bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Birth of an Identity: A Response to Del McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures
Authors: Scott Charles E.
Published: October 2010

First, I engage Del McWhorter's confessional voice in the context of her thought and emphasize her claim that even “objective knowledge” often has an indirectly confessional aspect. Second, I give an account of the value of historicity and genealogy in McWhorter's understanding of knowing and subjectivity. Third, I address her reconfiguration of the subjectivity of desiring by prioritizing pleasure in the project of “becoming truly gay.” Finally, I assess the meaning of her phrase, “straying afield from myself.“
The Death of the Other/Father: A Feminist Reading of Derrida's Hauntology1
Authors: Holland Nancy J.
Published: October 2010

This paper addresses the question of whether Derrida's “hauntology” as developed in Specters of Marx and related texts, can be anything more than yet another repetition of a specifically male preoccupation with the Father inscribed on the bodies of women, in this case the always absent daughter. A careful reading suggests that Derrida, and playwnght fathers of daughters such as Shakespeare and August Wilson, may be aware of the paradoxes of their situation.
On the Lap of Necessity: A Mythic Reading of Teresa Brennan's Energetics Philosophy
Authors: Caputi Jane
Published: October 2010

In several works Teresa Brennan examines how, contrary to social notions of the separate and contained self, all that exists in the natural world is connected energetically. She identifies a “foundational fantasy” whereby the ego comes into existence and is maintained by the notion that it controls the mother. The effects of this fantasy are socially oppressive and, in the technological era, environmentally disastrous. M;y examination of narratives and images in ancient myth, popular culture, literature, and art suggest ways to counteract the destructive fantasy through re-symbolization of the relation to what Brennan understands as the original/living nature, which is correlated to the mother's body.
Rape as an Essentially Contested Concept
Authors: Reitan Eric
Published: October 2010

Because “rape” has such a powerful appraisive meaning, how one defines the term has normative significance. Those who define rape rigidly so as to exclude contemporary feminist understandings are therefore seeking to silence some moral perspectives “by definition.” I argue that understanding rape as an essentially contested concept allows the concept sufficient flexibility to permit open moral discourse, while at the same time preserving a core meaning that can frame the discourse.
A Response to My “Critics”
Authors: Nicholson Linda
Published: October 2010

This essay is a response to comments made by Shane Fhelan, Cheshire Calhoun, and Naomi Scheman on my bookThe Play of Reason: From the Modern to the Postmodern(1999). I reiterate my belief that we best approach the issue of consensus and dissension in second’ Order justifications of social and political claims not philosophically but sociologically, politically, historically. I suggest similar approaches for dealing with the question of meaning. This mow signals an endorsement not of indifference but rather of commitment and humility.
Why Should a Knower Care?
Authors: Dalmiya Vrinda
Published: October 2010

This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five-step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of “care-knowing” and “care-based epistemology” emerge from construing caring (respectively) as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.
Do Confucians Really Care? A Defense of the Distinctiveness of Care Ethics: A Reply to Chenyang Li
Authors: Star Daniel
Published: October 2010

Chenyang Li argues, in an article originally published in Hypatia, that the ethics of care and Confucian ethics constitute similar approaches to ethics. The present paper takes issue with this claim. It is more accurate to view Confucian ethics as a kind of virtue ethics, rather than as a kind of care ethics. In the process of criticizing Li's claim, the distinctiveness of care ethics is defended, against attempts to assimilate it to virtue ethics.
Ideas in the Mind: Gender and Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Findlen Paula
Published: October 2010

“Neither doth our Sex delight or understand Philosophy.” (Margaret Cavendish, 1664)
Care and the Extension of Markets
Authors: Held Virginia
Published: October 2010

Many activities formerly not in the market are being “marketized,” and women's labor is increasingly in the market. I consider the grounds on which to decide what should and what should not be “in” the market. I distinguish work that is paid from work done under “market norms,” and argue that market values should not have priority in education, childcare, healthcare, and many other activities. I suggest that a feminist ethics of care is more promising than Kantian ethics or utilitarianism for recommending social decisions concerning limits on markets.
The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution
Authors: Davidson Julia O'Connell
Published: October 2010

This essay critically explores contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prostitution. It argues that to develop analyses relevant to the experience of more than just a small minority of “First World” women, those who are concerned with prostitution as a form of work need to look beyond liberal discourse on property and contractual consent for ways of conceptualizing the rights and wrongs of “sex work.”
Sexual Harassment and Sadomasochism
Authors: Williams Christine L.
Published: October 2010

Although many women experience harmful behaviors that fit the legal definition of sexual harassment, very few ever label their experiences as such. I explore how psychological ambivalence expressed as sadomasochism may account for some of this gap. Following Lynn Chancer, I argue that certain structural circumstances characteristic of highly stratified bureaucratic organizations may promote these psychological responses. After discussing two illustrations of this dynamic, I draw out the implications for sexual harassment theory and policy.
The Encounter between Wonder and Generosity
Authors: Caze Marguerite La
Published: October 2010

In a reading of René Descartes's The Passions of the Soul, Luce Irigaray explores the possibility that wonder, first of all passions, can provide the basis for an ethics of sexual difference because it is prior to judgment, and thus nonhierarchical. For Descartes, the passion of generosity gives the key to ethics. I argue that wonder should be extended to other differences and should be combined with generosity to form the basis of an ethics.
At Home with Down Syndrome and Gender
Authors: Wong Sophia Isako
Published: October 2010

I argue that there is an important analogy between sex selection and selective abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome. There are surprising parallels between the social construction of Down syndrome as a disability and the deeply entrenched institutionalization of sexual difference in many societies. Prevailing concepts of gender and mental retardation exert a powerful influence in constructing the sexual identities and life plans of people with Down syndrome, and also affect their families' lives.1
Negotiating Mutuality and Agency in Care-giving Relationships with Women with Intellectual Disabilities
Authors: Cushing Pamela , Lewis Tanya
Published: October 2010

This article is an ethnographic analysis of the mutuality that is possible in relationships between caregivers and women with intellectual disabilities who live together in L'Arche homes. Creating mutuality through which both parties grow and exercise agency requires that caregivers learn to negotiate delicate power relations connected to the physics of care and to reframe dominant stereotypes of disability. This helps them to support the women with intellectual disabilities to name and achieve their desires.
Love's Labor in the Health Care System: Working Toward Gender Equity
Authors: Tong Rosemarie
Published: October 2010

In this commentary on Eva Feder Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, I focus on Kittay's dependency theory. I apply this theory to an analysis of women's inadequate access to high-quality, cost-effective healthcare. I conclude that while quandaries remain unresolved, including getting men to do their share of dependency work, Kittay's book is an important and original contribution to feminist healthcare ethics and thes development of a normative feminist ethic of care.
Loves Labor Revisited
Authors: Kittay Eva
Published: October 2010

Love's Labor explores the relations that dependency work fosters between women and between men and women, and argues that dependency is not exceptional but integral to human life. The commentaries point to more facets of dependency such as the importance (and limitation) of personal narrative in philosophizing dependency (Ruddick); the role of spirituality that Gottlieb addresses with regard to his disabled daughter; and the application of the theory to the situation of elderly women (Tong).
Transforming Sacrifice: Irigaray and the Politics of Sexual Difference
Authors: Caldwell Anne
Published: October 2010

This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid “feminine” can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.
A Feminist Critique of the Alleged Southern Debt
Authors: Jaggar Alison M.
Published: October 2010

Neoliberal globalization has deepened the impoverishment and marginalization of many women. This system is maintained by the debt supposedly owed by many poor nations in the global South to a few rich nations in the global North, because the obligation to service the debt traps the people of the South within an economic order that severely disadvantages them. I offer several reasons for thinking that many of these alleged debt obligations are not morally binding, especially on Southern women.
Shedding Skins
Authors: Seigfried Charlene Haddock
Published: October 2010

I argue that the experimental method, like the corporeality of the body and the permeability of skins, links John Dewey and Friedrich Nietzsche. I raise questions about referring to bodies rather than body-minds, emphasizing hypothetical construction and the body rather than mutual responsiveness and situatedness, and whether Nietzsche's elitism is comparable to Dewey's democratic ideal of inclusiveness. With Naomi Zack, I argue for substituting ethnicity for race, and also develop Jane Addams as a model for recognizing and dismantling privilege.
The Devil's Insatiable Sex: A Genealogy of Evil Incarnate
Authors: Denike Margaret
Published: October 2010

This paper traces the political economy of the Christian concept of “evil” incarnate and its concomitant operations of sexual abjection and the repudiation of femininity, beginning with the early church's inaugural struggles to impose its monotheistic Law against maternal paganism. With attention to how “evil” has been deployed to sanction and sanctify the persecution of scapegoats, and particularly of heretics and witches, I examine the masculinist struggles for jurisdiction and control over women.
February 22, 2001: Toward a Politics of the Vulnerable Body
Authors: Bergoffen Debra
Published: October 2010

On February 22, 2001, three Bosnian Serb soldiers were found guilty of crimes against humanity. Their offense? Rape. This is the first time that rape has been pros-ecuted and condemned as a crime against humanity. Appealing to Jacques Derrida's democracy of the perhaps and Judith Butler's politics of performative contradiction, I see this judgment inaugurating a politics of the vulnerable body which challenges current understandings of evil, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Obscene Undersides: Women and Evil between the Taliban and the United States
Authors: Franks Mary Anne
Published: October 2010

This paper proposes to supplement an American self-identity predicated on a model of absolute difference from the Taliban (good versus evil, etc.) by exploring affinities between their respective ideologies. The place of “woman,” within and through the preponderance of sexual exploitation/violence common to both, is the starting point of this analysis. This article reads the two conflicting powers in a Lacanian/Žižekian dyad of the “Law” and its “obscene superego underside.”
Questions Regarding a War on Terrorism
Authors: Card Claudia
Published: October 2010

The concept of a war on terrorism creates havoc with attempts to apply rules of war. For “terrorism” is not an agent. Nor is it clear what relationship to terrorism agents must have in order to be legitimate targets. Nor is it clear what kinds of terrorism count. Would a war on terrorism in the home be a justifiable response to domestic battering? If not, do similar objections apply to a war on public terrorism?
Those Who “Witness the Evil”
Authors: Razack Sherene
Published: October 2010

For the better part of the last decade, Canadian peacekeepers have been encouraged to frame their activities in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia as encounters with “absolute evil.” Peacekeeping is seen as a moral project in which the North civilizes the South. Using the Canadian peacekeeping context, I reflect on President Bush's use of the phrase “axis of evil” in the New World Order. 1 argue that this phrase reveals an epistemology structured by notions of the civilized (White) North and the barbaric (Racialized) South. These racial underpinnings give the concept of an “axis of evil” its currency in countries of the North.
Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security Regime
Authors: Young Iris Marion
Published: October 2010

The essay theorizes the logic of masculinist protection as an apparently benign form of male domination. It then argues that authoritarian government is often justified through a logic of masculinist protection, and that this is the form of justification for the security regime that has emerged in the United States since September 11, 2001. 1 argue that those who live under a security regime live within an oppressive protection racket. The paper ends by cautioning feminists not ourselves to adopt a stance of protector toward women in so-called less developed societies.
Rethinking Identity and Feminism: Contributions of Mapuche Women andMachifrom Southern Chile
Authors: Bacigalupo Ana Mariella
Published: October 2010

I analyze how machi discourse and practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous Others, and the effects that Western notions of Self and Other and feminist rhetoric have on Mapuche women and machi: people who heal with herbal remedies and the help of spirits. Machi juggling of different worlds offers a particular understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted and of the relationship between Self and Other, theory and practice, subject and object, feminism and Womanism.
Vampires, Anxieties, and Dreams: Race and Sex in the Contemporary United States
Authors: Winnubst Shannon
Published: October 2010

Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, 1 use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn tojewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Harauiay's reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.
Feminism, Postmodernism, and Psychological Research
Authors: Cosgrove Lisa
Published: October 2010

Drawing primarily from the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, the author suggests that a postmodern approach to identity can be used to challenge the essentialism that pervades both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory, and thus move feminist psychology in a more emancipatory direction. A major premise of this paper is that an engagement with postmodernism redirects our attention to symbolic constructions of femininity and to the sociopolitical grounding of experience.
The Possibility of Nationalist Feminism
Authors: Herr Ranjoo Seodu
Published: October 2010

Most Third World feminists consider nationalism as detrimental to feminism. Against this general trend, I argue that “polycentric” nationalism has potentials for advocating feminist causes in the Third World. “Polycentric” nationalism, whose proper goal is the attainment and maintenance of national self-determination, is still relevant in this neocolonial age of capitalist globalization and may serve feminist purposes of promoting the well-being of the majority of Third World women who suffer disproportionately under this system.
Millett's Rationalist Error
Authors: Eddington Ross Elliot
Published: October 2010

This article examines Millett's condemnation of Ruskin in Sexual Politics (1977) to demonstrate that Ruskin's views on women are the product of a specific mode of experience—one that precludes his views being representative of traditional Victorian patriarchy. The article uses Oakeshott's philosophical framework of different modes of experience to illustrate that Millett narrowly interprets Ruskin's statements on women from her own modal perspective without considering his broader belief in the imaginative over the rational faculty.
Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust
Authors: Meagher Michelle
Published: October 2010

This essay examines an aesthetics of disgust through an analysis of the work of Scottish painter Jenny Saville. Saville's paintings suggest that there is something valuable in retaining and interrogating our immediate and seemingly unambivalent reactions of disgust. I contrast Saville's representations of disgust to the repudiation of disgust that characterizes contemporary corporeal politics. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn and Julia Kristeva, I suggest that an aesthetics of disgust reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to critically attend to the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body.
The “Batty” Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body
Authors: Hobson Janell
Published: October 2010

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.
Liberal Feminism, from Law to Art: The Impact of Feminist Jurisprudence on Feminist Aesthetics
Authors: Musgrave L. Ryan
Published: October 2010

This essay explores how early approaches in feminist aesthetics drew on concepts honed in the field of feminist legal theory, especially conceptions of oppression and equality. I argue that by importing these feminist legal concepts, many early feminist accounts of how art is political depended largely on a distinctly liberal version of politics. I offer a critique of liberal feminist aesthetics, indicating ways recent work in the field also turns toward critical feminist aesthetics as an alternative.
Particularity and Perspective Taking: On Feminism and Habermas's Discourse Theory of Morality
Authors: Wright Charles
Published: October 2010

Seyla Benhabib's critique of Jürgen Habermas's moral theory claims that his approach is not adequate for the needs of a feminist moral theory. I argue that her analysis is mistaken. I also show that Habermas's moral theory, properly understood, satisfies many of the conditions identified by feminist moral philosophers as necessary for an adequate moral theory. A discussion of the compatibility between the model of reciprocal perspective taking found in Habermas's moral theory and that found in Maria Lugones's essay “Playfulness,‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception” reinforces the claim that his moral theory holds as yet unrecognized promise for feminist moral philosophy.
Conversing on Love: Text and Subtext in Tullia d'Aragona's Dialogo della Infinità d'Amore
Authors: Curtis-Wendlandt Lisa
Published: October 2010

Few philosophical topics are as intertwined with gender questions as the topic of love, which moved center-stage in the diverse literary and philosophical productions of the Renaissance. Situated in the rich cultural environment of Cinquecento, Italy, Tullia d'Aragona's Dialogo della Infinita d'Amore offers not only a unique contribution to Renaissance theories of love, but also forces a reexamination of the aims and methods of communication, and provokes a reflection on philosophy's very own (male) self-conception.
Women's Agency in a Context of Oppression: Assessing Strategies for Personal Action and Public Policy
Authors: Chetkovich Carol
Published: October 2010

Popular debates about “victim feminism” have receded but underlying concerns about the extent of gender inequality and usefulness of strategies highlighting difference are still relevant. This paper applies Susan Wendell's framework—relating to women's agency under conditions of oppression—to the experience of women firefighters. The framework fits well, but one case reveals the need to modify it by attending to community. An elaboration of the framework is then used to examine four policy issues.
Politics and Prioritization of Evil
Authors: Bar On Bat-Ami
Published: October 2010

In this essay I question an assumption of Card's, which seems to place the (Kantian-style) ethical in a directive relationship with respect to the political. I call attention to the rupture between the two as a marker of modernity and suggest that the political is not only a sphere of power but also a value-sedimented field, with the values in question developing historically as in the case of liberal democracy.
Uses of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons from a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce
Authors: Anderson Elizabeth
Published: October 2010

The underdetermination argument establishes that scientists may use political values to guide inquiry, without providing criteria for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate guidance. This paper supplies such criteria. Analysis of the confused arguments against value-laden science reveals the fundamental criterion of illegitimate guidance: when value judgments operate to drive inquiry to a predetermined conclusion. A case study of feminist research on divorce reveals numerous legitimate ways that values can guide science without violating this standard.
A Socially Relevant Philosophy of Science? Resources from Standpoint Theory's Controversiality
Authors: Harding Sandra
Published: October 2010

Feminist standpoint theory remains highly controversial: it is widely advocated, used to guide research and justify its results, and yet is also vigorously denounced. This essay argues that three such sites of controversy reveal the value of engaging with standpoint theory as a way of reflecting on and debating some of the most anxiety-producing issues in contemporary Western intellectual and political life. Engaging with standpoint theory enables a socially relevant philosophy of science.
Virtue and Contingent History: Possibilities for Feminist Epistemology
Authors: Ruetsche Laura
Published: October 2010

Some feminist epistemologists make the radical claim that there are varieties of epistemically valid warrant that agents access only through having lived particular types of contingent history, varieties of epistemic warrant to which, moreover, the confirmation-theoretic accounts of warrant favored by some traditional epistemologists are inapplicable. I offer Aristotelian virtue as a model for warrant of this sort, and use loosely Aristotelian vocabulary to express, and begin to evaluate, a range of feminist epistemological positions.
Re-radicalizing Nelson's Feminist Empiricism
Authors: Sobstyl Edrie
Published: October 2010

The relationship between individuals and communities in knowing is a central topic of discussion in current feminist epistemology. Lynn Hankinson Nelson's work is unusual in grounding knowledge primarily in the community rather than the individual. In this essay I argue that responses to Nelson's work are based on a misinterpretation of her holistic approach. However, Nelson's holism is incomplete and hence inconsistent. I defend a more radically holistic feminist empiricism with a multiaspect view of the knower, which is more consistent with a feminist empiricist approach to evidence.
Feminist History of Colonial Science
Authors: Schiebinger Londa
Published: October 2010

This essay offers a short overview of feminist history of science and introduces a new project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural, economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the Old of abortifacients (widely used by Amerindian and African women in the West Indies).1
The Productive Power of Ambiguity: Rethinking Homosexuality through the Virtual and Developmental Systems Theory
Authors: Burlein Ann
Published: October 2010

This paper juxtaposes Deleuze's notion of the virtual alongside Oyama's notion of a developmental system in order to explore the promises and perils of thinking bodily identity as indeterminate at a time when new technologies render bodily ambiguity increasingly productive of both economic profit and power relations.
Reason, Religion, and Sexual Difference: Resources for a Feminist Philosophy of Religion in Hegel'sPhenomenology of Spirit
Authors: Lamothe Kimerer L.
Published: October 2010

Reading Hegel's1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religionalongside hisPhenomenology of Spirit, I argue that his vision for becoming a self-conscious subject—or seeing (oneself as) “spirit”—requires taking responsibility for the insight that every act of reason expresses an experience of sexual difference. It entails working to bring into being communities whose conceptions of gender and the absolute realize this idea.
Anthropological, Social, and Moral Limitations of a Multiplicity of Genders
Authors: Landweer Hilge , Postl Gertrude
Published: October 2010

This work argues from a social-theoretical perspective for the view that every concept of ‘gender’ remains bound to reproduction. As every culture is interested in its continuity, it distinguishes individuals according to their assumed possible contribution to reproduction and so develops a fundamental dual classification. Subsequent gender categories are necessarily derived from this one. The conceptual and empirical arguments for this thesis are illustrated through an imagined dystopia. There I envision under what conditions a complete dissociation of the concepts ‘sex and ‘gender’ from the old dual distinction would be possible and in what way a multiplicity of genders would be accomplished.
Meaning in Gender Theory: Clarifying a Basic Problem from a Linguistic-Philosophical Perspective
Authors: Waniek Eva
Published: October 2010

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: (1) that of the logician Gottlob Frege and (2) that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning (analytic philosophy and poststructuralism), to show how philosophy of language can contribute to current feminist debates.
The End or the Apotheosis of “Labor”? Hannah Arendt's Contribution to the Question of the Good Life in Times of Global Superfluity of Human Labor Power
Authors: Lenz Claudia , Postl Gertrude
Published: October 2010

This paper relates Arendt's critique of a labor society to her thoughts on the “good life.” I begin with the claim that in the post-mass production era, Western societies, traditionally centered around gainful employment, encounter a decrease in the relevance of labor and can thus no longer rely on it as a resource for individual or social meaning. From Arendt's perspective, however, the current situation allows for the possibility of a transition from a society based on labor to a society centered around activities. I explore Arendt's different types of activities—labor, work, action—with respect to the question of justice between the genders.
Gender, Morality, and Ethics of Responsibility: Complementing Teleological and Deontological Ethics
Authors: Schwickert Eva-Maria , Miller Sarah Clark
Published: October 2010

This text reconstructs the Kohlberg/Gilligan controversy between a male ethics of justice and a female ethics of care. Using Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental pragmatics, the author argues for a mediation between both models in terms of a reciprocal co-responsibility. Against this backdrop, she defends the circular procedure of an exclusively argumentative-reflexive justification of a normative ethics. From this it follows for feminist ethics that it cannot do without either of the two types of ethics. The goal is to assure the evaluative variety of different types of an ethics of the good without endangering the normative boundaries of a deontological discourse ethics.
Stories from the South: A Question of Logic
Authors: Babbitt Susan E.
Published: October 2010

In this paper, I argue that stories about difference do not promote critical self and social understanding; rather, on the contrary, it is the way we understand ourselves that makes some stories relevantly different. I discuss the uncritical reception of a story about homosexuality in Cuba, urging attention to generalizations explaining judgments of importance. I suggest that some stories from the South will never be relevant to discussions about human flourishing until we critically examine ideas about freedom and democracy, and their role in national identity, explaining the significance we give, or not, to such stories.
Rethinking Care Theory: The Practice of Caring and the Obligation to Care
Authors: Engster Daniel
Published: October 2010

Care theorists have made significant gains over the past twenty-five years in establishing caring as a viable moral and political concept. Nonetheless, the concept of caring remains underdeveloped as a basis for a moral and political philosophy, and there is no fully developed account of our moral obligation to care. This article advances thinking about caring by developing a definition of caring and a theory of obligation to care sufficient to ground a general moral and political philosophy.
Love, That Indispensable Supplement: Irigaray and Kant on Love and Respect
Authors: Caze Marguerite La
Published: October 2010

Is love essential to ethical life, or merely a supplement? In Kant's view, respect and love, as duties, are in tension with each other because love involves drawing closer and respect involves drawing away. By contrast, Irigaray says that love and respect do not conflict because love as passion must also involve distancing and we have a responsibility to love. I argue that love, understood as passion and based on respect, is essential to ethics.
The Epistemological Evaluation of Oppositional Secrets
Authors: Hundleby Catherine
Published: October 2010

Although political values guide people who take advice from standpoint epistemolo-gies in deciding whether to reveal secrets used to resist oppression, these decisions can also be understood and evaluated in purely cognitive or epistemological terms. When political considerations direct us to preserve a secret, the cognitive value progressively diminishes because the view of the world projected by the secret is increasingly vulnerable.
Deformed Desires and Informed Desire Tests
Authors: Superson Anita
Published: October 2010

The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional “informed desire” tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.
Liberalism, Adaptive Preferences, and Gender Equality
Authors: Levey Ann
Published: October 2010

I argue that a gendered division of labor is often the result of choices by women that count as fully voluntary because they are an expression of preferences and commitments that reflect women's understanding of their own good. Since liberalism has a commitment to respecting fully voluntary choices, it has a commitment to respecting these gendered choices. I suggest that justified political action may require that we fail to respect some people's considered choices.
Consequentialism and Feminist Ethics
Authors: Driver Julia
Published: October 2010

This essay attempts to show that sophisticated consequentialism is able to accommodate the concerns that have traditionally been raised by feminist writers in ethics. Those concerns have primarily to do with the fact that consequentialism is seen as both too demanding of the individual and neglectful of the agent's special obligations to family and friends. Here, I argue that instrumental justification for partiality can be provided, for example, even though an attitude of partiality is not characterized itself in instrumental terms.
Who's There? Selfhood, Self-Regard, and Social Relations
Authors: Meyers Diana Tietjens
Published: October 2010

J. David Velleman develops a canny, albeit mentalistic, theory of selfhood that furnishes some insights feminist philosophers should heed but that does not adequately heed some of the insights feminist philosophers have developed about the embodiment and relationality of the self. In my view, reflenvity cannot do the whole job of accounting for selfhood, for it rests on an unduly sharp distinction between reflexive loci of understanding and value, on the one hand, and embodiment and relationality, on the other. 1 conclude that what is missing from Velleman's account is an appreciation of the psycho-corporeal attributes and capabilities embedded in the embodied self and the relational self.
Feminists on the Inalienability of Human Embryos
Authors: McLeod Carolyn , Baylis Françoise
Published: October 2010

The feminist literature against the commodification of embryos in human embryo research includes an argument to the effect that embryos are “intimately connected” to persons, or morally inalienable from them. We explore why embryos might be inalienable to persons and why feminists might find this view appealing. But, ultimately, as feminists, we reject this view because it is inconsistent with full respect for women's reproductive autonomy and with a feminist conception of persons as relational, embodied beings. Overall, feminists should avoid claims about embryos’ being inalienable to persons in arguments for or against the commodification of human embryos.
Strange Anatomy: Gertrude Stein and the Avant-Garde Embryo
Authors: Morgan Lynn M.
Published: October 2010

Today's personable, sanitized images of human embryos and fetuses require an audience that is literally and metaphorically distanced from dead specimens. Yet scientists must handle dead specimens to produce embryological knowledge, which only then can be transformed into beautiful photographs and talking fetuses. I begin with an account of Gertrude Stein's experience making a model of a fetal brain. Her tactile encounter is contrasted to the avant-garde artistic tradition that later came to dominate embryo imagery. This essay shows the embryo visualizations portrayed in a contemporary coffee-table book about gestational development to be a remarkable political achievement predicated, in part, on keeping hidden the unsavory details of anatomical technique that transform dead specimens into icons of life.
Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment in Utero
Authors: Tremain Shelley
Published: October 2010

This article critically examines the constitution of impairment in prenatal testing and screening practices and various discourses that surround these technologies. While technologies to test and screen (for impairment) prenatally are claimed to enhance women's capacity to be self-determining, make informed reproductive choices, and, in effect, wrest control of their bodies from a patriarchal medical establishment, I contend that this emerging relation between pregnant women and reproductive technologies is a new strategy of a form of power that began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, my argument is that the constitution of prenatal impairment, by and through these practices and procedures, is a widening form of modem government that increasingly limits the field of possible conduct in response to pregnancy. Hence, the government of impairment in utero is inextricably intertwined with the government of the maternal body.
Shame, Gender, Birth
Authors: Lyerly Anne Drapkin
Published: October 2010

In recent years, critics of modern obstetrics have cited technology as responsible for women's discontent regarding childbirth. In this essay, I investigate and pry apart the connection between the quality of childbirth experience and technology. After identifying three factors considered constitutive of a ‘good birth,’ I demonstrate how technology can either facilitate or hinder each, but how dominant strains of birthing practice that reinforce female shame (hospital-based obstetrics and midwifery) consistently undermine them all. It is not technology per se, but its sensitive application, which may most effectively promote an optimal and affirming birth experience.
“Like a Maternal Body”: Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses
Authors: Guenther Lisa
Published: October 2010

Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a “wet nurse” bearing Others whom he has “neither conceived nor given birth to” (Num. 11:12). A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.
Parents and Children: An Alternative to Selfless and Unconditional Love
Authors: Mullin Amy
Published: October 2010

I develop a model of love or care between children and their parents guided by experiences of parents, especially mothers, with disabilities. On this model, a caring relationship requires both parties to be aware of each other as a particular (not interchangeable) person and it requires reciprocity. This does not mean that children need to be able to articulate their interests, or that they need to be self-reflectively aware of their parents’ interests or personhood. Instead, parents and children manifest their understanding of one another as unique, irreplaceable individuals, with identifiable needs and interests through their interactions with one another.
Adoptive Maternal Bodies: A Queer Paradigm for Rethinking Mothering?
Authors: Park Shelley M.
Published: October 2010

A pronatalist perspective on maternal bodies renders the adoptive maternal body queer. In this essay, I argue that the queerness of the adoptive maternal body makes it a useful epistemic standpoint from which to critique dominant views of mothering. In particular, exploring motherhood through the lens of adoption reveals the discursive mediation and social regulation of all maternal bodies, as well as the normalizing assumptions of heteronormativity, “reprosexuality,” and family homogeneity that frame a traditional view of the biological family. As participants in motherhood who resist “repro-narrativity,”“reprosexuality,” and essentialism, adoptive maternal bodies have the potential to both queer our notions of normal mothering and normalize our notions of queer mothering.
The Unacknowledged Socrates in the Works of Luce Irigaray
Authors: O'Dwyer Shaun
Published: October 2010

In Luce Irigaray's thought, Socrates is a marginal figure compared to Plato or Hegel. However, she does identify the Socratic dialectical position as that of a ‘phallocrat’ and she does conflate Socratic and Platonic philosophy in her psychoanalytic reading of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman. In this essay, I critically interpret both Irigaray's own texts and the Platonic dialogues in order to argue that: (1) the Socratic dialectical position is not ‘phallocratic’ by Irigaray's own understanding of the term; (2) that Socratic (early Platonic) philosophy should not be conflated with the mature Platonic metaphysics Irigaray criticizes; and (3) that Socratic dialectical method is similar in some respects with the dialectical method of Diotima, Socrates’ instructress in love and the subject of Irigaray's “Sorcerer Love” essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
On Treating Things as People: Objectification, Pornography, and the History of the Vibrator
Authors: Saul Jennifer M.
Published: October 2010

This article discusses recent feminist arguments for the possible existence of an interesting link between treating things as people (in the case of pornography) and treating people (especially women) as things. It argues, by way of a historical case study, that the connection is more complicated than these arguments have supposed. In addition, the essay suggests some possible general links between treatment of things and treatment of people.
A Defense of Stiffer Penalties for Hate Crimes
Authors: Wellman Christopher Heath
Published: October 2010

After defining a hate crime as an offense in which the criminal selects the victim at least in part because of an animus toward members of the group to which the victim belongs, this essay surveys the standard justifications for state punishment en route to defending the permissibility of imposing stiffer penalties for hate crimes. It also argues that many standard instances of rape and domestic battery are hate crimes and may be punished as such.
Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers
Authors: Heyes Cressida J.
Published: October 2010

This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.
The Book at a Glance
Authors: Mason Gail
Published: October 2010

Violence is a spectacle. Not because it is simply something that we observe but, more fundamentally, because it is a mechanism through which we observe and define other things. Violence has the capacity to shape the ways that we see, and thereby come to know, these things. In other words, violence is more than a practice that acts upon the bodies of individual subjects to inflict harm and injury. It is, metaphorically speaking, also a way of looking at these subjects.
Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color
Authors: Ortega Mariana
Published: October 2010

The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of “loving, knowing ignorance,” a type of “arrogant perception” that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of “arrogant” as well as of “loving” perception and presents an explanation of “loving, knowing ignorance.” The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, and María Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of “‘world’-traveling” may help us deal with “loving, knowing ignorance.” Ultimately, the author suggests that we need to become aware of instances of “loving, knowing ignorance,” especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's commitment to diversity.
Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance inCereus Blooms at Night
Authors: May Vivian M.
Published: October 2010

Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how willful and strategic epistemologies of ignorance intertwine. By rejecting a compartmentalized approach to domination, Mootoo highlights the disjuncture between idealized images of family, home, love, and the Caribbean and traumatic events of personal and cultural history. Mootoo not only asks readers to take up resistant questioning, argues May, but also to recognize that epistemology must acknowledge unspeakable and silenced stories to adequately account for multiple ways of knowing.
The Logic of Chastity: Women, Sex, and the History of Philosophy in the Early Modern Period
Authors: Gibson Joan
Published: October 2010

Before women could become visible as philosophers, they had first to become visible as rational autonomous thinkers. A social and ethical position holding that chastity was the most important virtue for women, and that rationality and chastity were incompatible, was a significant impediment to accepting women's capacity for philosophical thought. Thus one of the first tasks for women was to confront this belief and argue for their rationality in the face of a self-referential dilemma.
That Many of Us Should Not Parent
Authors: Cassidy Lisa
Published: October 2010

In liberal societies (where birth control is generally accepted and available), many people decide whether or not they wish to become parents. One key question in making this decision is, What kind of parent will I be? Parenting competence can be ranked from excellent to competent to poor. Cassidy argues that those who can foresee being poor parents, or even merely competent ones, should opt not to parent.
Receptacle/Chōra: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato'sTimaeus
Authors: Bianchi Emanuela
Published: October 2010

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōrain Plato'sTimaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōraoffers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōracan exceed its reduction to the maternal-feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns.
Nancy J. Hirschmann on the Social Construction of Women's Freedom
Authors: Friedman Marilyn
Published: October 2010

Nancy J. Hirschmann presents a feminist, social constructionist account of women's freedom. Friedman's discussion of Hirschmanns account deals with (1) some conceptual problems facing a thoroughgoing social constructionism; (2) three ways to modify social constructionism to avoid those problems; and (3) an assessment of Hirschmann's version of social constructionism in light of the previous discussion.