Reclamation is the phenomenon of an oppressed group repurposing language to its own ends. A case study is reclamation of slur words. Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt (2018) argued that a slurring utterance is a speech act which performs a discourse role assignment. It assigns a subordinate role to the target, while the speaker assumes a dominant role. This pair of role assignments is used to oppress the target. Here I focus on how reclamation works and under what conditions (...) its benefits can stabilise. I start by reviewing the data and describing preconditions and motivations for reclamation. Can reclamation be explained in the same basic framework as regular slurring utterances? I argue that it can. I also identify some features that must be a prediction of any theory of reclamation. I conclude that reclamation is an instance of a much broader class of acts we do with words to change the distribution of power: it begets power, but it also requires it. (shrink)

According to a rights forfeiture theory of punishment, liability to punishment hinges upon the notion that criminals forfeit their rights against hard treatment. In this paper, I assume the success of rights forfeiture theory in establishing the permissibility of punishment but aim to develop the view by considering how forfeited rights might be reclaimed. Built into the very notion of proportionate punishment is the idea that forfeited rights can be recovered. The interesting question is whether punishment is the sole means (...) for reclaiming forfeited rights. I argue for a pluralistic theory of rights reclamation, according to which, there are multiple ways by which a wrongdoer can recapture her forfeited rights. In particular, I argue that offering remorseful compensation is a valid means by which a wrongdoer might partially, or fully, reclaim her right against punishment. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's work does not present an obvious resource for projects seeking to reclaim women in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many authors introduce their reclamation project with an argument against conceptions, attributed to Irigaray or “French feminists” more generally, that the feminine is the excluded other of discourse. These authors claim that if the feminine is the excluded other of discourse, then we must conclude that even if women have written philosophy they have not given voice to feminine (...) subjectivity; therefore, reclamation is a futile project. In this essay, I argue against such conclusions. Rather, I argue, Irigaray's work requires that philosophy be transformed through the reclamation of women's writing. She gives us a method of reclamation for the most difficult cases: those in which we have no record of women's writing. Irigaray offers this method through an engagement with the character of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. The method Irigaray demonstrates is reclamation as love. (shrink)

It is generally thought that the reclamation of slurs is restricted to the in-group. Bianca Cepollaro and Dan Lopez de Sa challenge this assumption by presenting cases in which slurs are successfully reclaimed by members of out-groups. I agree with the idea that the out-groups often participate in reclamation. In this paper, I present a view which accommodates the fact that sometimes out-groups successfully reclaim slurs. At the same time, the view preserves the central role of the in-group (...) in reclamation. (shrink)

‘Feminist masculinity’ might seem like a contradiction in terms. One might have assumed that we can embrace feminism or embrace masculinity, but not both. If traditional masculinity is contrary to feminist values, a pressing query for feminist men is whether repudiation of traditional masculinity should move one to reject normative masculinity entirely, or to reframe and reclaim it instead. bell hooks and Michael Kimmel each counsel against discarding manhood and masculinity. hooks envisions feminist masculinity as an alternative to patriarchal dominance, (...) with masculinity to be reconstituted in terms of love, integrity, and mutuality; Kimmel advocates moving from immature and traditional masculinities toward justice and democratic manhood, with a new model of masculinity that identifies real men with adulthood and doing the right thing. Neither proposal provides a viable stance for feminist men without collapsing into androgyny or risking erasure of some men’s and women’s identities and experiences. Building on Alcoff’s work on anti-racist whiteness, I suggest that feminist allyship practices ground a normative model of masculinity compatible with, and informed by, feminist values. We may understand allyship masculinities as open-ended feminist approaches to manhood: masculinities predicated on recognizing and responding to, rather than ignoring or accepting, the privileges and expectations distinctive of men under patriarchy. (shrink)

Whereas in modern times Genesis has been read in the light of Exodus, and creation has been understood in the light of redemption and the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, it now seems clear that one must reverse the order Exodus is to be understood in the light of Genesis and redemption and law in the light of creation.

In this paper we distinguish two dimensions in which the reclamation of slurs can succeed (or fail). By reclamation we refer to the linguistic practice whereby certain speakers employ slurs in order to express pride, foster camaraderie, manifest solidarity, subvert extant structures of discrimination, and so on. Reclamation can succeed, we propose, in at least two senses: in terms of felicity, insofar as a certain use of a slur counts as a move within a reclamatory practice; and (...) in terms of accomplishment, insofar as it achieves the goals typically associated with reclamation. In the first part, we present the distinction between felicity and accomplishment. In the second, we show that it provides a deeper understanding of the worries and concerns to which reclamation may give rise within and outside the academic debate. This distinction thus constitutes a valuable addition to the theoretical toolkit for analyzing the phenomenon of reclamation. (shrink)

Industrial interventions in the landscape leave their imprint in a permanent way, but there remain options on how to deal with land even at that point in time. In this essay, three alternatives are considered: leaving such sites as they are, restoring them to a condition resembling their original state, or transforming them into artworks. The author focuses in particular on the third option in order to determine to what degree it is possible for artistic reclamation to redeem such (...) blights in the landscape. the work of art is beautiful to the degree that it opposes its own order to that of reality . Herbert Marcuse, 1978, p. 64. (shrink)

: The feminist significance of the Goddess Kali lies in an indigenous worshipful attitude of "Kali-bhakti" rather than in the mere image of the Goddess. The peculiar mother-child motif at the core of the poet Ramprasad Sen's Kali-bhakti represents, I argue, not only a dramatic reconstruction of femininity but of selfhood in general. The spiritual goal of a devotee here involves a deconstruction of "master identity" necessary also for ethico-political struggles for justice.

Since 2014, two legislative actions, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights)Act 2019, and the Draft Trafficking in Persons (Prevention, Care and Rehabilitation) Bill 2021, have been pivotal in re-inscribing the Indian state’s colonial policing of queer kinship networks. By criminalising relationalities outside the heteropatriarchal conjugal home, the sexual subaltern is exposed to the state’s mechanisms of rescue and rehabilitation. These developments have occurred alongside the constitutional recognition of privacy in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1 and (...) the decriminalisation of the anti-sodomy law in Navtej Johar v. Union of India 2018 (10) SCALE 386 which have been celebrated as victories of self-determination and dignity for queer kinship. These judicial pronouncements, although symbolically pertinent, fail to materially protect queer kinship, and with the contemporary advocacy around queer marriage, the need for legal and cultural recognition has obfuscated the substantive needs of pre-existing queer alliances. Queer communities continue to organise for their own emancipation and despite their vulnerability, queer visibility offers a public counter-narrative of resistance and survival against the brutalities of society and the state. (shrink)

The feminist significance of the Goddess Kali lies in an indigenous worshipful attitude of “Kali-bhakti” rather than in the mere image of the Goddess. The peculiar mother-child motif at the core of the poet Ramprasad Sen's Kali-bhakti represents, I argue, not only a dramatic reconstruction of femininity but of selfhood in general. The spiritual goal of a devotee here involves a deconstruction of “master identity” necessary also for ethico-political struggles for justice.

A currently popular form of psychological externalism takes the causal–evolutionary history of a person to be determinant of that person’s intentional content. Two challenges bearing on the feasibility of this doctrine are outlined and discussed: the problems of functional indeterminacy and the psychological non-status of Davidson’s Swampman. Using Schank and Abelson’s script construct, a division of intentionality into an aboutness component and a directedness component is introduced.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is more than a happy tale—it is a text of moral self-reflection that challenges us to think about the nature of moral duty, human happiness and personal transformation. The story speaks to fundamental questions: How are morality and the good life related? How does a self-centered person open their heart to the welfare of others? What are the steps in moral change? The story’s characters function as mirrors by which we can examine our own moral (...) dispositions. A Christmas Carol is an engaging way to discuss important and relevant moral topics with students. We first describe the format of our interdisciplinary course—we then discuss how we teach topics of personal ethics found in Dickens’ tale. (shrink)

Derogatory terms can be powerful mechanisms of subordination, while re-appropriating these terms can be a strategy to fight back against social injustice. I argue that projects seeking to reclaim slurs have a performative structure that raises particular hazards. Whereas more familiar forms of protest may fail to bring about their intended result, attempts to re-appropriate slurs can fail to be understood as transgressive acts at all. When attempts at reclamation fail, their force is distorted; context and convention lead the (...) hearer to give uptake to the speech act as a traditional deployment of the slur. The force of this traditional use is to validate and re-entrench the very norms the act was intended to subvert. This is the precarious structure of reclamation projects: when successful, reclamation is the subversion of powerful mechanisms of oppression, but when unsuccessful, the act has the ironic force of constituting mechanisms of oppression. (shrink)

Though feminists are correct to note that conventional standards of sexiness are oppressive, we argue that feminism should reclaim sexiness rather than reject it. We argue for an aesthetic and ethical practice of working to shift from conventional attributions of sexiness to respectful attributions, in which embodied sexual subjects are appreciated in their full individual magnificence. We argue that undertaking this practice is an ethical obligation, since it contributes to the full recognition of others’ humanity. We discuss the relationship of (...) ethical to aesthetic considerations and argue that the respectful notion of sexiness is a genuinely aesthetic one, even though it does not involve assessment in relation to standards. (shrink)

Abstract:This article is a case study in feminist reclamation in Ruist (Confucian) philosophical traditions. While most feminist reclamation has been concentrated in the history of Western philosophy, this article considers what is involved in feminist reclamation in an East Asian context, taking one of Ruism's greatest critics as its subject. The article argues that the early twentieth-century Chinese anarcho-feminist He Yin Zhen 何殷震 (aka He Ban 何班 and He Zhen 何震) (ca. 1884–1920) should be considered a Ruist (...) (Confucian) philosopher, providing reasons ranging from the historical to the decolonial. Because of her sensitivity to issues of gender, hierarchy, and oppression, and her critical interventions in Ruist philosophy, it argues that He Yin Zhen's work enriches the Ruist canon and could transform Ruist philosophizing for the future. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the Reclamation Worry (RW), raised by Anderson and Lepore 2013 and addressed by Ritchie (2017) concerning the appropriation of slurs. I argue that Ritchie’s way to solve the RW is not adequate and I show why such an apparent worry is not actually problematic and should not lead us to postulate a rich complex semantics for reclaimed slurs. To this end, after illustrating the phenomenon of appropriation of slurs, I introduce the Reclamation Worry (...) (section 2). In section 3, I argue that Richie’s complex proposal is not needed to explain the phenomenon. To show that, I compare the case of reclaimed and non-reclaimed slurs to the case of polysemic personal pronouns featuring, among others, in many Romance languages. In section 4 I introduce the notion of ‘authoritativeness’ that I take to be crucial to account for reclamation. In section 5, I focus on particular cases (the “outsider” cases) that support my claims and speak against the parsimony of the indexical account. Finally, I conclude with a methodological remark about the ways in which the debate on appropriation has developed in the literature (section 6). (shrink)

While databases of taboo language word norms exist, none focus specifically on slurs as a category of taboo language. Furthermore, no existing databases include measures of linguistic reclamation, a phenomenon which may specifically affect the processing of slurs. I produced a database in which 155 native or near-native speakers of British English rated 41 LGBTQ+ slurs for a number of word properties and measures of linguistic reclamation. I then ran correlation and demographic group comparison analyses on the resulting (...) database. I found a clear correlation pattern between properties and reclamation behaviours. I also found that there were age-related differences in age of acquisition and familiarity ratings; that gender identity and sexual identity differences were affected by being the target of slurs; and that sexual identity particularly affected differences in reclamation ratings. (shrink)

Reclamation work denotes the process of uncovering the lost contributions of women to the philosophy of education, analyzing their works, making them accessible to a larger audience, and (re)introducing them to the historical record and canon. Since the 1970s, scholars have been engaged in the reclamation work, thus making available to students, professors, and researchers a rich and varied perspective for tracing the evolution of educational thought. This article shares the responses of undergraduate and graduate students to discussing (...) the reclamation work and canonical formation in their Philosophy of Education course. Two of the benefits most commonly cited by students involve learning a fuller, more accurate picture of history and ameliorating contemporary gender inequity. We assert that the traditional canon and syllabi for Philosophy of Education and Social Foundation courses could be enriched through the inclusion of works that trace the tradition of women's intellectual thought. (shrink)

In the mid-1980s, feminist philosophers began to turn their critical efforts toward reclaiming women in the history of philosophy who had been neglected by traditional histories and canons. There are now scores of resources treating historical women philosophers and reclaiming them for philosophical history. This article explores the four major argumentative strategies that have been used within those reclamation projects. It argues that three of the strategies unwittingly work against the reclamationist end of having women engaged as philosophers. The (...) fourth type, the one that seeks to transform philosophical practice and reconstruct its history, is the only strategy that will result in that engagement because it is the only strategy that pays sufficient attention to the mechanisms by which women have been excluded from philosophy and its history. (shrink)

This paper discusses the suitability of using systemic thinking for teaching environmental rehabilitation to undergraduate students at Federal Universityof Viçosa. This is a predominantly agricultural sciences-based institution located in southeast Brazil. Student receptivity is discussed given concurrent campus paradigms of positivism, Marxism, and individualistic utilitarianism. Student projects using causal-loop diagrams to model degradation and land reclamation are presented. Eight archetypes common to systemic thinking are explained in reclamation contexts. Limitations of systemic thinking are discussed, including theoretical modeling problems (...) and practical teaching considerations. (shrink)

The aesthetic transformation becomes a vehicle of recognition and indictment. Herbert Marcuse, 1978, p. 9 In his ‘Reflections on Reclamation through Art’, Thomas Heyd poses the question: Can art ef...

ABSTRACTIn Therapeutic Nations, Dian Million highlights the complicated role that neoliberal arenas like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and international dialogues concerning human rights play in the marginalization of Indigenous communities. Neoliberal arenas are empowered by sociopolitical imaginaries, or a metaphorical moral fabric of a given community, that consist in discursive content and affective, felt knowledge. According to Million, the sociopolitical imaginaries that give weight and context to negative stereotypes about Indigenous peoples are the same sociopolitical imaginaries that empower neoliberal (...) arenas. In a sense, the proposed solutions are ‘cut from the same cloth’ as the causes of settler colonial violence. Million does not directly apply her argument to Indigenous language reclamation, but Million’s conceptions of sociopolitical imaginaries and paradoxically imposed neoliberal arenas are useful for framing a discussion of the potential harms in some Indigenous language reclamation projects, specifically, revitalization programming described by UNESCO and those pursued by U.S. research universities. I aim to show that some of these proposed solutions to Indigenous language loss are cut from the very same cloth, justified by the same sociopolitical imaginaries, as attempted linguicide itself. (shrink)

Group‐based slurs are words that express derogatory attitudes toward some group demarcated by a property that has historically caused social antagonism, for example, gender or ethnicity, among others. Reclamation, in turn, is the process whereby a slur starts being used non‐derogatorily by members of the target group to express a positive attitude. Some content‐based theories of slurs (which pin the derogatory force of such terms on their conventional meaning) account for reclamation by arguing that it involves a change (...) in meaning so that reclaimed slurs are ambiguous. But these theories face a challenge, namely to account for the difference between reclaimed slurs and run‐of‐the‐mill ambiguous terms, whose felicitous uses do not seem to be restricted to in‐group speakers. In this article, we argue that the Reclamation Worry is not a problem for content‐based theories of slurs by advancing an account of reclamation that is compatible with such views. As we shall argue, such a theory must rely on the sociolinguistic dimension of such terms. (shrink)

Abstract:AbstractDrawing from qualitative data in a Southern African context, this article explores meanings assigned to names for female genitalia to establish whether males and females assign the same meanings to the same vocabulary used in naming or whether they associate the same vocabulary with different meanings. The study illustrates that while males associate the meanings of terms for female genitalia with well-established, stigmatized views of women, female informants associate the same terms with different meanings that provide alternative views about women (...) and, at the same time, appear to be a form of reclamation of Southern African women’s personhood, identity, and agency. Although males, through these vocabulary items, metaphorically associate female genitalia with possession, which discursively constructs women as powerless objects that can be owned and commoditized, females draw from the philosophy of Africana womanism, indicating that even in asymmetrically structured societies, some women subjectively and purposefully construct their own identities as strong, smart, socially conscious, and independent. (shrink)

From domestic goddess to desperate housewife, this book explores the importance and centrality of postfeminism in contemporary popular culture.

Kathryn Morgan has introduced us to a typology of ‘the ways in which women’s moral voice and her sense of moral integrity are twisted and destroyed by patriarchal ideology and lived experience.’ She claims that this experience can induce in women ‘a sense of confusion and genuine moral madness.’I am in agreement with much of what Morgan says. However, I suspect that some others might find her case less convincing than I for the reason that she supports her claims by (...) an appeal to classical philosophical literature and what we might loosely call ‘sociological observations.’ One can imagine the easy retort—‘Yes, well, it’s true that Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau and Kant did say those silly things about women, but their remarks were mere asides and no one takes them seriously in this matter any more anyway. (shrink)

Kathryn Morgan has introduced us to a typology of ‘the ways in which women’s moral voice and her sense of moral integrity are twisted and destroyed by patriarchal ideology and lived experience.’ She claims that this experience can induce in women ‘a sense of confusion and genuine moral madness.’I am in agreement with much of what Morgan says. However, I suspect that some others might find her case less convincing than I for the reason that she supports her claims by (...) an appeal to classical philosophical literature and what we might loosely call ‘sociological observations.’ One can imagine the easy retort—‘Yes, well, it’s true that Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau and Kant did say those silly things about women, but their remarks were mere asides and no one takes them seriously in this matter any more anyway. (shrink)

Underscoring recurrent calls for the decolonization of university curricula in South Africa are underexplored presumptions that by only disrupting theoretical content, universities might release themselves from a colonialist grasp, that continues to dominate and distort higher education discourse. While it might be the case that certain theories hold enormous authoritative, ‘truthful’ sway, as propagated through western interpretations and norms, there are inherent problems in exclusively approaching the decolonization project as a content-based hurdle, removed from the subjectivities of students’ social, lived (...) and learning realities. The argument advanced in this article is that until the epistemic harm of colonialism and apartheid are afforded careful recognition and attention – as in focusing on the lived experiences, realities, and stories of individuals - the hard work of de-legitimizing coloniality, and its implicit structures of hegemonies and binaries cannot unfold. In addressing these harms, I commence by describing some of the contexts of epistemic harm, promulgated through colonialism and apartheid. This is followed by a consideration of decolonization, both as theory and practice-within-context. Here, I also foreground the #Rhodesmustfall campaign, as a particular moment of painful clarity about why decolonization, as well as transformation have faltered in higher education in South Africa. In the second half, I focus on the necessity of prioritising storytelling as a deep manifestation of decolonization. Stories, I maintain, provide access into unknown lives, and can subvert the invisible, normative framings, which dictate how we live in this world. As a manifestation of decolonization, students’ stories hold profound implications for the recognition and affirmation of pluralist identities, histories, knowledge, values, and worldviews. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 26 (2006) 213-216 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byJohn Berthrong Boston University School of TheologyDialogues at One Inch Above the Ground: Reclamations of Belief in an Interreligious Age. By James W. Heisig. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003. 215 pp.Few scholars are better prepared than James W. Heisig to write about the current state of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and few have written more insightfully about the historical, theological, (...) religious, and spiritual factors that have made Buddhist-Christian dialogue so intriguing for the last four decades. Heisig is the director of the Nanzan Institute, one of the premier institutions in the world dedicated to cultivating dialogue primarily between Christians and Buddhists, but also with people of other traditions and no religious belief at all.The title of the book is taken from the writings of the famous medieval poet Saigyō, who said that he tried to live at "one inch above the ground." Heisig follows Saigyō's advice by focusing many of his articles on themes such as health and ecology rather than abstruse metaphysical discussions of the intricacies of Buddhist and Christian doctrines, although, as one would expect, he shows a deft hand at explaining the philosophical and theological dimensions of living life at one inch above the ground.The opening two chapters on how we can collectively view the current ecological crisis demonstrate Heisig's sure hand at moving between profound meditations on current events and demonstrating how these problems can be even better understood in terms of spiritual and religious insights. Heisig argues that having two eyes, one Buddhist and one Christian, might just help us walk better on the ground, especially a ground that is being harmed on a daily basis by human disregard for the natural environment. His essay on the interpretation of the Buddhist principle of sufficiency is based on the injunction that we should learn to "consider how much is enough." The following essay demonstrates how hard-headed he can be with his call for us not to move from an uncaring contempt for nature to an equally ill-conceived sentimentalization of nature.There are so many insightful and clever features to the essays in the book that it is hard to pick out any one essay for special comment, but one of my favorites, high-lighting [End Page 213] Heisig's rhetorical powers, is "Six Sūtras on Dialogue" (pp. 139–157). This essay demonstrates what a Christian theologian might learn from engaging in interreligious dialogue. Moreover, it even takes the form, as Heisig explains, of the traditional Buddhist sūtra of six teachings on the nature of dialogue. Dialogue, according to Heisig (echoing Alfred North Whitehead), "is an adventure of ideas" (p. 141). The first teaching is "The spirit of interreligious dialogue need not be born of traditions in order to be reborn there" (p. 145). One of the strong points Heisig makes over and over again is that we now live with increasing self-awareness in a religiously pluralistic world. Actually, we always have, though various theological traditions have been adept at either ignoring or rejecting the notion that there could be anything positive about religious pluralism. At its worst, pluralism simply demonstrated the spiritual depravity and turbidity of humankind, and at best, it could simply be ignored as unworthy of serious comment. With the growing social, political, economic, military, and cultural interconnections of the modern world, no one can ignore pluralism. Theologians and religious leaders, in particular, need to think about religious pluralism even if this dialogue is not something that was "born" within their traditional theological discourse.The second teaching is a corroloary of the first: "Dialogue is primarily a minority enterprise that stands free of the obligations of institutional religion" (p. 147). Now, the leaders of institutional religion might dispute this point, but again Heisig is correct in noting that people are going to talk to their neighbors regardless of what they are told to do by worried religious authorities. He makes the... (shrink)

Kathryn Morgan has introduced us to a typology of ‘the ways in which women’s moral voice and her sense of moral integrity are twisted and destroyed by patriarchal ideology and lived experience.’ She claims that this experience can induce in women ‘a sense of confusion and genuine moral madness.’I am in agreement with much of what Morgan says. However, I suspect that some others might find her case less convincing than I for the reason that she supports her claims by (...) an appeal to classical philosophical literature and what we might loosely call ‘sociological observations.’ One can imagine the easy retort—‘Yes, well, it’s true that Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau and Kant did say those silly things about women, but their remarks were mere asides and no one takes them seriously in this matter any more anyway. (shrink)