our pleasures and narrow our possibilities; encourage us to take care of ourselves while increasing our dependence on experts. Self transformation through the body can limit us and liberate us at the same time. To move beyond this paradox, the book concludes by arguing that Foucault's last work on ethics provides untapped resources for understanding how we might use our embodied agency to change ourselves for the better.

Moral Understandings

Margaret Urban Walker — 2007-09-01

Author:: Margaret Urban Walker
ISBN:: 9780195315394
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195315394.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

This book defends an expressive-collaborative model of morality that challenges common assumptions in philosophical ethics. Morality is best revealed in practices of responsibility that express shared understandings about who we are, what we value, and to whom we are accountable for what we do. Morality is collaborative as we reproduce or shift our moral understandings together in many daily interactions of social life. For this reason, moral practices cannot be separated from other social practices, nor moral identities from social roles and institutions in particular ways of life; morality is not socially modular. But not everyone has the same power to set or change moral terms, and differently valued social-moral identities with different responsibilities and privileges are the rule in human societies. This book argues for empirically informed and politically critical ethics that aims for transparency about the moral significance of social differences including, but not only, gender differences. The book responds to the work of major philosophers of the 20th century, such as Bernard Williams, John Rawls, Robert Goodin, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre, while putting the tools of feminist epistemology and ethics to use. It also challenges uncritical assumptions in academic ethics about what we are in a position to know and for whom we are in a position to speak. This text is the second edition and contains an updated view of the state of moral philosophy, a new chapter on the moral and epistemological significance of public projects of truth-telling, and a concluding response to some common questions about the book.

Women's Liberation and the Sublime

Bonnie Mann — 2006-09-01

Author:: Bonnie Mann
ISBN:: 9780195187458
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/0195187458.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2006-09-01

In the 1980s, this book contends, an uncritical affirmation of anti-essentialism turned this important feminist critique into a disciplinary dogmatism that constrained and homogenized feminist thinking. Feminist work in the academy became forgetful of both women and nature, and began to exchange an engaged politics for the intensity of sublime experience in its postmodern form. This book works between the modern and postmodern notions of the sublime to show that the gendered politics and effacement of nature, central to the modern sublime, especially in Kant's account, are at the heart of the postmodern sublime as well. It turns to Lyotard's postmodern sublime to argue that this sublime is hard at work in feminist poststructuralism, especially the early texts of Judith Butler. The melting away of the extra-discursively real in these accounts tends to make feminist thinking incapable of meaningfully articulating our relations to the natural world and to one another. Yet these very relations are necessarily tied to powerful aesthetic experiences of beauty and sublimity.

Ecological Thinking

Lorraine Code — 2006-09-01

Author:: Lorraine Code
ISBN:: 9780195159431
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/0195159438.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2006-09-01

Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation.

Bioethics and Women

Mary Briody Mahowald — 2006-09-01

Author:: Mary Briody Mahowald
ISBN:: 9780195176179
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/0195176170.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2006-09-01

This book deals with bioethical issues relevant to women across the life span. “Gender justice” is the starting point and the end point of the author’s approach to the issues addressed. The first section offers an overview of bioethics, critiques prevalent approaches to bioethics and models of the physician-patient relationship, and sketches distinguishing aspects of women’s health care. Classical pragmatists and feminist standpoint theorists are enlisted in support of “an egalitarian perspective”, and positions on the moral status of fetuses and those already born are examined. The second section identifies topics that are directly or indirectly related to women’s health; these include prenatal testing, childbirth and newborn decisions, treatment of minors and the elderly, assisted reproduction, abortion, eating disorders, domestic violence, breast and gynecological cancer, end of life care, and research on women. Brief cases illustrate variables related to each topic. Empirical and theoretical considerations follow each set of cases; these are intended to precipitate more expansive and critical examination of the questions raised. The book concludes with discussion of an egalitarian ideal to be pursued through an ethic of virtue or supererogation rather than obligation. By embracing this ideal, according to the author, moral agents support a more demanding level of morality than guidelines or laws require.

Autonomy, Gender, Politics

Marilyn Friedman — 2006-02-01

Author:: Marilyn Friedman
ISBN:: 9780195138504
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/0195138503.001.0001
Published in print:: 2003
Published Online:: 2006-02-01

Women have historically been prevented from living autonomously by systematic injustice, subordination, and oppression. The lingering effects of these practices have prompted many feminists to view autonomy with suspicion. This book defends the ideal of feminist autonomy. The book proposes that behavior is autonomous if it accords with the wants, cares, values, or commitments that the actor has reaffirmed and is able to sustain in the face of opposition. By this account, autonomy is socially grounded yet also individualizing and sometimes socially disruptive, qualities that can be ultimately advantageous for women. The book applies the concept of autonomy to domains of special interest to women. It defends the importance of autonomy in romantic love, considers how social institutions should respond to women who choose to remain in abusive relationships, and argues that liberal societies should tolerate minority cultural practices that violate women's rights so long as the women in question have chosen autonomously to live according to those practices.

Women and Citizenship

Marilyn Friedman — 2005-10-01

Author:: MarilynFriedmanWashington University St. Louishttp://www.vanderbilt.edu/ans/philosophy/faculty/_Friedman.html
ISBN:: 9780195175349
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/0195175344.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2005-10-01

These studies explore a variety of ways in which citizenship has been politically and culturally differentiated by gender. Despite women’s political gains in the past century in many parts of the world, the rights and privileges of women’s citizenship status may still fall short of those of men. These differences may be linked systematically to gender hierarchies in spheres of life such as civil society and the family. At the same time, these spheres of life can provide models for improving the citizenship status of both women and men. These essays explore gendered contexts and practices of citizenship in the United States and elsewhere. Three of the essays focus on the roles and policies of government and law, for example, the gender parity (parité) requirements for legislative candidates in France. Four of the essays explore manifestations and models of citizenship in culture and civil society, for example, women’s neighborhood political activism in the United States, non-governmental organizations and some problems they pose for women, Chicana/Latina citizenship in the United States, and care practices. Finally, three essays consider the grounds of citizenship in culture and civil society, including kinship in the Middle East, progressive options for women within traditional Islam, and, with a special focus on India, women’s education or lack of it.

Burdened Virtues

Lisa Tessman — 2005-10-01

Author:: Lisa Tessman
ISBN:: 9780195179149
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
DOI:: 10.1093/0195179145.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2005-10-01

Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, the book addresses the ways in which the devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities for flourishing. The book describes two different forms of “moral trouble” prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them, and that are referred to as “burdened virtues.” These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer’s own well being. It is suggested that eudaimonistic theories should be able to account for virtues of this sort.