I show how much psychiatric disability is informed by trauma, marginalization, sexist norms, social inequalities, concepts of irrationality and normalcy, oppositional mind-body dualism, and mainstream moral values. Drawing on feminist discussion of physical disability, I present a feminist theory of psychiatric disability that serves to liberate not only those who are psychiatrically disabled but also the mind and moral consciousness restricted in their ranges of rational possibilities.

In this essay, I analyze pregnancy loss from a feminist phenomenological perspective. I draw upon relational accounts of personhood wherein a person's status and identity are formed through a lived history and the activity of “calling into personhood” a being a woman may seek to know or become. I draw upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who advances a feminist phenomenology that grounds the status and identity of women within embodied situations. Her important work sheds light on the varied (...) perceptions and processes that inform experiences of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. (shrink)

Personal reflections on the philosophical career of Henry Johnstone, B.S. Haverford College, 1942, and Ph.D. Harvard, 1950, professor at Williams College 1948-1952 and Pennsylvania State University, 1952 - 2000. Founder and editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Johnstone wrote eight books, including two logic texts, three monographs, and over 150 articles or reviews. The focus is on his efforts to resolve problems stemming from the conflict between the logical empiricism Johnstone embraced in his dissertation, and the arguments of his absolute idealist (...) colleagues at Williams, efforts he pursued in Philosophy and Argument (1959), and Validity and Rhetoric in Philosophical Argument (1978). (shrink)

Nature relative to subjectivity is an under theorized area of performance philosophy, one that we ignore at our peril. There is such a thing as nature. It encompasses all that humans are not, and suffuses all that we are and do. It is not merely a social or cultural construction, as we consider in this essay. In order to speak more definitively of nature and the body, we employ the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and reach back to the lifeworld philosophy (...) of Edmund Husserl. Some read Husserl as an essentialist, but there are other readings, such as the one developed here. One of Ricoeur’s major works, Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and the Involuntary, concerns motives and values at the organic level, studying how habits inform individual habitus and become embodied as nature in flux. Accordingly, this essay explores subjectivity, intentionality and nature in performance using examples from butoh relative to metamorphosis, a ubiquitous process in the rhythms and multi-tiered rhizomes of nature. Through Sartre and Ricoeur, the text also considers lived values of freedom relative to intention. In this light, readers are invited to explore their own porousness and evaporations via Freedom in Plasma, a butoh to do at the end of the essay. (shrink)