This collection of eleven new essays contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. While honoring early feminist work on the subject, it aims to go beyond speech act analyses of pornography and to reshape the philosophical discourse that surrounds pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, with Rae Langton's speech act theoretic analysis dominating specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite the predominance of (...) this literature, there remain considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many key issues: What is pornography? Does pornography constitute women's subordination and silencing? Does it objectify women in harmful ways? Is pornography authoritative enough to enact women's subordination? Is speech act theory the best way to approach pornography? Given the deep divergences over these questions, the first goal of this collection is to take stock of extant debates in order to clarify key feminist conceptual and political commitments regarding pornography. This volume further aims to go beyond the prevalent speech-acts approach to pornography, and to highlight novel issues in feminist pornography-debates, including the aesthetics of pornography, trans* identities and racialization in pornography, and putatively feminist pornography. (shrink)

Book synopsis: The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. (...) Together they testify to the intellectual value of feminism as a radicalizing energy internal to philosophical inquiry. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject. (shrink)

This is a book about speech and the silencing of speech; about who gets to speak and who does not; about who is listened to and who is ignored. In this down-to-earth analysis of the democratic principle of freedom of speech, Betty McLellan insists that, if this prized democratic principle is to have any continuing credibility, free speech must be free for all.

This volume draws on a range of approaches in order to explore the problem and determine what ought to be done about allegedly harmful speech.Most liberal societies are deeply committed to a principle of free speech. At the same time, however, there is evidence that some kinds of speech are harmful in ways that are detrimental to important liberal values, such as social equality. Might a genuine commitment to free speech require that we legally permit (...) class='Hi'>speech even when it is harmful, and even when doing so is in conflict with our commitment to values like equality? Even if such speech is to be legally permitted, does our commitment to free speech allow us to provide material and institutional support to those who would contest such harmful speech? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, which kinds of speech are harmful in ways that merit response, either in the form of legal regulation or in some other form? This collection explores these and related questions. Drawing on expertise in philosophy, sociology, political science, feminist theory, and legal theory, the contributors to this book investigate these themes and questions. By exploring various categories of speech (including pornography, hate speech, Holocaust denial literature, 'Whites Only' signs), and attending to the precise functioning of speech, the essays contained here shed light on these questions by clarifying the relationship between speech and harm. Understanding how speech functions can help us work out which kinds of speech are harmful, what those harms are, and how the speech in question brings them about. All of these issues are crucially important when it comes to deciding what ought to be done about allegedly harmful speech. (shrink)

We all know that speech can be harmful. But how? Mary Kate McGowan argues that speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm. She investigates such harms as oppression, subordination, and discrimination in such forms of speech as sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers, and micro-aggressions.

For years, mainstream feminist ethics focused criticism on male supremacy. Feminist philosophers in this volume adopt a less male-focused stance to look closely at oppression's impact on women's agency and on women's relations with women. Examining legal, social, and physical relationships, these philosophers confront moral ambiguity, moral compromise, and complicity in perpetuating oppression. Combining personal experience with philosophical inquiry, they vividly portray their daily engagement with oppression as both victims and perpetrators. They explore such issues as how pornography (...) silences women and radical feminist politics' complicity in racism. Among these insightful essays, Sandra Bartky argues that women share guilt for racism when they benefit from it without protest; Susan Brison reflects on uses of narrative in trauma recovery from such experiences as being targeted for rape or murder; Joan Callahan examines fallout of derogatory speech directed at lesbians; Virginia Held proposes carrying care into marketplaces and governments; and, in her introduction, Claudia Card draws on Primo Levi's conception of "gray zones" in exploring dangers of character damage to victims of misogyny. A fitting companion to Card's highly regarded Feminist Ethics, this volume interweaves observations on character, political ethics, violence, and love into an accessible sourcebook for students. It tackles some of feminism's most pressing issues and helps readers to identify and then overcome the real damage caused by oppression. (shrink)

Recent feminist philosophy of language has highlighted the ways that the speech of women can be unjustly impeded, because of the way their gender affects the uptake their speech receives. In this chapter, I explore how similar processes can undermine the speech of a different sort of speaker: Indigenous communities. This involves focusing on Indigeneity rather than gender as the salient social identity, and looking at the ways that group speech, rather than only individual (...) class='Hi'>speech, can be unjustly impeded. To do this, I make use of the notion of ‘discursive injustice’ that has been developed by Quill Kukla, and, with reference to three case studies, show how discursive injustice can effectively derail the speech of Indigenous communities. (shrink)

We defend the view of some feminist writers that the notion of silencing has to be taken seriously in discussions of free speech. We assume that what ought to be meant by ‘speech’, in the context ‘free speech’, is whatever it is that a correct justification of the right to free speech justifies one in protecting. And we argue that what one ought to mean includes illocution, in the sense of J.L. Austin.

ABSTRACT This article argues that Thomas Hobbes' analysis of insult or ‘contumely’ prefigures recent developments in moral and political philosophy in striking ways. Specifically, Hobbes's concerns about the dignitary harms in hate speech went well beyond ‘fighting words’ to the essential role played by expressions of hatred and contempt in making and unmaking social hierarchies. Hobbes’s sensitivity to contumely’s subtle power to constitute social in/equalities recalls recent work in feminist and critical race theory. Yet his expansive solutions – (...) both negative and positive, legal and ethical – also shed light on the difficulties faced by aspirationally egalitarian societies in their efforts to eradicate contempt today. (shrink)

This article argues that Thomas Hobbes' analysis of insult or ‘contumely’ prefigures recent developments in moral and political philosophy in striking ways. Specifically, Hobbes's concerns about the dignitary harms in hate speech went well beyond ‘fighting words’ to the essential role played by expressions of hatred and contempt in making and unmaking social hierarchies. Hobbes’s sensitivity to contumely’s subtle power to constitute social in/equalities recalls recent work in feminist and critical race theory. Yet his expansive solutions – both (...) negative and positive, legal and ethical – also shed light on the difficulties faced by aspirationally egalitarian societies in their efforts to eradicate contempt today. (shrink)

How can we critique political theory when all we have to use are its own conceptual tools? As Hannah Arendt observed, it can only be done through leaps, inversions, and the turning of concepts upside-down. But this twisting operation must be done in order to turn those who philosophize back to the hard work of real life change. In Turning Operations, renowned theorist Mary G. Dietz challenges specific contemporary modes of theorizing politics-from feminist theory to Habermasian discourse- -while appropriating (...) some of political theory's own approaches and some of its most striking figures, including Aristotle, Nietzsche, Weber, Beauvoir, and Arendt in order to foment some leaps, inversions, reversals and turns on politics along the way. Dietz confronts a number of current debates, arguing that most are filled with artificial division and empty terms. She argues that we must abandon commonly supported dichotomies-masculine versus feminine, speech versus action, liberty versus community -to create abetter discourse, and a better world. Turning Operations is an essential new contribution to democratic and feminist political thought. (shrink)

In her Nobel speech in 2019, Olga Tokarczuk presented the category of tenderness as a new way of narrating the contemporary world. This article is a proposal for the analysis and interpretation of tenderness in ethical and aesthetic terms. (1) From an ethical perspective, tenderness is interpreted as an extension and complement of feminist relational ethics, i.e., the ethics of care. In the proposed approach, tenderness is a broader and more universal quality than care in the feminist (...) understanding. This article opens with a brief discussion of feminist interventions in ethics, with particular emphasis on the ethics of care. Next, the differences between care and tenderness are enumerated and described, in order to show how tenderness can serve as an extension and complement of the feminist ethic of care. These considerations are guided by the question of why tenderness is a better—more appropriate and more responsive to contemporary challenges—moral guidepost than care. (2) From the aesthetic perspective, tenderness is the negation of a contemplative, distanced, impersonal, and rational view of reality. As an aesthetic imperative, tenderness implies engaged experience of the beauty of reality in all of its manifestations. Therefore, in the last part of the article, existential tender attunement is described in aesthetic terms, as a position serving to sensitize others to the beauty and complexity of the post-anthropocentric world. (shrink)

The question which this paper examines is that of the correct scope of the claim that extra-linguistic factors (such as gender and social status) can block the proper workings of natural language. The claim that this is possible has been put forward under the apt label of silencing in the context of Austinian speech act theory. The ‘silencing’ label is apt insofar as when one’s ability to exploit the inherent dynamic of language is ‘blocked’ by one’s gender or social (...) status then one might justly be said to be silenced. The notion that factors independent of any person’s linguistic competence might block her ability to exploit the inherent dynamic of language is of considerable social as well as theoretical significance. I shall defend the claim that factors independent of a person’s linguistic competence can indeed block her ability to do things with words but I will show that the cases that have been previously considered to be cases of illocutionary failure are instances of rhetic or locutionary act failure instead. I shall refine the silencing claim as previously advanced in the debate in at least one fundamental respect. I also show that considering the metaphysics of speech acts clarifies many of the issues previously appearing as thorny bones of contention between those who hold that the only notion of silencing that is coherent is that of physically preventing someone from speaking or writing and those who hold the opposite sort of claim sketched above. (shrink)

In this monograph, I offer feminist reasons to develop a multidimensional account of forgiveness as a moral, and therefore at least partially deliberative, action or set of actions, which functions as a remedy in responding to blame or condemnation, releasing offenders from the fullness of their blameworthiness, in relational contexts which therefore require considerations of power between relata. I rely on feminist philosophical account of the relational self in order to contextualise these power relations. I provide accounts of (...) forgiveness as a performative utterance, third-party forgiveness, and self-forgiveness based upon this feminist and multidimensional model of forgiveness. (shrink)

Pornography deserves special protections, it is often said, because it qualifies as speech; therefore, no matter what we think of it, we must afford it the protections that we extend to most speech, but don't extend to other actions. In response, it has been argued that the case is not so simple: one of the harms of pornography, it is claimed, is that it silences women's speech, thereby preventing women from deriving from speech the very benefits (...) that warrant the special protections in the first place. ;This dissertation offers a way of making sense of the view that pornography silences women. In Chapter 1, I develop an account of silencing which, unlike other accounts of the same phenomenon, helps make clear why a speaker who is silenced is thereby deprived of the benefits that led us to place a special value on speech. In Chapter 2, I respond to an objection that purports to show that, even if women are silenced, pornography cannot be responsible: in fact, according to this objection, the responsibility for any instance of silencing cannot lie with any party other than the speaker and the audience involved. I show that this objection relies on an overly simplistic picture of what audiences can reasonably be required to do in a speech situation; I also offer an alternate picture, which leaves open the possibility that a speaker may be silenced in a context in which both she and her audience behave competently. In Chapter 3, I consider a view about the way in which pornography contributes to the silencing---and more generally, to the subordination---of women. I argue that this view fails because it is too individualistic: it ignores how the social and political context in which the pornography is consumed helps determine whether it subordinates. I then make some suggestions about what a more satisfactory view would be. ;Though pornography is the principal case study throughout this dissertation, much of what I say generalizes to other forms of representation that set limits on what speakers are able to convey. The main aim of my discussion is to contribute to the philosophical and feminist understanding of communication, by showing how an individual's social role can constrain her possibilities as a speaker. (shrink)

At the center of the hate speech controversy is the question whether it constitutes conduct. If hate speech is not conduct, then restricting it runs counter to free speech. But even if it could be shown that it is a kind of conduct, complicated questions arise. Does it necessarily follow that we restrict speech? Practically speaking, can speech even be restricted, either through new legislation or the enforcement of existing laws regulating conduct? Are measures such (...) as hate crimes legislation both useful and appropriate in protecting individuals and groups from violence? The present paper aims to address these questions by reconstructing and assessing Judith Butler’s important treatment of speech-acts and hate speech in her book Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative. (shrink)

Carole Patemanâe(tm)s writings have been innovatory precisely for their qualities of engagement, pursued at the height of intellectual rigour. This book draws from her vast output of articles, chapters, books and speeches to provide a thematic yet integrated account of her innovations in political theory and contributions to the politics of policy-making. The editors have focused on work in three key areas: Democracy Patemanâe(tm)s perspective is rooted in a practical perspective, enquiring into and speculating about forms of participation over and (...) above the âe~traditionalâe(tm) exclusions through which representative systems have been variously constructed over time. Her work pushes hard on theorists and politicians who make easy assumptions about apathy and public opinion, who bracket off the workplace and the home, and who see politics only in partisan activity, voter behaviour and governmental policy. Women Patemanâe(tm)s innovatory and still-cited work on participation antedates the feminist revolution in political theory and many of the practical struggles that developed through the later 1970s. While woman-centred, her concerns were always worked through larger conceptions of social class, economic advantage, power differentials, âe~liberalâe(tm) individualism and contracts including marriage. Her feminism was innovative in political theory, and within feminism itself. As a feminist Pateman defies categorization, and her concepts of âe~the sexual contractâe(tm) and âe~Wollstonecraftâe(tm)s dilemmaâe(tm) are canonical. Welfare Patemanâe(tm)s innovation here is an integration of welfare issues âe" in particular the proposals for a âe~basic incomeâe(tm) or for a âe~capital stakeâe(tm) âe" into her broad but always rigorous conception of democracy. This is argued through in terms of citizenship, taken as the result of a social contract. In that way Pateman puts liberalism itself through an imminent critique, drawing in the practicalities and risks of life in late capitalist societies. Her theory as always is political, taking in neo-liberal attacks on âe~welfare statesâe(tm) and the stark realities of international inequalities. Patemanâe(tm)s career achievements in democratic and feminist theory are brought productively to bear on debates that would otherwise occur in more limited, and less provocative, academic and political contexts. (shrink)

A growing body of literature in feminist philosophy exposes the way in which occupying a particular group identity inhibits an affected agent’s ability to engage in communicative exchange effectively. These accounts reveal a fault in standard liberal defences of free speech, showing how, if free speech is a goal worth pursuing, then it must involve both a concern about the legitimate limits of state interference and of the effect of social norms on an agent’s communicative capacities. Building (...) on the emergence of a ‘critical’ branch of neo-republicanism, this article argues that such speech-related injustices are best understood as a feature of structural domination that threatens the agency of those affected. Recalibrating our understanding of free speech along critical republican lines thus secures discursive agency in our communicative exchanges in a way that both ensures democratic legitimacy and realises equal status for all. (shrink)

At first glance, hate speech and microaggressions seem to have little overlap beyond being communicated verbally or in written form. Hate speech seems clearly macro-aggressive: an intentional, obviously harmful act lacking the ambiguity (and plausible deniability) of microaggressions. If we look back at historical discussions of hate speech, however, many of these assumed differences turn out to be points of similarity. The harmfulness of hate speech only became widely acknowledged after a concerted effort by critical race (...) theorists, feminists, and other activists. Before the 1990s, slurs were widely considered socially acceptable behavior: mere jokes that weren’t intended to be harmful. Authors like Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence pushed back against this dismissal. In this chapter, I show that their arguments for the serious harmfulness of hate speech prefigure and provide support for current debates about the serious harmfulness of microaggressions. Exploring resonances with the 1980s hate speech debate will allow us to explain why microaggressions fall below the cutoff for legal liability but remain apt targets for moral blame. (shrink)

Is logic masculine? Is women's lack of interest in the "hard core" philosophical disciplines of formal logic and semantics symptomatic of an inadequacy linked to sex? Is the failure of women to excel in pure mathematics and mathematical science a function of their inability to think rationally? Andrea Nye undermines the assumptions that inform these questions, assumptions such as: logic is unitary, logic is independenet of concrete human relations, and logic transcends historical circumstances as well as gender. In a series (...) of studies of the logics of historical figures--Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege--she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, or scientists. (shrink)

Freedom of speech long has been regarded as one of the “preferred freedoms” in the United States: one of the freedoms the U.S. Supreme Court deems “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” However, what freedom of speech does—and should—mean is a highly charged question in American constitutional law. I will explore this question by examining how several prominent constitutional theorists have proposed particular approaches to free speech law in order to further their political objectives. I will (...) examine the free speech theories of the nation's leading feminist legal theorist , critical race theorists , libertarian , and legal republican . I also will discuss the principal criticisms of each of these theories, whether the courts have been influenced by any of them, and, in conclusion, whether it is possible to advance a nonpolitical theory of free speech. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have recast feminist arguments against pornography in terms of Speech Act Theory. In particular, they have considered the ways in which the illocutionary force of pornographic speech serves to set the conventions of sexual discourse while simultaneously silencing the speech of women, especially during unwanted sexual encounters. Yet, this raises serious questions as to how pornographers could (i) be authorities in the language game of sex, and (ii) set the conventions for sexual discourse (...) - questions which these speech act-theoretic arguments against pornography have thus far failed to adequately answer. I fill in this gap of the argumentation by demonstrating that there are fairly weak standards for who counts as an authority or convention-setter in sexual discourse. With this analysis of the underpinnings of a speech act analysis of pornography in mind, I discuss a range of possible objections. I conclude that (i) the endorsement of censorship by a speech act analysis of pornography competes with its commitment to the conventionality of speech acts, and, more damningly, that (ii), recasting anti-pornography arguments in terms of linguistic conventions risks an unwitting defence of a rapist's lack of mens rea - an intolerable result; and yet resisting this conclusion requires that one back away from the original claim to women's voices being 'silenced'. (shrink)

In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of attempts were made to put into U.S. law a civil rights ordinance that would make it possible to sue the makers and distributors of pornography for doing so (under certain conditions). One defence of such legislation has come to be called "the free speech argument against pornography." Philosophers Rae Langton, Jennifer Hornsby and Caroline West have supposed that this defence of the legislation can function as a liberal defence of the legislation: (...) in particular, a defence of the legislation based on the value of women's liberty. This would be somewhat unexpected given MacKinnon's own antipathy toward liberalism. In this paper, I argue that the free speech argument against pornography cannot be used as a liberal defence of the ordinances. The legislation is, to some extent, self-defeating insofar as it understood in terms acceptable to a fairly standard kind of liberal. This becomes apparent when we consider the value pornography can have for women, which we can see if we consider what female makers, distributors and consumers of pornography have to say about why they make, distribute and consume it. (shrink)

Contemporary egalitarian liberals—unlike their classical counterparts—have lived through many contentious events where the right to freedom of expression has been tested to its limits—the Skokie, Illinois, skinhead marches, hate speech incidents on college campuses, Internet pornography and hate speech sites, Holocaust deniers, and cross-burners, to name just a few. Despite this contemporary tumult, freedom of expression has been nearly unanimously affirmed in both the U.S. jurisprudence and philosophical discourse. In what follows, I will examine Ronald Dworkin's influential contemporary (...) justification for freedom of expression, which claims that a thoroughgoing right to freedom of expression is justified by the fact that it guarantees and preserves liberalism's commitment to equality by offering everyone an opportunity to speak, whereas any other policy, such as state regulation, would fail to offer this equal opportunity. This justification has been challenged by feminists and critical race theorists, who find the cases of pornography and hate speech to be sufficient threats to the freedom of expression and equality of their targets—women and minorities—to warrant limiting freedom of expression in these cases. I will argue that if Dworkin is to take equality as seriously as he claims to, then, by his own lights, he must back away from an unrestricted freedom of expression, in light of these distinctly contemporary challenges of the harms of systemic racism and sexism, which underlie hate speech and pornography. (shrink)

The sixteen essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, (...) and the home. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:736 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Carol Giardina MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism The first meeting of feminist protest in the 1960s was called to order by Dorothy Height, the president of the 800,000-member National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), in Washington, DC, on August 29, 1963. It was the day (...) after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (MOW).1 “We could hardly believe that after all we were doing in the Civil Rights Movement,” Height recalls, “the women came to feel that they were getting a kind of runaround” as they sought and were denied fair representation in the march because of their sex.2 “I was determined,” she said in her 2003 memoir, “to bring wise women together to learn and gather strength from the experience.”3 As “women talked freely of their concern about women’s participation,” Height observed, “we began to realize that if we did not... demand our rights, we were not going to get them. The women became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism in our dealings with 1. Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 146. 2. Dorothy Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 88. 3. Height, Open Wide, 146. Carol Giardina 737 the male leadership in the movement.”4 “That moment,” Height recalled, “was vital to awakening the women’s movement.”5 Black women’s fight for representation in the MOW appears narrowly framed in scholarly literature as a specific and isolated reaction to the sexism of male MOW planners. I argue, however, that the campaign of feminist protest meetings surrounding the MOW—and the political lessons that emerged—was a starting point in the chronology of the rebirth years of feminist upheaval in the 1960s. Why? Because the lessons of that campaign provided the crucial conceptual model of an “NAACP for women” that would be consciously and purposely adopted by the newly forming National Organization for Women (NOW). Together with Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the MOW planning committee, and longtime co-conspirator Pauli Murray, who spearheaded the MOW protests, were critical actors in NOW’s formation and brought the model to NOW’s more well-known white organizers. This model, and the Black women who developed it, opened the trajectory that led to NOW’s establishment in 1966, the first feminist organization of the decade. Black scholar activist Bernice Johnson Reagon called the Civil Rights Movement the “borning” struggle of its time.6 By the early 1960s, the impact of this phase of civil rights mobilization was felt nationwide from lunch counters in small towns to Congress and the Supreme Court. Since at least the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, many thousands of African American women had been protesting, organizing, staging sit-ins and jail-ins, writing treatises, and giving speeches for Black civil rights. Although some white women did participate in the Civil Rights Movement, there were far fewer of them than African American women. Because of African American women’s collective confrontation with white supremacy, more of them were positioned to grasp the systemic nature of male supremacy and the need to fight it collectively. They understood sexism sooner than most white women because they 4. Height, “We Wanted the Voice,” 88–89. 5. Height, Open Wide, 145. 6. Mary King, Casey Hayden, Jean Wheeler Smith, Joyce Ladner, Prathia Hall, Kathie Sarachild, Michael Thelwell, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, “SNCC Women and the Stirrings of Feminism,” in A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, ed. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 150. 738 Carol Giardina had already learned the operations of power and exploitation. They were best prepared to challenge female oppression, as were the white women who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. After all, if the established order could be pushed back when it... (shrink)

Caffeine makes you sexy! This absurd slogan can be seen in the shop windows of a popular Brussels coffee chain – its bold pink lettering indicating how they are mainly targeting female customers. It is one of the silliest examples of something that is both very common and very worrisome nowadays, namely, the constant call on women to look ‘hot’ and conform to the standards of sexiness as they are projected in the media, entertainment industry, and advertising. But what exactly (...) is wrong with this state of affairs and what can be done about it? In a recent essay Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin take up this issue and make an elaborate case for what they call a ‘feminist reclamation’ of sexiness. This chapter investigates the merits and shortcomings of their proposal, presents an alternative account, and considers how pornography may be part of the problem but also part of the solution in this matter. (shrink)

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affirms the existence of a divine woman, a Heavenly Mother as a companion to a Heavenly Father. Feminist philosophers of religion have argued for the importance of a divine feminine as a challenge to patriarchal religion, yet the Heavenly Mother tradition has not created an egalitarian religion in Mormonism. Mormon feminists have charged that relative silence about this teaching is a primary cause of this discrepancy. This paper explores the performative dynamics (...) of speech and silence and their relationship to presence and absence in a feminist analysis of power. (shrink)

The freedom to create and disseminate pornography has often been defended based on a liberal claim that the free speech of pornographers would be violated if pornography were censored. The classic defense of free speech, given by John Stuart Mill, is often invoked to defend this position. In opposition, many feminist theorists have advocated arguments for regulatory measures against pornography. Some of these authors have also utilized the writings of Mill. They have argued that, contrary to the (...) liberal defense of free speech, Mill’s arguments are compatible with, or even require, the forced regulation of pornography. Logically, unless Mill’s writings are contradictory, they should not be invoked to support diametrically opposed positions. This paper investigates this apparent dilemma and argues that, contrary to the antipornography feminist position, Mill’s writings do not support pornography regulation. In fact, in a surprising twist, the arguments of anti-pornography feminists can, using the writings of Mill, be seen as strongly supporting the liberal anti-censorship position. (shrink)

In Of Grammatology, Derrida gave his attention to a number of philosophies of language for which writing is attributed the status of a supplemental form, with speech considered a more original form of language and the proper object of the linguist's science. A number of Derrida's remarks pointed out that the very defense of democracy, or human rights, even where they excluded children, women, workers, and colonized peoples, also provided the resources for subsequent claims by these groups for inclusion. (...) Feminisms bear witness to the historical auto‐immunity of the denial of women's rights. Historically, women's rights claims will also have their own auto‐immune logics, in their identifications with nationalist logics, in their alignment with an image of progress often disseminated at the expense of other cultures or classes, in an ethnocentrism or race blindness to which feminism has often been prone. (shrink)

This paper concentrates on the method-critique of feminist philosophers and demonstrates that their claim that science is essentially male-biased is unfounded, and itself grounded in their own political agenda. The feminist agenda has shown itself to be detrimental not only to liberty and free speech, but to women.

This article explores the potential applications of feminist pedagogy to the lived experience of weekly preaching from the perspective of a young, white, cis female, heterosexual faith community leader. When privilege is both obvious, but authority is simultaneously presumed and challenged based on historical constructs of theological role and presentation of gender, the act of preaching becomes a site of resistance. This article then discusses the act of homiletics – the art of interpretive storytelling, history teaching, persuasive speech, (...) and spiritual performance – as informed by a feminist perspective. Does the pulpit present a bridge or barrier where gender is concerned? The physical act of preaching can represent an in-moment incarnating of a role, a historical step in a long-flowing river, and a psychological break point of self-erasure. This article posits that a thoughtful application of feminist pedagogy might dismantle these unspoken rules of the trade and create an opportunity for preaching as an act of resistance. (shrink)

Discussions about nineteenth-century African American ethnology tend to focus only on black male thinkers. In the nineteenth century, ethnology was the study of difference among humans and often used racist science to justify discrimination against blacks. Black woman thinker Maria W. Stewart made important contributions to ethnology but remains understudied. I argue that Stewart is a black feminist ethnologist because she aligns herself with her black male interlocutors on the core points of ethnology. Yet Stewart adds a distinctly black (...) feminist position to the conversation. By focusing on Stewart's speech “An Address Delivered to the African Masonic Hall”, I show that she concurs with her contemporaries that black people are inherently great because of their genealogical connection to Africa. Stewart also agrees that the inherent greatness of blacks establishes their claim to sociopolitical rights. I argue that Stewart's call for racial unity makes her a proto-black feminist and is a unique feature of her contribution to African American ethnology. Stewart's call demands that white people be held responsible for the harm that they have caused to blacks, which can be remedied by the races coming together on equal footing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 127.4 (2006) 607-611MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byPaul Allen Miller University of South Carolina e-mail: [email protected] Habinek. The World of Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. x + 329 pp. Cloth, $52.It has become increasingly evident that the texts we study from ancient Rome are embedded objects, implicated in a rich field of symbolic systems and (...) corporeal practices. The image of the poem as an isolated aesthetic object has become untenable as the field has become dominated by concepts of intertextuality, performativity, social construction, and self-fashioning. The text in books like Tony Corbeill's Controlling Laughter (Princeton 1996) is less an object than an action. Thomas Habinek's The World of Roman Song represents an attempt to make good on the promise of these developments by rethinking the entirety of Roman literature as an embedded social process of "song," of marked speech, that stands at the origins of the Roman social order. Ritual hymns, funereal laudations, convivial play, and comedic performances become so many moments in the constitution of what it means to be Roman, even as conflicts between center and periphery, masculine and feminine, vir and cinaedus are both played out and resisted in the various genres that constitute the world of ritualized speech and its formal derivatives.Any such sweeping endeavor brings with it both a necessary boldness—asking us to rethink the history of Roman culture from a new perspective—and the danger of reductiveness. For the most part, these are dangers that Habinek manages skillfully to skirt through a combination of fine-grained philological analysis and a sophisticated, but never overbearing, theoretical apparatus. The World of Roman Song features close readings of the usage of words such as cano, carmen, dico, ludus, convivia, and sodalis, from their earliest attestations through their appearance in later imperial literature. It also deploys an intellectual armature that draws upon contemporary anthropology, Frankfurt-school Marxism, object-relations psychoanalysis, and the theories of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Bataille. Yet, as we shall see, the very methodology that makes this sweeping [End Page 607] and important survey possible—the examination not of texts but of lemmata to trace the memes of Roman self-constitution through formalized language—leads to certain unavoidable distortions. Complex textual systems become reduced to exemplary moments of embeddedness. This reduction is an enabling gesture that like any mode of analysis, however, ultimately produces its own limit.For this reader, the heart of the book is to be found in chapter 4, "Song and Play." Here Habinek traces the relation between three primary sets of terms: dico, dictum, and implicitly dictator, meaning to make an authoritative statement; cano, canto, and carmen, meaning to perform a song (carmen) of one's own (cano), or to repeat that of another (canto), so as to establish a relation between the singer and the constituted social, and ultimately cosmic, whole, via ritualized speech; and ludo, ludus, and lusus, referring to scripted or formalized movements of the body. Thus a poetic ludus, such as that described in Catullus 50 between the poet and Licinius Calvus, would refer not so much to the acts of song (carmina) to which the game of composition gave rise as to the formalized interchange and embodied practice of writing capping verses in different meters in a convivial setting. The previous chapter, "Song and Speech," had established the difference between loquor and dico, with the former referring to unmarked speech and the latter to the making of statements that the speaker asserts as authoritative and hence true. It is thus possible for the terms cano and dico to overlap and those of ludo and cano as well. Nevertheless, the ultimate dream of aristocratic Roman manhood (and, as any number of feminists would point out, of patriarchy as a whole) is for carmen—the ritualized speech that constitutes the community as a living unity—to assume the status of dictum, authoritative speech freed from the... (shrink)

"Do You Have To Be A Lesbian To Be A Feminist?" Plenary session speech at the conference of the National Women's Studies Association, June 1990.

This article was developed from a paper given at an international conference on the influence of Malthus, held in Paris in January 1980; its purpose was to suggest the way in which the U.S. experience of Malthusianism and neo-Malthusianism was profoundly different from that in Europe . Thus the points made here were chosen specifically to hightlight the U.S.-European contrasts. The paper draws on materials and arguments in numerous articles and a book on the subject by myself. Since the book (...) is relatively easily available, I did not add reference notes to this speech except when drawing materials from sources not noted in the book. (shrink)

Recent state regulations require women, before undergoing abortions, to be subjected to unwanted and nonmedically necessary sonograms, often requiring an intrusive vaginal probe. Physicians, for their part, are forced to turn the viewing screens toward the faces of their patients and to describe to them the details on the screen. In this commentary, I explain these current laws and the various court responses to them to date. Further, I demonstrate why these abortion regulations violate the ethical principles governing informed consent (...) and why they should be declared unconstitutional based on women’s constitutional rights as settled by Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey and physicians’ First Amendment rights. (shrink)

This article analyses the new demographic programme that was announced by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in 2006. The main goal of this programme is to encourage fertility, especially the birth of a second child. New benefits should elevate the status of wome taking maternity leave, who might otherwise suffer from discrimination in the family. The housewife is considered to be dependent and `degraded'. We argue that this demographic politics recalls continuity with soviet gender politics centred on the support of (...) wage-earning working mothers. The programme provokes different critiques. Liberal critics argue that the programme is a populist one and it may have undesired economic and social consequences. Conservative critics want to encourage more traditional `woman' and `family' roles in society. Feminist critics argue that this politcs would reinforce both the inferior position of women on the labour market and gender imbalances on the symbolic level. (shrink)

This study analyzes two public speeches of two North-American Seventh-day Adventist women who oppose women’s ordination, in order to understand how they reconcile inequity perpetuated by their religious position that denigrates women. The two women in this study address the apparent disadvantage by reframing the issue and reordering their reality. Whereas one speaker creates other formidable sub-issues that make exclusion of women from church leadership imperative, the other speaker resorts to the elusive notion of female privilege. I demonstrate how their (...) discourse surrounding ministry and headship illuminates the fact that gender relations and religious convictions are ordered through permeable boundaries of arbitrary lexico-semantics. (shrink)

This is the story of a woman, now long dead and almost forgotten, but for a crumbling gravesite overlooking the ocean at Bronte in Sydney and some small acts of remembrance that functioned to restore her voice ever so partially. The hint of her voice allowed genealogical traces to emerge and help heal the wounds of not only the individual family genealogy to which this woman was almost lost but also for the monumental primordial forgetting of women. The story of (...) this woman whose life seems exceptionally different from my own, whom I never met, is re-told a hundred years after she lived and breathed, to heal deep ancestral wounds and give voice to the struggles of the living and in particular to us—their grand-daughters. (shrink)