Women often seek midwifery care as an alternative to the maternity services that are readily available within the insured health care system in Alberta. Some aspects of community-based, primary care midwifery in Alberta that characterize this alternative are the use of story-telling as a form of knowledge, the development of social con nections among women seeking midwifery care, and nonauthoritarian relationships between midwives and women. In this paper, the concept of confidentiality, as it relates to these aspects of midwifery practice, (...) is explored, using traditional, caring and feminist models of ethics. (shrink)

Ethics is enabling of agency, but also normative and conventional. At the moment a gendered ethics, or the gendering of ethics, is a helpful approach because it is concerned with issues to do with people often peripheral to and excluded from power. At the moment it can work to keep ethics responsive, but how do we halt the drift into the normative, both as prescriptive and as ideological? A feminist ethics maintains the responsive and undermines prescriptive categories, and is committed (...) to involving disempowered voices in the conversation. The article is particularly concerned with the articulation of the situated, and raises questions about attending to, learning how to listen to and learning how to speak, so that many people from different places can get involved in ethics. Otherwise ethics isn’t ethical. (shrink)

The focus of this article is two texts, ‘Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells’ (1982) by Alice Walker and Disgrace(1999) by J.M. Coetzee, both of which present ethical problems for the reader. The texts share a common event, an incident of black-on-white, male-on-female rape. In each case the white woman keeps silent about the rape and the narrative is troubled by that silence. I read the dilemma of these texts as at once ethical, political and aesthetic and I explore (...) that multi-faceted problem through three perspectives – the issue of silence, the narrative structures of the texts and the impossibility of resolution. The texts repeatedly question my reading position, not least in that they both suggest that the silence of the white woman might, in certain circumstances, be a condition for political progress. (shrink)