A few years ago, the New York City Department of Health introduced a public health campaign entitled “Cut Your Portions, Cut Your Risk”, a series of posters in which images of food in increasingly large portion sizes appear. In one example, three packets of french fries are featured; in another, cheeseburgers are shown. In a red box in each, the text, in large, all-capital letters in English and Spanish, reads “Portions have grown,” and, below this, in all capitals, “so has (...) obesity, which can lead to many health problems” or “so has type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations.” Beneath the food, the posters admonish, again in all-capital... (shrink)

There have been few feminist analyses of the abuse and neglect of elderly women per se. We think that most standard gerontological studies of the abuse and neglect of aging people have not disaggregated the group – elderly people – according to their differences in gender, race, ethnicity, social status, economic well-being, and so on. In contrast, feminist theory has certainly paid attention to gender differences, but many analyses have been surprisingly ageist. Feminists still focus on issues of (...) concern to younger women, giving short shrift to, or simply ignoring, the issues of many older women: chronic diseases, depression, loneliness, and confrontation with their mortality. In this chapter, we point out some of the ways that physical abuse and neglect differ for elderly women. We also argue that feminists, indeed everyone, should be especially concerned about the issues of elderly women as a matter of social justice. Because women still have much heavier caregiving roles and responsibilities than men, they generally reach old age poorer, sicker, and more stretched than men. Thought and efforts must be expanded in order to achieve the continually elusive goal of gender equity. (shrink)

This essay examines how conceptions of “woman-husband” and “male-daughter” are supported and practiced in Igbo traditional thought. The essay argues from a feminist perspective that the practice not only promotes patriarchy but also solicits the aid and involvement of women to develop a female subjectivity that fits in with a society that privileges the male. The practice deepens the problem it tries to solve by causing existential predicament, discrimination and stigmatization to women victims and their offspring. The practice also (...) alienates women from their natural inclination by doubling their gender roles. This essay combines analysis and phenomenology to subsequently develop a feminist critical interpretation of the issues at stake. (shrink)

This paper shows how the mythology surrounding rape enters into a criterion of reasonableness which operates through the legal system to make women vulnerable to unscrupulous victimization. It explores the possibility for changes in legal procedures and presumptions that would better serve women's interests and leave them less vulnerable to sexual violence. This requires that we reformulate the criterion of consent in terms of what is reasonable from a woman's point of view.

North American scholarship has charted resonances between 1990s legislative and feminist discourse concerning violence against women. Feminist critique of official discourse surrounding the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 suggests that 1990s resonances did not reach the UK: however, an examination of the Hansard debates suggests this under-estimates the influence of feminist discourse. Halley’s discussion of “bad faith” helps to explain both the tendency of feminists to under-estimate their influence and why this matters. A commitment to an understanding (...) of themselves as powerless may encourage feminists to underplay similarities between feminist and official discourse, leading feminists to find only what they expect. Such an understanding gives feminism the capacity to change social life without acknowledging, let alone agonising over, the full range of its distributive effects. This is most troubling in relation to “carceral” feminism, since under-assessment of feminist impact encourages amplification and intensification of the carceral message. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the arguments against physician-assisted suicide Susan Wolf offers in her essay, "Gender, Feminism, and Death: Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia." I argue that Wolf's analysis of PAS, while timely and instructive in many ways, does not require that feminists reject policy approaches that might permit PAS. The essay concludes with reflections on the relationship between feminism and questions of agency, especially women's agency.

In this article, I argue for the distinctness of the 2013 Gezi uprisings from other anti-austerity protests. With a materialist feminist eye on the third-term AKP government's conservative authoritarianism, I explore the causal links among patriarchal, racist biopolitics, heteronormative family values and increasing austerity measures. My broader analytical goal is to demonstrate the centrality of moral politics to uneven, security-based neoliberal regulations across markets, public spaces, and civic expression in and beyond Turkey. Second, I zoom in on the mothers’ (...) rallies and gendered, ethnic acts of mourning to analyse the performative constitution of multiple publics during the protests. What exclusions have the participants produced in the name of inclusion? How can a performance paradigm help us understand the contradictory uses of space among and against the protestors, and more broadly, the relevance of embodied dissent to different visions of social justice? To deepen our intersectional feminist analysis, I suggest taking performances seriously, from human chains to soundscapes of resistance, stillness, and brutality; and from eclectic dance forms to architectural disruptions. Attending to the uprisings’ fault-lines and radical contributions, I also caution against ‘romancing resistance’. Hope with qualms is what remains. (shrink)

: In this essay, I examine the arguments against physician - assisted suicide Susan Wolf offers in her essay, "Gender, Feminism, and Death : Physician - Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia." I argue that Wolf's analysis of PAS, while timely and instructive in many ways, does not require that feminists reject policy approaches that might permit PAS. The essay concludes with reflections on the relationship between feminism and questions of agency, especially women's agency.

In this essay, I examine the arguments against physician-assisted suicide Susan Wolf offers in her essay, “Gender, Feminism, and Death: Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.” I argue that Wolf's analysis of PAS, while timely and instructive in many ways, does not require that feminists reject policy approaches that might permit PAS. The essay concludes with reflections on the relationship between feminism and questions of agency, especially women's agency.

In this essay, I examine the arguments against physician-assisted suicide Susan Wolf offers in her essay, “Gender, Feminism, and Death: Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.” I argue that Wolf's analysis of PAS, while timely and instructive in many ways, does not require that feminists reject policy approaches that might permit PAS. The essay concludes with reflections on the relationship between feminism and questions of agency, especially women's agency.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may be situated within a cultural landscape produced, in part, by demographics and the marketing strategies of an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry. The simultaneously corporeal and visual domain of advertisements for anti-AD drugs generates dynamic images of gender and embodiment, and it also lends itself to feminist interventions engaging with the images and ideas circulating around aging, medicine and the body. In this article, we investigate advertisements targeting medical practitioners treating patients with AD. Working within a methodological (...) framework we identify as ‘feminist visual studies of technoscience’, we want to propel the discussion in the direction of a broader corpus of medical media. Through this limited exercise, we hope to make a scholarly contribution to the feminist community by critiquing some of the images emerging within popular/scientific media with regard to Alzheimer’s, a disease collectively imagined within an aging Western population. (shrink)

This edited volume presents critical scholarship analysing governance practices in diverse jurisdictions in Europe and North America, at multiple scales, and in relation to several different arenas of policy and practice. The contributors address shortcomings in the mainstream literature on governance within the discipline of political science. The volume as a whole is marked by geographical and topical diversity. However, what the individual chapters have in common is that each considers whether and how gender, racialized identity, and/or other axes of (...) marginalization are visible within the conceptualizations and/or practices of governance under discussion. Drawing together insights and conceptual tools from both feminist and post-structuralist frameworks in analysing governance practices, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and graduates who engage with feminist and/or post-structural analysis of policy and governance. It will also be of use to critical policy scholars in anthropology, geography, sociology, and women's studies. (shrink)

This book should be essential reading for anyone interested in the new reproductive technologies, biomedical ethics, and women's health.

As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in philosophy, the concept of vulnerability has become a shared reference point in these discussions. As a fundamental part of the human condition, vulnerability has significant ethical import: how one responds to vulnerability matters, whom one conceives as vulnerable and which criteria are used to make such demarcations matters, how one deals with one’s own vulnerability matters, and how one understands the meaning of vulnerability matters. Yet, the meaning (...) of vulnerability is commonly taken for granted and it is assumed that vulnerability is almost exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. This reductively negative view leads to problematic implications, imperiling ethical responsiveness to vulnerability, and so prevents the concept from possessing the normative value many theorists wish it to have. When vulnerability is regarded as weakness and, concomitantly, invulnerability is prized, attentiveness to one’s own vulnerability and ethical response to vulnerable others remain out of reach goals. Thus, this book critiques the ideal of invulnerability, analyzes the problems that arise from a negative view of vulnerability, and articulates in its stead a non-dualistic concept of vulnerability that can remedy these problems. (shrink)

This research aspires to represent the subversion of pre-defined gender roles in the novels; The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto, Butterfly Season by Natasha Ahmed, and Stained by Abda Khan. The researchers aim to depict the destabilization of gender-based stereotyped identity from the Pakistani perspective. The selected method of study is Feminist Analysis by Tyson, which examines literature as a medium to represent feminist issues, whereas; the theoretical angle of “Matrix of Domination” from Collins’ (...) Feminist/Gender theory is used as a principle to analyze and depict the subversion of pre-defined gender roles in the selected novels. This study aims to establish the notion of gender as a social construct that could be subverted through literary discourses that have the potential to challenge the power-based gender roles within a patriarchal society. In this regard, different critical works of prominent theorists and writers have been discussed briefly in the literature review to project the significance of the works by contemporary Pakistani women writers as a medium to subvert identities formed by their society. Gender is also a means of power through which the dominant seeks to control the subordinate. The objective of this research is to suggest that gender is socially constructed, therefore, it can be deconstructed through literature. The selected novels exemplify the current gender inclinations of today’s Pakistan with the pen of female writers. Stereotyped gender identity is a socially constructed vice that divides humans into segments, hence it is required of the contemporary discourses to decenter such power discourses that perpetuate hegemonic boundaries and restrict the women into social shackles of imposed identities. (shrink)

Feminists have indicated the inadequacies of bioethical debates about human embryonic stem cell research, which have for the most part revolved around concerns about the moral status of the human embryo. Feminists have argued, for instance, that inquiry concerning the ethics and politics of human embryonic stem cell research should consider the relations of social power in which the research is embedded. My argument is that this feminist work on stem cells is itself inadequate, however, insofar as it has (...) not incorporated an analysis of disability into its considerations of the ethical and political issues that surround the phenomena. Thus, I consider claims that disability theorists and anti-disability activists have made about the research. I conclude by indicating that stem cell research must be situated within a cultural matrix that operates in the service of normalisation. (shrink)

The expropriation of marginalized women’s labor is a key issue in business ethics in these times of global outsourcing and informal work arrangements. This has led to a transnational advocacy movement for securing the labor rights of homeworkers, who are poor women working on piece-rate contracts out of their homes. Drawing on materialist feminism, our paper critically explores the homeworker network in Pakistan, that was set up as part of a global push by international institutions and networks to localize the (...) issue across geographies. Our focus is the national women’s NGO that leads advocacy efforts on the issue in the country and its relationship with other actors. Through fieldwork spanning 3 years we find that the network employs a top-down ‘us versus them’ approach in advocacy and mobilization. The race-to-the-bottom between the network’s national and district-level actors for donor funding further undermines prospects for developing indigenous narratives of resistance. The network, while mission bound to enhance the collective agency of its constituency, has depoliticized what should have been a class-based feminist struggle. From a materialist perspective, we conclude that the NGOized network rests upon and feeds off of its constituency, creating an additional layer of primitive accumulation over the workers it represents. (shrink)

In recent years feminist scholarship has increasingly focused on the importance of the body and its representations in virtually every social, cultural, and intellectual context. Many have argued that because women are more closely identified with their bodies, they have access to privileged and different kinds of knowledge than men. In this landmark new book, Paula Cooey offers a different perspective on the significance of the body in the context of religious life and practice. Building on the pathbreaking work (...) of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, Cooey looks at a wide range of evidence, from the Argentine prison narrative of Alicia Partnoy, to the novels of Toni Morrison and the paintings of Frida Kahlo. Drawing on current social theory and critique, cognitive psychology, contemporary fiction and art, and women's accounts of religious experience, Cooey relates the reality of sentience to the social construction of reality. Beginning with an examination of the female body as a metaphor for alternative knowledge, she considers the significance of physical pain and pleasure to the religious imagination, and the relations between sentience, sensuality, and female subjectivity. Cooey succeeds in bringing forward a sophisticated new understanding of the religious importance of the body, at the same time laying the foundations of a feminist theory of religion. (shrink)

European prostitutes occupied an important intermediary status in colonial Bombay’s racially stratified sexual order. In this article, the author offers a transnational feminist analysis of how the colonial state managed its racial and spatial location. The colonial state individuated, fostered, and monitored European prostitutes much more closely than others involved in the sex trade, and “coercive protection” by the police and brothel mistresses kept European brothel workers within their assigned spaces. Paradoxically, international antitrafficking efforts in colonial Bombay consolidated, (...) rather than undermined, these relations of coercive protection. The League of Nations’ antitrafficking measures in the 1920s encouraged the police to focus on cross-nationalcases andthird-partyprocurers andto overlook women who were deemed insufficiently pure. Comparing police, missionary, and social workers’ records, the author offers a critique of both international antitrafficking discourses and the Indian colonial state’s interests in sustaining the sex trade. (shrink)

In 2000, the Netherlands became the first European country to legalize prostitution, a policy supported by Dutch feminists. It distinguishes forced from voluntary prostitution, defining the latter as ‘sex work’, in contrast to feminist positions viewing it as ‘sexual domination’. This article examines the discourses used by parliamentarians in the debates since the 1980s and charts the shift from a traditional moral view to the sex-work frame, creating new meanings of ‘ prostitutes’, ‘clients’ and ‘brothel keepers’ in the process. (...) The new discourse allows for an active female sex worker but desexualizes the nature of the prostitution exchange. Neither does it offer an account of why it is mainly men buying sex from women. The analysis also highlights the contradictions created by the forced/voluntary distinction when speaking of the trafficking of women from poor countries and current anti-migration discourse, as well as the near obliteration of the racial differences between ‘clients’ and ‘workers’ in parliamentary discourse. (shrink)

There is an abundant and growing feminist literature examining the implications of reproductive technologies that separate genetic, physiological, and social motherhood. The literature explains the development of these technologies in terms of the motivations of men, stressing the victimization of women by the medical and legal institutions and the commodification of these technologies. This article examines these technologies from a Marxist-Feminist perspective, locating their sources in the overall development of the forces of production; that is, in structural changes (...) irreducible to their microfoundations. In the process of changing the biological conditions of intergenerational social reproduction, these technologies have established the material basis for the structural separation between the mode of procreation and the mode of social and physical reproduction. These structural changes are generating new identities and forms of consciousness that clash with taken-for-granted ideas about motherhood. These differences are captured in feminist debates about the significance of these technologies. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which women’s nature has been defined as different from men’s in Mormonism. Unlike many mainstream Christian traditions, Mormons have a positive view of the Fall and of Eve, do not embrace the doctrine of original sin, and reject dualities which assign women to lower bodily categories in opposition to men’s higher rational ones. However, women in Mormonism are subordinated to men. This subordination is due, not to a sense that men are superior to women, (...) but to a sense that man’s distinct role is to be leader in church and family. This sense of the propriety of role differentiation coexists with romantic notions of women’s greater natural spirituality and altruism. In the last section of the paper, I discuss the ways in which feminist Mormons have critiqued the notions of gender role differentiation and women’s greater spiritual capacities. (shrink)

Private cord blood banking is the practice of paying to save cord blood for potential future use. Informed by the literature on corporeal commodification and feminist theories, this article analyses women’s work in banking cord blood. This article is based on in-depth interviews with 13 women who banked in a private bank in Canada. From learning about cord blood banking to collecting cord blood and transporting it to the private bank’s laboratory, women labour to ensure that cord blood is (...) successfully banked. Private cord blood banking involves the overlap or insertion of commercial practices, and relations with clinical practices and relations that may cause tensions and confusion for women and clinical practitioners. Moreover, private banking reinforces and is reinforced by an ‘intensive mothering’ ideology. This article shows that corporeal commodification is not confined to a laboratory and the work of experts but extends into women’s everyday lives. (shrink)

This article examines the discourses of the Indian state and of community élites during battles for the custody of a young Muslim girl, Ameena, who was ‘rescued’ from a marriage with an elderly Arab. The battles for Ameena's custody were fought as much in news reports, opinion columns, and letters to the editor of metropolitan and vernacular newspapers, as in courts. Questions were raised about Ameena's age, the viability of her marriage, the applicability of secular laws to Muslim communities, and (...) the political economy of the sexuality of girl-children. In these representations, Ameena became a symbol of minority identity, and was transformed into an unwilling and unwitting object of protection. Why did Ameena's story attract so much attention? What were the different positions underlying the arguments made for Ameena's ‘protection’? Without dismissing the protection of children and the advocacy of their rights, this article analyses the agendas shaping the discourses of the Indian state and national and community élites during the battles for Ameena's custody. The article situates the controversies surrounding Ameena in the wider context of the increasing polarization between Hindu and Muslim communities in India in the early 1990s, and focuses on the relationship between notions of childhood and discourses of community, gender and nation. The article argues that there was a synecdochic relationship between the purity of girl-children and the purity of the Indian nation: far from being ‘pre-cultural’ or apolitical, discourses of childhood were profoundly implicated in the politics of gender, sexuality, community and nation. What are the implications of Ameena's predicament for feminist epistemology and praxis? In pointing to the ways in which feminist critiques of modernist regimes of power and knowledge can enable us to understand the multiple positionalities of children in the contemporary world, the article explores the spaces available for feminist theorists and activists to engage in a politics of vigilance and intervention with regard to the state's positions towards children. (shrink)

Racial, Gender, and Intersectional Biases in AI / -/- Dominant View of Intersectional Fairness in the AI Literature / -/- Three Fundamental Problems with the Dominant View / 1. Overemphasis on Intersections of Attributes / 2. Dilemma between Infinite Regress and Fairness Gerrymandering / 3. Narrow Understanding of Fairness as Parity / -/- Rethinking AI Fairness: from Weak to Strong Fairness.

My goal in this lecture is to continue the adventure of feminist thought about religion that has been going on for over 30 years now. It's a discursive adventure, isn't it? A bit like hiking through new terrain—we explore how far we can go today so that others who come after us can go even farther. Or, more optimistically, so that tomorrow we ourselves can go farther still in our own lifetimes. Of course, a metaphor like hiking breaks down (...) over this point: when we hike we don't create the terrain—although we might change it just by passing through. The land has a thereness that our activities in discourse do not—or, rather, the thereness of discourse is of a different order. Our adventure as feminist theorists is one in which we have a large part in creating that which we explore. (shrink)

In 2003 the UK National Blood Service introduced a policy of ‘male donor preference’ which involved women’s plasma being discarded following blood collection. The policy was based on the view that data relating to the incidence of Transfusion-Related Acute Lung Injury (TRALI) was linked to transfusion with women’s plasma. While appearing to treat female donors as equal to male donors, exclusion criteria operate after donation at the stage of processing blood, thus perpetuating myths of universality even though only certain ‘extractions’ (...) from women are retained for use in transfusion. Many women in the UK receive a plasma-derived product called Anti-D immunoglobulin which is manufactured from pooled male plasma. This article examines ways in which gender has significance for understanding blood relations, and how the blood economy is gendered. In our study of relations between blood donors and recipients, we explore how gendered bodies are produced through the discursive and material practices within blood services. We examine both how donation policies and the manufacturing and use of blood products produces gendered blood relations. (shrink)

This is the first collection to bring together well-known scholars writing from feminist perspectives within critical discourse analysis. The theoretical structure of CDA is illustrated with empirical research in Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, Asia, South America and the US, demonstrating the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining particular gender(ed) orders. These studies deal with texts and talk in domains ranging from parliamentary settings, news and advertising media, the classroom, community literacy programs and (...) the workplace. (shrink)