Online research in philosophy

This paper develops a new feminist paradigm for global justice that includes several components. I deploy a non-ideal ethics approach based on an argumentabout what principle of justice is possible to act on, given a historical and intersectional feminist analysis of what kind of feminist coalitions are possible in the present period. I claim that the time is ripe for a new progressive feminist Solidarity paradigm of justice that supersedes the classical liberal debates between Libertarian Freedom paradigm and the Social (...) Democrat Equality paradigm of Justice. I outline the antiglobalization economic and political networks coming into existence, as evidenced by networks of worker-owned cooperatives, labor unions, fair trade commitments, squatter and other land reform movements. Such movements are creating the material conditions in which North-South women’s coalition movements, based not on essentialist but on transformational identities, can unite around various issues of global gender justice, including reproductive rights, environmental justice, and the feminization of poverty. (shrink)

The essays are organized into topic areas that are of interest to students in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in ethics, feminist theory, and ...

: Gay marriage highlights a contradiction in American national identity: if gay marriage is supported, the normative status of the heterosexual nuclear family is undermined, while if not, the civil rights of homosexuals are undermined. This essay discusses the feminist dilemma of whether to support gay marriage to promote these individual civil rights or whether to critique marriage as a part of the patriarchal system that oppresses women.

: This paper on Ofelia Schutte's work discusses five main themes: gender oppression in the context of Latin American theories of social liberation; normative heterosexuality in Beauvoir and Irigaray; Schutte's analysis of women and capitalist globalization processes; her work on cultural identities; and the possibility of feminist transnational identities. I conclude with a comment on her postcolonial epistemological method in addressing cultural incommensurability and the possibility of a common agenda for transnational feminism.

The essays in Daring to Be Good challenge the private/public split that assumes ethics is a private, individual concern and politics is a public, group concern. This collection addresses philosophical issues and controversies of interest to feminists, including prostitution, the ethics of the Human Genome research project as it impacts Native Americans, and reproductive technology. Contributors include:Bat-Ami Bar On, Sandra Lee Bartky, Chris Cuomo, Ann Ferguson, Jane Flax, Lori Gruen and Maria Lugones.

Northern researchers and service providers espousing modernist theories of development in order to understand and aid countries and peoples of the South ignore their own non-universal starting points of knowledge and their own vested interests. Universal ethics are rejected in favor of situated ethics, while a modified empowerment development model for aiding women in the South based on poststructuralism requires building a bridge identity politics to promote participatory democracy and challenge Northern power knowledges.

I support Cheshire Calhoun's argument that there is a distinctive type of sexuality injustice addressed to lesbians and gays, but challenge her definitional strategy regarding the concepts of "lesbian" and "gay" and the "universalistic essentialist" distinction that she draws between patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Finally, I take issue with the political implications of her claim that lesbians' and gays' special oppression stems from our exclusion from the legal prerogatives of marriage and parenthood.

The aim of this essay is to rethink classic issues of freedom and moral responsibility in the context of feminist and antiracist theories of male and white domination. If personal identities are socially constructed by gender, race and ethnicity, class and sexual orientation, how are social change and moral responsibility possible? An aspects theory of selfhood and three reinterpretations of identity politics show how individuals are morally responsible and nonessentialist ways to resist social oppression.

This paper provides an overview of twenty years of feminist philosophy in Northamerica. The professionalization of feminist theory that has occurred through the mainstreaming of feminist philosophy creates a danger of a gap between theory and practice that creates the danger of co-optation. Three stages of feminist philosophizing are outlined, including the radical critique, gender difference and difference/post-modernist stages. The last stage, it is argued, leads to an conceptual impasse about feminist strategies for social change.

This is a review essay that also serves as an introduction to the other essays in the issue. It discusses feminist theory's relation to Freud, feminist ethical questions on motherhood and sexuality, the historical question of how systems of socially constructed sexual desire connect to male dominance, the question of the role of the body in feminist theory, and disputes within feminism on self, gender, agency and power.