Rape, traditionally a spoil of war, became a weapon of war in the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia. The ICTY Kunarac court responded by transforming wartime rape from an ignored crime into a crime against humanity. In its judgment, the court argued that the rapists violated the Muslim women’s right to sexual self-determination. Announcing this right to sexual integrity, the court transformed women’s vulnerability from an invitation to abuse into a mark of human dignity. This close reading of the trial, (...) guided by the phenomenological themes of the lived body and ambiguity, feminist critiques of the autonomous subject and the liberal sexual/social contract, critical legal theory assessments of human rights law and institutions, and psychoanalytic analyses of the politics of desire, argues that the court, by validating women’s epistemic authority (their right to establish the meaning of their experience of rape) and affirming the dignity of the vulnerable body (thereby dethroning the autonomous body as the embodiment of dignity), shows us that human rights instruments can be used to combat the epidemic of wartime rape if they are read as de-legitimating the authority of the masculine autonomous subject and the gender codes it anchors. (shrink)

This paper breaks ranks with those philosophers and feminists who either ignore de Beauvoir or find her passé. It argues that de Beauvoir is fundamentally a philosopher; that one of her crucial contributions to philosophy was to identify the erotic as a philosophical category; and that we best understand de Beauvoir's place in the feminist and philosophical fields if we read her as a phenomenologist who reworks Husserl's theory of intentionality and who, in this reworking, steps out of Sartre's shadow (...) to develop an ethic of erotic generosity. This argument depends on reading de Beauvoir's texts with an ear for her two voices. It develops the idea that de Beauvoir's muted voice, in speaking of the erotic, the gift and generosity, offers us a coherent and fruitful way of thinking through the questions of embodiment, the flesh, the other and the “we”. (shrink)

: This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.

This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.

This essay argues that the ambiguities of the just war tradition, sifted through a feminist critique, provides the best framework currently available for translating the ethical entitlement to human dignity into concrete feminist political practices. It offers a gendered critique of war that pursues the just war distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets of wartime violence and provides a gendered analysis of the peace which the just war tradition obliges us to preserve and pursue.

: Ofelia Schutte's relationship to Nietzsche is contentious. Sometimes she identifies him as an ally. Sometimes she calls him an enemy. Appealing to Nietzsche's abolition of the appearance reality distinction and to his discussions of women as skeptics, I turn to Ofelia's discussions of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo to suggest that their protests can be understood as a Nietzschean politics of transvaluation where the myth of the mother and the materialities of women's bodies become the ground of (...) the demand for justice. (shrink)

This essay argues that the ambiguities of the just war tradition, sifted through a feminist critique, provides the best framework currently available for translating the ethical entitlement to human dignity into concrete feminist political practices. It offers a gendered critique of war that pursues the just war distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets of wartime violence and provides a gendered analysis of the peace which the just war tradition obliges us to preserve and pursue.

Ofelia Schutte's relationship to Nietzsche is contentious. Sometimes she identifies him as an ally. Sometimes she calls him an enemy. Appealing to Nietzsche's abolition of the appearance reality distinction and to his discussions of women as skeptics, I turn to Ofelia's discussions of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo to suggest that their protests can be understood as a Nietzschean politics of transvaluation where the myth of the mother and the materialities of women's bodies become the ground of the (...) demand for justice. (shrink)

This response to Falguni Sheth’s and Ann Murphy’s readings of my book, Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body, pursues the questions they raise regarding the domestic implications of establishing rape as a crime against humanity, the problematic distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing, the politics of autonomy, the trafficking in shame, the relationship between violence and vulnerability, and the possibility of an ethics of vulnerability, by focusing on the disruptions created by ICTY Kunarac (...) case. These disruptions blur the distinction between wartime and peacetime rape, challenge the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing, expose the norms of patriarchal privilege embedded in ontologies of autonomy and invulnerability, reveal the relationship between an ontology and ethics of vulnerability and show how shame, as Pharmakon, can transform the shocked conscience of humanity invoked in contemporary human rights documents into political action. (shrink)

Examines the implications of recent continental epistemology challenging the relationship between traditional, analytic, continental and postmodern understandings of science, showing that the challenging circumstances of the scientific project are transforming the role and meaning of science in the modern/postmodern world.