Feminists have long hoped to intervene in the practice of war. Many have thought of war as a masculine endeavor which endangers women in distinctive ways and reflects and contributes to men's violence against women in civil society. Some have also believed that women have distinct capacities for making peace. In recent decades, feminists have elaborated these insights, offering a more precise understanding of war's masculinity, war's victimization of women and feminine peacefulness. Despite the vitalizing presence of many military feminists, (...) the cumulative effect of feminist intervention has been to question the practice of warmaking itself and to challenge the cultures which prepare, justify, and suffer from war. (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of (...) racial-ethnic women's "motherwork.". (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of (...) racial-ethnic women's "motherwork.". (shrink)

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives-theoretical, social/political, and personal-that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 1989 Philosopher, mother, and feminist Sara Ruddick examines the discipline of mothering, showing for the first time how the day-to-day work of raising children gives rise to distinctive ways of thinking.

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives—theoretical, social/political, and personal—that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

The contributors to two new anthologies A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity and Feminist Epistemologies are philosophers for whom feminism is an intellectual as well as political commitment and they produce original, valuable feminist and philosophical work. I focus on differences between the anthologies and on two themes: the social character of knowledge and the allegedly oppressive “masculinism” of epistemological ideals.

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives—theoretical, social/political, and personal—that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

: I try to identify the distinct moral horror occasioned by the attacks of September 11 in order to accord them an appropriate, limited place in the ongoing history of terror and violence. I consider the agents of evil and the victims as evil constructs them. I conclude with victim stories that reveal evil by showing the goodness it violates, making us feel the bitter loss of what violence has killed, kills, and will kill again.

For many of us, entry into motherhood involves an ambiguous visibility and intelligibility, where our acceptance into mainstream spaces as mothers entails a loss of lesbian difference. Mann explores this loss using the work of two philosophers of lesbian difference, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She argues that the figure of the lesbian mother is deployed on a broad cultural scale to reinvigorate and renaturaUze the myth of the happy, natural, heterosexual mother.

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

The contributors to two new anthologies A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (edited by Louise Antony and Charlene Witt) and Feminist Epistemologies (edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter) are philosophers for whom feminism is an intellectual as well as political commitment and they produce original, valuable feminist and philosophical work. I focus on differences between the anthologies and on two themes: the social character of knowledge and the allegedly oppressive "masculinism" of epistemological ideals.

An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Choderow and Adrienne Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of (...) difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice Di Quinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering. (shrink)

This book brings together the stories of biographers, novelists, scholars, and artists as they have written about the journeys (some literal, some figurative) they have made to their subjects. Contributors include Elizabeth Wood, J.J. Wilson, Leah Glasser, Jane Lazarre, and Alice Walker.

This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in (...) relation to nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly. (shrink)

Sara Ruddick's contemporary philosophical account of mothering reconsiders the maternal arguments used in the women's peace movements of the earlier part of this century. The culmination of this project is her 1989 book, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Ruddick's project is ground-breaking work in both academic philosophy and feminist theory. -/- In this chapter, I first look at the relationship between the two basic components of Ruddick's argument in Maternal Thinking: the "practicalist conception of (...) truth" (PCT) and feminist standpoint theory (FST). I argue that Ruddick is never clear about the exact relation between the two components. These tensions point to a deeper problem in Ruddick's discussion of the critical power of maternal thinking. -/- The diversity of maternal practices presents a genuine challenge to Ruddick’s account. I argue that neither of the components she explores can adequately ground a feminist peace politics without first answering the question of who speaks for mothers. While I can suggest ways to make Ruddick's argument consistent, she still faces-despite her claims of universality- the deeper problem of reconciling her account of maternal practice with the genuine diversity of actual maternal practices. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking was criticized for harboring a latent ethnocentrism. Ruddick responded to these critiques in the 1995 edition of her book, but her response has not yet been addressed in the feminist philosophical literature. This essay addresses this lacuna in the scholarship on Ruddick. In the last installment of this critique, Alison Bailey and Patrice DiQuinzio suggested that the only way for Ruddick to avoid the ethnocentrism charge would require (...) her near-universalistic claims about mothering to be rejected in favor of “particularized, localized accounts of mothering.” In this essay I'll show that this claim goes too far. After reviewing Lugones's and Bailey's critiques of Ruddick, along with Ruddick's response, I propose a “modified universalism” that addresses the concerns raised by Ruddick's critics while preserving key elements of her theory. (shrink)

A welcome addition to the Routledge Critical Thinkers series, Judith Butler is the first guidebook on this renowned feminist and queer theory scholar, which will help not only students of literary criticism but also students of law, sociology, philosophy, film and cultural studies. Examining Butler's work through a variety of contexts, including the formation of gender performativity, identity and subjecthood, Sarah Salih address Butler's crucial ideas on the gender agenda, the body, pornography, race, gay self-expression and power and psychoanalysis. Concluding (...) with an annotated bibliography, this book will be the ideal starting point for all new to Butler. (shrink)

Large portions of mathematics such as algebra and geometry can be formalized using first-order axiomatizations. In many cases it is even possible to use a very well-behaved class of first-order axioms, namely, what are called coherent or geometric implications. Such class of axioms can be translated to inference rules that can be added to a sequent calculus while preserving its structural properties. In this work, this fundamental result is extended to their infinitary generalizations as extensions of sequent calculi for both (...) classical and intuitionistic infinitary logic. As an application, a simple proof of the infinitary Barr’s theorem without the axioms of choice is shown. (shrink)

[This] is a... guide to both the major schools of literature and the political, philosophical and cultural theories informing them from the nineteenth century to the present. It covers the fundamental basics of each theory alongside discussions of current debates and contemporary usage..."--Back cover.

Many philosophers hypothesize that our concept of personal identity is partly constituted by the one-person-one-place rule, which states that a person can only be in one place at a time. This hypothesis has been assumed by the most influential contemporary work on personal identity. In this paper, we report a series of studies testing whether the hypothesis is true. In these studies, people consistently judged that the same person existed in two different places at the same time. This result undermines (...) some widely held philosophical assumptions, supports others, and fits well with recent discoveries on identity judgments about inanimate objects and non-human animals. (shrink)

It is impossible to imagine contemporary critical theory without the work of Michel Foucault. His radical reworkings of the concepts of power, knowledge, discourse and identity have influenced the widest possible range of theories and impacted upon disciplinary fields from literary studies to anthropology. Aimed at students approaching Foucault's texts for the first time, this volume offers: * an examination of Foucault's contexts * a guide to his key ideas * an overview of responses to his work * practical hints (...) on 'using Foucault' * an annotated guide to his most influential works * suggestions for further reading. Challenging not just what we think but how we think, Foucault's work remains the subject of heated debate. Sara Mills' Michel Foucault offers an introduction to both the ideas and the debate, fully equipping student readers for an encounter with this most influential of thinkers. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Max Deutsch argues that there is no “qua problem” for purely causal theories of reference, according to which the extensions of some expressions are grounded in causal relations to members of their extensions during dubbing acts. The qua problem is the difficulty in specifying the facts in virtue of which the reference of “elephant” is grounded by causal contact with something _qua_ elephant and not _qua_ its other properties. If no such specification can be given, reference (...) remains unacceptably indeterminate. This has led many to abandon purely causal reference grounding. Deutsch’s argument for the dissolution of the problem goes as follows: we usually agree that an event can cause its effect _qua_ some of its properties and not _qua_ others. For example, a hot acidic solution causes a glass beaker to break due to its heat and not due to its acidity. Given this assumption, we can simply say that an event caused a dubbing act _qua_ the causally relevant property and not _qua_ the causally irrelevant properties, thus grounding the reference of the term; the qua problem has vanished. I will argue that causal mechanisms, and in particular the facts about causal relevance appealed to by Deutsch, are insufficient to dissolve the qua problem. It is not generally the case that a _unique_ property is causally relevant in purely physical cases of causation; but this is precisely what is required to avoid the referential indeterminacy highlighted by the qua problem. I will demonstrate that if we rely on causal relevance to dissolve the qua problem, there is no way to respect the uniqueness requirement: there are too many properties that are causally relevant to the occurrence of any single dubbing act, including the intentional states of the dubber. (shrink)

This paper considers the complex relation between migrants’ interest in their host country and their consequent civic or social engagement in the framework of processes of transition following the rupture of international migration (cf. Zittoun 2006). In phases of transition, migrants live processes of identity definition, sense-making of the situation and learning new knowledge and social, cognitive and practical skills. I argue that learning may be considered a precondition for a migrant’s interest and engagement with the host country culture and (...) institutions. In this connection, I use Eade’s (2007) notion of migration strategy to describe migrant profiles based on learning. My case is supported by a qualitative analysis of two paradigmatic case studies. (shrink)

Feminism is sensational -- On being directed -- Willfulness and feminist subjectivity -- Trying to transform -- Being in question -- Brick walls -- Fragile connections -- Feminist snap -- Lesbian feminism -- Conclusion 1: A killjoy survival kit -- Conclusion 2: A killjoy manifesto.

_The Promise of Happiness_ is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which (...) is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including_ Mrs. Dalloway_, _The Well of Loneliness_, _Bend It Like Beckham_, and _Children of Men_, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy. (shrink)

Introduction: find your way -- Orientations toward objects -- Sexual orientation -- The orient and other others -- Conclusion: disorientation and queer objects.

Our fast-paced society does not approve of solitude; being alone is antisocial and some even find it sinister. Why is this so when autonomy, personal freedom and individualism are more highly prized than ever before? Sara Maitland answers this question by exploring changing attitudes throughout history. Offering experiments and strategies for overturning our fear of solitude, she to helps us to practice it without anxiety and encourages us to see the benefits of spending time by ourselves. By indulging in (...) the experience of being alone, we can be inspired to find our own rewards and ultimately lead more enriched, fuller live. - The School of Life is dedicated to exploring life's big questions: How can we fulfill our potential? Can work be inspiring? Why does community matter? Can relationships last a lifetime? We don't have all the answers, but we will direct you toward a variety of useful ideas--from philosophy to literature, from psychology to the visual arts--that are guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, nourish, and console. (shrink)