Challenges Beauvoir's self-portrait and argues that she was a philosopher in her own right.

Rape, traditionally a spoil of war, became a weapon of war in the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia. The ICTY Kunarac court responded by transforming wartime rape from an ignored crime into a crime against humanity. In its judgment, the court argued that the rapists violated the Muslim women’s right to sexual self-determination. Announcing this right to sexual integrity, the court transformed women’s vulnerability from an invitation to abuse into a mark of human dignity. This close reading of the trial, (...) guided by the phenomenological themes of the lived body and ambiguity, feminist critiques of the autonomous subject and the liberal sexual/social contract, critical legal theory assessments of human rights law and institutions, and psychoanalytic analyses of the politics of desire, argues that the court, by validating women’s epistemic authority (their right to establish the meaning of their experience of rape) and affirming the dignity of the vulnerable body (thereby dethroning the autonomous body as the embodiment of dignity), shows us that human rights instruments can be used to combat the epidemic of wartime rape if they are read as de-legitimating the authority of the masculine autonomous subject and the gender codes it anchors. (shrink)

The politics of disgust weaponizes the bodily recoil of revulsion to legitimate sexist, anti-Semitic, colonial and genocidal violence. Citing the work of neurologists, psychologists, existentialists and phenomenologists, I argue that disgust can be severed from this politics to serve a politics of the body where the repugnance of disgust is reserved for those who repudiate the humanity of our intersubjective vulnerability.

This chapter distinguishes the oppression endured by “free” women from the oppression suffered by enslaved and colonized women and men to read The Second Sex's question: Why don't women rebel? in terms of the type of personhood offered to women – vassal freedom – the type of violence used to enforce this truncated mode of subjectivity – rape – and the threat to dignity that haunts women's lives – the body of the whore. Following Beauvoir's logic of woman's degradation as (...) the sex, noting that the epitaph whore is flung at women who assert their economic or political independence, and listening to the voices of self‐affirming prostitutes, I find that the fate of the women challenging the glass ceiling and of those who claim their dignity as sex workers are intertwined, for so long as some women are seen and shamed as the sex, all women's status as legitimate subjects is threatened. (shrink)

This paper breaks ranks with those philosophers and feminists who either ignore de Beauvoir or find her passé. It argues that de Beauvoir is fundamentally a philosopher; that one of her crucial contributions to philosophy was to identify the erotic as a philosophical category; and that we best understand de Beauvoir's place in the feminist and philosophical fields if we read her as a phenomenologist who reworks Husserl's theory of intentionality and who, in this reworking, steps out of Sartre's shadow (...) to develop an ethic of erotic generosity. This argument depends on reading de Beauvoir's texts with an ear for her two voices. It develops the idea that de Beauvoir's muted voice, in speaking of the erotic, the gift and generosity, offers us a coherent and fruitful way of thinking through the questions of embodiment, the flesh, the other and the “we”. (shrink)

: 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 prosecuted 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.

: This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.

This essay argues that the ambiguities of the just war tradition, sifted through a feminist critique, provides the best framework currently available for translating the ethical entitlement to human dignity into concrete feminist political practices. It offers a gendered critique of war that pursues the just war distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets of wartime violence and provides a gendered analysis of the peace which the just war tradition obliges us to preserve and pursue.

: Ofelia Schutte's relationship to Nietzsche is contentious. Sometimes she identifies him as an ally. Sometimes she calls him an enemy. Appealing to Nietzsche's abolition of the appearance reality distinction and to his discussions of women as skeptics, I turn to Ofelia's discussions of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo to suggest that their protests can be understood as a Nietzschean politics of transvaluation where the myth of the mother and the materialities of women's bodies become the ground of (...) the demand for justice. (shrink)

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.

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 prosecuted 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.

This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.

When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted the Bosnian Serb soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war of violating the human right to sexual self determination and of crimes against humanity, it transformed vulnerability from a mark of feminine weakness to a shared human condition. The court's judgment directs us to note the ways in which the exploitation of our bodied vulnerability is an assault on our dignity. It alerts us to the ways in which (...) the body of human rights law is a law of bodies; to the ways in which our desire for intimacy creates communal ties that ground our personal and social identities; to the ways in which the symbolic meanings of our bodies are integral to our sense of integrity and worth; and to the ways in which gender structures which position men as protectors of women make it possible for rape to be used as an effective and criminal weapon of war. (shrink)

Detailing the logic of Clausewitz’s depiction of war as the violent pursuit of the politics of submission, I read the recent protests in Iran as a feminist revolt against Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic war on women. This war is institutionalized in the war-like violence of veiling, gender apartheid, and marriage and family law. Rebelling under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” the people of Iran tie the destiny of women to the destiny of all. The government has crushed the uprising. It has (...) not quelled the protestors’ demands. Signs of resistance continue as the rebellion inhales the hope of a time to come of freedom. (shrink)

The testimonies of men raped by men in Uganda indicate that the meaning of rape as an aggression that enforces the gendering of women as vulnerable and therefore dependent on men's protection needs to be reformulated to account for the fact that being raped transforms a man into a woman. In describing their humiliation, these men reveal that gendered masculinity is grounded in a flight from vulnerability that depends on the presence of vulnerable/rapeable victim bodies. Their words teach us that (...) as long as men's illicit identity as autonomous and invulnerable is illegitimately secured by stigmatizing vulnerability, heterosexual and male-male rape will be used to denigrate women and men alike. They indicate that the antidote to the scourge of rape lies in delegitimizing gender systems that victimize vulnerability and in creating cultural norms that recognize vulnerability as inherent in the interdependence and dignity of the human condition. (shrink)

Jean Pierre Boulé's Sartre, Self Formation and Masculinities argues that we cannot adequately understand Sartre without taking account of the unique ways in which he negotiated the gender mandates of patriarchy. Taking Boulé's cue, I call on Lacan, Cixous and Beauvoir to interrogate Sartre's relationship to women, to his body and to writing. I argue for Boulé's approach but against several of his conclusions. Further, I credit Boulé with providing ammunition for challenging Lacan's universal account of the mirror stage, and (...) for pushing me to read Beauvoir's "Must we Burn Sade?" as a critique of Sartre's betrayal of the erotic's ethical demands. (shrink)

This essay argues that the ambiguities of the just war tradition, sifted through a feminist critique, provides the best framework currently available for translating the ethical entitlement to human dignity into concrete feminist political practices. It offers a gendered critique of war that pursues the just war distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets of wartime violence and provides a gendered analysis of the peace which the just war tradition obliges us to preserve and pursue.