This paper explores essential characteristics of current nursing practice from the perspectives of clinically experienced registered nurses in various fields of health care in Sweden. Nursing practice has been the subject of much debate in the past and because of its complexity as well as continuous changes in society it is important to continue the debate. A qualitative study, including 16 group interviews with altogether 74 participants, was conducted. Nursing practice was viewed as a multifaceted field. The participants struggled to (...) define nursing but were able to describe it using concrete examples. The analysis, using interpretive description, identified current practice as essentially consisting of: ‘A practice pervaded by comprehensive responsibility’, ‘A practice that recognises a patient's unique needs’, ‘A practice based on multifaceted knowledge’ and ‘A practice that mediates between traditional values and changing demands’. Current nursing practice can be understood as striving to be in close proximity to the patient, but in tension with pervasive requirements and societal changes. Going forward, it is necessary to continue to reflect on and discuss the nature of nursing practice in an interprofessional context. Studies from primary and home care are also needed to broaden the understanding of nursing practice. (shrink)

STAJDUHAR K, FUNK L, JAKOBSSON E and ÖHLÉN J. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 221–230A critical analysis of health promotion and ‘empowerment’ in the context of palliative family care-givingTraditionally viewed as in opposition to palliative care, newer ideas about ‘health-promoting palliative care’ increasingly infuse the practices and philosophies of healthcare professionals, often invoking ideals of empowerment and participation in care and decision-making. The general tendency is to assume that empowerment, participation, and self-care are universally beneficial for and welcomed by all (...) individuals. But does this assumption hold for everyone, and do we fully understand the implications of health-promoting palliative care for family caregivers in particular? In this study, we draw on existing literature to highlight potential challenges arising from the application of ‘family empowerment’ strategies in palliative home-care nursing practice. In particular, there is a risk that empowerment may be operationalized as transferring technical and medical-care tasks to family caregivers at home. Yet, for some family caregivers, a sense of security and support, as well as trust in professionals, may be equally if not more important than empowerment. Relational and role concerns may also at times take precedence over a desire for empowerment. The potential implications of ‘family empowerment’ are explored in this regard. ‘Family empowerment’ approaches need to be accompanied by a strong understanding of how to best support individual palliative family caregivers. (shrink)

Die Phänomenologie stellt eine der Hauptströmungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie dar und findet in zahlreichen Wissenschaften sowie in Praxis und Therapeutik starke Resonanz. Nach 120 Jahren Wirkungsgeschichte füllt die Bibliothek phänomenologischer Werke zahllose Bücherregale und selbst für Expert:innen ist die Forschungsliteratur mittlerweile unüberschaubar geworden. An allgemeinen Einführungen sowie spezialisierter Fachliteratur mangelt es dabei keineswegs, wohl aber an einem Handbuch, in dem sowohl der Vielfalt der historischen Entwicklungen als auch dem berechtigten Wunsch nach innerer systematischer Kohärenz Rechnung getragen wird. Das Handbuch Phänomenologie schließt (...) diese Lücke. Ausgewiesene Autor:innen bereiten in eigens für diesen Band verfassten Artikeln komplexe sachliche Zusammenhänge übersichtlich auf. Durch seinen Aufbau eignet sich das Handbuch sowohl für Anfänger:innen als auch für Fortgeschrittene. Anhand bündig präsentierter Grundbegriffe und Verfahren konturiert das Handbuch die Spezifik der phänomenologischen Methode, spart dabei jedoch nicht die Kontroversen und methodologischen Neuausrichtungen aus, die von ihrer Lebendigkeit und Vielstimmigkeit zeugen. Ein umfangreicher Schlussteil ist der Rezeption und Anwendung in einzelnen Wirkfeldern gewidmet. Als Hilfsmittel zur eigenständigen Erschließung der phänomenologischen Denkrichtung und zu ihrer Anwendung auf aktuelle Probleme zeichnet sich das Handbuch durch seine Leser:innenfreundlichkeit und einen stark forschungspraktischen Bezug aus. Ein Kompendium, das sich bald als ABC der Phänomenologie etablieren dürfte. (shrink)

Smiles provide information about a social partner’s affect and intentions during social interaction. Although always encountered within a specific situation, the influence of contextual information on smile evaluation has not been widely investigated. Moreover, little is known about the reciprocal effect of smiles on evaluations of their accompanying situations. In this research, we assessed how different smile types and situational contexts affected participants’ social evaluations. In Study 1, 85 participants rated reward, affiliation, and dominance smiles embedded within either enjoyable, polite, (...) or negative (unpleasant) situations. Context had a strong effect on smile ratings, such that smiles in enjoyable situations were rated as more genuine and joyful, as well as indicating less superiority than those in negative situations. In Study 2, 200 participants evaluated the situations that these smiles were perceived within (rather than the smiles themselves). Although situations paired with reward (vs. affiliation) smiles tended to be rated more positively, this effect was absent for negative situations. Ultimately, the findings point toward a reciprocal relationship between smiles and contexts, whereby the face influences evaluations of the situation and vice versa. (shrink)

Ethical problems regularly arise during daily care in nursing homes. These include violation of patients' right to autonomy and to be treated with respect. The aim of this study was to investigate how caregivers emphasize daily dialogue and mutual reflection to reach moral alternatives in daily care. The data were collected by participant observation and interviews with seven caregivers in a Norwegian nursing home. A number of ethical problems linked to 10 patients were disclosed. Moral problems were revealed as the (...) caregivers acted in ways that they knew were against patients' interest. We used a theoretical interpretation according to Habermas' discourse ethics on the importance of dialogue when deciding moral courses of action for patients. This theory has four basic requirements: communicative competence, equality, self-determination, and openness about motives. (shrink)

Targeted modifications of the human epigenome, epigenome editing (EE), are around the corner. For EE, techniques similar to genome editing (GE) techniques are used. While in GE the genetic information is changed by directly modifying DNA, intervening in the epigenome requires modifying the configuration of DNA, for example, how it is folded. This does not come with alterations in the base sequence (‘genetic code’). To date, there is almost no ethical debate about EE, whereas the discussions about GE are voluminous. (...) Our article introduces EE into bioethics by translating knowledge from science to ethics and by comparing the risks of EE with those of GE. We, first (I), make the case that a broader ethical debate on EE is due, provide scientific background on EE, compile potential use-cases and recap previous debates. We then (II) compare EE and GE and suggest that the severity of risks of novel gene technologies depends on three factors: (i) the choice of an ex vivo versus an in vivo editing approach, (ii) the time of intervention and intervention windows and (iii) the targeted diseases. Moreover, we show why germline EE is not effective and reject the position of strong epigenetic determinism. We conclude that EE is not always ethically preferable to GE in terms of risks, and end with suggestions for next steps in the current ethical debate on EE by briefly introducing ethical challenges of new areas of preventive applications of EE (III). (shrink)

Telepsychiatry has long been discussed as a supplement to or substitute for face-to-face therapeutic consultations. The current pandemic crisis has fueled the development in an unprecedented way. More and more psychiatric consultations are now carried out online as video-based consultations. Treatment results appear to be comparable with those of face-to-face care in terms of clinical outcome, acceptance, adherence and patient satisfaction. However, evidence on videoconferencing in a variety of different fields indicates that there are extensive changes in the communication behaviour (...) in online conversations. We hypothesise that this might impact ethically relevant aspects of the therapeutic relationship, which plays a prominent role in psychiatry. In this paper, we review effects of video-based consultations on communication between therapists and patients in psychiatry. Based on a common understanding of video-based consultations as changing the lived experience of communication, we categorise these effects according to sensory, spatial and technical aspects. Departing from a power-based model of therapeutic relationships, we then discuss the ethical significance of this changed communication situation, based on dimensions of respect for autonomy, lucidity, fidelity, justice and humanity. We conclude that there is evidence for ethically relevant changes of the therapeutic relationship in video-based telepsychiatric consultations. These changes need to be more carefully considered in psychiatric practice and future studies. (shrink)

Interactions between humans and machines that include artificial intelligence are increasingly common in nearly all areas of life. Meanwhile, AI-products are increasingly endowed with emotional characteristics. That is, they are designed and trained to elicit emotions in humans, to recognize human emotions and, sometimes, to simulate emotions. The introduction of such systems in our lives is met with some criticism. There is a rather strong intuition that there is something wrong about getting attached to a machine, about having certain emotions (...) towards it, and about getting involved in a kind of affective relationship with it. In this paper, I want to tackle these worries by focusing on the last aspect: in what sense could it be problematic or even wrong to establish an emotional relationship with EAI-systems? I want to show that the justifications for the widespread intuition concerning the problems are not as strong as they seem at first sight. To do so, I discuss three arguments: the argument from self-deception, the argument from lack of mutuality, and the argument from moral negligence. (shrink)

A caring approach to knowledge production has been portrayed as epistemologically radical, ethically vital and as fostering continuous responsibility between researchers and research-subjects. This article examines these arguments through focusing on the ambivalent role of care within the first large-scale experimental beagle colony, a self-professed ‘beagle utopia’ at the University of California, Davis. We argue that care was at the core of the beagle colony; the lived environment was re-shaped in response to animals ‘speaking back’ to researchers, and ‘love’ and (...) ‘kindness’ were important considerations during staff recruitment. Ultimately, however, we show that care relations were used to manufacture compliancy, preventing the predetermined ends of the experiment from being troubled. Rather than suggesting Davis would have been less ethically troubling, or more epistemologically radical, with ‘better’ care, however, we suggest the case troubles existing care theory and argue that greater attention needs to be paid to histories, contexts, and exclusions. (shrink)

Si bien Kant ha sido considerado como el representante moderno del eurocentrismo, del racismo y del sexismo, me propongo argumentar que en su teoría del reconocimiento ético y jurídico se hallan las claves para rescatar una posición coherente con la defensa de una filosofía de la libertad, la igualdad y la pluralidad. Para ello, en la primera parte, considero el panorama de las críticas e interpretaciones dirigidas a Kant respecto de las distintas formas de opresión, para recuperar las razones para (...) no descartar su filosofía como posible punto de partida para pensar un frente ante ellas. Luego, en la segunda parte, desarrollo la teoría kantiana del reconocimiento jurídico y ético-político como un doble frente ante las diversas formas de opresión, y la profundizo desde teorías críticas no-ideales para pensar con Kant y más allá de Kant. (shrink)

Information Retrieval systems benefit from the use of long queries containing a large volume of search-relevant information. This situation is not common, as users of such systems tend to use very short and precise queries with few keywords. In this work we propose a modification of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) technique using data from the document collection and its vocabulary for a better representation of short queries. Additionally, a study is carried out on how the modification of the proposed (...) LDA weighted vectors increase the performance using relevant documents as feedback. The work shown in this paper is tested using three biomedical corpora (TREC Genomics 2004, TREC Genomics 2005 and OHSUMED) and one legal corpus (FIRE 2017). Results prove that the application of the proposed representation technique, as well as the feedback adjustment, clearly outperforms the baseline methods (BM25 and non-modified LDA). (shrink)

The easiest and most tempting solution of these problems is to dissolve them by pointing out the artificiality of the issues leading to these "third things." Though tempted, I am not convinced that Kant's philosophy can be treated thus as an exercise in a complicated solution of pseudo-problems. Also, I would thereby deprive myself of the uncomfortable and nagging sense of obscure importance which assails me—and many Kant students share this feeling—whenever I consider these points. I am prepared to admit (...) that the problems may be represented as artificial. But I want to maintain, with special emphasis on the Kantian schema, that a serious reconsideration repays the effort, even if it should force us to reconsider critically also some of Kant's systematic assumptions. (shrink)

Revision of the author's thesis--Frankfurt am Main, 2009.

The article argues that in the Symposium, but also the Phaedrus and the Protagoras, Plato instructs us on the correct way of engaging in discourse by adducing examples from the activities of drinking and singing (/performing poetry). By presenting Socrates as grappling with the use of wine, rhetoric and poetry, almost failing at times, but always able to recollect himself and identify the faults in his methods (as well as of others), Plato recognizes the difficulties of the process, while acknowledging (...) Socrates’ extraordinary intellect. (shrink)

This empirically oriented contribution focuses on different data- and body-practices in the specific fieldof self-tracking. Based ona phenomenological differentiation between body (Körper in German) and embodiment (Leib in German) following Plessner and Merleau-Ponty, we reflect on the machine-like-body, the cybernetic control loop, the data-like-body and most of all practices of habitualization. In a multi-perspective approach, we do not only examine bodies and body-values, but also the manipulation of the body (e. g. in the field of biohacking), the relation between the (...) body and experiences in epigenetics, as well as the emergence of new bodily perceptions and senses. Thereby, we observe both tendencies towards alienated embodiment and possibilities to gain new accesses to the world by including embodied performances. (shrink)

El propósito de este trabajo es ofrecer una lectura ético-política del amor en la ética de la virtud kantiana contenida en la _Religión dentro de los límites de la mera Raz_ón y en la _Metafísica de las Costumbres_. Para ello, en primer lugar, estudiaré el problema que presenta el amor propio entendido como un posible obstáculo para el amor hacia los demás, con quienes interactuamos. En segundo lugar, estudiaré cómo la idea de amor práctico en la ética de la virtud (...) kantiana, da lugar, en el ámbito de la relación con los otros, al deber de amar al prójimo y contribuir con su felicidad. Finalmente, estudiaré cómo la ética política kantiana, encarnada en la idea de la comunidad ética, expresa una ética del amor que permite contrarrestar el exceso de amor propio. (shrink)

Under what conditions do motherhood penalties emerge in countries undergoing transition from state socialism to capitalism? This analysis identifies the ways managers in global financial firms employ gendered assumptions in constructing and implementing labor practices among highly skilled professional workers in Hungary. Relying on 33 in-depth interviews with employers as well as interviews with headhunting firms, labor and employment lawyers, and analysis of antidiscrimination cases brought before Hungary’s Equal Treatment Authority between 2004 and 2008, we identify several strategies global employers (...) use to shed, demote, and marginalize professional mothers. By demonstrating the salience of motherhood as a status characteristic in the postsocialist labor market, our work contributes to existing scholarship on motherhood penalties. Our work also extends this scholarship by showing how the salience of motherhood is strongly conditioned by state-level arrangements that shape the opportunity context in which employers design and carry out employment practices. (shrink)

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, national triage guidelines were developed to address the anticipated shortage of life‐saving resources, should ICU capacities be overloaded. Rationing and triage imply that in addition to individual patient interests, interests of population health have to be integrated. The transfer of theoretical and empirical knowledge into feasible and useful practice models and their implementation in clinical settings need to be improved. This paper analyzes how triage protocols could translate abstract theories of distributive justice into concrete material and (...) procedural criteria for rationing intensive care resources during a pandemic. We reconstruct the development and implementation of a rationing protocol at a German university hospital: describing the ethical challenge of triage, clarifying the aspirational norms, and summarizing specific norms of fair triage and allocation for developing an institutional policy and practice model and implementing it. We reflect on how critical topics are seen by clinicians and what helped manage the perceived burdens of the triage dilemma. We analyze what can be learned from this debate regarding the difficult issues around triage protocols and their potential implementation into clinical settings. Analyzing the ought‐to‐is gap of triage, integrating abstract ethical principles into practical concepts, and evaluating those should clarify the benefits and risks of different allocation options. We seek to inform debates on triage concepts and policies to ensure the best possible treatment and fair allocation of resources as well as to help protect patients and professionals in worst‐case scenarios. (shrink)

Depression is associated with increased maintenance of negative affect (NA) and reduced – blunted and short-lived – maintenance of positive affect (PA). Studies have focused on factors associated with the maintenance of NA, specifically, the emotion regulation strategy of brooding and the capacity to hold negative affective experiences in working memory (WM). Despite its theoretical importance, less attention has been given to factors associated with the maintenance of PA in depression. This study aims to synthesise factors playing a role in (...) the maintenance of both NA and PA. Specifically, we used self-reported assessment of PA and NA regulation and performance-based measures of NA and PA processing in WM to predict depressive symptoms severity. Participants (N = 219) completed the Affective Maintenance Task (AMT, Mikels et al., Citation2008), which provided performance-based measures of PA and NA maintenance, and filled out questionnaires assessing brooding, positive rumination and depressive severity. Brooding, positive rumination and AMT-based measures of positive (but not negative) affective information processing were independently associated with depressive symptoms. We highlight the unique contributions of PA processing, as well as of self-reported emotion regulation strategies in understanding depression maintenance. (shrink)

In this critique of Michael Goodhart's "Human Rights and Global Democracy," Eva Erman argues that Goodhart has reconceptualized democracy and therefore does not offer a better understanding of the relationship between human rights and global democracy.

In efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, social entrepreneurship has gained popularity as a vehicle for positive change in developing countries. The multiplicity of stakeholders, diverging sociocultural contexts and the hybrid mission complicate the process of legitimacy construction for social entrepreneurs as a basis for the acquisition of scarce resources. This study investigates how social entrepreneurs operating in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia tackle this challenge of bridging conflicting directions in discursive interaction with their European funders. We conduct a multimodal (...) discourse analysis to uncover discursive strategies for legitimacy construction by combining linguistic data from interviews with visual data from social media accounts. Legitimacy construction, and thus resource acquisition, centers on three aspects which interlink pragmatic, cognitive and moral legitimacy: developing innovative solutions, mobilizing private-sector efficiency, and contributing to local empowerment. Presenting these aspects as mutually reinforcing overcomes contradictions between social and business logics and provides an expanded space for legitimacy construction of social entrepreneurship. Discursively constructing legitimacy around a ‘glorified version of social entrepreneurship’ mobilizes resources but downplays the risk of being an entrepreneur in the Global South, contributing to increasing corporatization of social purpose organizations. (shrink)

This article explores Southern Saami reindeer herders’ experiences and contestations over state consultation and corporate dialogue during a conflict over the Øyfjellet wind energy project in Norway. Informed by a committed research approach and juxtaposition with findings from Indigenous peoples' territorial struggles in Latin-America, the article provides critical perspectives on governance practices in a Nordic-Saami green colonial context. The research draws on ethnography from a consultation meeting between Jillen Njaarke, the impacted reindeer herding community, and state authorities, as well as (...) diverse written material. The study suggests that the state- and corporate-led “dialogues” displaced the root cause of the conflict, revealed epistemic miscommunication, and perpetuated relations of domination which limited emancipatory effects for Jillen Njaarke. The premises and discourses underpinning the “dialogues” further reproduced racist notions which devalue ancestral Saami reindeer herding knowledges, practices, and landscape relations. These findings challenge dialogue as prescription of good governance and conflict resolution in a context where democracy and compliance with Indigenous peoples’ rights are perceived as high. (shrink)

Contrasting two standard models of corporate responsibility—the so-called “collectivist” and “individualist” model—this essay proposes a third option, namely, a discursive conception of responsibility and examines whether and how this conception can be applied to the corporate level. It does so by taking a careful look at one of the preconditions of individual discursive responsibility, i.e. discursive practical reason, and discussing how corporate agents can meet this precondition. Building on this new concept, the essay also offers a novel approach to justifying (...) corporate responsibility by referring to an argument advanced by Rainer Forst stating that a fundamental human right to justification is the normative core of any kind of responsibility and combining it, in a second step, with an argument recently proposed by Philip Pettit and Christian List showing the impossibility of forming consistent group attitudes and beliefs as a function of the attitudes and beliefs of individual group members. Finally, this essay outlines certain preliminary conclusions about the incorporation of responsibility in a corporate context. (shrink)

Cursory review of the reception of Adorno's unfinished Aesthetic Theory up to the present suggests that an introduction to the book's major concerns, its structure (or lack thereof), and its concepts is missing to this date. Going back to Fredric Jameson's watershed contribution Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), the article attempts to provide the introduction missing to date. It is organized around key concepts of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, beginning with the guiding juxtaposition of Kant's formalist (...) aesthetics vs. Hegel's content aesthetics and the various notions of the End of Art, followed by two sections on art and its respective others (from the culture industry and art appreciation to nature and natural beauty), and concluding with the axiom of suffering and its impact on the key notions of semblance, expression, and mimesis. (shrink)

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease that was first recognized in China in late 2019. Among the primary effects caused by the pandemic, there was the dissemination of health preventive measures such as physical distancing, travel restrictions, self-isolation, quarantines, and facility closures. This includes the global disruption of socio-economic systems including the postponement or cancellation of various public events (e.g., sporting, cultural, or religious), supply shortages and fears of the same, (...) schools and universities closure, evacuation of foreign citizens, a rise of unemployment, changes in the international aid schemes, misinformation, and incidents of discrimination toward people affected by or suspected of having the COVID-19 disease. The pandemic has brought to the fore unpreparedness in critical areas that require attention, amid prospects and challenges. Moreover, considerable reorganization efforts are required with implications for assets, resources, norms, and value systems. COVID-19 is challenging the concept of globalization and stimulating responses at the levels of local and regional socio-economic systems that lead to the mobilization of assets that have been unrecognized earlier on, such as various forms of economic capital, social capital, cultural capital, human capital, and creative capital. For example, through digital channels, local groups are forming to create schemes of support for physical and mental wellbeing. These emerging exchanges lead to various social and technological innovations by building on skills and assets that are less important in the free-market economy, such as empathy, skills for crafts, making and fixing; locally grown microgreens; and micromanufacturing. Isolation and local living are also making it much harder to ignore the civic responsibilities towards communities, meant as individuals, vulnerable groups, and local businesses. Whilst the pandemic is limiting physical participation, this challenging time is uncovering alternative ways of mutual support, which may create long-term benefits for socio-economic systems, including environmental and biodiversity protection, reduction of the air pollution, and climate action. The pandemic’s threat to public health will hopefully be overcome with implications for disruption for an extended period that we are unable to forecast at this stage. It is key to focus on studies recognizing the activities and interventions leading to the recovery of socio-economic systems after the pandemic. Reflecting and planning on how societies and economies will go back to “business as usual” requires new forms of communication and cooperation, imaginative design thinking, new styles of management, as well as new tools and forms of participation in various public policies. Many questions related to the care of the vulnerable, economic restart, and the risk of future pandemics, to mention but a few, are already occupying the academic, scientific, experts, and activist communities, who have started to imagine the “new normal.”. (shrink)

This article addresses tensions within the emerging field of animal studies, which have arisen in the process of trying to craft an ethics that is not grounded in humanist rights-frameworks, by--firstly--mapping how these debates are manifested and--secondly--positing Cary Wolfe’s concept of "affirmative biopolitics" as means of overcoming these conceptual rifts. Building on work that attributes these tensions to the influence of posthumanism, it argues that the embrace of posthumanist thought has marginalised critique by framing perspectives such as ecofeminism and critical (...) animal studies as irredeemably humanist. To counter this marginalisation, Wolfe’s recent work on biopolitics is used to create a much-needed conversation between these perspectives. Debates surrounding veganism provide a route into instigating this dialogue, due to it being a contested practice that crystallises the differences between "mainstream" and critical animal studies. This framing of veganism not as a totalising practice but as a form of "affirmative biopolitics," however, is not solely intended to highlight affinities between apparently antagonistic perspectives, but offered as a contribution to broader debates about how a "posthumanist ethics" could be enacted in practice. (shrink)

Background:Less sedated and more awake patients in the intensive care unit may cause ethical challenges.Research objectives:The purpose of this study is to describe ethical challenges registered nurses experience when patients refuse care and treatment.Research design:Narrative individual open interviews were conducted, and data were analysed using a phenomenological hermeneutic method developed for researching life experiences.Participants and research context:Three intensive care registered nurses from an intensive care unit at a university hospital in Norway were included.Ethical considerations:Norwegian Social Science Data Services approved the (...) study. Permission was obtained from the intensive care unit leader. The participants’ informed and voluntary consent was obtained in writing.Findings:Registered nurses experienced ethical challenges in the balance between situations of deciding on behalf of the patient, persuading the patient and letting the patient decide. Ethical challenges were related to patients being harmful to themselves, not keeping up personal hygiene and care or hindering critical treatment.Discussion:It is made apparent how professional ethics may be threatened by more pragmatic arguments. In recent years, registered nurses are faced with increasing ethical challenges to do no harm and maintain dignity.Conclusion:Ethically challenging situations are emerging, due to new targets including conscious and aware critical care patients, leaving an altered responsibility on the registered nurses. Reflection is required to adjust the course when personal and professional ideals no longer are in harmony with the reality in the clinical practice. RNs must maintain a strong integrity as authentic human beings to provide holistic nursing care. (shrink)

The gendered assumptions embedded in the construction of the rational individual are well established in Western feminist thought but inapplicable to describe societies operating on different principles, such as East European state socialism. This article identifies the communist subject as the building block of communist political ideology and argues that this formulation was no less male biased than its counterpart, the rational individual under liberal capitalism. In state socialist Hungary this male bias came to be expressed differently: Women were integrated (...) into society through membership in a social group perceived as relatively homogeneous regarding interests and obligations and with gender-specific qualities and privileges. These qualities were considered inferior to men's since women—because of household responsibilities—were not capable of total devotion to the communist party. The author explores this construction of the female communist subject through a content analysis of classified materials from the archives of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. (shrink)