In this paper I make a preliminary analysis of Western (or global North) discourses on sexual violence, focusing on the important concepts of “consent” and “victim.” The concept of “consent” is widely used to determine whether sexual violence has occurred, and it is the focal point of debates over the legitimacy of statutory offenses and over the way we characterize sex work done under conditions involving economic desperation. The concept of “victim” is shunned by many feminists and nonfeminists alike for (...) its apparent eclipse of agency. Putting these concepts into a global framework sheds light on their limitations. Bringing in the debate over the concept “honor crime” reveals contrasting assumptions about the nature of sexual violence. The comparative analysis used in this paper shows how we can avoid universalizing from specific frameworks, but also how we can learn from the discourses elsewhere toward developing an account of commonalities across contexts. Ultimately I argue that in applications to sexual violence, “consent” has intrinsic limitations, “victim” has context-based dangers, and “honor crime” makes both correct as well as incorrect assumptions. (shrink)

In this paper I explore white attempts to move toward a proactive position against racism that will amount to more than self-criticism in the following three ways: by assessing the debate within feminism over white women's relation to whiteness; by exploring "white awareness training" methods developed by Judith Katz and the "race traitor" politics developed by Ignatiev and Garvey, and; a case study of white revisionism being currently attempted at the University of Mississippi.

The feminist critique of liberalism runs parallel to the Marxist critique of liberal equality and rights. In each case the objection is that a set of liberties and rights formally guaranteed for all does nothing to prevent unfair inequalities in substantive life prospects from burgeoning within this formally equal framework. Workers and capitalists are formally free to trade with each other on any mutually agreeable terms but the enormous disparities in ownership of property bring it about that workers are forced (...) to sell their labor power for subsistence wages. Men and women are formally free to contract with each other and deal with each other on any mutually agreeable terms but social norms, the threat advantage that accrues to men in virtue of their being on the average physically larger and stronger, the social inheritance by men of greater property and political power initially gained in brutally misogynist regimes, and so on conspire to leave women worse off than men on the average in life prospects. (shrink)

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

"A collection of essays in feminist philosophy.

Principle-based formulations of bioethical theory have recently come under increasing scrutiny, particularly insofar as they give prominence to personal autonomy. This essay critiques the dominant conceptualization of autonomy and urges an alternative formulation freed from the individualistic assumptions that pervade the prevailing framework. Drawing on feminist perspectives, I discuss the need for a vision of patient autonomy that joins relational experiences to individuality and acknowledges the influence of patterns of power and authority on the exercise of patient agency. Deficiencies in (...) the current models of science and social relations guiding medical practice are analyzed, particularly (1) the tendency to disregard the patients self-knowledge and (2) failure to recognize limitations on the generalizability of medical knowledge. Models of social relations such as mothering and friendship are explored to advance a conception of autonomy better suited to the practical activities of medicine. In conclusion, I consider how acknowledgement of the specificity and complexity of social relations can contribute to reconfiguration of other principles comprising the standard framework of bioethics, particularly beneficence, justice, and equality. (shrink)

Autonomy has risen in esteem, then fallen, only to rise again in recent theorizing about women in society and culture. In this paper, I further bolster the renewed feminist interest in autonomy. I characterize feminist social aspirations in terms of three very abstract goals and then argue that women’s individual autonomy promotes at least two of them in crucial ways. Women’s autonomy will improve the quality of the close personal relationships that pervade women’s traditional moral concems (the first goal) and (...) it will enable women the better to resist traditional, gender-based constraints on their lives (the second goal). My conclusion is tempered, however, by the view that individual autonomy interferes to a significant degree with the solidarity and collective action by women needed to effect feminist social change (the third goal) . In passing, I gesture toward a conception of autonomy as a certain kind of narrative of self-development. (shrink)

This collection of original essays explores the social and relational dimensions of individual autonomy. Rejecting the feminist charge that autonomy is inherently masculinist, the contributors draw on feminist critiques of autonomy to challenge and enrich contemporary philosophical debates about agency, identity, and moral responsibility. The essays analyze the complex ways in which oppression can impair an agent's capacity for autonomy, and investigate connections, neglected by standard accounts, between autonomy and other aspects of the agent, including self-conception, self-worth, memory, and the (...) imagination. (shrink)

Disabled women were absent for many years from the discipline that has become known as women and gender studies. This field of study had its origins in the late 1970s following the second wave of feminism. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, disabled women and their allies introduced the necessary task of exploring disabled women's embodiment to the wider feminist community. A wealth of research now exists that incorporates disabled women's bodies into a range of disciplines: from literature, (...) film, art, social sciences, geography, and the environment to many other areas of scholarship. Indeed, many of the themes covered in this special issue have been addressed in different contexts in the disciplines .. (shrink)

: The article first develops an account of autonomy, explaining individual autonomy by means of three normative components and then discussing two objections. The first objection claims that autonomy has to be thought of as essentially relational; this objection is refuted. The second objection, labeled the skeptical objection, claims that we simply do not live autonomously, nor could we ever. Reference is made to novels by Iris Murdoch to present a skeptical solution to this objection.

Feminist approaches to bioethics have the striking ability to usefully disrupt conversations otherwise in danger of calcifying into immovable opposing camps. Take, for instance, debates between theorists in disability studies and bioethicists who often take two different approaches to understanding disability. On one side are those such as Buchanan, Brock, Daniels, and Wikler (2000) who seek to locate the apparent functional deficiency of disability in biologically abnormal bodies. Let us call this a normal functioning approach to understanding disability. On the (...) other side are those such as Amundson (2000a; 2005) who argue that to be paraplegic or deaf is not to be inherently deficient but different in .. (shrink)

This paper examines Harold Garfinkel's notion of the natural attitude about sex and his claim that it is fundamentally moral in nature. The author looks beneath the natural attitude in order to explain its peculiar resilience and oppressive force. There she reveals a moral order grounded in the dichotomously sexed bodies so constituted through boundaries governing privacy and decency. In particular, naked bodies are sex-differentiated within a system of genital representation through gender presentation—a system that helps constitute the very boundaries (...) between the public and private. (shrink)

: This paper engages with theories of the monstrous maternal in feminist philosophy to explore how examples of visual art practice by Susan Hiller, Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman disrupt maternal ideals in visual culture through differently imagined body schema. By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to maternal subjectivity, disability, abortion, and "prosthetic" pregnancy, it asks whether the "monstrous" can offer different kinds of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and (...) potential power of the pregnant subject. (shrink)

: We criticize a view of maternity that equates the natural with the genetic and biological and show how such a practice overdetermines the maternal body and the maternal experience for women who are mothers through adoption and ART (Assisted Reproductive Technologies). As an alternative, we propose a new framework designed to rethink maternal bodies through the lens of feminist embodiment. Feminist embodied maternity, as we call it, stresses the particularity of experience through subjective embodiment. A feminist embodied maternity emphasizes (...) the physical relations of the subjective lived-body rather than the genetic or biological connections. Instead of universalizing claims about the maternal body, embodied maternity looks to communicable experiences and empathetic understanding. (shrink)

: According to Kelly Oliver and Elizabeth Grosz, while Friedrich Nietzsche begins to open Western philosophy to the other, the body, he cuts off feminine body. Here I create a framework through which the possibility and questionability of a symbolically feminine body begins to emerge. I do this by using the metaphor of Indian curry. The metaphor works on two levels: 1) as a symbolically feminine body; 2) as Nietzsche's conception of subject-formation as a dynamic monism.

Sites of embodied disruption challenge academics to engage with power at its seams. In this article I consider an ethics of embodiment, situating it within questions raised by Judith Butler in her articles, “Doing Justice to Someone” (Butler 2001a) and “Giving an Account of Oneself” (Butler 2001b). In “Giving an Account,” Butler claims that gaps in knowledge and representation are germane to ethical practice, that brave inadequacies and creative approximations are the best we can do for others and ourselves. In (...) “Doing Justice,” Butler enacts this stance, recounting the story of David Reimer, a child who in 1965 was offered up to science after his penis was severed in a botched circumcision. She seizes upon, through narrative fragments, a body whose sexual indeterminacy became the site and occasion for particularly brutal regimes of interpretation. Butler situates this patchwork narrative within the academic industry that reappropriates David's story for its own purposes. Taking Butler's ideas to heart, I carefully trace the nuances of her argument and highlight the (necessary) silences and foreclosures of her account. I propose “seamfulness” as a possible ethical-aesthetic strategy for embodying Butler's ethical concerns. I close by briefly introducing some implications for arts-informed representations in academic work. (shrink)

"A collection of essays in feminist philosophy.

Introduction -- Power/sex/gender -- Performativity/citationality -- The body -- Normative violence -- Political ontology -- Kinship trouble -- Subversion.

: Contrasting the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz, and Moira Gatens with the poststructuralist philosophy of Judith Butler, this paper identifies a distinctive "Australian" feminism. It argues that while Butler remains trapped by the matter/representation binary, the Spinozist turn in Lloyd and Gatens, and Grosz's work on Bergson and Deleuze, are attempts to think corporeality.

This paper will examine the experience of and drive for bodily invisibility in women through the theoretical approaches of phenomenology and social constructionism. An examination of the social disruptions of bodily invisibility and the compulsive avoidance of such instances, particularly with respect to the fastidious maintenance of body comportment and appearance within the narrow parameters afforded by social norms, will lead to an exploration of the conflation of biomedicine with the beauty industry.

Exploring the idea of knowledge as embodied, engendered and embedded in place and space, gender and sexuality are re-examined through the methodological and conceptual lenses of cartography, fieldwork, resistance, transgression and the divisions between local/global and public/private space. BodySpace brings together some of the best known geographers writing on gender and sexuality today to explore the role of space and place in the performance of gender and sexuality. The book takes a broad perspective on feminism as a theoretical critique, and (...) aims to reassess notions of sexuality, citizenship, work, violence, "race" and disability in their geographical contexts. (shrink)

Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures provides an unusual and important reading of Michel Foucault's later work. This response is an effort to introduce McWhorter's project and to describe the challenge it presents to engage in askesis, the transformative exercise of thinking, which McWhorter's work itself exemplifies.

: Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures provides an unusual and important reading of Michel Foucault's later work. This response is an effort to introduce McWhorter's project and to describe the challenge it presents to engage in askesis, the transformative exercise of thinking, which McWhorter's work itself exemplifies.

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

Imaginary Bodies is a collection of essays that offer a sustained challenge to traditional philosophical notions of the body, sex and gender. Moira Gatens explores alternative positions to dualism by exploring psychoanalytic, Foucaultian and Spinozist notions of embodiment. The book traces a largely neglected geneaology of philosophers from Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Deleuze and sets this tradition against that of the Enlightenment. What emerges are new ways of thinking those aspects of life which Gatens calls "imaginary." Confining herself to (...) neither philosophy of "the subject" nor an ahistorical philosophy of "the body" at the expense of broader ethical and socio-political issues, Gatens shows the many connections between theories of bodies politic and the (sexed) individual. She compellingly, lucidly, and trenchantly engages with the ethical, legal and sexual relations between men and women which are placed in its proper historical and political context. (shrink)

Introduction and acknowledgments Part I. Introduction 1 Refiguring bodies Part II The inside out 2 Psychoanalysis and physical topographies 3 Body images: ...

: Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a "wet nurse" bearing Others whom he has "neither conceived nor given birth to" (Num. 11:12). A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.

Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and discomfort; felt disorientations almost always make us unsure of (...) how to go on. I argue that experiences of disorientation can strengthen the moral agency of individuals. I begin by clarifying experiences of felt ease and orientation. I then characterize disoriented embodiment by investigating select experiences that often involve or accompany disorientation, focusing throughout on how disorientation prompts changes in motivation and action. I conclude by charting how disoriented embodiments can help individuals become better moral agents overall, in part by challenging norms that restrict embodiment and undermining dualistic conceptions of the self. (shrink)

: Contemporary global health crises that involve mothers necessarily invoke the varied cultural problematics of maternal embodiment. Examining breastfeeding in light of current concerns about maternal contagion and contamination, with special attention to HIV and environmental toxins, allows us to consider how ambivalence toward maternal embodiment affects the ways we address these health crises within which mothers figure so significantly.

Michel Foucault's ethics of embodiment, focusing upon care of the self, has motivated feminist scholars to pursue promising models of embodied resistance to disciplinary normalization. Cressida Heyes, in particular, has advocated that these projects adopt practices of “somaesthetics,” following a program of body consciousness developed by Richard Shusterman. In exploring Shusterman's somaesthetics proposal, I find that it does not account for the subjective challenges of resisting normalization. Based on narrative theories of subjectivity, the role narrative plays in normalization, and a (...) commitment to developing concrete, feminist practices of embodied ethics, I develop a model of “narrative somaesthetics” based on an updated consciousness-raising model that emphasizes group heterogeneity and narrative conflict that deals with these challenges. Through an analysis of interviews with self-identified femme lesbians and a “female to femme” transition support group featured in the documentary film, FtF: Female to Femme, I argue that narrative somaesthetics enables the analytical, genealogical work required to identify and weaken normalization's constraints on embodied feminist ethics. (shrink)

: Hipparchia's use of exile as an ethical and rhetorical space from which to critique convention is the point of departure for an examination of the ethics of using exile as a rhetorically effective position for feminist theorizing. To address the ethical problems involved in using exile as a rhetorical space, I argue for a reading of exile as both a rhetorical and embodied space that can maintain an ethical anchor for feminist rhetorical and political practice.

This book is about body outlaws, operating in the interzone between the cold seduction of the hysterical male and the beginning of that new horizon called "the last sex.".

In Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation, Iris Marion Young describes the lived bodily experience of women who have “chosen” their pregnancies. In this essay, Lundquist underscores the need for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy. Drawing on sources in literature, psychology, and phenomenology, she offers descriptions of the cryptic phenomena of rejected and denied pregnancy, indicating the vast range of pregnancy experience and illustrating substantial phenomenological differences between “chosen” and unwanted pregnancies.

This paper reviews the characteristics of anorexia nervosa described in the DSM-III-R , relates them to normative gender roles and adolescent development, and critiques those roles on feminist grounds. Two apparently contradictory explanations for the irrational pursuit of thinness are considered: a) the anorexic thus attempts to conform to a socially defined feminine ideal; b) the anorexic thus attempts to avoid the appearance and consequences of mature womanhood. I propose that both explanations are applicable, together emplifying the ambiguity that Simone (...) de Beauvoir considers characteristic of female experience. Because both explanations suggest a gender identity disorder, I question the fact that the DSM-III-R fails to indicate this linkage. I argue further that therapeutic considerations require efforts to alter the socialization factors that are implicative in anorexia nervosa. Keywords: anorexia nervosa, diagnoses, feminism, philosophy of biology, psychiatry CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

My essay is framed by Hypatia's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist (...) debates from the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify and “abjectify” the maternal body?Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The “choice” to become a mother as a “feminist choice”; 3. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something like “women's time.”. (shrink)

: Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied cul-ture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I re-formulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary relationships as loving.

This essay shows that Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeality in such texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theories of body. I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified, integrated body of humanist discourses in favor of dis-integrated bodies constituted by multiple alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a "being-exscribed" begin the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential (...) criticisms of Nancy's work and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in adopting the framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing forms of gender normativity. (shrink)

Arguing that a Foucauldian feminism is possible, Sawicki rejects the view that the power of the phallocentric is total. Instead, like Foucault, she sees discouse as ambiguous and a source of conflict.

A trenchant critique of sexuality in an age of discipline, where bodies and pleasures have become sites of regulatory power.

This is the first book to offer a systematic account of feminist philosophy as a distinctive field of philosophy. The book introduces key issues and debates in feminist philosophy including: the nature of sex, gender, and the body; the relation between gender, sexuality, and sexual difference; whether there is anything that all women have in common; and the nature of birth and its centrality to human existence. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy shows how feminist thinking on these and related topics (...) has developed since the 1960s. The book also explains how feminist philosophy relates to the many forms of feminist politics. The book provides clear, succinct and readable accounts of key feminist thinkers including de Beauvoir, Butler, Gilligan, Irigaray, and MacKinnon. The book also introduces other thinkers who have influenced feminist philosophy including Arendt, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan. Accessible in approach, this book is ideal for students and researchers interested in feminist philosophy, feminist theory, womens studies, and political theory. It will also appeal to the general reader. (shrink)

: This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

In this paper I discuss some thoughts Judith Butler presents regarding corporeal vulnerability. This might help to elucidate the problem of whether critical education is still possible today. I first explain why precisely the possibility of critique within education is a problem for us today. This is because the traditional means of enhancing a critical attitude in pupils, stimulating their self-reflective capacities, contributes to the continued existence and strengthening of the current societal and political regime. A way out of this (...) deadlock is offered from within a Foucauldian perspective. Criticality here refers to an experience of exposure and expropriation of the self. This kind of limit-experience is also of a central importance in the most recent work of Judith Butler. She links this experience to the corporeal condition of susceptibility. Our bodies have a public dimension as we are inescapably exposed to one another. The main argument of my paper has to do with whether this appeal to corporeal vulnerability might offer a new way of thinking about the public realm and about the possibility of critique, especially within the field of education. I conclude the paper by showing the originality of Butler's thought in this respect and the possibilities it opens for thinking in a radically new way about critical pedagogy. (shrink)

Philosophy and the Maternal Body is a fascinating exploration of an overlooked aspect of feminist thought: what is the role of maternity in philosophy and in what ways has it been used by male theorists to effectively "silence" the voices of women in philosophy? Drawing on rich examples such as Plato's allegory of the cave, Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein's writing on the mother and the mother-daughter relationship, and the psychoanalytic and feminist insights of Irigaray and Kristeva, Michelle Boulous Walker (...) clearly shows how terms such as denial, repression and foreclosure offer crucial insight into the philosophical construction of the maternal body. (shrink)

This third edition of the bestselling An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives confirms the ongoing centrality of feminist perspectives and research to the sociological enterprise and introduces students to the wide range of feminist contributions to key areas of sociological concern. This completely revised edition includes: · new chapters on sexuality and the media · additional material on race and ethnicity, disability and the body · many new international and comparative examples · the influence of theories of globalization and post-colonial (...) studies. The theoretical elements have also been fully rethought in light of recent developments in social theory. Written by three experienced academics, this book gives students of sociology and women's studies an accessible overview of the feminist contribution to all the key areas of sociological concern. (shrink)

Feminist approaches to bioethics have the striking ability to usefully disrupt conversations otherwise in danger of calcifying into immovable opposing camps. Take, for instance, debates between theorists in disability studies and bioethicists who often take two different approaches to understanding disability. On one side are those such as Buchanan, Brock, Daniels, and Wikler (2000) who seek to locate the apparent functional deficiency of disability in biologically abnormal bodies. Let us call this a normal functioning approach to understanding disability. On the (...) other side are those such as Amundson (2000a; 2005) who argue that to be paraplegic or deaf is not to be inherently deficient but different in .. (shrink)

: This paper engages with theories of the monstrous maternal in feminist philosophy to explore how examples of visual art practice by Susan Hiller, Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman disrupt maternal ideals in visual culture through differently imagined body schema. By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to maternal subjectivity, disability, abortion, and "prosthetic" pregnancy, it asks whether the "monstrous" can offer different kinds of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and (...) potential power of the pregnant subject. (shrink)

This paper examines five groups of women that were instrumental in the emergence of the category of "feeblemindedness" in the United States. It analyzes the dynamics of oppression and power relations in the following five groups of women: "feeble-minded" women, institutional caregivers, mothers, researchers, and reformists. Ultimately, I argue that a feminist analysis of the history of mental retardation is necessary to serve as a guide for future feminist work on cognitive disability.

This paper discusses the question whether care work for dependent persons (children, the elderly, and disabled persons) may be entrusted to the market; that is, whether and to what extent there is a normative justification for the “commodification of care.” It first proposes a capability theory for care that raises two relevant demands: a basic capability for receiving care and a capability for giving care. Next it discusses and rejects two objections that aim to show that market-based care undermines the (...) caring motives essential to care, one of them because of its reliance on contracts and the other because of the corrupting influence of payment on motivation. If market care is in principle legitimate, the commodification question transforms into one about the appropriate combinations of market and non-market care. This question can be answered only by adding an additional complication: care is to be balanced against other activities, most notably work for the labor market. This brings in the problem of gender inequality, since paid work has been traditionally distributed to men and caring activities to women. I show how the capability theory of caring presented in this paper can help resolve the dispute between competing models for balancing work and caring. (shrink)

: Disability theory privileges masculinist notions of presence, visibility, material "reality," and identity as "given." One effect of this has been the erasure of "sensibility," which, it is argued, inscribes, materializes, and performs the critique of binary thought. Therefore, sensibility must be re-articulated in order to escape the "necessary error" of identity implicit in accounts of cultural diversity, and to dialogue across difference in ways that dislocate disability from its position of dis-value in feminist thought.

: This article is an ethnographic analysis of the mutuality that is possible in relationships between caregivers and women with intellectual disabilities who live together in L'Arche homes. Creating mutuality through which both parties grow and exercise agency requires that caregivers learn to negotiate delicate power relations connected to the physics of care and to reframe dominant stereotypes of disability. This helps them to support the women with intellectual disabilities to name and achieve their desires.

In 1998, the US Supreme Court first held that asymptomatic HIV infection constituted a disability when it ruled on the case of Bragdon v. Abbott . The use of yet another label (disabled) to identify women living with HIV has been rarely (if ever) questioned. While we do value the use of this label as an anti-discriminatory strategy, we believe that there is a need to examine how language and more specifically, the use of words such as disability, (...) limitation, and impairment may create new forms of identities for women living with HIV. Using this legal case as a starting point, the goal of this paper is to critically examine the 'fabrication' of asymptomatic HIV infection as a disability. Grounded in a feminist poststructuralist perspective, this paper exposes the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity, and power in the construction of difference. By doing so, it addresses the identification of women living with HIV/AIDS as disabled and the self-differentiation process that they must go through in order to live as normally as possible. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

: My purpose in this essay is to locate disabled women within the women's movement as well as the disability movement in India. While foregrounding the existential realities for disabled women in the Indian scene, I underscore the reasons for their absence from the agenda of Indian feminism. I conclude by reflecting on the possibilities of inclusion within Indian feminist thought.

Neither secular moral theory nor religious ethics have had much place for persons in need of constant physical help and cognitive support, nor for those who provide care for them. Writing as the father of a fourteen-year-old daughter with multiple disabilities, I will explore some of moral issues that arise here, both from the point of view of the disabled child and from that of the child's caretaker(s).

: This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance (...) that seek to reclaim and celebrate them. (shrink)

This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance that (...) seek to reclaim and celebrate them. (shrink)

: I assess representations of black women's derrières, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the "unmirrored" black female body.

With a few notable exceptions disability studies has not taken account of intersexuality, and it is principally through the lenses of feminist and queer-theory oriented ethical discussions but not through ‘straight’ bioethics that modes valuing intersex difference have been proposed. Meanwhile, the medical presupposition that intersex characteristics are inherently disabling to social viability remains the taken-for-granted truth from which clinical practice proceeds. In this paper I argue against bioethical perspectives that justify extensive and invasive pre- and post-natal medical interference to (...) eradicate intersex. I argue instead that to constitute the necessary conditions for the recognition of the intersexed child as a person, a life valid in its own right, clinicians must refrain from aggressive interference. Clinical specialists presuppose that intersexed children will be socially disabled and unrecognizable as persons; frustrated by the general failure of traditional interventions to assign a sex, clinicians are now pursuing prenatal technologies, including selective termination, to erase intersex. (shrink)

Love's Labor explores the relations that dependency work fosters between women and between men and women, and argues that dependency is not exceptional but integral to human life. The commentaries point to more facets of dependency such as the importance (and limitation) of personal narrative in philosophizing dependency (Ruddick); the role of spirituality that Gottlieb addresses with regard to his disabled daughter; and the application of the theory to the situation of elderly women (Tong).

I explore the ethics of altering the body of a child with severe cognitive disabilities in such a way that keeps the child “forever small.” The parents of Ashley, a girl of six with severe cognitive and developmental disabilities, in collaboration with her physicians and the Hospital Ethics Committee, chose to administer growth hormones that would inhibit her growth. They also decided to remove her uterus and breast buds, assuring that she would not go through the discomfort of menstruation and (...) would not grow breasts. In this way she would stay “forever small” and be able to be carried and handled by family members. They claimed that doing this would ensure that she would be able to be part of the family and of family activities and to have familial care. But the procedure has raised thorny ethical questions. I wish to explore these questions philosophically by bringing to bear my own experiences as a mother of a grown daughter with severe cognitive impairments. (shrink)

According to the most important theories of justice, personal dignity is closely related to independence, and the care that people with disabilities receive is seen as a way for them to achieve the greatest possible autonomy. However, human beings are naturally subject to periods of dependency, and people without disabilities are only “temporarily abled.” Instead of seeing assistance as a limitation, we consider it to be a resource at the basis of a vision of society that is able to account (...) for inevitable dependency relationships between “unequals” ensuring a fulfilling life both for the carer and the cared for.**. (shrink)

: The effects of head injury, even mild traumatic brain injury, are wide-ranging and profound. Persons with adult-onset head injury offer feminist philosophers important perspectives for philosophical methodology and philosophical research concerning personal identity, mind-body theories, and ethics. The needs of persons with head injury require the expansion of typical teaching strategies, and such adaptations appear beneficial to both disabled and non-disabled students.