This article offers a new hypothesis regarding Judg. 11.39d-40, a reference to an otherwise unknown festival celebrated by the ‘daughters of Israel’ in memory of the sacrifice of Jepththah’s daughter. After a survey of feminist and non-feminist speculations as to the nature of the festival, evidence from Greek heroine cults in which daughters are sacrificed for the good of the state is adduced as the closest parallel in ancient literature. The article concludes with some feminist theological considerations occasioned by (...) the patriotic and military nature of the festival. (shrink)

Though premarital sex among Thai young adults resulted in a large number of abortions and child mothers, university students were less likely than vocational students and out-of-school adolescents to have premarital sex. The authors believe that the university students’ attitude against premarital sex is fostered through mother-daughter relationships and an observance of the Buddhist five precepts. To support this contention, the authors conducted a study among 198 female university undergraduate students and hypothesized that mother-daughter relationships were related to (...) an attitude against premarital sex through the mediation effect of an observance of the five precepts. Results supported the research model, affirming the role of mother-daughter relationships in fostering an attitude against premarital sex, and suggesting that the five precepts have a protective effect in guarding against adverse health and life-changing risks among Thai adolescents. (shrink)

Does life have meaning? What is flourishing? How do we attain the good life? Philosophers, and many others of us, have explored these questions for centuries. As Eva Feder Kittay points out, however, there is a flaw in the essential premise of these questions: they seem oblivious to the very nature of the ways in which humans live, omitting a world of co-dependency, and of the fact that we live in and through our bodies, whether they are fully abled or (...) disabled. Our dependent, vulnerable, messy, changeable, and embodied experience colors everything about our lives both on the surface and when it comes to deeper concepts, but we tend to leave aside the body for the mind when it comes to philosophical matters. Disability offers a powerful challenge to long-held philosophical views about the nature of the good life, what provides meaning in our lives, and the centrality of reason, as well as questions of justice, dignity, and personhood. These concepts need not be distant and idealized; the answers are right before us, in the way humans interact with one another, care for one another, and need one another--whether they possess full mental capacities or have cognitive limitations. We need to revise our concepts of things like dignity and personhood in light of this important correction, Kittay argues. This is the first of two books in which Kittay will grapple with just how we need to revisit core philosophical ideas in light of disabled people's experience and way of being in the world. Kittay, an award-winning philosopher who is also the mother to a multiply-disabled daughter, interweaves the personal voice with the philosophical as a critical method of philosophical investigation. Here, she addresses why cognitive disability can reorient us to what truly matters, and questions the centrality of normalcy as part of a good life. With profound sensitivity and insight, Kittay examines other difficult topics: How can we look at the ethical questions regarding prenatal testing in light of a new appreciation of the personhood of disabled people? What do new possibilities in genetic testing imply for understanding disability, the family, and bioethics? How can we reconsider the importance of care, and how does it work best? In the process of pursuing these questions, Kittay articulates an ethic of care, which is the ethical theory most useful for claiming full rights for disabled people and providing the opportunities for everyone to live joyful and fulfilling lives. She applies the lessons of care to the controversial alteration of severely cognitively disabled children known as the Ashley Treatment, whereby a child's growth is halted with extensive estrogen treatment and related bodily interventions are justified. This book both imparts lessons that advocate on behalf of those with significant disabilities, and constructs a moral theory grounded on our ability to give, receive, and share care and love. Above all, it aims to adjust social attitudes and misconceptions about life with disability. (shrink)

Media representations of illnesses, particularly those associated with stigma such as non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), not only define health conditions for mass audiences, but generally do so in ways that are consistent with dominant ideologies. This article examines the construction of non-suicidal self-injury as practiced by female adolescents and young adults in four US films: Girl, Interrupted, Painful Secrets, Prozac Nation, and Thirteen. The methodology used to examine the films’ narrative structure is Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, while Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection (...) informs the analysis. On one hand, a paradigmatic reading suggests that the films frame self-injury as resistance to repressive maternal domination of female adolescents. On the other hand, syntagmatic analysis reveals a privileged response to NSSI in the form of pacification administered by psychotherapists functioning as the return of the phallic-mother fantasy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowAlison StoneGod the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with (...) Christ and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties.Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body.However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all.Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche.The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Interests and Obligations Self‐Knowledge Moral Development Through Humility, Courage, and Wisdom Character and the Common Good Further Down the Road Notes.

Discourses often uncover underlying social boundaries related to concepts such as ethnicity, gender and religion. By applying an intersectional approach, this article shows how the gendering of ethno-religious boundaries is central in the narratives of parents of Belgian, Italian and Moroccan origin, living in Flanders, Belgium. These processes are extremely salient when discourses on partner choice are discussed, as is the focal point in the current study. The construction of boundaries and identities are deeply influenced by dominant social representations. The (...) results show how the construction and justification of boundaries can also have restrictive consequences for individuals. Parents want to restrict daughters for their own good, and exogamy seems to be the prerogative of sons. (shrink)

When The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused a immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that there lies a strong connection between the consumption of women and animals so plainly asserted. But, as the 21 personal stories in this anthology show, the impact of (...) this provocative text on womens lives continues to this day, and it is as diverse as it is revelatory. One writer attempts to reconcile her feminist-vegan beliefs with her Muslim upbringing; a second makes the connection between animal abuse and her own self-destructive tendencies. A new mother discusses the sexual politics of breastfeeding, while another pens a letter to her young son about all she wishes for him in the future. Many others recall how the book inspired them to start careers in the music business, animal advocacy, and food. No matter whether they first read it in college or later in life, whether they are in their late teens or early forties, these writers all credit The Sexual Politics of Meat in some way with the awakening of their identities as feminists, activists, and women. Even if you havent read the original work, youre sure to be moved and inspired by these tales of growing up and, perhaps more important, waking up to the truths around us. (shrink)

Daughters of Hecate: Women & Magic in the Ancient World. Edited by Kimberly B. Stratton and Dayna S. Kalleres. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 533. $39.95.

Daughters of Emptiness, Poems of Chinese Buddhist Nuns. Beata Grant. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. x, 192 pp. ISBN 0861713621.

This article focuses on the cultural world of Jewish women in Eastern Europe between the 16th century and the beginning of the 19th century. It reveals the extent to which Yiddish language and literature were a means of gaining knowledge for such women. This is because Yiddish - a Jewish language that developed around 1000 years ago among the Jews living in Ashkenaz - was the language of the people, of ordinary life, of business and social relations, and also of (...) the home and the kitchen. It was the language of female spaces, stigmatized by its ‘humble’ associations with women and uncultivated persons. In turn, Yiddish literature was closely associated with women and a female readership. (shrink)

Patriarchal culture, Luce Irigaray reminds us, is an exclusivist culture among men. Its intolerance of difference isolates women and strips them of their subjectivity. Women are thus reduced to their biological capacity to satisfy men's erotic, social and procreative needs.1 The consequence of this culture for the female child is also important. Unwelcome daughters are excluded from paternal society as fathers seek the sameness of the sons who carry on their names. The concept of women's own divinity is necessary if (...) women are to constitute a sense of purposefulness of existence and identity. (shrink)

I bring several ecofeminist critiques of deep ecology to bear on mainstream animal rights theories, especially on the rights and utilitarian treatments of the animal research issue. Throughout, I show how animal rights issues are feminist issues and clarify the relationship between ecofeminism and animal rights.

In recent years, progress in cancer treatment has greatly increased the chances of recovery. Yet, treatment may have irreversible effects on patients’ fertility. In order to protect future fertility, preservation of ovarian tissue may be offered today even to very young girls, involving a surgical procedure that may be performed by minimally invasive laparoscopy, under general anesthesia. However, in the tragic event of a girl’s death, questions may arise regarding the possible use of the preserved ovarian tissue by her parents. (...) Should posthumous reproductive use of ovarian tissue without the girl’s prior consent (due to her young age) be considered a violation of her rights? On the other hand, can it be argued that it is in the interest of a child who died young to leave a genetic trace through posthumous reproduction, because genetic continuity is in the interest of every human being? After presenting the relevant clinical facts, we explore the ethical dimensions of this possible practice through an analysis of the interests of the deceased, her parents, and the child that may be born posthumously. (shrink)

The socio-historical events and libertarian cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s shaped the Catholic mother-daughter relationship for the women in this feminist genealogical study. This study is based on interviews with 36 Anglo-Australian Catholic women – 13 sets of mothers and daughters – as well as dialogue between my mother and myself about family photographs. Women’s stories of secondary school days tell of the formation of lady-like identities circumscribed through uniform regulations, the cult of the Virgin Mary and (...) ceremonies of everyday Catholic school life. The abject maternal body resurfaces in adolescence with the flow of menstrual blood, and the heralding sexuality of young women is circumscribed through patriarchal institutions such as Catholicism. Amid their silenced and contested dialogue, although years apart, the stories between mothers and daughters in this study drew parallels. (shrink)

This exciting collection offers a range of perspectives from some of the most prominent feminist voices of our time, including Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, and Jack Halberstam. Employing experimental modes of thinking and writing, the contributors remain faithful to the feminist tradition of subversion and resistance, while refusing to submit to its political tradition of a loving sisterhood or dutiful daughterhood. Through productive disagreement and cognitive dissonance, the essays presented here reflect the specific circumstances of our (...) present, and attempt to dream and envision possible alternatives for the future. The volume thus invites us to think of the becoming of feminism itself, and the possibilities of future feminisms-to-come. (shrink)

This essay argues that the book of Ruth's reopening of Israel's history and national mythology functions in such a way as to redeem, as it were, the plight of the subaltern Moabite—a plight begun with the daughters of Lot in Genesis 19. A parallel is then drawn with the 1619 Project, the recent journalistic project which posits the entire historical sweep of African slavery in North America since 1619 as the defining arc of the United States' founding. As theoretical frames, (...) the essay draws on the work of literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (including her concept of “moral love”) and political philosopher Arash Abizadeh. In so doing, the essay illustrates how a “functionalist” approach to biblical ethics that balances the content of the biblical narrative with attention to how the text functions in its broader context can provide guidance for contemporary ethical application. (shrink)

Parental investment decisions guide parental actions regarding children’s productive work and are shaped by ecological context. Urban ecology enhances long-term payoffs to investment in human capital, increasing opportunity costs for work performed by children, and decreased workload should result. Using an embodied capital framework, self-reported data on urban and rural Indo-Fijian children’s work activities are compared. Results show higher workloads for older children, rural children, and girls. High scholastic achievement is associated with lower workloads for girls, but not boys. This (...) pattern is interpreted as daughter-biased investment in the context of urbanization. (shrink)

This article offers a reconstruction of Theodor Adorno's work as it concerns sex/gender and feminist praxis. Although the prevailing interpretation of Adorno's work conceptualizes its relationship to women as one of either exclusion or essentialism, I argue that both the reading of Sade's Juliette in Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as a number of Adorno's aphorisms in Minima Moralia, present complex feminist claims and commitments. Max Horkheimer and Adorno position Juliette as a subject of the Enlightenment, forestalling the possibility that (...) women qua women are potentially utopian figures. I utilize Adorno's work in Minima Moralia to show that he—far from excluding or essentializing women—was interested in metaphorically capturing the subjective conditions developed by a system of binary sex/gender within a heteropatriarchal society. Indeed, one can find an iteration of queer theoretical commitments in Minima Moralia. As a result, I argue that he displays a number of straightforwardly feminist commitments: that a liberated society requires the disambiguation of sex from gender, affirming the nonnaturalness of our social sex/gender regime, and claiming that all subjects as gendered subjects are damaged by living within a heteropatriarchal society. Lastly, I provide preliminary evidence of Adorno's critique of liberal feminist praxis. (shrink)

With the publication recently of two valuable studies on Attic demes, we are now more fully aware of what we know, and do not know, of the deme. With Osborne's work, we now have some idea of the tendency of Athenians to own and maintain property in the deme of origin, but the role of marriage in consolidating property in that deme is more difficult to assess. In contrast to Osborne's focus on the ancestral deme, this brief study will concentrate (...) on the deme into which the woman married; such a deme will be termed the deme of marriage or the marital deme. The study will focus particularly on the families who contracted more than one alliance for their kinswomen into the same outside deme and will emphasize the importance of siblings in securing and maintaining these alliances in the marital deme. (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli documentary My Land Zion and the Palestinian documentary Paradise Lost. Both films are critical autobiographical texts and in both, the woman filmmaker negotiates her emotional and ideological ties with her culture, history, and nation. Naaman proposes that by using the autobiographical genre and by engaging emotionally as well as rationally, the women filmmakers discussed offer a particular gendered position rebelliously outside nationalism and the place of women within it.

This article takes The Shamer Chronicles, the teenage fantasy series by the Danish author Lene Kaaberbøl, as an example of a queer feminist affect theoretical thought experiment. It shows how Kaaberbøl’s tetralogy allows us to link shame and paranoid/reparative reading with the figure of the feminist killjoy. The Chronicles can be read as a meditation on shame as a form of accountability and the shaming killjoy as a heroic figure who insists on paranoid vision as the precondition for reparative imagination. (...) The article elaborates postcolonial criticisms of shame theories, showing how racialisation makes a difference in which forms of shame are marked as acceptable. Rather than dismiss shame theories altogether, the article explores how such criticisms can be integrated into, and thus further qualify, a critical shame reading of The Chronicles. (shrink)

This work examines the relationship between the endings chosen for musical works based on the biblical story of Jephtah's daughter and broader currents of European thought. Because the biblical story leaves the fate of Jephtah's daughter unclear, commentators have offered two interpretations: Jephtah's daughter is either sacrificed or consecrated to God. The examination of these two interpretations in the various commentaries and artistic works throughout the ages suggest a possible correlation between a given artist's religious affiliation and (...) the type of ending he composed for the story. Although Catholics would appear more likely to choose consecration as promoting the ideal of women's celibacy, no such correlation is seen in practice. Rather, the determining factor in the choice of the musical ending of the story is the dominant artistic convention of the time. This finding is in line with Curt Sachs's cultural theory of a universal pendulum of styles in Western civilization. Thus, the specific choice of the ending of the story of Jephtah's daughter in various artistic media may serve as a paradigm for broader trends of European thought. (shrink)

The article argues on behalf of a neglected tradition of feminist engagement with orthodox Christian theological themes, which deserves recognition as an aspect of feminist theology. As a preface to this argument, the heritage and current vibrancy of feminist liberation theology as a struggle for justice is first affirmed, then Christian theological currents are mapped by means of crosscutting coordinates. Evidence of feminist engagement across this theological map, and of the map operating within feminist theology, is presented to show that (...) feminist theology exceeds its mainstream identity as a liberation theology, and to reject the notion of liberation theology as a successor theology. The core of the article begins with Woodhead's neo-orthodox critique of feminist theology and responds in two ways: by identifying an existing feminist engagement with orthodoxy which is ignored by Woodhead; and by reading the texts she criticizes as imaginative revisitings of core Christian themes. The creative potential of imaginative revisiting of orthodox themes is further explored, concluding with a parable of the prodigal daughter. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Emperor’s Daughter, the Wise Rabbi, and the Realtor’s FaceliftJohn Davidson and Ruhama WeissFour decades ago during the clinical years of medical school, my (JD) first patient–care efforts included serendipitous contacts with three non–physician mentors. Each a rabbi. Each a Texan. Each of a different generation. Each acting in a pastoral care role in Houston’s Texas Medical Center. By sharing with all–comers their command of the two–millennia–old rabbinic (...) literary corpus, especially its aggadic, or nonlegal texts, they changed me forever. Theological dogma was not their passion. Caregiving for their hospitalized congregants was. And in so doing, they opened gates of discovery to rabbinic stories (aggadot) as articles of faith to be put into action for patients, staff, students, and doctors alike. These unexpected gifts have catalyzed and sustained my medical career and personal life ever since.The most influential of those stories was the famous Talmudic tale of the eminent Rabbi Eliezer (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b) using every conceivable means to support his view in a dispute, including miracles and a voice of approval from Heaven. His colleagues refused to assent to the singularity of his methods or arrival. They insisted on reasoning their way through to a majority decision based on consideration of the evidence at hand with the tools available. The tale ends with a joyous, proud, yet defeated parental deity declaring, “My children have bested Me, my children have bested Me.”The legend empowered me as a student to speak my mind in seeking to value the methodical, collaborative process of clinical decision–making over the sometimes ferocious voices of “the experts.” It continues to resurface decades later in daily efforts at finding common ground with both patients and other clinicians as we try to figure out, “what to do.” For more on this topic see my article, “Empathy and Integrative Thinking: Talmudic Paradigms for the Essentials of a Medical Interview” found in Medical Humanities.Just as those rabbis in the 1970’s told their stories in order to make sense of worldly and spiritual matters, so have I come now to appreciate the value of similar narratives for my patients and myself. Sometimes stories are shared in a near prescriptive fashion. Sometimes they are recalled silently as a compass suggesting the next step in an interview or treatment process. These rabbinic tales come to mind during clinical encounters after years of personal reflection on favorite texts and even more often in the midst of weekly if not daily textual study as a central element of my Jewish religious life. This practice has led to a realization that recalling rabbinic texts in contemporary clinical contexts is neither far–fetched nor irrelevant. At times it is uncannily helpful. Two millennia are not so long ago.During the past year, an Israeli colleague (RW) and I have revisited various Talmudic passages on a regular basis. Unlike Texas four decades ago, now I have learned with a pastoral care clinician who is a “hevruta,” or study partner, from the same Hebrew root as “haver,” meaning “friend.” Ours is a centuries–old way of study consisting of a pair of learners conversing freely on equal footing as they wrestle with interpreting a chosen, often familiar, text in a new way. My hevruta and I parse verbs. We examine articles. We question redundancy and grammatical reversals. We search for allusions. We read closely. We do all of this for its sake alone. It is part of our spiritual journey. It is one way we search for God. We engage the words on the page or screen and talk to each other.It is also a dyadic effort whose process and content bear a likeness to that of a doctor and a patient as they try to dialogue together regarding a patient’s concerns and the doctor’s capacity to help. Here, too, there is give and take, an attention to details, a reinterpretation of the past, and a reconsidering of the present. It is not surprising that the fruits of an ongoing dialogue on one stage with a hevruta, related to rabbinic stories and grammatical puzzlements, is of use on another... (shrink)

In 1987 the book Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody became a worldwide best-seller. In the line of Mahmoody’s book, similar ‘true stories’ of western white women with oriental husbands were published. These books concentrate on topics like bad marriages, abuse and international parental abduction. In this article the books are analysed as popular culture products of orientalist discourse on mixed marriages. They are maternal melodramas in which women who are victims of their intermarriage become heroines by sacrificing (...) themselves for the sake of their children. As ‘learned foolhardy women’ the authors of these stories are cultural reproducers of the West; their function is to warn other women not to enter into a mixed marriage and to warn western society about the dangers of racial and cultural intermixture. (shrink)