Feminist Perspectives on Phenomena, Misc

Greater numbers of women are entering workplaces in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. Structural features of patriarchy are changing in Middle Eastern societies and workplaces, but women’s experiences of gendered segregation, under-representation and exclusion raise questions around the feminist politics and ethics mobilized to respond to them. Building on and extending emerging research on feminism, gender, resistance, feminist ethics and the Middle East, we use data from an interview study with 58 Saudi Arabian women to explore their attitudes (...) toward gender-segregated and mixed workplaces. We develop a novel conceptualization of how gender is experienced through patternings of resistance and conformity shaped by the ethicopolitical, religiopolitical and sociocultural webs of meaning in Saudi society that permeate workplaces. Saudi women’s attitudes and actions in the workplace are neither entirely individual and private nor entirely collective and public, but made up of nuanced commitments and resistances to context-relevant identity issues. We discuss implications of our findings for the feminist ethics and politics of gendered resistance and conformity to working practices and norms in Islamic and Middle Eastern settings. (shrink)

In recent years, online ‘involuntary celibate’ or ‘incel’ communities have been linked to various deadly attacks targeting women. Why do these men react to romantic rejection with, not just disappointment, but murderous rage? Feminists have claimed this is because incels desire women as objects or, alternatively, because they feel entitled to women’s attention. I argue that both of these explanatory models are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence towards women — for their oscillation between obsessive desire and (...) violent hatred. I propose instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian “Other”. For Beauvoir, when men conceive of women as Others, they represent them as simultaneously human subjects and embodiments of the natural world. Women function then as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. I go on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Roger’s autobiographical manifesto, “My Twisted World”. I show how this Beauvoirian model sheds light on Rodger’s racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence towards women. It therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement. (shrink)

Contemporary feminisms are ineluctably drawn into comparisons with historic discourses, forms of praxis and tactical repertoires. While this can underscore points of continuity and commonality in ongoing struggles, it can also result in nostalgia for a more unified and purposeful feminist politics. Kate Eichhorn argues that our interest in nostalgia should be to understand feminist temporalities, and in particular the specific context in which we experience such nostalgia. Accordingly, this article takes up the idea that neoliberalism and populism, which have (...) given rise to both neoliberal feminism and femonationalism, have produced a series of contestations regarding the purpose and nature of feminist politics, as expressed by white popular feminism in the United Kingdom. This article examines two dimensions of feminist nostalgia: first, nostalgia for a more radical form of feminist politics – one not co-opted by neoliberal forces, not individualistic and not centred around online activism; and second, a nostalgia for the idea of ‘sisterhood’ – a time before white feminists were called upon to engage with intersectionality or be inclusive of trans-women. We analyse these themes through analysis of white popular feminism produced in the United Kingdom between 2010 and 2020, cautioning against a feminist nostalgia which neglects to engage with the radical politics of intersectionality. (shrink)

Pamela Sue Anderson's A Feminist Philosophy of Religion and Grace Jantzen's Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion set the tone for subsequent feminist philosophies of religion. This Element builds upon the legacy of their investigations, revisiting and extending aspects of their work for a contemporary context struggling with the impact of 'post-truth' forms of politics. Reclaiming the power of collective action felt in religious community and the importance of the struggle for truth enables a changed perspective on the (...) world, itself necessary to realise the feminist desire for more flourishing forms of life and relationship crucial to feminist philosophy of religion. (shrink)

L’affaire Weinstein et le mouvement #MeToo ont mis la question des violences sexuelles au premier plan. Depuis, le consentement renvoie naturellement au consentement sexuel et amoureux, envisagé comme un sésame de l’égalité entre femmes et hommes. Pourtant, il est bien difficile à définir, et soulève trois problèmes. Le problème juridique, bien connu de celles et ceux qui suivent l’actualité, peut être résumé ainsi: que faire pour que les cas de viol, d’agression et de harcèlement sexuels soient efficacement punis ? Le (...) deuxième problème est moral : comment penser des relations amoureuses et sexuelles qui ne soient pas fondées sur des normes sociales sexistes et inégalitaires ? Enfin, le problème politique : comment ne pas reconduire les injustices de genre qui se manifestent dans les rapports amoureux et sexuels ? La magistrale analyse du consentement que propose Manon Garcia revisite notre héritage philosophique, plongeant au cœur de la tradition libérale, mettant à nu ses impensés et ses limites. De John Locke aux théoriciennes féministes françaises et américaines, en passant par Michel Foucault et les débats sur la pratique du BDSM, c’est une nouvelle cartographie politique de nos vies privées que dessine cet essai novateur. Au terme de ce livre, il s’agira en somme, pour reprendre la formule de Gloria Steinem, d’« érotiser l’égalité » plutôt que la domination : en ce sens, le consentement sexuel, conçu comme conversation érotique, est sans doute l’avenir de l’amour et du sexe. (shrink)

The notion that rape is an act of violence rather than sex is a central tenet in rape crisis support and education. A therapeutic benefit of this conceptualisation of rape is that it counters shame and guilt by affirming that the victim was not a complicit partner in an act of sex. However, this conceptualisation has recently been criticised for not capturing what makes rape an especially serious kind of wrong. This raises an apparent dilemma for rape crisis support. Recent (...) work in analytic moral philosophy on the nature of rape offers a way to resolve this dilemma. It is argued that rape is not sex, but is nonetheless sexual. This distinction allows for a charitable reformulation of the central tenet in rape crisis support, which can facilitate the dual therapeutic aims of countering the sense of shame and of recognising the especially serious kind of the harm suffered by the victim. (shrink)

El procés de modernització que va viure el Japó en el tombant dels segles xix i xx va obrir un important debat sobre la situació de les dones, abordat des de plantejaments feministes diversos i en contrast amb el model reformista que perseguia renovar la moral nacional des d’una instrumentalització dels drets de les dones.

This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field in feminist philosophy. The editors' introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields (...) of philosophy. The first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy's contributions to numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field's engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers. (shrink)

This paper considers Linda Martín Alcoff’s discussion of sexual agency and sexual violation in Rape and Resistance. It is argued that Alcoff’s move away from ‘sexual violence’ to ‘sexual violation’ to address the harms of rape and rape culture is significant with regard to conceiving of a feminist sexual ethic more generally and to understanding the harm of rape and sexual assault in particular. More specifically, this paper focuses on Alcoff’s norm of self-making and considers the way it can interrupt (...) racialized heterosexist sex and sexuality and normative feminine subjectivity vis-à-vis temporality. (shrink)

Empirical data show that members of underrepresented and historically marginalized groups in academia undertake many forms of undervalued or unnoticed labor. While the data help to identify that this labor exists, they do not provide a thick description of what the experience is like, nor do they offer a framework for understanding the different kinds of invisible labor that are being undertaken. We identify and analyze a distinct, undervalued, and invisible labor that the data have left unnamed and unmeasured: ontological (...) labor, the work required to manage one’s identity and body if either or both do not fit into academic structures, norms, and demands. We argue that ontological labor efforts should be understood as a form of labor. We then provide a characterization of ontological labor, detailing the labor as navigating one’s obligations to give and managing entitlements to take. We also highlight the ontological labor that takes place through instances of resistance, such as through complaint or refusals. (shrink)

Chinese translation by Zhuanxu Xu. Analytic philosophy has transgender trouble. In this paper, I explore potential explanations for this trouble, focusing on the notion of 'cisgender commonsense' and its place in philosophical methodology.

“Experience” is a thoroughly political category, a social and historical product not authored by any individual. At the same time, “the personal is political,” and one's own lived experience is an important epistemic resource. In _Anaesthetics of Existence_ Cressida J. Heyes reconciles these two positions, drawing on examples of things that happen to us but are nonetheless excluded from experience. If for Foucault an “aesthetics of existence” was a project of making one's life a work of art, Heyes's “anaesthetics of (...) existence” describes antiprojects that are tacitly excluded from life—but should be brought back in. Drawing on critical phenomenology, genealogy, and feminist theory, Heyes shows how and why experience has edges, and she analyzes phenomena that press against those edges. Essays on sexual violence against unconscious victims, the temporality of drug use, and childbirth as a limit-experience build a politics of experience while showcasing Heyes's much-needed new philosophical method. (shrink)

This dissertation is an investigation into how scientific values may influence the kinds of theories which are investigated, and in turn which theories become ‘mainstream’. I have focussed on psychedelic therapy as a family of theories, and I identified three main reasons as to why psychedelic therapy is somewhat incompatible with the current psychiatric paradigm: (1) the inability to conduct double-blind trials, (2) The inability to isolate one explanatory variable, and (3) The mystical and spiritual dimensions of the mechanisms of (...) action of psychedelic drugs. Because double-blind randomised controlled trials, isolating one explanatory variable, and neurobiological- style explanations of mechanisms of action are seen as an integral part of good psychiatric research, this means that psychedelic therapy is inherently disadvantaged as a research avenue in the current paradigm. These three things also arguably embody scientific values proposed by Kuhn (1977), such as accuracy, simplicity, and consistency. Helen Longino (1995) argues that Kuhn’s values do not simply increase the likelihood of a theory being true, but in some instances serve to perpetuate discriminatory ideologies. She proposes her own list of values as a route to a more equitable science, and by extension, a more equitable society. Interestingly, psychedelic therapy as a theory embodies many, if not all of the values proposed by Longino. This led me to my conclusion that if the psychiatric paradigm were more feminist according to Longino’s criteria, then psychedelic therapy would be considered a “better” theory. It would therefore be easier to conduct research in this area, and psychedelic therapy would have a better chance at becoming a mainstream treatment. (shrink)

This article examines the portrayal of matricentric feminism as well as expounds the issues of mythology and how both informed each other in Umaru Landan and Dexter Lyndersay’s Shaihu Umar. It argues that Fatima’s sojourn in search of her son, Shaihu, is propelled by a will borne out of motherhood and given strength by supernatural forces. The methodological base of the study is qualitative in nature appropriating the concepts of matricentric feminism and mythology as structural scaffoldings while Jacques Derrida’s concept (...) of deconstruction will be used as analytical framework. This concept attempts to challenge the interpretation of a text based on conventional notions of stability of human self, the external world, and of language and meaning. The philosophy of existence of the eponymous character is revealed in the play. The article tries to probe if the matricentric elements exuded by Fatima (Shaihu’s mother) are just a will tied to motherhood or if it is given strength by the metaphysics of presence and the messianic. (shrink)

This article explores the role of second-order anger in the formation of resistant feminist space through the work of María Lugones and Sara Ahmed. I argue that this incommunicative form of anger can operate as a bridge between two senses of resistant spatiality in Lugones, connecting the hangout, which is a collective and transgressive space for alternative sense making, and the cocoon, which is a solitary and germinative space of tense internal transformation. By weaving connections with Ahmed’s concept of feminist (...) fragile sheltering, I demonstrate that the insulating character of second-order anger need not be equated with spatial solitude. Rather, given its orientation toward a future becoming away from oppressed subjectivity, germinative cocooning can be understood as constitutive of collective, feminist, and resistant spaces. I conclude, therefore, that feminist spaces ought to shelter second-order angers and embrace fragility as a condition of resistant transformation. (shrink)

What is philosophy, why does it matter, and how would it be different if women wrote more of it? At a time when the importance of philosophy, and the humanities in general, is being questioned and at a time when the question of gender equality is a huge public question, 22 women in philosophy lay out in this book how they think of philosophy, what they actually do, and how that is applied to actual problems. By bringing together accounts of (...) the personal experiences of women in philosophy, this book provides a new understanding of the ways in which the place of women in philosophy has changed in recent decades while also introducing the reader to the nature and the value of philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

In the philosophy of language and epistemology, debates often centre on what content a person is communicating, or representing in their mind. How that content is organised, along dimensions of salience, has received relatively little attention. I argue that salience matters. Mere change of salience patterns, without change of content, can have dramatic implications, both epistemic and moral. Imagine two newspaper articles that offer the same information about a subject, but differ in terms of what they headline. These articles can (...) be said to adopt different linguistic salience perspectives. Making different things salient in language is a way of making different things salient in an audience’s mind: it is a way of encouraging the audience to adopt a particular cognitive salience perspective. Building on Elisabeth Camp’s work on perspectives, and Sebastian Watzl’s work on attention, I suggest that one has a certain cognitive salience perspective in virtue of better noticing, remembering, and finding cognitively accessible certain contents over others. Drawing on psychological research into cognitive biases and framing effects, I argue that that simply making some content salient in the mind, perhaps through first making it salient in language, can be sufficient to activate substantive cultural beliefs or ideologies associated with that content. Where those beliefs and ideologies have epistemic and moral problems, we have grounds for criticising the salience perspective that causally produced them. Besides this instrumental harm, I also suggest that certain salience perspectives can themselves constitute harm. I draw on feminist work on objectification to argue that making the wrong thing salient about a person can constitute a way of dehumanising them. A great many factors, from physical and psychological violence, to false beliefs and credibility deficits, have already been identified as potentially harming an individual or group. What is distinctive about this argument, then, is the idea that, sometimes, mere patterns of salience can be damaging in and of themselves. (shrink)

This article discusses the category of foreigner in the context of academia. In the first part I explore this category and its philosophical significance. A quick look at the literature reveals that this category needs more attention in analyses of dimensions of privilege and disadvantage. Foreignness has peculiarities that demarcate it from other categories of identity, and it intersects with them in complicated ways. Devoting more attention to it would enable addressing issues affecting foreigners in academia that go commonly unnoticed. (...) In the second part of the article I argue that current efforts to make academia a more inclusive environment should address the disadvantages that many foreign academics face. I focus on two senses of foreigner: working and living in a country that is not your country of origin, and being a nonnative speaker of the language in which you work. (shrink)

If someone says, “You’ve stereotyped me,” we hear the statement as an accusation. One way to interpret the accusation is as follows: you haven’t seen or treated me as an individual. In this essay, I interpret and evaluate a theory of wrongful stereotyping inspired by this thought, which I call the failure-to-individualize theory of wrongful stereotyping. According to this theory, stereotyping is wrong if and only if it involves failing to treat persons as individuals. I argue that the theory—however one (...) interprets it—is inadequate. Either the theory will not reliably identify all cases of wrongful stereotyping or it will fail to adequately explain why they are wrong. I conclude that it does not follow that we must entirely jettison the objection that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals. What follows is only that the objection must play a more circumscribed role in a theory of when and why stereotyping is wrong. (shrink)

This article studies Madame de Lambert's early eighteenth-century views on aging, and especially the aging of women, by contextualizing them in a twofold way: It understands them as a response to La Rochefoucauld's skepticism concerning aging, women, and the aging of women; It understands them as being closely connected to a long series of scattered remarks concerning esteem, self-esteem, and honnêteté in Lambert's moral essays. Whereas La Rochefoucauld describes aging as a decline of intellectual, emotional, and physical powers and is (...) suspicious of the mechanisms of esteem and self-esteem, Lambert develops a view of aging as offering the chance to become more independent of the judgment of others, especially the chance for women to become more independent of the judgment of men. As she argues, aging offers women the possibility of cultivating genuinely estimable intellectual and emotional qualities that attract the justified esteem essential for a stable friendship, as well as the opportunity to develop a form of self-esteem that is based on respect for one's own capacities of judgment. (shrink)

In this article, Dembroff argues that the category nonbinary should not be understood in terms of presentation or psychological states, but instead in terms of how its members are politically situated with respect to the binary expectations of Western gender ideology.

The question of diversity, both with regard to the demographic profile of philosophers as well as the content of philosophical inquiry, has received much attention in recent years. One figure that has gone relatively unnoticed is that of the foreigner. To the extent that philosophers have taken the foreigner as their object of inquiry, they have focused largely on challenges nonnative speakers of English face in a profession conducted predominantly in English. Yet an understanding of the foreigner in terms of (...) the nonnative speaker does not exhaust the conceptual space of the foreigner. This article provides a more nuanced conceptual apparatus that allows for a more precise identification and discussion of other ways in which one can be a foreigner in philosophy. I develop a taxonomy of different conceptions of the foreigner, namely the linguistic, material, cultural, and epistemic foreigner; I discuss the different and specific challenges they face; and I show how foreigners enrich philosophical practice. (shrink)

This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, but a freedom understood with Spinoza and Nietzsche as grounded (...) in necessity rather than only in the will, and with Arendt and Foucault as a practice rather than an achievement of a sovereign subject. Somatic practices grounded in awareness and acceptance of the body’s necessities, along with attention to the I-can cultivate a form of embodied freedom that bridges care of the self and the political. (shrink)

Most mainstream feminist anti-rape scholarship and activism may be described as carceral feminism, insofar as it fails to engage with critiques of the criminal punishment system and endorses law-and-order responses to sexual and gendered violence. Mainstream feminist anti-rape scholars and activists often view increased conviction rates and longer sentences as a political goal—or, at the very least, are willing to collaborate with police and lament cases where perpetrators of sexual violence are given “light” or non-custodial sentences. Prison abolitionists, on the (...) other hand, have tended to insist that most lawbreakers are non-violent and that the “dangerous” are “few”, thus avoiding serious engagement with the widespread phenomenon of sexual violence. Despite the prevalence of carceral feminism, to my knowledge no feminist scholar has explicitly embraced this label, and the closest I have found to a defense of carceral feminism is feminist legal scholar Lise Gotell’s “critique of the critique of carceral feminism”. For this reason, it is with Gotell’s article that I primarily engage in defending anti-carceral feminism and prison abolitionism even in the difficult case of sexual assault. (shrink)

This article contributes to feminist expositions of emotion and “matters of the heart” by highlighting the gendered nature of the mobilization of shame. It focuses on the role shame plays in state apology and the desire to recover pride. Specifically, it analyzes the state apology offered to the survivors of Magdalen Laundries by Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach of Ireland. By drawing out how the state apology recreates the Irish nation, it traces the deployment of a potentially productive variety of the (...) politics of shame, which comes to be subverted in the service of keeping the virtuous, feeling “heart” of Ireland—the nation's very core—intact across a temporal, moral continuum. (shrink)

Sexual and racial differences matter. Indeed, facile assumptions of sameness born from the desire to claim universal truths persist as a dangerous tendency. Difference matters and we have yet to fully understand what difference means. But claims of absolute difference have a history of justifying colonization and recently can justify slipping into indifference about people with different embodiment. In philosophy of race’s emphasis that race has ontological significance, such emphasis on difference can leave differently racialized and sexualized people living in (...) isolation from each other. Absolute sameness and absolute difference are not true to phenomenological experience. Philosophy has long debated the relation between identity and difference, from its metaphysical origin in the relation between monism and dualism, to Hegel’s formulation of a dialectical relation between identity and difference. But the idea of an identity-in-difference explores a more immediate relation between the two. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work explores the idea of an identity-in-difference throughout his phenomenology in both its epistemic and ontologic senses. This paper explores at least four instantiations of the relation of identity-in-difference in Merleau-Ponty’s work to argue for upholding the value of both difference and sameness in developing our understanding of race. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask whether there is a defensible philosophical view according to which everybody is beautiful. I review two purely aesthetical versions of this claim. The No Standards View claims that everybody is maximally and equally beautiful. The Multiple Standards View encourages us to widen our standards of beauty. I argue that both approaches are problematic. The former fails to be aspirational and empowering, while the latter fails to be sufficiently inclusive. I conclude by presenting a hybrid ethical–aesthetical (...) view according to which everybody is beautiful in the sense that everybody can be perceived through a loving gaze. I show that this view is inclusive, aspirational and empowering, and authentically aesthetical. (shrink)

Research on violence against women tends to focus on topics such as sexual assault and intimate partner violence, arguably to the detriment of investigating men’s violence and intrusion in women’s everyday lives. The reality and possibility of the routine intrusions women experience from men in public space – from unwanted comments, to flashing, following and frottage – are frequently unaddressed in research, as well as in theoretical and policy-based responses to violence against women. Often at their height during women’s adolescence, (...) such practices are commonly dismissed as trivial, relatively harmless expressions of free speech too subjective to be legislated against. -/- Based on original empirical research, this book is the first of its kind to conduct a feminist phenomenological analysis of the experience for women of men’s stranger intrusions in public spaces. It suggests that intrusion from unknown men is a fundamental factor in how women understand and enact their embodied selfhood. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the philosophical meaning of pregnancy and maternity in the writ-ings of R. Soloveitchik and Emmanuel Lévinas. They both make a phenomenological enquiry into these phenomena, by looking on the biological aspect and the emotional aspects. R. Solove-itchik suggests a spiritual interpretation concerning the meaning of pregnancy, which is both biological and spiritual. He attempts to differentiate between the natural parenthood and the spiritual parenthood. Lévinas gives us the philosophical observation through the phenomenolog-ical research of pregnancy, (...) motherhood and parenthood. For him, this inquiry may be revealed as an ethical occurrence that demand responsibility. Perhaps this is one of the unique dimensions of modern Jewish philosophy, looking towards the religious texts with modern philosophical method and modern philosophy theories. Reading carefully the biblical story of Genesis on the notion of birth and maternity, raises textual questions and cultural questions. For Lévinas and R. Soloveitchik these questions can open the door to new philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper I look at the philosophical struggles of one eighteenth-century woman writer to reconcile a desire and obvious capacity to participate in the creation of republican ideals and their applications on the one hand, and on the other a deeply held belief that women's role in a republic is confined to the domestic realm. I argue that Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland's philosophical writings—three unpublished essays, published and unpublished letters, as well as parts of her memoirs—suggest that even though she (...) adopted a Rousseau-style rural republicanism that relies on complementarity of men and women's virtues, she somehow succeeds in proposing a less sexist picture of the republican family, one that makes it possible for men and women to take an equal part in family business and politics. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been heralded as a canonical text of feminist theory. The book focuses on providing an account of the lived experience of woman that generates a condition of otherness. However, I contend that it falls short of being able to account for the multidimensionality of identity insofar as Beauvoir's argument rests upon the comparison between racial and gendered oppression that is understood through the black–white binary. The result of this framework is the imperceptibility of (...) identities at the crossroads between categories of race and gender. Hence, the goal of this article is to explore the margins of Beauvoir's work in order to decenter the “other” of The Second Sex and make known what is made imperceptible by its architecture, using Latina identity as an interventional guide. I conclude that given the prominence of The Second Sex in feminist theory, this shortcoming must be addressed if feminist theorists are to use it responsibly. (shrink)

Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution was, upon its original publication, both radicacmen would be freed from the burden of childbirth, in which the nuclear family, gender roles, typical constructions of marriage and parenting are all a thing of the past, still for many seems radical, even forty-five years after its debut in 1970. With Firestone's recent passing, it is a particularly suitable time to reconsider her work in light of the medical, technological, and social changes (...) of the past few decades. Specifically, I wish to argue that the kind of future society that Firestone envisioned, which would be possible only through the use of certain medical technologies, has begun to be actualized within many trans-affirming communities. The greater the recognition of trans identities, trans lives, and trans relationships, the more we will approach the realization of the post-revolutionary society that she describes. In this essay, I consider Firestone's ideas on the issues of biological sex, gender, relationships, and parenthood, after which I will identify how present trans-affirming practices serve to support these Firestonian ideals. (shrink)

Stereotype threat is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals become aware that their behavior could potentially confirm a negative stereotype. Though stereotype threat is a widely studied phenomenon in social psychology, there has been relatively little scholarship on it in philosophy, despite its relevance to issues such as implicit cognition, epistemic injustice, and diversity in philosophy. However, most psychological research on stereotype threat discusses the phenomenon by using an overly narrow picture of it, which focuses on one of its (...) effects: the ability to hinder performance. As a result, almost all philosophical work on stereotype threat is solely focused on issues of performance too. -/- Social psychologists know that stereotype threat has additional effects, such as negatively impacting individuals’ motivation, interests, long-term health, and even their sense of self, but these other effects are often downplayed, or even forgotten about. Therefore, the “standard picture” of stereotype threat needs to be expanded, in order to better understand the theoretical aspects of the phenomenon, and to develop broader, more effective interventions. This dissertation develops such an “expanded picture” of stereotype threat, which emphasizes how the phenomenon can negatively impact both self-identity and epistemic agency. In doing so, I explore the nature of stereotypes more generally and argue that they undermine groups’ moral status and contribute to what is called “ontic injustice.” I also show how stereotype threat harms members of socially subordinated groups by way of coercing their self-identity and undermining their epistemic agency, which I argue is a form of epistemic injustice. Lastly, I analyze the expanded picture’s implications for addressing the low proportion of women in professional philosophy. I critically engage recent arguments that these low numbers simply reflect different interests women have, which if innate or benign, would require no intervention. My expanded picture shows the mistakes in this sort of reasoning, which is also present in discussions on the underrepresentation of women in science. The expanded picture of stereotype threat that this dissertation develops is not only practically important, but also advances key philosophical debates in social epistemology, applied ethics, and social metaphysics. (shrink)