Over the last decade, legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Canada has accelerated. By and large, same-sex cohabitants are now recognised in the same manner as opposite-sex cohabitants, and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2005. Without diminishing the struggle that lesbians and gay men have endured to secure this somewhat revolutionary legal recognition, this article troubles its narrative of progress. In particular, we investigate the terms on which recent legal struggles have advanced, as well as the ways in which resistance (...) to the legal recognition has been expressed and dealt with. We argue that to the extent that feminist critiques of marriage, familial ideology, and the privatisation of economic responsibility are marginalised, conservative and heteronormative discourses on marriage and family are reinforced. Our case studies include two pivotal moments in the quest for legislative recognition of same-sex relationships: the Hearings of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-23, The Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act, in 2000 and the hearings on Same-Sex Marriage in 2003. We find that the debates operated within a narrow paradigm that bolstered many existing hierarchies and exacerbated conditions for those who are economically disadvantaged. (shrink)

The SlutWalk campaigns around the world have triggered a furious debate on whether they advance or limit feminist legal politics. This article examines the location of campaigns such as the SlutWalk marches in the context of feminist legal advocacy in postcolonial India, and discusses whether their emergence signifies the demise of feminism or its incarnation in a different guise. The author argues that the SlutWalks, much like the Pink Chaddi (panty) campaign in India, provide an important normative and (...) discursive challenge to a specific strand of feminism based on male domination and female subordination in the area of sexuality and also speaks to the emergence of consumer agency in the very heart of pleasure in the neo-liberal moment. It serves as a space clearing gesture, a form of feminism ‘lite’, rather than offering a transformative or revolutionary politics, and thus enables the possibility of feminist theoretical positions in a postcolonial context that have hitherto been marginalised or ignored in feminist legal advocacy in India to emerge. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive, analytical study of the way the mind/body dichotomy has perpetuated social hierarchy on the basis of gender. It challenges the tradition of dualism and argues that the term “rational woman” is not a contradiction in terms. Having investigated the two major dualisms contained in the term “rational woman”, the author develops an argument for a new relational conception of all the terms involved in “rational woman”, emphasizing the relationship of interdependence of reason and emotion, man (...) and woman, rather than placing these terms in hierarchical and polarized opposition. (shrink)

Biology is seen not merely as a privileged oppressor of women but as a co-victim of masculinist social assumptions. We see feminist critique as one of the normative controls that any scientist must perform whenever analyzing data, and we seek to demonstrate what has happened when this control has not been utilized. Narratives of fertilization and sex determination traditionally have been modeled on the cultural patterns of male/female interaction, leading to gender associations being placed on cells and their (...) components. We also find that when gender biases are controlled, new perceptions of these intracellular and extracellular relationships emerge. (shrink)

Feminist critiques of science are widely dispersed and often quite inaccessible as a body of literature. We describe briefly some of the influences evident in this literature and identify several key themes which are central to current debates. This is the introduction to a bibliography of general critiques of science, described as the “core literature,” and a selection of feminist critiques of biology. Our objective has been to identify those analyses which raise reflexive (epistemological and methodological) questions about (...) the status of scientific knowledge and practice, both in general terms and in relation to biological research. We have abstracted these listings from a body of material compiled by members of the research project, “Philosophical Feminism: The Critiques of Science,” which covers a range of discipline-specific critiques beyond biology, as well as the more general philosophical critiques which constitute the core of the present bibliography. (shrink)

In this essay I distinguish four different modes of feminist critique of reason. Discussing the work of authors such as Keller, Irigaray, and Butler, I point out that the issue of masculine connotations has been addressed with regard to different concepts-or at least different aspects-of reason. In view of a tendency to overdraw the objections, I suggest to reformulate the feminist critique of reason. I also argue that a rediscovery of those philosophical concepts of reason that (...) do not restrict this term to instrumental rationality might be useful for this purpose. (shrink)

This essay aims to show how feminist theoretical and practical perspectives have enriched and deepened debate about moral and social issues generated by the proliferation and commodification of new reproductive techniques. It evaluates alternative feminist appraisals beginning with the first group to organize a collective response to the medicalization of infertility and explores several weaknesses working within their assessment: objectification of infertile women, naturalizing constructions of motherhood, hostility to technology, and an overly simplistic conception of power relations. Next, (...) it shows how subsequent feminists have reframed the issues to overcome these weaknesses, drawing on themes prominent in recent theoretical debates: the need to reclaim women's agency, to revalue mothering, and to reappraise power relations. Lastly, it weighs the prospects for a collaborative politics that is sensitive to the social marginalization of vulnerable women and suggests practical strategies for responding to mounting pressures to procreate at any price. (shrink)

Applying the insights of Donna Haraway (1989, 1991) and Helen Longino (1989, 1990), this paper reviews Sandra Harding's (1986a) tripartite model of feminist critiques of science-empiricist, standpoint, and postmodern-and argues that it is based on misunderstandings of the relationship between scientific inquiry, objectivity, and values. An alternative view of scientific inquiry makes it possible to see feminist scientists as postmodern and postmodern feminists as having standpoints.

"Intra-feminist Critique: Modes of Disengagement," invited participant on a panel on intrafeminist critique, sponsored by the Society for Women in Philosophy, at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association Meetings, March 2001.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1997, given by Martha C. Nussbaum, an American philosopher.

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.

This paper examines dominant arguments advocating for the procreative right to undergo sex selection for social reasons, based on gender preference. I present four of the most recognized and common justifications for sex selection: the argument from natural sex selection, the argument from procreative autonomy, the argument from family balancing, and the argument from children’s well-being. Together these represent the various means by which scholars aim to defend access to sex selection for social reasons as a legitimate procreative choice. In (...) response, I contend that these justifications are flawed and often inconsistent and therefore fail to vindicate the practice. (shrink)

The decisive epistemological and methodological moment of feminist analysis and critique is the moment of intervention. An intervention does not require a standpoint; instead, it displaces the locus of critique from the standpoint to the effects or consequences of critique. Intervention requires no new information or hitherto concealed facts about the object being interfered with. The critical effects of an intervention are the results of what is called a ‘sexing-up’ strategy. Different epistemological and methodological aspects of (...) this strategy are discussed and a connection established between feminist interventions in science and politics, and the strategy of sexing-up. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay examines Freud's construction of a mythical moment during early childhood, in which differences between male and female sexual identities are said to originate. It focuses on the way in which Freud divides fear and envy between the sexes, allocating the emotion of fear to men, and that of envy to women. On the one hand, the problems of this construction are pointed out, but on the other hand, it is shown that even a much-maligned myth may still (...) provide food for thought.Then, four critiques of Freud which have been articulated by prominent feminist psychoanalysts – Karen Horney, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Jessica Benjamin – are presented, as well as the alternative visions of sexual identities which these thinkers have developed. The basic metaphors or economies guiding these visions of sexual difference are appraised in terms of their breadth and depth, with particular reference to their ability to acknowledge and integrate the presence of fear and envy as passions which are evoked but also repressed in the face of sexual difference.From this angle, the contributions of Nancy Chodorow and Luce Irigaray are found to be more limited than those of Karen Horney and Jessica Benjamin, since the former two theorists allocate fear primarily or exclusively to men, as Freud has done, while they remain completely silent on envy. Differences in the scope or reach of the four feminist approaches are explained as a result of the theorists' differing perceptions of the social, political, and cultural position of women in patriarchal society. (shrink)

Various levels of feminist criticism of Hegel's account of woman and family, both contentious and sophisticated, are examined. While finding much that is telling and valid in them, the author finds much that is uncomprehended and much that stands to be learned about the issues in question were the texts allowed to speak for themselves.

Logic is the systematic study of patterns of correct inference. The first treatise on logic is Aristotle's Prior Analytics , written around 350 B.C. and there are remarkable similarities between the way he presented his theory of valid arguments and the way it is still taught today. He analyzes the form of various inferences and then illustrates them with concrete examples. He begins with very simple cases.

"... some very serious critiques of French existential phenomenology and post-structuralism... the contributors offer some refreshingly new insights into some tried and 'true' philosophical texts and more recent works of literary theory." -- Philosophy and Literature "By bridging the gap between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy, the authors of The Thinking Muse: Feminism and the Modern French Philosophy largely overcome the cultural polarity between 'male thinker' and 'female muse'." -- Ethics "These engaging essays by American Feminists bring toether feminist philosophy, (...) existential phenomenology, and recent currents in French poststructuralist thought. The editors provide an excellent introductory overview, making this an ideal book for courses in feminist theory and philosophy and modern French thought." -- Philosopher's Index "The concerns raised in this volume are substantial.... a solid addition to the canon of American feminist philosophy." -- Philosophy and Literature "... a forum for feminist appropriations of existential and post-structuralist philosophy." -- Canadian Philosophical Reviews Marking a radical shift in the traditional philosophical separation between muse (female) and thinker (male), The Thinking Muse revises the scope and methods of philosophical reflection. These engaging essays by American feminists bring together feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, and recent currents in French poststructuralist thought. (shrink)

Following in Joan Scott's anti-foundationalist footsteps, Linda Zerilli argues for a theory of feminist political judgement not framed in terms of epistemological certainty but assimilated to aesthetic judgement. Tani Barlow criticises Zerilli for not taking adequate account of history in her theory. I analyse the implications of Zerilli's ‘abyssal’ approach to political judgement and Barlow's critique of it. Despite their shared concerns, Zerilli's, Barlow's, and Scott's abyssal approaches struggle to effectively ground the validity of historical analysis and political (...) judgement within a context of plurality and historical difference. All three thinkers focus extensively on discursive and imaginative potential for change while marginalising the role of materiality in the creation of new horizons for women. Incorporating a dynamic account of the materiality of human life into their work would allow them to tie politics and history to an explanation of the role material life plays in constituting plurality, factuality, and historicity. (shrink)

Religious ethics was founded on a commitment to inclusion, welcoming projects from and about different religious and philosophical traditions. This paper argues that the increasing welcome of feminist ethics in the JRE also reveals a tension in the field between inclusion and critique: where feminist ethics is included as another tradition of ethical inquiry, its critical claims can be escaped by appeal to difference from the traditions it seeks to engage. The response to feminist critique (...) should not be to applaud its inclusion without responding to its claims. Where this occurs, religious ethicists must renegotiate the terms of inclusion and the borders of difference. Feminist critique thus requires a return to founding questions of this journal, and the field, about the terms on which different traditions can be discussed and engaged in a common, critical conversation of religious ethics. (shrink)

In this text, the authors examine the relationship between political and feminist theory, characterizing and criticizing liberalism and communitarianism from a feminist perspective.

A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

Why was Wollstonecraft's landmark feminist work, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, categorised as a work of political economy when it was first published? Taking this question as a starting point, Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy gives a compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as critic of the material, moral, social, and psychological conditions of commercial modernity. Offering thorough analysis of Wollstonecraft's major writings - including her two Vindications, her novels, her history of the French Revolution, and her travel (...) writing - this is the only book-length study to situate Wollstonecraft in the context of the political economic thought of her time. It shows Wollstonecraft as an economic as much as a political radical, whose critique of the emerging economic orthodoxies of her time anticipates later Romantic thinkers. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. (shrink)

This paper concentrates on the method-critique of feminist philosophers and demonstrates that their claim that science is essentially male-biased is unfounded, and itself grounded in their own political agenda. The feminist agenda has shown itself to be detrimental not only to liberty and free speech, but to women.

This paper deals with two questions. First, if all scientists were perfect Popperians, how much influence could their background values and experiences have? It is argued that background can play a role in problem choice and in the constructing and testing of hypotheses. Second, do the ideals of feminism suggest the need for a new methodology and epistemology for science? In answering this question, Harding's paper in this volume is discussed.

Reclaiming ‘Big Nurse’: a feminist critique of Ken Kesey's portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Nurse Ratched or ‘Big Nurse’ in Ken Kesey's counter‐culture novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of popular culture's most arresting and memorable images of the nurse. She is, however, deemed to be remarkable primarily for her malice and authoritarianism. This paper argues that such a purely realist reading fails to fully appreciate the significance of the (...) character of Nurse Ratched. A feminist critique of the novel contends that die importance of ‘Big Nurse’ is less related to how realistic/unrealistic or good/bad she is as a nurse. Nurse Ratched is important because she exemplifies all diat traditional masculinity abhors in women, and particularly in strong women in positions of power and influence. This paper explores the stereotype of ‘Big Nurse’ and argues that Kesey's vision of her ultimate ‘conquest’ is not a progressive allegory of ‘individual freedom’, but a reactionary misogyny which would deny women any function other than that of sexual trophy. (shrink)

This article critiques Jack Halberstam's concept of queer failure through a feminist cripistemological lens. Challenging Halberstam's interpretation of Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher as a symbol of postcolonial angst rather than a figure of psychosocial disability, the article establishes a critical coalition between crip feminist theory and queer-of-color theory to promote a materialist politics and literal-minded reading practice designed to recognize minority subjectivities rather than exploiting them for their metaphorical resonance. In asserting that Erika Kohut is better (...) understood as a woman with borderline personality disorder , and in proposing borderline personality disorder as a critical optic through which to read both The Piano Teacher and The Queer Art of Failure , the article challenges the usual cultural undermining of epistemic authority that comes with the BPD diagnosis. It asserts instead that BPD might be a location of more, rather than less, critical acumen about the negative affects that accompany queer failures, and reflect on what we might call a borderline turn in queer theory. On a broader level, the article joins an emergent conversation in crip theory about the reluctance of queer theory to address disability in meaningful and substantive ways. (shrink)

The scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft is divided concerning her views on women's role in public life, property rights, and distribution of wealth. Her critique of inequality of wealth is undisputed, but is it a complaint only of inequality or does it strike more forcefully at the institution of property? The argument in this article is that Wollstonecraft's feminism is partly defined by a radical critique of property, intertwined with her conception of rights. Dissociating herself from the conceptualization of (...) rights in terms of self-ownership, she casts economic independence—a necessary political criterion for personal freedom—in terms of fair reward for work, not ownership. Her critique of property moves beyond issues of redistribution to a feminist appraisal of a property structure that turns people into either owners or owned, rights-holders or things acquired. The main characters in Wollstonecraft's last novel—Maria, who is rich but has nothing, and Jemima, who steals as a matter of principle—illustrate the commodification of women in a society where even rights are regarded as possessions. (shrink)

Abstract:Taking up the question of style, I argue that this term provides a generative framework for reassessing the historical challenges of feminist writing and politics. To develop my argument, I read Judith Butler's philosophy alongside Denise Riley's poems, historical criticism, and philosophical prose, proposing that both writers are inventive participants in the tradition of immanent critique. I demonstrate how feminist questioning of linguistic conventions and social norms is enfolded in Butler's paratextual reflections on philosophical grammar and in (...) Riley's poetic and theoretical efforts to acknowledge her uneasy relationship to lyric. Any dialogue between philosophy and poetry returns us to the longstanding debate about the value of these respective disciplines. I conclude by proposing that Riley and Butler encourage us to consider that each demands the other as a supplement—a necessity that emerges from the need to account for the collective life in which language is embedded. (shrink)

“Look Great Naked!” “Sexy Legs Now!” “Score a Perfect 10 Body!” These invitations appear regularly on the covers of glossy fitness magazines, always beside a photograph of a too-perfect-not-to-be-airbrushed, generally scantily clad, young woman. Are they really invitations or are they imperatives? What should we make of the apparently presumed connection between fitness and sex? These are the questions that drive this article, in which we distinguish between fitness and sport and provide a feminist account of fitness to set (...) the stage for analysis of the conflict between norms of femininity and heteronormativity in sport and in the fitness industry. We examine the medicalization of fitness to show that women’s... (shrink)

Until recently, feminist theory and citizenship theory have seemed two distinct areas, with writers in both camps seldom discussing the other's work.

The article contributes to the debate on new materialism commenced by Sara Ahmed (2008). Taking up Lena Gunnarsson’s (2013) argument that erasing distinctions is no effective antidote to dualistic theorising, the article argues that Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) theory is problematic on this count. Whereas Barad dilutes the theoretical distinction between mind and matter as well as that between the animate and the inanimate, the contention here is that it is ethically and politically vital to hold on to a notion (...) of subjectivity understood in terms of the capacity for experience, on account of which sentient being is exposed to suffering. This requires accentuating the passive dimension of subjectivity rather than merely the active dimension of matter. This article contests Barad’s reinscription of a masculinist devaluation of passivity on the grounds that only by moving beyond it can we overcome the hierarchical opposition of subject versus object and, in consequence, of mind versus matter. (shrink)

Anyone who goes beyond procedural questions of a discourse theory of morality and ethics and, in a normative attitude … embarks on a theory of the well-ordered, or even emancipated, society will very quickly run up against the limits of his own historical situation.For some time now, a certain strand of contemporary critical theory has understood its task not as providing a substantive critique of power relations, let alone an alternative normative conception of what social relations might be, but (...) as how to justify critique as such: how to justify those elements which critique owes to its philosophical origins, albeit in a nonfoundationalist manner.1 This focus on—if not obsession with—the theoretical problem of... (shrink)

This book project reshapes the way we think about Enlightenment: rather than viewing it primarily as the era of the emancipation of human reason, it emphasizes the gendered nature of the Enlightenment ideal of human progress and investigates how this ideal oppressed women. I take a critical look at this ideal from within intellectual debates of the time, examining how the restrictive view of women’s socio-political and educational opportunities was challenged by progressive female German and Polish thinkers of the late (...) Enlightenment. The under-studied views of these thinkers exhibit insightful early-feminist arguments against women’s inability to take an active role in the Enlightenment project and the confinement of women to the “private” sphere of the household, in which they take care of men – “public”, free-thinking citizens. (shrink)

Medicalization occurs when an aspect of embodied humanity is scrutinized by the medical industry, claimed as pathological, and subsumed under medical intervention. Numerous critiques of medicalization appear in academic literature, often put forth by bioethicists who use a variety of “lenses” to make their case. Feminist critiques of medicalization raise the concerns of the politically disenfranchised, thus seeking to protect women—particularly natal sex women—from medical exploitation. This article will focus on three feminist critiques of medicalization, which offer an (...) alternative narrative of sickness and health. I will first briefly describe the philosophical origins of medicalization. Then, I will present three feminist critiques of medicalization. Liberal feminism, trans feminism, and crip feminism tend to regard Western medicine with a hermeneutics of suspicion and draw out potential harms of medicalization of reproductive sexuality, gender, and disability, respectively. While neither these branches of feminism—nor their critiques—are homogenous, they provide much-needed commentaries on phallocentric medicine. I will conclude the paper by arguing for the continual need for feminist critiques of medicalization, using uterus transplantation as a relevant case study. (shrink)