This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives-theoretical, social/political, and personal-that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic (...) women's "motherwork.". (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic (...) women's "motherwork.". (shrink)

Building on Deleuze’s theories of the becoming of bodies, and notions of the geographic maturity of the disabled body we formulate an emplaced model of disability wherein bodies, social expectations and built form intersect in embodied experiences in specific environments to increase or decrease the capacity of disabled children to act in those environments. We join a growing effort to generate a more comprehensive model of disability, which moves beyond a binary between the individual and the social. Drawing on in-depth (...) case studies conducted with 13 physically disabled children, we consider the intersections between their primary environments (homes, schools and neighbourhoods) and the multiple subjectivities they embody. Ultimately we make a case about the importance of responsive, situated models of subjectivity for the development of adaptations, and that physical and social adaptations must respond to these children’s complex and varied needs and desires. (shrink)

For many of us, entry into motherhood involves an ambiguous visibility and intelligibility, where our acceptance into mainstream spaces as mothers entails a loss of lesbian difference. Mann explores this loss using the work of two philosophers of lesbian difference, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She argues that the figure of the lesbian mother is deployed on a broad cultural scale to reinvigorate and renaturaUze the myth of the happy, natural, heterosexual mother.

This article presents diagrams developed from the insights of three middle school children with limited mobility about their experiences navigating social and spatial relations in their home, school and neighbourhoods. The paper explores the concept of assemblage as well as operationalising the Deleuzian idea of the diagram. The diagrams we produce are developed in connection with dominant idealisations of neighbourhood and home range that function in North America to choreograph children's progression from infancy through adolescence. We undertake this diagramming in (...) order to immediately and affectively illustrate the limits and possibilities of the challenges these young people face. (shrink)

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social (...) body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writings on the scream, as a vehicle to uncover new terrains of struggle and new possibilities for collectivity. (shrink)

There are, I thinks too many morally significant exceptions to accept the physician's rationales or the bioethicist's criticisms, stated siveepingly. Physicians need to take account of the harms caused by loss of hopes, especially false hopes due to deception, as Ivell, as of the harms of successfully maintained deceptive hopes. As for autonomy, hopes even..

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 1989 Philosopher, mother, and feminist Sara Ruddick examines the discipline of mothering, showing for the first time how the day-to-day work of raising children gives rise to distinctive ways of thinking.

Summary. Disputes about pediatric, educational, and other child-related matters may reflect more general concepts of parenthood, including parental rights and responsibilities. These concepts may be child-centered, focusing either on a child’s needs or on a child’s development. Needs and development are not wholly distinct or in competition, but some parents may emphasize one or the other and, in case of conflict, favor one over the other. Such emphasis and preference tends to distinguish parents as child-carers and parents as child-raisers (in (...) most cases, adult-raisers). So distinguished, these kinds of parental focus involve different temporal perspectives (present and future), as well of different categories of assessment and analogies (associated with nursing and teaching). (shrink)

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After reviewing the history, rationale, and Jim Rachels’ varied uses of the notion of biographical lives, the essay further develops its social dimensions and proposes an ontological analysis. Whether one person is leading one life or more turns on the number of separate social worlds he or she creates and maintains. Furthermore, lives are constituted by narrated events in a story. Lives, however, are not stories, but rather are extended “verbal objects,” that is, “narrative objects” with a hybrid character, both (...) linguistic and by inference non-verbal. In this they are like facts, propositions, and histories, grasped only through their verbal expression. Being narrative and socially embedded, lives can arguably be extended beyond the death of the principal liver of a life by the commemorative actions of those who shared it. Jim hoped to persuade doctors to shift from a traditional Sanctity of Life principle to a Sanctity of Lives principle. Accordingly, they could stop pointless prolongation of biological life once a patient permanently loses consciousness, his criterion of the end of a biographical life. It might seem that allowing lives to be extended past that point or death would forego that clinical benefit, but that is not so. (shrink)

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives—theoretical, social/political, and personal—that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

The contributors to two new anthologies A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity and Feminist Epistemologies are philosophers for whom feminism is an intellectual as well as political commitment and they produce original, valuable feminist and philosophical work. I focus on differences between the anthologies and on two themes: the social character of knowledge and the allegedly oppressive “masculinism” of epistemological ideals.

Like morally sensitive hospital staff, philosophers resist routine simplification of morally complex cases. Like hospital clergy, they favour reflective and principled decision-making. Like hospital lawyers, they refine and extend the language we use to formulate and defend our complex decisions. But hospital philosophers are not redundant: they have a wider range of principles and categories and a sharper eye for self-serving presuppositions and implicit contradictions within our practices. As semi-outsiders, they are often best able to take an 'external point of (...) view,' unburdened by routine, details, and departmental loyalties. Their clarifications can temporarily disrupt routine, but can eventually improve staff morale, hence team practice and patient welfare. (shrink)

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives—theoretical, social/political, and personal—that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

At graduation, some North American medical students repeat the Prayer of Maimonides "never to forget that the patient is a fellow creature in pain, not a mere vessel of disease." [2] How could a physician ever forget that a patient is in pain? Don't physicians confront constant reminders­moans, groans, winces, and other obvious manifestations of pain? Yes, but it is those very "reminders," as I shall explain, that provoke at least two kinds of forgetting common among physicians­one, psychological and the (...) other, conceptual. The psychological kind of forgetting is primarily self-protective, but the conceptual kind has deeper roots in the very definition of modern Medicine as curative and life-preserving. If my analysis is right, more lecture time on pain and pain relief in medical schools will do little to correct this "forgetting" of pain. But there may be better remedies for pain-forgetting, some already at work in North American medical practices. (shrink)

Philosophers have simplified brain death issues by drawing two distinctions--that between dead persons and dead bodies or organisms, and that between the concept of definition of death and the criteria for determining when and that death has occurred. The result has been protracted debates as to whether the death of patients is the death of persons or the death of organisms, and whether physicians should use cardio-respiratory criteria, whole brain criteria, or higher brain criteria. Advocates of the death of persons (...) prefer higher brain criteria; advocates of the death of organisms prefer cardiovascular criteria; but both will compromise, for different reasons, on the whole brain criteria that most legislators have come to accept. Advocates of person -death regard whole brain criteria as unnecessarily demanding and woefully wasteful of transplantable organs and nursing care. Nonetheless, they accept current whole-brain based legislation as a first neurological step away from traditional cardio-respiratory. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the question of the ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza’s theory of the composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause (whether good or evil). The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition—which Nature do (...) we ally with, what components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported (and threatened) by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of the monstrous infinite. (shrink)

In this paper I explore this question of the ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza’s theory of the composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause. The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition—which Nature do we ally with, what (...) components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of the monstrous infinite. (shrink)

For many years now a “principle of uncertainty” has played a major role in all discussion of the problem of scientific law as description of nature. That this principle had its origin in the efforts of science to describe nature is entirely appropriate; that it has had so immediate an effect on philosophic thought is inevitable.It is also inevitable that questions should be raised concerning the meaning of certainty and its reference to descriptive law. Such questions are bound to occur (...) to one who is concerned about the kinds of law in terms of which nature might be described. If these kinds can be considered to be two, one “mechanical,” the other “statistical,” it appears to be an easy step from the assertion of a principle of uncertainty which requires that the description of elemental processes and facts of nature be statistical—in terms of probabilities, that is—to a further assertion that after all a strictly mechanical description of nature is impossible, since the observational data which constitute its material are approximate and probable, and because the laws which provide the formal element of that description can never be more than approximately or probably true. It is concluded, then, that no element of certainty attaches to the so-called mechanical laws, any more than to others that are avowedly statistical. When a prediction is based on either sort of law, it is taken to be a prediction that an event will probablyoccur. (shrink)