Sex Matters addresses a cluster of related questions that arise from the conflict of interests between rights based on sex and rights based on gender identity. Some of these questions are theoretical, including: who has the more ambitious vision for women's liberation, gender-critical feminists or proponents of gender identity? How does each understand what gender is? What are the arguments for the refrain that 'trans women are women!', and do they succeed? Other questions taken up (...) in the book are more applied to specific issues in law and policy including: should there be a right to exclude people who are biologically male from women-only spaces? How do the interests of all stakeholders to bathrooms, in particular, trade off when it comes to moving from sex to gender identity as the basis for self-inclusion? If we think about types of transition, or gatekeeping requirements on transition, as providing assurance to women who are asked to accept the opening up of women-only spaces to transwomen, are any such assurances sufficient? Is 'TERF' a slur, as some radical and gender-critical feminists have claimed? And finally, is gender-critical speech 'hate speech', as it has been classified by some social media platforms, or at least harmful speech? -/- Holly Lawford-Smith discusses these issues in a series of essays, all but one of them previously unpublished. She takes an analytic philosophical approach to these issues, drawing on ideas from political philosophy, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of language, as well as second-wave feminist theory and empirical literature, to defend a gender-critical position in response to all of these questions. (shrink)

This article considers how those subordinated for their gender and sexual orientation, but privileged for their race and class, may be better allies to people, especially women, of colour. Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997) is a helpful aid. Butler offers us a strategy to think through — albeit by way of supplementary voices such as legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher George Yancy — how white women may find an ‘insurrectionary’ form of speech (...) that is both embodied and attentive to how we stand in the pecking order of public sphere expression and exchange. The article considers how white women’s ‘critical freedoms’ have helped shape the discursive preclusions faced by Black women. It analyses the conditions by which white women may assert their freedom of speech without this being to the detriment of women of colour. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Social media has given way to information and prosumption-oriented discursive fields wherein individuals construct their own social identities. Although interactivity, multimodality, user-centeredness and accessibility are the unique aspects of digital media but the fact that digital media as effective spaces for representing extreme self/other representation while being anonymous and free from following social norms, can cause dysfunctional social behaviours such as cyber hate. Mirroring the normative notions of femininity, masculinity and gender stereotype allows groups and individuals to connect (...) and express similar manifestations of hate, which, often result in the emergence of a ‘discursive spiral of hate’, misogyny and sexism. This paper draws on the important caveats discussed around Social Media-Critical Discourse Studies understanding of the contemporary digital discourses to deconstruct the complex relations between gender, hate speech and celebrities’ discourses on social media. In particular, how Lena Dunham, American celebrity, portrays herself on her Instagram page by going against the hegemonic views and how the audiences, i.e. the digital prosumers perceive that portrayal. Analysing 2000 user-generated comments deconstruct how women are required to suppress their feeling and limit their authentic online presentation to maintain the outward countenance that matches the stereotypical gender roles in audiences’ state of mind. (shrink)

This anthology of contemporary articles (and court cases provides a philosophical analysis of race, sex and gender concepts and issues. Divided into three relatively independent yet thematically linked sections, the anthology first addresses identity issues, then injustices and inequalities, and then specific social and legal issues relevant to race, sex and gender. By exposing readers to both theoretical foundations, opposing views, and "real life" applications, the anthology prepares them to make critically reasoned decisions concerning today's race, gender (...) and sex social issues. Sex and Gender Identity. Sexuality and Sexual Orientation. Race and Ethnicity. Racism. Sexism. Heterosexism and Homophobia. Equality and Preferential Treatment. Discriminatory Harassment. Identity Speech and Political Speech. Sexual Speech. Sexual Assault. For anyone interested in the philosophical underpinnings of today's Race, Sex, and Gender issues. (shrink)

The relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression through legislation, such as the UK’s 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. This article offers a critical analysis (...) of the assumptions concerning the performativity of speech in this kind of legal intervention. It extends Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept of ‘harmful speech’ as reported by Butler (Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, Routledge Classics, London, 1997) to conceptualize speech-acts as performative not only when it comes to populations, but also when it comes to institutions. Reconceptualizing universities as producing as well as being constituted by speech-acts, the article argues that the effects of free speech legislation need to be considered in the context of the transformation of universities and other political actors (including governments and student unions) in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that legal enforcement of free speech at universities further obscures the distinction between negative and positive liberties identified by Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), and considers this shift as part of the reconfiguration of political ontology in late modernity. (shrink)

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of (...) the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values, and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza, Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars. (shrink)

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition (...) to be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal. (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)

The expectation used to be that men would be masculine and women would be feminine, and this was assumed to come naturally to them in virtue of their biology. That orthodoxy persists today in many parts of society. On this view, sex is gender and gender is sex. -/- A new view of gender has emerged in recent years, a view on which gender is an 'identity', a way that people feel about themselves in terms of (...) masculinity or femininity, regardless of their sex. On this view, sex is dismissed as unimportant, and gender is made paramount. -/- In the rush to celebrate this new view of gender, we have lost sight of a more powerful challenge to the traditional orthodoxy, namely the feminist sex/gender distinction according to which sex is biological and gender is social. On this view, gender is something done to people on the basis of sex. Women are socialised to conform to norms of femininity (and sanctioned for failure), and masculinity and femininity exist in a hierarchy in which femininity is devalued. This view helps us to understand injustice against women, and what we can do about it. -/- Holly Lawford-Smith introduces and defends gender-critical feminism, a theory and movement that reclaims the sex/gender distinction, insists upon the reality and importance of sex, and continues to understand gender as a way that men and women are made to be, rather than a way they really are. (shrink)

Critics have suggested that deliberative democracy reproduces inequalities of gender, race, and class by privileging calm rational discussion over passionate speech and action. Their solution is to supplement deliberation with such forms of emotional expression. Hall argues that deliberation already inherently involves passion, a point that is especially important to recognize in order to deconstruct the dichotomy between reason and passion that plays a central role in reinforcing inequalities of gender, race, and class in the first place.

: Critics have suggested that deliberative democracy reproduces inequalities of gender, race, and class by privileging calm rational discussion over passionate speech and action. Their solution is to supplement deliberation with such forms of emotional expression. Hall argues that deliberation already inherently involves passion, a point that is especially important to recognize in order to deconstruct the dichotomy between reason and passion that plays a central role in reinforcing inequalities of gender, race, and class in the first (...) place. (shrink)

Critics have suggested that deliberative democracy reproduces inequalities of gender, race, and class by privileging calm rational discussion over passionate speech and action. Their solution is to supplement deliberation with such forms of emotional expression. Hall argues that deliberation already inherently involves passion, a point that is especially important to recognize in order to deconstruct the dichotomy between reason and passion that plays a central role in reinforcing inequalities of gender, race, and class in the first place.

ABSTRACT Despite the claim in Miroslav Imbrišević’s paper about differences between the positions of Jon Pike and myself, there are also significant overlaps. I endorsed the WR consultative process that Jon was part of, agreed that Jon had produced a compelling argument, and agreed with the lexical framework of the argument. Miroslav’s major contentions with my argument appears to be that it dresses up patriarchal outcomes in feminist clothes, and that it ignores the voices of women [athletes] in coming to (...) its conclusions. In this paper, I address the charges by suggesting that both emanate from Miroslav’s attempts to see gender critical feminism as the gauge against which all positions need to be judged. My position is that this school of feminism will lead to largely conservative outcomes in the discursive and organizational hierarchies in sport, so that any individual benefits that accrue to female athletes will be less substantial than the loss of transformational potential in women’s sport. (shrink)

v. 1. "Gender" and "Philosophy": contested terms -- v. 2. Gender and the history of philosophy -- v. 3. Knowledge and reality -- v. 4. Values and society.

Cynthia Willett brings together diverse insights from social psychology, classical and contemporary literature, and legal and justice theory to redefine the basis of the moral and legal person. Feminists, communitarians, and postmodern thinkers have made clear that classical liberalism, with its emphasis on individual autonomy and excessive rationalism, is severely limited. Although she is sympathetic with the liberal view, Willett finds it necessary to go further. For her, attention to the social dimensions of the family and civil society is (...) class='Hi'>critical if issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality are to be taken seriously. Interdependency, not autonomy, is of increasing significance in an era of globalization. Willett proposes an alternate normative theory that recognizes the impact of social forces on individual well-being. Citizenship in a democracy should not be defined solely on the basis of rights to autonomy, such as bare rights to property or free speech, she explains. Rather, citizenship should be defined first of all in terms of the rights, responsibilities, and capacities of the social person. It is within the African American tradition of political thought that Willett finds a more useful definition of human identity and political freedom. The African American experience offers a compelling vision of social change and a deeper understanding of what it means to be a social person. By focusing on everyday battles against racism, Willett contends, we can gain valuable insight into the meaning of justice. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

Gender mainstreaming has been prioritised within the national agricultural policies of many countries, including Nepal. Yet gender mainstreaming at the national policy level does not always work to effect change when policies are implemented at the local scale. In less-developed nations such as Nepal, it is rare to find a critical analysis of the mainstreaming process and its successes or failures. This paper employs a critical gender analysis approach to examine the gender mainstreaming efforts (...) in Nepal as they move from agricultural policies to practices. The research involved a structured review of 10 key national agricultural policy documents, 14 key informant interviews, and two focus group discussions with female and male smallholder farmers. Results suggest that gender mainstreaming in national agricultural policy and practice has largely failed. The creation of the Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) section within the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development is paradoxical to gender-responsive agricultural innovation because it has received limited human and financial resources with an expectation for women to manage this policy development in informal and largely unrecognized ways. At the regional and local levels, implementation of fundamental gender equity and social inclusion procedures—such as gender-responsive planning and budgeting—has become staff responsibility without requisite formal training, gender sensitization, and follow-up. In Nepal, women as smallholder farmers or agricultural labourers are recognized as a vulnerable group in need of social protection, but the welfare approach to gender mainstreaming has achieved little in terms of gender equity, social inclusion, and agricultural sustainability. This paper concludes that what is generally missing is a systemic transformation of gender roles and relations in agriculture, with policies that would support rural women's empowerment through the provision of economic and political rights and entitlement to productive resources. (shrink)

The Muskoka Initiative – or the Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Initiative has been a flagship foreign policy strategy of the Harper Conservatives since it was introduced in 2010. However, the maternal health initiative has been met with a number of key criticisms in relation to its failure to address the sexual and reproductive health needs of women in the Global South2. In this article, I examine these criticisms and expose the prevalent and problematic discourse employed in Canadian policy papers (...) and official government speeches pertaining to the MNCH Initiative. I examine the embodiment of the MNCH and how these references to women’s bodies as “walking wombs” facilitate: the objectification and ‘othering’ of women as mothers and childbearers; a discourse of ‘saving mothers’ in a paternalistic and essentialist language; and the purposeful omission of gender equality. Feminist International Relations and post-colonial literature, as well as critical/feminist Canadian foreign policy scholarship are employed in this paper to frame these critiques. (shrink)

Abstract This paper explores gender and mental health with particular reference to the emerging philosophical field of critical realism. This philosophy suggests a shared ontology and epistemology for the natural and social sciences. Until recently, most of the debate surrounding gender and mental health has been guided either implicitly or explicitly within a positivist or constructivist philosophy. With this in mind, key areas of critical realism are explored in relation to gender and mental health, and (...) contrasted with the positions of positivism and constructivism. It is argued that critical realism offers an alternative philosophical framework for the exploration of gender issues within mental health care. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent RhetoricSarah E. DempseyPeaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric. Ellen W. Gorsevski. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.pp. 262. $55.00, hardcover.The overriding emphasis on violence, militarization, and retribution within current geopolitical contexts demands that we acquire greater understandings of nonviolent communicative practices. In Peaceful Persuasion, author Ellen Gorsevski, Professor of English and Communication at Oregon State University, argues that nonviolent (...) rhetoric tends to be ignored by scholars—that its methods, strategies, and impacts are often passed over and that nonviolence is often framed as hopelessly utopian, unrealistic, and ineffective. Gorsevski situates her study of nonviolent rhetoric less within its humanistic and religious inheritance, drawing instead on a contrast with existing models of rhetoric. As a strategy for rhetorical and political action, Gorsevski takes nonviolence to be instructive of new ways to reconfigure both rhetorical studies and social movement strategy.It is important to note that Gorsevski's need to study peaceful means of relating to others is driven as much by a love of rhetorical theory as by a passion for translating an understanding of nonviolent rhetoric into strategies for activists. As such, this book provides a solid introduction to rhetorical theory, including an appendix on the connection between rhetoric and nonviolence that details what activists have to gain from each. In addition, instructors will find useful a chapter on the specifics of incorporating nonviolence into speech communication classrooms.Peaceful Persuasion's greatest contribution to rhetorical studies is the careful drawing out of the many ways that a rhetorical take on nonviolence has become increasingly necessary. To make this solid case, Gorsevski draws on four very diverse case studies of nonviolent rhetoric. In a move that is both surprising and refreshing, Gorsevski's case studies do more than provide exemplars of how critics may read nonviolence as a powerful rhetorical strategy; each helps to further delineate the key characteristics of what has been, until now, a relatively undefined area of rhetorical action.Gorsevski's gift to her readers is the ability to demonstrate the rich subtleties of nonviolence through very different contexts. The case studies [End Page 89] draw from such different sources that at first seem disorienting. Upon reflection, it becomes clearer that they greatly complicate our notions of nonviolence, redressing the disservices of previous bleary analyses that configured nonviolence only by its lack of violence rather than according to its fruitful range of seemingly contradictory strategies. The cavernous distances each study crosses illuminate the multiplicity of forms, meanings, and strategies that nonviolence may take. As such, any definition of nonviolence that I may provide in this short review does a serious disservice to the depth that Gorsevski creates through her sometimes disjointed case studies.The case studies serve at least dual purposes, as each provides an analysis that extends our understandings of nonviolence in action as it also offers instructive mini-lessons for the further development of rhetorical studies. In the first case study, Gorsevski provides a contextualized analysis of critics' interpretations of the film The Spitfire Grill, which she shows to be reflective of the "predominantly accepting orientation that rhetoric and film critics hold for the idea that humans are characterized by "innate aggression" and violence" (68). For Gorsevski, this study demonstrates that nonviolence as a lens can be applied to a range of texts just as well as any other approach to rhetoric. Gorsevski moves her analysis of nonviolent rhetoric into the geopolitical realm for her study of President of Macedonia Kiro Gligorov's historic first speech before the United Nations. She takes his speech as evidence of the usefulness of pragmatic nonviolence, which entails "noncooperation or defiance of political adversaries in order to decry a perceived injustice" (72). Gligorov's speech illustrates that nonviolence and violence are best seen less as equivalent than, rather, as operating on a sliding scale. For Gorsevski, successful use of pragmatic nonviolence may even include a measure of violence as long as it serves to reduce the escalation of further strife.Next Gorsevski explores the visual rhetoric of the gendered body of Burmese activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi to show... (shrink)

Background:Nursing practice is complex, as nurses are challenged by increasingly intricate moral and ethical judgments. Inadequately studied in underrepresented groups in nursing, moral distress is a serious problem internationally for healthcare professionals with deleterious effects to patients, nurses, and organizations. Moral distress among nurses has been shown to contribute to decreased job satisfaction and increased turnover, withdrawal from patients, physical and psychological symptoms, and intent to leave current position or to leave the profession altogether.Research question:Do significant gender differences exist (...) in the moral distress scores of critical care nurses?Research design:This study utilized a quantitative, descriptive methodology to explore moral distress levels in a sample of critical care nurses to determine whether gender differences exist in their mean moral distress scores.Participants and research context:Participants ( n = 31) were critical care nurses from an American Internet nursing community who completed the Moral Distress Scale–Revised online over a 5-day period in July 2013.Ethical considerations:Institutional review board review approved the study, and accessing and completing the survey implied informed consent.Findings:The results revealed a statistically significant gender difference in the mean moral distress scores of participants. Females reported statistically significantly higher moral distress scores than did males. Overall, the moral distress scores for both groups were relatively low.Discussion:The findings of a gender difference have not previously been reported in the literature. However, other findings are consistent with previous studies on moral distress.Conclusion:Although the results of this study are not generalizable, they do suggest the need for continuing research on moral distress in underrepresented groups in nursing, including cultural and ethnic groups. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Advocacy, Therapy, and PedagogyJohn E. MacKinnonBeyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University, edited by Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir; 272 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.Anyone who would doubt the relevance of philosophy to public affairs ought to attend to the unhappy evolution of the Canadian university. On campuses across the country in recent years, speech codes have been introduced, the “re-education” of (...) professors urged, visiting speakers on controversial subjects silenced, and classes monitored by administrators eager to do the bidding of various special interest groups. As universities have come more and more to see their role as that of some sort of multipurpose social project, education itself has become less pressing a priority. Thus, while money is found to hire sexual harassment officers, employment equity advisors and “wellness” mavens, academic posts disappear. Those that remain are frequently filled in accordance with crass gender and race-based quotas, and when that fails to guarantee positions for members of bureaucratically favored groups, contrived “schools” and pseudodisciplines proliferate. Many of these developments, however, are simply the manifestation of trickle-down deconstruction, trickle-down Rortyism, trickle-down “politics of difference,” of the sort that Charles Taylor is prone to rhapsodize. Notions of value, nature and merit, of equality, universality and objectivity are dismissed as mere inventions, “imperial” notions designed to favor the powerful and oppress the disenfranchised. The art [End Page 492] of spoken and written argument, with their ideals of detachment and discipline, are taken as evidence of a smug “androcentrism,” while rationality itself is derided as a “regime” that works “to maintain patriarchal control of knowledge and knowledge production.” Even the notion of evaluating students by means of essays and exams is ridiculed as scandalously “non-feminist.” While past attacks on academic independence have tended to come from outside the university, Canadian academics over the past decade have slavishly accepted their own domestication. More disconcerting still has been the role of pliant university presidents, most of whom have proved eager to unburden themselves of the inconvenience of scholarship and to indulge the cosmological musings of the radical left.Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University bristles both with resentment that such criticisms should even be aired and paranoia about their motivation. According to its contributors, the challenge to political correctness—the very use of the term as an epithet—is the result of a “neo-conservative” attack that has been orchestrated in and “imported” wholesale from the United States (to morally smug Canadians, there can be no more dastardly provenance) and insinuated into public debate by a servile media. The first two articles in the collection, by Dorothy Smith and Lorna Weir respectively, pursue this very theme. Each betrays that dreary habit, particularly prevalent among social scientists, of rendering imposingly technical the most bracingly trite. For instance, Smith writes: “The textuality of public text-mediated discourse is essential to its peculiar temporal and spatial properties of ubiquity and constancy of replication across multiple and various actual situations of watching, reading, or hearing” (p. 25). Translation? The more one sees, reads or hears a view expressed, the more one tends to believe it’s true. Her concern here, of course, is to establish that whoever controls the means of public debate controls its terms as well, that those means happen to be controlled by neo-conservative interests bent on retarding social progress, and that growing public disquiet about educational reform simply confirms the success of that neo-conservative strategy. But the failure of Smith’s account goes far beyond the thoroughly rebarbative nature of her expression.According to Smith, the very term, “political correctness,” is shorthand for an “ideological code” that has been expressly designed by “neo-conservatives” to caricature the good works of the visionary left. An ideological code, she says, operates as a “free-floating form of control,” which, once established, is “self-reproducing” (p. 27). Now, [End Page 493] the trouble with this picture is that it can account only for ascendant ideological codes, those that are successfully transmitted and progressively consolidated. And yet, in recent years, the ideological code of the left has to a considerable extent... (shrink)

There can be no doubt that discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion or beliefs should not be tolerated in academia. Surprisingly, however, in recent years, policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity(DIE), officially introduced to counteract discrimination, have increasingly led to quite the opposite result: the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics (feminism, other gender activisms, critical race theory, etc.), and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such (...) dogmas. This subversion of academia ― disguised Trojan-horse style as universal human rights advocacy ― is unacceptable because academia must be politically neutral and protect freedom of speech, a cornerstone of professional scholarly activity without which universities as we know them will slowly but surely suffocate. -/- Our purpose here is to put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression in a single book, testifying to a ubiquitous trend within western culture, irreducible to a few isolated complaints. The essays contained here illustrate the abuse of power, censorship and witch-hunts at many universities and research centres in the name of DIE. -/- List of coauthors in alphabetical order: Dorian Abbot, Tomonori Agoh, Gerhard Amendt, Ivar Arpi, David Benatar, Peter Boghossian, Civitas Research Team, David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Pedro Domingos, Janice Fiamengo, Étienne Forest, Jorge Gibert Galassi, Norman Goldstuck, José L. González Quirós, Lawrence M. Krauss, Patrick LaBelle, Martín López Corredoira, Heather Mac Donald, Martin Malmgren, Erik. J. Olsson, Jordan Peterson, Constantin Polychronakos, Philip C. Salzman, Alessandro Strumia, Tom Todd, Andrei Yafaev. (shrink)

Since the appearance of her early-career bestseller Gender Trouble in 1990, American philosopher Judith Butler is one of the most influential (and at times controversial) thinkers in academia. Her work addresses numerous socially pertinent topics such as gender normativity, political speech, media representations of war, and the democratic power of assembling bodies. The volume Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler brings together essays from scholars across academic disciplines who apply, reflect on, and (...) further Butler's ideas to their own research. It includes a new essay by Butler herself, from which it takes its title. Organized around four key themes in Butler's scholarship - performativity, speech, precarity, and assembly - the volume offers an excellent introduction to the contemporary relevance of Butler's thinking, a multi-perspectival approach to key topics of contemporary critical theory, and a testimony to the vibrant interdisciplinary discourses characterizing much of today's humanities' research. (shrink)

The under-representation of women on boards is a heavily discussed topic—not only in Germany. Based on critical mass theory and with the help of a hand-collected panel dataset of 151 listed German firms for the years 2000–2005, we explore whether the link between gender diversity and firm performance follows a U-shape. Controlling for reversed causality, we find evidence for gender diversity to at first negatively affect firm performance and—only after a “critical mass” of about 30 % (...) women has been reached—to be associated with higher firm performance than completely male boards. Given our sample firms, the critical mass of 30 % women translates into an absolute number of about three women on the board and hence supports recent studies on a corresponding “magic number” of women in the boardroom. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 207-208 [Access article in PDF] Society Cosponsors International Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand Payap University and Payap University's Institute for the Study of Religion and Culture will be sponsoring a week-long International Academic Conference on "Religion and Globalization in Chiang Mai, Thailand" beginning the last week of July 2003. The conference is being cosponsored by the American Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. Ruben Habito, vice-president of (...) the Society, is serving as a member of the planning committee and as the liaison between Payap University and the Society. Other members of the planning committee include Donald Swearer, Michael von Brueck, David Chappell, Wolfgang Schmidt, Parichart Suwanbubbha, Saeng Chandrangam, and John Butt. It is hoped that a large contingent of members of the American Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies will participate in the conference both by submitting academic papers and by attending.Other cosponsoring organizations include the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, the Museum of World Religions based in Taiwan, the International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter, the Church of Christ in Thailand (CCT), and a number of other academic and religious organizations from around the world and within Thailand.The conference will be held on the main Payap University campus beginning with dinner on Sunday evening, July 27. It will end with lunch on Saturday, August 2, 2003. Lodging will be provided at the four-star Amari Rincome Hotel located near the Payap campus. Following the conference, Payap is arranging for several optional post-conference excursions to important religious and historical sites in Thailand and neighboring countries for those wishing to extend their stay in Southeast Asia.The overall theme of the conference is "Religion and Globalization". Plenary speeches, academic papers, discussions, and workshops will be organized around three broad themes:Religious Diversity and Interfaith Relations in a Global Age This section will include topics concerning religious pluralism, missions, religious conflict and reconciliation, and religious dialogue.Religion and a Global Society This section will focus on specific topics related to issues of social and economic justice, such as the relation between religion and human rights, structural violence, gender, tourism, prostitution, HIV/AIDS, the natural environment, media, technology, arts, and culture. [End Page 207]Religious Reform and Reformulation for a Global Age This section will focus on the reformulation of religious teachings and doctrines as well as on reforms of religious rituals, practices, and institutions in relationship to globalization.Several reasons make Thailand an appropriate and attractive site for this conference. Thailand has the largest percentage of Buddhists of any country in the world. It also has significant Islamic, Christian, and Hindu minorities. Animistic beliefs and practices underlie the religious faith of most of the Thai people. Over the past century and especially during the past several decades the country and the region have experienced rapid and profound changes as a result of modernization and globalization. For all these reasons Chiang Mai presents an excellent venue for examining how the Theravada Buddhist tradition and other major religious traditions are affecting and being affected by globalization. In addition, the Chiang Mai area has been an important "crossroads" for various religious and cultural movements since the beginning of the Common Era. For over 2,000 years Thailand has been both a receiver and a sender of religious missions. Thus, Chiang Mai provides a superb locale for critically reexamining religious missions and interfaith relations.The complete cost for the seven-day conference (including all meals, lodging, local transportation, site visits, entertainment, and conference registration) will be $575 (U.S.). International air travel to Chiang Mai will be additional. But based on current fares, travel from the North America to Chiang Mai should be no more than between $800 and $1,200 (U.S.). The exact international travel cost will depend on the carrier and the place of origin. Optional post-conference excursions will involve some additional expense and will vary depending on the destination and length of the excursion.Details regarding procedure for registration and submitting papers, lodgings, the conference schedule, optional post-conference excursions, and travel... (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

This paper anticipates a peril involved in Catholic writing on trans issues, which I call perlocutionary dominion: the empowerment of cisgender voices, and disempowerment of transgender voices within our theological communities through perlocutionary acts. It finds an example of this peril in Helen Watt's paper, ‘Gender Transition: The Moral Meaning of Bodily and Social Presentation’, focusing specifically on the use of negative themes; as well as the less obvious, positive-affective feature of gestures of care. It then looks to Pope (...) Francis's ‘four principles’ in Evangelii gaudium as the basis for a methodological principle that can help to avoid it. It argues that Francis's principles exhort us towards a project of community building that embraces alterity and invites critical engagement with our own convictions, while reflecting honestly on how our speech shapes that community in ways beyond their constative function. It concludes by suggesting the principle, ‘Everything About Us, For Us’, which encapsulates the kinds of behaviours required by this project. (shrink)

In this paper a dialogue game for critical discussion is developed. The dialogue game is a formalisation of the ideal discussion model that is central to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. The formalisation is intended as a preparatory step to facilitate the development of computational tools to support the pragma-dialectical study of argumentation. An important dimension of the pragma-dialectical discussion model is the role played by speech acts. The central issue addressed in this paper is how the (...) class='Hi'>speech act perspective can be accommodated in the formalisation as a dialogue game. The starting point is an existing ‘basic’ dialogue game for critical discussion, in which speech acts are not addressed. The speech act perspective is introduced into the dialogue game by changing the rules that govern the moves that can be made and the commitments that these result in, while the rules for the beginning, for the end, and for the structure of the dialogue game remain unchanged. The revision of the move rules is based on the distribution of speech acts in the pragma-dialectical discussion model. The revision of the commitment rules is based on the felicity conditions that are associated with those speech acts. (shrink)

Despite the invaluable role that women play in the peacebuilding process, statistics still show this as a male-dominated field. Since media narratives have the power to frame reality providing the public with preferred lenses to understand it, this study asks, How do media narratives frame the role of Afghan women in conflict resolution? To address this question, we combine Frame Theory (Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58) and Critical Discourse (...) Analysis (van Dijk, T. A. (2015). Critical discourse analysis. In D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 466–485). Wiley Blackwell) to explore media narratives before and after the Taliban came into power in August 2021. The samples include 32 articles published between 2018 and 2022 on different sources ranging from traditional news outlets to magazines, newsrooms, intergovernmental organizations, and think tanks. Findings show that media narratives perpetuate unfair gendered expectations, failing to effectively render the irreplaceable role of women in peacebuilding. Frames confirm the double bind of hegemonic femininity (Schneiker, A. (2021). The UN and women's marginalization in peace negotiations. International Affairs, 97(4), 1165–1182) as women are subject to different expectations – the exception presents them as courageous, yet the norm frames them as being too vulnerable and without a voice. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond “Born this Way”Tim R. JohnstonLGBTQ liberation requires that we become more critical of “born this way” rhetoric—the political and quasi-scientific claims that sexual orientation and gender identity are immutable and intrinsic facts. Born this way rhetoric gets at a lot of feminist and queer theorists’ favorite questions: Are we born with a sex or a gender? Does sex inform gender, or is sex just (...) gender masquerading as nature? Do I have a gay gene that somehow got flipped on, or was I just around one too many dolls at a formative age?I’m going to make a case for moving away from this rhetoric, but before I go too much farther let me say that I am not interested in policing anyone’s language or restricting the terms we use to explain our experience. I think born this way rhetoric can and should be utilized by those who find it accurately expresses their experience, and if progressive arguments are strengthened by born this way rhetoric then I think it is fine, as a political and rhetorical strategy, to continue using it to demand respect.How can we be critical of this rhetoric while still deploying it for personal or strategic reasons? Doing so requires acknowledging that the nature/nurture debate is not likely to be resolved anytime soon, so let’s take a short cut, sidestep that debate entirely, and talk about how born this way rhetoric functions politically. After reading the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, I’ve started to think of born this way rhetoric as a kind of founding mythology. Nancy describes myth as self-inscribing, auto-articulating, totalizing discourse. A myth is complete and self-sufficient because it explains itself, and in so doing it also establishes the framework within which the myth is intelligible. For example, telling the Christian creation myth both [End Page 140] explains the creation of the world, while also setting up the ontological and theological framework necessary to legitimate that myth. Myth is totalizing because it controls what is deemed intelligible or reasonable discourse. As the Christian creation myth describes the foundation of the world, it also invalidates alternative discourses such as evolution, making the myth a closed circuit that both founds and perpetuates itself.Nancy argues that myths only exist in their telling, and telling a myth creates community: “Myth arises only from a community and for it: they engender one another, infinitely and immediately” (Nancy 1991, 50). The telling of a myth posits that myth as a foundation for the community that believes and retells the myth. Nancy says:Absolute community—myth—is not so much the total fusion of individuals, but the will of community: the desire to operate, through the power of myth, the communion that myth represents and that it represents as communion or communication of wills. Fusion ensues: myth represents multiple existences as immanent to its own unique fiction, which gathers them together and gives them their common figure in its speech and as this speech. This does not mean that community is a myth, that communitarian communion is a myth. It means that myth and myth’s force and foundation are essential to community and that there can be, therefore, no community outside of myth.(Nancy 1991, 57)It is the telling of a myth in a community that both installs the myth as foundation and creates the community of people who share in that myth. Nancy recognizes the importance of myth in the formation of community, but warns that its tendency to provide a complete and totalizing view of the world can lead to fascist thinking. Myths are not necessarily supple, and a community based on myth may not afford its members the opportunity to make sense of their experience apart from the logic of the foundational myth.I propose we treat born this way rhetoric as a meaningful and important mythological foundation for many LGBTQ communities, while also remaining critical of its tendency to become a dogmatic and totalizing discourse. Born this way thinking is an unproven and unprovable certainty. We do not know why people have different sexual orientations and gender identities. It is a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Genealogy of SilenceChōra and the Placelessness of Greek WomenAdam KnowlesIsn’t excess that which the philosopher... must bring back, within measure?—Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin HeideggerAnd if I must make some mention of the virtue of those wives who will now be in widowhood, I will indicate all with a brief word of advice. To be no worse than your proper nature [phuseōs], is a great (...) honor for you; and great honor is hers, whose reputation among males is least, whether for praise or for blame.—PericlesIntroductionPhilosophy in the twentieth century is mapped upon a terrain of silence. At the turn of the century Sigmund Freud sought to translate the silent language of the unconscious, as Friedrich Nietzsche heralded an untimely voice that could not yet be heard.1 Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, foundational thinkers in analytic and continental philosophy respectively, each placed silence at the core of his most influential works.2 In the phenomenological tradition, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas prominently thematized silence,3 while the subsequent generation of poststructuralist, [End Page 1] deconstructionist, and feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray all grappled with silence in various forms.4 Among these works, Lyotard’s theory of the differend, a term that describes an ontological gap of incommunicability, is now a standard term for addressing questions of silence, silencing, the ethics of sayability and trauma.5 Later, in queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s closet became a complex synonym for many forms of silence and silencing.6Beyond this philosophical concern for silence and silencing, a number of similar themes emerged in the art and literature of the twentieth century, demonstrating both the creative and destructive force of silence.7 In literature, dramatists such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter brought silence to the stage, while poets and novelists like Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf traced the presence of silence in language, each thematizing the power of silencing in unique ways.8 In music, John Cage famously utilized silence as an element of his compositions and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergmann and Chantal Akerman likewise crafted silence to structure the cinematic spaces of their works.9 Silence became one of the most persistent themes of philosophy in the twentieth century, both implicitly and explicitly. Could one even go so far as to say that a certain silence haunted philosophy in the twentieth century?Amid this abundance of artistic and philosophical work on silence, “breaking the silence” became the watchword for emancipatory projects pursued by groups such as first-wave feminists, postcolonial scholars, race theorists, and campaigns for social justice.10 These emancipatory projects sought to disrupt processes of silencing by locating, recovering, and translating marginalized voices from the silencing of oppression and disenfranchisement. Though essential political interventions at the historical moment when they emerged, these projects of recovery soon met with the critique of the politics of representation best exemplified by thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Toril Moi.11 Spivak and Moi effectively argued that recovering and speaking for silenced and marginalized voices entails a further form of silencing. These critiques showed that projects of recovering silence from the archives, history, literature, art, culture, and everyday practices of living were constrained by the very concept of silence they employed. As a result, any naive politics of granting a voice and breaking silence became impossible after the 1980s. From this point onward the deconstructive critique of representation folded silence back into itself, destroying any simple binary of empowered speech and disempowered silence. Even despite this powerful deconstruction of the speech/silence binary, philosophy, to the extent that it still operates within representational schemes and a speech/silence binary, still remains haunted by the specter of silence—a silence that carries with it a deeply gendered heritage. Pursuing rigorous analyses of the manifold structures of silence and silencing remains an urgent ethical and political task for feminist philosophy. [End Page 2]This essay seeks to contribute to that task by arguing that, in order to critically engage with the many... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lynn Huffer's Mad For Foucault:An Analysis of Historical Eros?Laura HengeholdMad for Foucault is a remarkably beautiful book balanced on the edges between the personal, the impersonal, and the public and reflected through Foucault's own struggles to establish those divides. Huffer's goal in Mad for Foucault is to draw scholarly attention to the emotional and ethical content of Foucault's writing, as well as to assess the risks of queer theory's (...) dependence on dialectics and psychoanalytic theory. Reading History of Sexuality I in light of History of Madness, she argues, renders the ethical aspects of Foucault's early project clear and reveals the continuity with his later work on ethics, putting the central concerns of queer theory in a different light. But this continuity is only visible through attention to the lyrical force resulting from tensions between these edges, which also separate genders and epochs, as if Las Meninas were to draw the viewer's gaze toward a fractured mirror rather than a sovereign one.The elements of History of Sexuality I that have been most important for the queer theorists Huffer engages are Foucault's attempt to date the shifts from a perception of sinful acts to a perception of homosexual personality types, and his warning that reifying such personality types as "identities" in hopes of liberation from heterosexist oppression continues to support the social mechanisms that identify personal truth with sexuality. Some (associated with Judith Butler) have tried to develop an account of agency that owes less to the exclusions of traditional moral and psychological theories but risks establishing its own hierarchies of psychic "health." Others (Lee Edelman is exemplary) [End Page 226] have also argued that the affects associated with these acts and identities, and possibly the ethical attitudes arising from these affects, are historical effects that must be bracketed in the name of resisting biopower (Huffer 2010, 94-95).Both groups, Huffer argues, have merely performed a dialectical reversal within the order of sexualities inherited from the nineteenth century, without appreciating Foucault's effort to cast the very terms of that order into question—above all, in History of Madness (Huffer 2010, 113-16). What is more disturbing, both sides have enlisted psychoanalysis on their behalf, although Foucault remained skeptical of psychoanalysis. In History of Madness (2006a), Foucault's skepticism was justified in the name of the affective attachments of queer life and his deeply felt fascination for the traces of a sexual hybridity almost erased from European history. For Huffer, the real question posed by both History of Sexuality I and History of Madness is not, as queer theorists might believe, "why sexuality became a moral issue" (and how might it cease to be one) but who was buried when the nineteenth-century medicalization of sexuality replaced erotic experience with explanations of sexual abnormalities (2010, 229). She reads Foucault's work as a meditation on the ethical tragedy presented by the scattered ashes of even "infamous men."Although there are many themes I could address, I will let my comments be guided by Huffer's reading of the explicit and implicit critique of psychoanalysis found in Foucault's work, and its relation to Foucault's ambivalent Kantianism (2010, 127-33, 134). This critique comes from several directions. First, throughout all his works, including Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault criticizes interpretive approaches to the historical record and to human speech. Practices such as "commentary" reduce the variety of events that can be perceived in the historical field and turn some into the content or meaning of others, which are thereby privileged metaphysically as "more real." Second, Foucault criticizes power relations forcing some to confess and to interpret the products of their own confession in terms of the meanings religious or medical authorities insist on finding there. From the seventeenth century through the present, such authorities have identified work and family-oriented behavior as "reasonable" and have forced those whose behavior does not fit those terms to understand themselves as deviations from that norm (Huffer 2010, 105, 107-108).Third, according to Huffer, Foucault subjects belief in the psyche as scientific object and focus of work on the self to historical analysis... (shrink)

There can be no doubt that discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion or beliefs should not be tolerated in academia. Surprisingly, however, in recent years, policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE), officially introduced to counteract discrimination, have increasingly led to quite the opposite result: the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics (feminism, other gender activisms, critical race theory, etc.), and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss (...) such dogmas. This subversion of academia — disguised Trojan-horse style as universal human rights advocacy — is unacceptable because academia must be politically neutral and protect freedom of speech, a cornerstone of professional scholarly activity without which universities as we know them will slowly but surely suffocate. Our purpose here is to put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression in a single book, testifying to a ubiquitous trend within western culture, irreducible to a few isolated complaints. The essays contained here illustrate the abuse of power, censorship and witch-hunts at many universities and research centres in the name of DIE. List of coauthors in alphabetical order: Dorian Abbot, Tomonori Agoh, Gerhard Amendt, Ivar Arpi, David Benatar, Peter Boghossian, Civitas Research Team, David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Pedro Domingos, Janice Fiamengo, Étienne Forest, Jorge Gibert Galassi, Norman Goldstuck, José L. González Quirós, Lawrence M. Krauss, Patrick LaBelle, Martín López Corredoira, Heather Mac Donald, Martin Malmgren, Jordan Peterson, Constantin Polychronakos, Erik. J. Olsson, Philip C. Salzman, Alessandro Strumia, Tom Todd, Andrei Yafaev. (shrink)

If We Were Kin is about the we of politics-how that we is made, fought over, and remade-and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. While reigning frameworks in the study of politics leave forms of identification sedimented in the background as a priori identities or prop them up front as a part of a mechanistic and calculated game, political identification cannot be captured by these frameworks and is a far more significant (...) and profound political process than they allow. While this book stakes a wider claim about the centrality of identification to politics, it attends most closely to its deeper registers, and in particular to attempts by political actors within racial and gender justice and queer and trans liberation movements to get people to shift or reshape their foundational identifications. Drawing on the political thought of Sylvia Rivera, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and grassroots LGBTQ activists in Southerners On New Ground, I identify a distinct lineage of calls which challenge the atomized and hierarchical racial formations that structure political life in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. As I trace through activist archives, political speeches, and original interviews, these appeals demand not only a rethinking of fundamental assumptions in the study of politics, but provide critical resources for understanding the way power works in struggles to constitute a we, how commitments towards or away from racial justice are cultivated through battles over identification, and the dangers and possibilities of identificatory appeals. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

ABSTRACTPopular music life is permeated by a quantitative form of male dominance, and has been for several decades. Based on a recent study this article engages with the reproduction of said male dominance by attempting to understand boys’ approaches to popular music and musicians. In particular, by making use of an interdisciplinary explanatory feminist theory the article seeks to show that interacting mechanisms at different levels make the adoption of a so-called ‘identificatory’ approach attainable for boys. The potential effect of (...) their adoption of this approach is that male dominance within popular music life is reproduced. In addition to this, however, a more general aim of this article is to illustrate the ways in which critical realism can inform empirical gender research, especially in terms of the postulation of explanatory mechanisms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, I address a highly controversial question of feminist philosophy, namely, the so-called sex/gender distinction, from a Deweyan perspective. I argue that Dewey's naturalism provides useful insights for dealing with and solving the problems concerning this particular type of dualism. My argumentation unfolds in three steps. First, after having briefly introduced the meanings of the two terms, I outline two different, both unsuccessful strategies for overcoming the sex/gender distinction, namely, what I call the radical social (...) constructionist and the nondialectical naturalist strategies. Second, I draw on Dewey's version of naturalism with the aim of conceiving of human beings as simultaneously naturally and socially constructed. Third, I sketch out the hypothesis that Dewey's way of overcoming the pernicious dichotomy between nature and society may be useful for outlining a critical metaphysics of gender. (shrink)

In the volatile conflicts that inaugurated the twenty-first century, secularism, democracy, and freedom were identified by Western nation-states as symbolizing their civilizational values, in contrast to the fanaticism, misogyny, and homophobia they attributed to “Islam.” The figure of the Muslim was thus transformed into an existential threat. This paper analyzes an exchange among scholars—Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech—that engages these highly contested issues. As such, the text provides a rare opportunity to study how particular significations of (...) the West, its epistemological tradition, and its relation with Islam are contested and negotiated in a critically engaged site during a moment of global crisis. My reading of the text leads me to argue that the stabilization of the epistemic power of the West is presently reliant on a new iteration of its foundational philosophical concepts to suppress counter-hegemonic narratives that foreground its forms of violence. Further, the terrain for this reshaping of the dominance of this tradition is gender/sexuality, such that queer politics are located at the forefront of the Western politico-philosophical project. As such, the advancement of this tradition is co-constitutive with that of the gendered-sexual subject as emblematic of its highest civilizational values. (shrink)