Varieties of Feminism, Misc

Having elsewhere connected Walter Otto’s interpretation of Dionysus as a politically progressive deity to Huey P. Newton’s vision for the Black Panthers, I here expand this inquiry to a line of Otto-inspired scholarship. First, Alain Daniélou identifies Dionysus and Shiva as the dancing god of a democratic/decolonizing cult oppressed by tyrannical patriarchies. Arthur Evans sharpens this critique of sexism and heteronormativity, concluding that, as Dionysus’s chorus is to Greek tragedy, so Socrates’s circle is to Western philosophy. I thus call for (...) the creation of a hybrid Dionysian-Socratic revolutionary philosophical chorus, modeled on Dionysus Lyseus, wielding philosophical analysis to loosen injustice’s bonds, as a vanguard of social justice. I find a handbook for this chorus’s creation in Euripides’s Bacchae, whose Dionysus is an ally of immigrant women, overthrower of Theban patriarchy, and international revolutionary. Finally, I offer a contemporary example of such a chorus that is based in my hometown in Alabama, namely, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild. (shrink)

‘Intersectionality’ is one of the rare pieces of academic jargon to make it out of the university and into the mainstream. The message is clear and well-known: your feminism had better be intersectional. But what exactly does this mean? This paper is partly an exercise in conceptual clarification, distinguishing at least six distinct types of claim found across the literature on intersectionality, and digging further into the most philosophically complex of these claims—namely the metaphysical and explanatory. It’s also partly a (...) reply to Sara Bernstein, who argued recently that the best interpretation of the metaphysical claim is explanatory priority. We’ll argue that duly clarified, it’s far from obvious that feminism had better be intersectional. At the very least, it had better not be only intersectional. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 7, July 2022.

Appeals to some thesis of underdetermination, to the idea that scientific theories and hypotheses are not entailed by the evidence that supports them, are common in feminist philosophy of science. These appeals seek to understand and explain how androcentrism and other problematic approaches to gender have found their way into good science, as well as the reverse – how feminist approaches to gender and science that are also value-laden, can contribute to good science. Focusing on W.V. Quine’s positions on holism (...) and underdetermination, I argue that although Quine’s general thesis of holism does not entail his thesis of global underdetermination, his account of and arguments for moderate holism entail a localized and generalizable underdetermination, which I call moderate underdetermination. This moderate underdetermination is not transient or true of only some theories and hypotheses. Rather, it is a permanent state of affairs that characterizes all reasonably inclusive theories and hypotheses, however much evidence for them accumulates. I contend that Quine’s moderate holism entails the most robust and defensible argument for localized underdetermination, and that feminists would do well to appeal to it in arguing that values inform good science. (shrink)

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)

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)

In order to revise interpretive prejudgments, it is important to first recognize them for what they are. Problematically, the habitual overreliance on deficient prejudgments can make such recognition difficult. An impasse appears: How can one intervene on deficient interpretive resources if those very same resources conceal their deficiencies? I analyze James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” in which the protagonist Gabriel is highly resistant to internalizing experiences that might otherwise prompt him to revise his interpretive projections. I argue that Gabriel (...) only becomes aware of his interpretive shortcomings after an experience of profound hesitation that allows him to affectively sense the limitations of his prejudice. Drawing from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kristie Dotson, and Alia Al-Saji, I argue that Gabriel’s experience of hesitation temporarily denaturalizes his deeply entrenched sexism, circumventing the hermeneutical impasse described above. Read in this way, “The Dead” illustrates the power of affective experiences to unsettle highly resilient ways of seeing the world. (shrink)

I explore both the potential and the perils of Twitter as a space for constituting a Deweyan public aimed at transforming how "we" (here, I mean not only citizens of the United States but global citizens) affectively receive and thereby respond to and resist sexual violation. In the course of this brief exploration, I operate with a pragmatic notion of "truth," namely, as democratically formulating a hypothesis concerning the nature of a social problem that enables fruitful amelioration of the problem. (...) I specifically focus on the viral #WhyIDidntReport Twitter campaign provoked by Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court hearing. (shrink)

This is a most welcome handbook arriving at a timely moment for those interested in feminism in relation to sex/gender, progressive politics and sustainability. Critical realism has been an invalua...

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)

Appeal to women’s experience for moral delineation in theological ethics has been perplexed by the issue of cultural diversity and colonialism as raised by postcolonial critique. This paper aims to examine the debates from Third-World feminism and Christian feminism in dealing with difference and solidarity, leading to the call for contextual analysis and related power mappings. Margaret A. Farley’s proposal for sexual ethics in Just Love will then serve as an example to discuss how the search for common morality among (...) cultural diversity may prevent or reinforce colonial agendas and other privileges. (shrink)

This paper develops and articulates a metaphysics of intersectionality, the idea that multiple axes of social oppression cross-cut each other. Though intersectionality is often described through metaphor, theories of intersectionality can be formulated using the tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics. A central tenet of intersectionality theory, that intersectional identities are inseparable, can be framed in terms of explanatory unity. Further, intersectionality is best understood as metaphysical and explanatory priority of the intersectional category over its constituents, akin to metaphysical priority of (...) the whole over its parts. (shrink)

Val Plumwood’s 1993 paper, “The politics of reason: towards a feminist logic” (hence- forth POR) attempted to set the stage for what she hoped would begin serious feminist exploration into formal logic – not merely its historical abuses, but, more importantly, its potential uses. This work offers us: (1) a case for there being feminist logic; and (2) a sketch of what it should resemble. The former goal of Plumwood’s paper encourages feminist theorists to reject anti-logic feminist views. The paper’s (...) latter aim is even more challenging. Plumwood’s critique of classical negation (and classical logic) as a logic of domination asks us to recognize that particular logical systems are weapons of oppression. Against anti-logic feminist theorists, Plumwood argues that there are other logics besides classical logic, such as relevant logics, which are suited for feminist theorizing. Some logics may oppress while others may liberate. We provide details about the sources and context for her rejection of classical logic and motivation for promoting relevant logics as feminist. (shrink)

Understanding a normative concept like oppression requires attention to not only its harms but also the causes of those harms. In other words, a complete understanding of such a concept requires a proper causal explanation. This causal explanation can also inform and constrain our moral response to such harms. Therefore, the conceptual explanatory framework that we use to inform our moral diagnosis and our moral response become significant. The first goal of this dissertation is to propose complexity theory as the (...) proper framework for not only explaining a social phenomenon like oppression but also understanding the proper sites for social change. The second goal of this dissertation is to answer three interrelated questions about how we should respond, morally, to a chronic and complex social problem like racial or gender inequality: (1) Why do the current interventions to address these problems fail? (2) Do social movements play any unique role in addressing these problems? (3) What is our individual responsibility to participate in social movements? In response, I argue that the explanatory frameworks that we choose to understand the cause(s) of social problems can be the source of the inadequacy of our intervention. I argue that a proper social and moral intervention needs to capture the complex and dynamic nature of the social world. I also show that changing the explanatory framework allows us to see the unique role social movements play in making effective and sustainable social change possible. Finally, I conclude supporting such movements is a moral imperative. (shrink)

Penelope Deutscher’s book, "Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason" engages with the recent interest in reproduction, futurity, failure, and negativity in queer theory, but also the historical and ongoing investments in the concept of reproduction in feminist theory as well as (US) social movements. "Foucault’s Futures" troubles the forms of subjectivation presupposed by “reproductive rights” from a feminist perspective, exploring the “contiguity” between reproductive reason and biopolitics—specifically the proximity of reproduction to death, risk, fatality, and threat: its thanatopolitical underbelly.

Resumen: El concepto “womenomics” propone la idea de “comprar la economía femenina” designando con ello la necesidad de Japón de hacer esfuerzos por incluir exponencialmente a la mujer en el mercado laboral e introducir uno de los mecanismos para corregir un futuro de estancamiento y contracción del crecimiento económico. El concepto lo acuñó en 1999 Kathy M. Matsui al frente de la división de investigación en Asia de Economía, Materias primas y Estrategia del grupo de banca y valores más importantes (...) del mundo, Goldman Sachs. En este ensayo se propone estudiar y analizar críticamente el marco político y económico de la estrategia conocida como Abe-Womenomics con el objetivo de conocer un aspecto de la actual política japonesa doméstica, y, por extensión, las implicaciones regionales e internacionales de su adopción y adaptación, para, luego, demostrar si este tipo de medidas buscan un giro hacia la equidad genuina o solamente replican un patrón productivista, resignificando las aspiraciones feministas en beneficio del sistema neoliberal. Palabras clave: Abe-Womenomics, Womenomics, Kathy M. Matsui, Nancy Fraser, resignificación, neoliberalismo. Abstract: The concept "womenomics" proposes the idea of "buying the female economy", thus designating Japan's need to make efforts to exponentially include women in the labor market and introduce one of the mechanisms to correct a future of stagnation and contraction of the economic growth. The concept was coined in 1999 by Kathy M. Matsui at the head of the Asian research division of Economy, Commodities and Strategy of the world's leading banking and investment group, Goldman Sachs. This essay proposes to study and critically analyze the political and economic framework of the strategy known as Abe-Womenomics, with the aim of knowing an aspect of current Japanese domestic policy, and, by extension, the regional and international implications of its adoption and adaptation. Then, the objective is to demonstrate whether this type of measure seeks a turn towards a genuine equity or only replicates a productivist pattern, re-signifying feminist aspirations for the benefit of the neoliberal system. Keywords: Abe-Womenomics, Womenomics, Kathy M. Matsui, Nancy Fraser, resignification, neoliberalism. (shrink)

Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric presents composition professor Lydia McDermott's "sonogram" methodology of rhetorical listening, an exercise that discloses feminine voices muted or unjustly disciplined within texts ostensibly written on women's behalf. The texts examined by McDermott range from eighteenth-century pregnancy manuals to speeches by Favorinus, the ancient sophist, who is described from antiquity as a hermaphrodite. Part of McDermott's purpose in sonogramming is to critique modern and contemporary feminists. She objects to the feminist trend of perpetuating and (...) answering a "disability" rhetoric about women, or of demonstrating that women can overcome a... (shrink)

How are patriarchal regimes perpetuated and reproduced? Kate Manne’s recent work on misogyny aims to provide an answer to this central question. According to her, misogyny is a property of social environments where women perceived as violating patriarchal norms are ‘kept down’ through hostile reactions coming from men, other women and social structures. In this paper, I argue that Manne’s approach is problematically incomplete. I do so by examining a recent puzzling social phenomenon which I call (post-)feminist backlash: the rise (...) of women-led movements reinstating patriarchal practices in the name of feminism. I focus on the example of ‘raunch feminist’ CAKE parties and argue that their pro-patriarchal dimension cannot be adequately explained by misogyny. I propose instead a different story that emphasizes the continued centrality of gender distinctions in our social normative life, even as gendered social meanings become increasingly contested. This triggers meaning vertigo, a distinct form of social anxiety and the reactionary impulse at the heart of (post)-feminist backlash. Meaning vertigo both complicates the answer to Manne’s main question—“why is misogyny still a thing?”—and suggests the need and opportunity for a different kind of feminist political intervention. (shrink)

This article identifies five genres of anti-queer hate speech found in The Australian’s Facebook comments sections, exposing and analyzing the ways in which such comments are used to derogate cisgender and heterosexual women. One may be tempted to think of cis-het women as third-party victims of queerphobia; however, this article argues that these genres of anti-queer speech are, in fact, misogynistic. Specifically, it argues that these are instances of cis-hetero-misogynistic hate speech. Cis-hetero-misogyny functions as the “law enforcement branch” of a (...) cis-hetero-patriarchal gender order. Given the existence of such an order, it is clear that cis-het women’s liberation is inextricable from queer liberation. This article argues that to facilitate allyship and challenge this gender order—the order that elicits such hate speech acts—we need an epistemological revolution in the way we recognize and re-cognize human difference. (shrink)

This essay examines the cultural phenomena of noise in its perceived social constructions and demonstrates its emergence as a form of resistance against prevailing dominant hegemonic codes of culture. In particular, the paper explores the ability of noise to be enacted as a tool to escape the shackles of heteronormative constructions of sexuality and gender in the cultural landscape of the United States. Examined to support this argument are the contrasting works of two American artists: John Cage and Emilie Autumn. (...) Through Cage and his avant-garde articulations of sound, covert acts of resistance against the dominant heteronormative constructions of masculinity are explored, and through Autumn’s classical crossover work, a more overt and explicit form of resistance to subvert gender stereotypes and structures of normality and patriarchy are illuminated. Additionally, the paper explores possibilities for artists to engage with other movements, such as disability activism to create new possibilities for change. -/- . (shrink)

Client-provider relationships have significant effects on how individuals comprehend their life situation during chronic disease and illness. Yet, little is known about how frontline health care providers (HCPs) influence client’s identity formation through meaning-making with clients such as HIV-positive women living in poverty. This requires ethical consideration of the meanings made between clients and providers about client’s health and well-being, both individually and in the larger society. Health care providers (N = 15) and married women living with HIV (N = (...) 33) in north-central India engaged in separate intensive interviews providing narrative data which were analysed using a conceptual framework crossing Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy theory (Lipsky 2010) with meaning-making processes. HCPs and women construct meanings of women’s role as caregivers that impact women’s sense of identity, health, and well-being. Findings indicate that despite being well-intentioned, HCPs inadvertently reinforce rigid gender norms and convey that women’s worth is tied to their familial caregiving role. HCPs’ discretionary advocacy may also reinforce societal images of women as incapable and needy, thereby harming them more generally. Attention to the gender-sensitive training of HIV health care providers may assure that discretion is ethically interrogated to promote gender equity and enhance women’s access to social welfare services. (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)

Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s recent work on maternal inclinations as a postural term, the overall purpose of this article is to seek out a geometry of the educational relation that is alien to the masculine myth of the ‘economic man’. Drawing on Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’s critique of the marketization of education, reading their giving ‘shape and form’ to the scholastic school through the geometry of Cavarero’s ‘maternal inclinations’, the article shows how images and metaphors associated with the posture (...) of rectitude infuse the scholastic model of the school. At the same time, we argue, it testifies to a geometry of an inclined subject and, in doing so, it offers an opening for recovering the significance of the feminine and maternal to educational theory. Affirming this opening, the paper makes a shift of emphasis from scholastic techniques to educational postures. (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 we aim to show the potential of cross-continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕrónké Oyĕwùmí. Oyĕwùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwùmí's claims. We then (...) draw Irigaray and Oyĕwùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyĕwùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of. (shrink)

Many feminists (e.g. T. Bettcher and B. R. George) argue for a principle of first person authority (FPA) about gender, i.e. that we should (at least) not disavow people's gender self-categorisations. However, there is a feminist tradition resistant to FPA about gender, which I call "radical feminism”. Feminists in this tradition define gender-categories via biological sex, thus denying non-binary and trans self-identifications. Using a taxonomy by B. R. George, I begin to demystify the concept of gender. We are also able (...) to use the taxonomy to model various feminist approaches. It becomes easier to see how conceptualisations ofgender which allow for FPA often do not allow for understanding female subjugation as being rooted in reproductive biology. I put forward a conceptual scheme: radical FPA feminism. If we accept FPA, but also radical feminist concerns, radical FPA feminism is an attractive way of conceptualising gender. (shrink)

CITATION: Du Toit, L. 2014. Human rights discourse : friend or foe of African women’s sexual freedoms?. Acta Academic, 46: 48-69.

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)

Neoliberalism, we are told, has “seduced” feminism. What is meant is that the libertarian and democratic hopes that have scoped this radical social movement have been reconfigured and re-energised by neoliberal project that models all our freedoms upon the market. Misgivings about “seductions” and “betrayals” require that feminist theory adopts the role of the arbiter on goals and meanings and this puts strains upon its deep commitment to democratic epistemologies. The following paper finds that the leading theorist of feminism as (...) critique in a neoliberal age has failed to fully grasp the normative tension that is involved. Nancy Fraser fails to rethink the tasks of critique in terms that is sufficient to its role as arbiter on meanings. I suggest that this rethinking might be done without betraying the demands of a democratic epistemology if we reconstruct the emancipatory idealisations that underpin Fraser’s account of a democratic epistemology. While this rendering of feminism as critique retrieves a representation of feminist ideals that might unmask neoliberal distortions, it does so without betraying the responsiveness to self-interpreted needs that is also claimed by a critical and democratic feminist theory. (shrink)

This positional paper explores the role of personal networks (family and friends) in caring for people with mental health problems. Since the eighties, major changes have been made in the organization and focus of professional mental healthcare. Correspondingly, new expectations and changes in the division of care responsibilities between people with mental health problems, their personal networks and their professional care providers were created. In this paper, I investigate how the transition in mental healthcare changed the allocation of care responsibilities (...) between personal networks, people with mental health problems and professional caregivers. I will consider why care responsibilities of personal networks have been taken for granted in these processes, and discuss whether personal networks should have a more prominent voice in the assignment of care responsibilities, and how this can be done. A theoretical framework of feminist care ethics inspired by scholars such as Margaret Urban Walker, Joan Tronto and Hilde Lindemann is used to reflect on the need for social inclusion. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud famously described three existential insults to humanity stemming from heliocentrism, evolution, and psychoanalysis. In recent years we are, perhaps, beginning to see the emergence of a fourth: interdependency. Over the last several centuries, Anglo-American culture has modelled itself on a vision of the independent individual – strong, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Yet from feminist theory, communitarianism, disability theory, institutionalist economics, and elsewhere, the evidence mounts that independence is, in most contexts, a myth. We are, in fact, fundamentally social beings: (...) fragile, vulnerable, variously disabled, and intrinsically dependent. In their time, each of the existential insults had profound effects; they forced a re-examination of the self, which rippled throughout the culture and uprooted old practices. This article argues that taking interdependency seriously would similarly lead to profound changes in our culture, our central political concepts, and even our major institutions. (shrink)