Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality

“Experience” is a thoroughly political category, a social and historical product not authored by any individual. On the other hand, “the personal is political,” and one's own lived experience is an important epistemic resource. In _Anaesthetics of Existence_ Cressida J. Heyes reconciles these two positions, drawing on examples of things that happen to us but are nonetheless excluded from experience. If for Foucault an “aesthetics of existence” was a project of making one's life a work of art, Heyes' “anaesthetics of (...) existence” describes anti-projects that are tacitly excluded from life—but should be brought back in. Drawing on critical phenomenology, genealogy, and feminist theory, Heyes shows how and why experience has edges, and analyzes phenomena that press against them. Essays on sexual violence against unconscious victims, the temporality of drug use, and childbirth as a limit-experience build a politics of experience while showcasing Heyes' much-needed new philosophical method. (shrink)

The Love-Code is a continuation of The Couple to the family, whose image has changed dramatically. Sexual promiscuity, the social equality of male and female, the individual planning of biographies, all make traditional gender roles appear outdated. Whether these changes will make the living together of the sexes easier is doubtful. This book addresses the question, how can love even in the conditions of neo-liberalism keep its mysterious binding force: through the recognition of sexual identity as a way to knowing (...) the self and the other. (shrink)

This work represents the turn in philosophical anthropology to intersubjectivity. In our day, when society threatens to disintegrate into elementary particles, the question becomes acute, What holds individuals together? Fellmann’s answer: the couple as anthropological radical liberates individual humans from isolation. Even outside of marriage and family institutions, erotic love is the communicative medium that cannot be replaced with discourse alone. Thus, the human finds justification through love: a way of living in no way inferior to Christian justification through belief.

Resumen: El texto presenta una experiencia educativa en la que se incluye como competencia clave el trabajo de la alteridad desde la perspectiva de género. La actividad se ha realizado con perfiles de estudiantes heterogéneos, no sólo por edad, sino también por los objetivos y expectativas que anteceden a su acceso a cursos y asignaturas del campo de la filosofía. Se describe la actividad formativa centrada en mostrar herramientas que sean útiles para cuestionar los procesos empleados para feminizar y/o masculinizar (...) contextos socioculturales ajenos o alejados al nuestro, en el caso específico, los del este asiático. -/- Abstract: The text presents an educational experience in which the work of alterity from a gender perspective is included as a key competence. The activity has been realized with heterogeneous students’ profiles, by the objectives and expectations that precede their access to courses in the field of philosophy. The description of the formative activity focuses on showing tools that can be useful for questioning the processes that feminize and / or masculinize sociocultural contexts alien to, or far from, student’s own context, as in the specific case, those from East Asia. -/- . (shrink)

Self-control is integral to successful human agency. Without it we cannot extend our agency across time and secure central social, moral, and personal goods. But self-control is not a unitary capacity. In the first part of this paper we provide a taxonomy of self-control and trace its connections to agency and the self. In part two, we turn our attention to the external conditions that support successful agency and the exercise of self-control. We argue that what we call moral security (...) is a critical foundation for agency. Parts three and four explore what happens to agency when moral security is lacking, as in the case of those subject to racism, and those living in poverty. The disadvantages suffered by those who are poor, in a racial minority or other oppressed group, or suffering mental illness or addiction, are often attributed to a lack of individual self-control or personal responsibility. In particular, members of these groups are often seen as irresponsibly focused on short-term pleasures over long-term good, a view underwritten by particular psychological theories of self-control. We explore how narratives about racism and poverty undermine moral security, and limit and distort the possibility of synchronic and diachronic self-control. Where moral security is undermined, the connection between self-control and diachronic goods often fails to obtain and agency contracts accordingly. We close with some preliminary reflections on the implications for responsibility. (shrink)

Philosophy ultimately searches for what lies beyond the possible. This question is what makes us human. We ask about the limits of language, the framing of the world, and how by breaking with what always already is we invite a madness that makes further understanding impossible. -/- This book presents a call to withstand the normalcy that presents itself as continual variations of the ‘new’. To face the illusions that clutter reality and to engage in asking the final question that (...) is left for us to answer, to un-answer, to suffer again and again. The question of the necessity of the impossible. (shrink)

Nothing was more important for W. E. B. Du Bois than to promote the upward mobility of African Americans. This essay revisits his “The Conversation of Races” to demonstrate its general philosophical importance. Ultimately, Du Bois’s three motivations for giving the address reveal his view of the nature of philosophical inquiry: to critique earlier phenotypic conceptions of race, to show the essentiality of history, and to promote a reflexive practice. Commentators have been unduly invested in the hermeneutic readings and as (...) a result have misunderstood it as a philosophical text. Du Bois did more than introduce the concept of race into the purview of philosophy, he provided a method for philosophical inquiry into a concept that is notoriously difficult to approach with precision. My goal here is to show why no introduction to philosophy and no discussion about the nature of philosophical inquiry is complete without consideration of “Conservation.” Certainly, it is a text about race, but it is also an important philosophical text in general. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to investigate modalities of resistance to sexual violence. It begins from the observation that the nature of what we understand ourselves to be resisting—that is, how we define the scope, content, and causes of sexual violence—will have profound implications for how we are able to resist. I critically engage one model of resistance to sexual violence: feminist philosophical scholarship on self-defense, highlighting several shortcomings in how the feminist self-defense discourse inadvertently frames sexual violence. (...) Holding these criticisms in mind, I expand the landscape of resistance to sexual violence by considering the new possibilities that empathy might offer. The work of two contemporary women of color feminists—Roxane Gay and Tarana Burke—launches further exploration of empathy’s alternative modes of resistance. By focusing on empathy between survivors of sexual violence, we can expand our understanding of the possibilities of resistance by redistributing and broadening our attention in three main ways: from action to affect and attitude, from a spatially and temporally limited event to something more expansive, and from the individual through the interpersonal to the structural. (shrink)

In his new book, IDENTITY, THE DEMAND FOR DIGNITY AND THE POLITICS OF RESENTMENT, Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama addresses themes which might more properly be considered matters of political and legal philosophy. In particular, though he affirms the importance of the concepts of human dignity and identity, more or less as these are commonly understood in contemporary political debates and judicial decisions, he also sets himself against the contemporary phenomenon of identity politics which he views as a danger (...) to liberal democracy. “The rise of identity politics in modern liberal democracies,” writes Fukuyama, “is one of the chief threats that they face;” and moreover, “unless we can work our way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict” (p. xvi). Readers learn in the Preface that “This book would not have been written had Donald J. Trump not been elected president in November 2016” (p. ix). Fukuyama warns of “political decay,” though he holds it had set in well before the shocks of Brexit and Trump in 2016, “as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups” viz. vetocracy, “a rigid structure that was unable to reform itself” (p. ix). In the Preface, Fukuyama also draws lines to his earlier works, including his essay “The End of History?” (1989), his related book, THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN (1992) and his impressive recent volumes, THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER (2011) and POLITICAL ORDER AND POLITICAL DECAY (2014). (shrink)

In this debate-format book, four philosophers--Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer--articulate contrasting views on race. Each author presents a distinct viewpoint on what race is, and then replies to the others, offering theories that are clear and accessible to undergraduates, lay readers, and non-specialists, as well as other philosophers of race.

Les deux articles d’Eric Fassin, et la réponse de mon collègue Alain Policar, apportent intelligence et lucidité sur un sujet difficile, et un débat pénible que l’on peine à voir dans la polémique de Marianne (n° 1152,2-18 avril), ni malheureusement dans quelques articles sur ces sujets parus dans l’Obs. Pour une non-française, il n’est pas toujours facile de comprendre une lutte, plutôt qu’un ‘débat’, autour du mot ‘race’, qui semble spécifiquement française, mais où néanmoins les idées et textes américains (et (...) parfois anglais) font partie du champ de bataille. J’espère que cette intervention, motivée par la critique de Fassin par Policar, peut être utile même si elle manque de l’élégance et de la maitrise du contexte intellectuel français. (shrink)

I will reflect on the reconciliation between “subjective” life and “objective” doctrine experienced by Catholic lgbt couples. Even though their particular experience cannot be considered as universal it can nevertheless constitute a case study for theological reflection. I will propose a theological model for the integration of lgbt Catholics into Christian communities. The case of lgbt Catholics also helps us address the theoretical difficulties of religious pluralism. Their experience of faith is an example of “lived pluralism”. In the lexicon of (...) religious pluralism, this experience is an intra-system or intra-theistic diversity, but it also touches upon the meta-theological issue of the model of reason that is to be applied to every system. I believe that every possible case of pluralism is worth considering if we want to theorize this concept. This may lead us to consider pluralism as a premise from which to start, articulated at different levels. (shrink)

There is an inherent link between colonisation and carceral institutions, and in this paper I aim to illuminate and critically review the philosophical implications of prison structures in relation to coloniality. I draw on the work of Lewis Gordon, Frantz Fanon & Nelson Maldonado-Torres in arguing that physical incarceration not only colonises the body, but the mind too, as a form of structural violence. In order to establish an existential phenomenological framework for coloniality in incarceration, I also make reference to (...) Hannah Arendt. Her work on both totalitarianism and the banality of evil help to develop the framework, and I further utilise Lisa Guenther’s work on solitary confinement in taking a phenomenological approach to thinking about incarceration. After this critical discussion of the coloniality of incarceration, I apply the framework to the New Zealand context, where Māori are hugely overrepresented in prisons. In invoking Sharon Shalev’s recent report into solitary confinement in Aotearoa, I argue that the disproportionate numbers of Māori in New Zealand prisons are symptomatic of the inherently colonial nature of carceral institutions, and also maintain that understanding the fundamentally colonial nature of prisons is key to ensuring the Crown and government fulfil certain obligations to Māori under the Treaty of Waitangi. (shrink)

In this existential reading of Kim Kardashian-West's International Women's Day selfie of 2016, I focus on the rise of selfie culture and public discourse around emerging digital representations of women's bodies. The selfie is a relatively new phenomenon, and is particularly curious because of the subject/object paradox it creates; in taking a selfie, a person asserts control over their own image, but at the same time, becomes object in their own gaze. My argument is that selfies, like other assertions of (...) bodily subjectivity in digital spaces, are a threat to patriarchal structures that paint women as immanent, object, as reflected in public discourse around Kardashian-West's International Women's Day selfie. I draw on both Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's work on subjectivity in existentialism and phenomenology, as well as Amy Shields Dobson's work on post-feminism and young women's projections of self, in order to delineate what it is about the selfie that creates this paradox. I also make reference to the work of Elisabeth Grosz and Frantz Fanon in relation to a colonial hierarchy that prioritises body over mind, as well as Laura Mulvey's work on the male gaze. (shrink)

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning. But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational (...) knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged—or even engaging—epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren’s idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower’s being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other. (shrink)

La première chose que nous devons garder à l'esprit est que lorsque vous dites que la Chine dit ceci ou la Chine fait cela, nous ne parlons pas du peuple chinois, mais des sociopathes qui contrôlent le PCC -- Parti communiste chinois, c'est-à-dire les sept tueurs en série sociopathiques séniles (SSSSK) de l'E e Comité permanent du PCC ou des 25 membres du Politburo, etc. -/- Les plans du PCC pour la Troiseme Guerre mondiale et la domination totale sont énoncés (...) très clairement dans les publications et les discours du gouvernement chinois et c'est le « rêve chinois » de Xi Jinping. C'est un rêve seulement pour la petite minorité (peut-être quelques dizaines à quelques centaines) qui gouvernent la Chine et un cauchemar pour tout le monde (y compris 1,4 milliard de Chinois). Les 10 milliards de dollars par an leur permettent, eux ou leurs marionnettes, de posséder ou de contrôler des journaux, des magazines, des chaînes de télévision et de radio et de placer des fausses nouvelles dans la plupart des grands médias partout chaque jour. En outre, ils ont une armée (peut-être des millions de personnes) qui troll tous les médias plaçant plus de propagande et de noyer les commentaires légitimes (l'armée de 50 cents). -/- En plus de dépouiller le 3e monde des ressources, l'une des grandes orientations de l'initiative Belt and Road, qui s'est portée à plusieurs milliards de dollars, consiste à construire des bases militaires dans le monde entier. Ils forcent le monde libre dans une course aux armements massive de haute technologie qui fait de la guerre froide avec l'Union soviétique ressembler à un pique-nique. -/- Bien que le SSSSK, et le reste de l'armée du monde, dépensent d'énormes sommes sur le matériel de pointe, il est très probable que WW3 (ou les petits engagements qui y ont précédé) sera dominé par le logiciel. Il n'est pas hors de question que le SSSSK, avec probablement plus de pirates (codeurs) travaillant pour eux, puis tout le reste du monde combiné, va gagner de futures guerres avec un conflit physique minimal, juste en paralysant leurs ennemis via le net. Pas de satellites, pas de téléphones, pas de communications, pas de transactions financières, pas de réseau électrique, pas d'Internet, pas d'armes avancées, pas de véhicules, trains, navires ou avions. -/- Il n'y a que deux voies principales à enlever le CCP, libérant 1,4 milliard de prisonniers chinois, et mettant fin à la marche folle à WW3. Le pacifique est de lancer une guerre commerciale tous adhérences pour dévaster l'économie chinoise jusqu'à ce que l'armée en ait marre et démarre le PCC. -/- Une alternative à la fermeture de l'économie de la Chine est une guerre limitée, comme une frappe ciblée par dire 50 drones thermobares sur le 20e Congrès du PCC, lorsque tous les membres supérieurs sont en un seul endroit, mais qui n'aura pas lieu jusqu'en 2022 afin on pourrait frapper à la réunion plénière annuelle. Les Chinois seraient informés, au fur et à mesure de l'attaque, qu'ils devaient déposer les armes et se préparer à tenir des élections démocratiques ou à être nuked dans l'âge de pierre. L'autre alternative est une attaque nucléaire tous adhérences. La confrontation militaire est inévitable compte tenu de la trajectoire actuelle du PCC. Il se produira probablement au-dessus des îles dans la mer de Chine méridionale ou à Taïwan dans quelques décennies, mais pendant qu'ils établissent des bases militaires dans le monde entier il pourrait se produire n'importe où (voir Tigre accroupi etc.). Les conflits futurs auront des aspects de hardkill et de softkill avec les objectifs déclarés du CCP pour souligner la cyberguerre en piratant et paralysant des systèmes de commande de toutes les communications militaires et industrielles, équipements, centrales électriques, satellites, internet, banques, et tout appareil ou véhicule connecté au réseau. Les SS sont lentement sur le terrain d'un éventail mondial de sous-marins de surface et autonomes habités et autonomes ou des drones capables de lancer des armes conventionnelles ou nucléaires qui peuvent rester en sommeil en attendant un signal de la Chine ou même à la recherche de la signature de navires ou d'avions américains. Tout en détruisant nos satellites, éliminant ainsi la communication entre les États-Unis et nos forces dans le monde entier, ils utiliseront les leurs, en conjonction avec des drones pour cibler et détruire nos forces navales actuellement supérieures. Bien sûr, tout cela est de plus en plus fait automatiquement par l'IA. (shrink)

I defend Fricker’s virtue-theoretic proposals for grappling with epistemic injustice, arguing that her account is both empirically oriented and plausible. I agree with Fricker that an integral component of what we ought to do in the face of pervasive epistemic injustice is working to cultivate epistemic habits that aim to consistently neutralize the effects of such prejudices on their credibility estimates. But Fricker does not claim that her specific proposals constitute the only means through which individuals and institutions should combat (...) epistemic injustice. I therefore build on Fricker’s account by beginning to sketch a fuller picture of the structure of cultivating epistemic virtue. Virtue cultivation must, I argue, occur on two broad but interrelated fronts: first, the direct retraining of more automatic and unreflective patterns of thinking, feeling, and reacting to epistemic social reality, and second, the cultivation of more reflective, metacognitive virtues, such as the ability to swiftly identify contexts in which our first-order epistemic intuitions are likely astray. Although I articulate a range of individual-level obligations, my account is not individualistic. With Fricker, I argue that individual self-transformation is a necessary but not sufficient component of the struggle for epistemic justice. Accordingly, I sketch several ways in which individual virtue cultivation must be a socially and institutionally embedded process. Moreover, I argue that this process is ongoing. While most individuals cannot actually achieve such moral-epistemic ideals, many can (and therefore should try to) get much closer than they already are. (shrink)

Do we love for reasons? It can seem as if we do, since most cases of non‐familial love seem *selective*: coming to love a non‐family‐member often begins with our being drawn to them for what they are like. I argue, however, that we can vindicate love's selectivity, even if we maintain that there are no reasons for love; indeed, that gives us a simpler, and hence better, explanation of love's selectivity. We don't, in short, come to love *for* reasons. That (...) which seemed like evidence for thinking that there are reasons for love, then, turns out to militate against that view: how can these purported reasons be reasons for love, if they don't engender (in virtue of rationalizing) it? (shrink)

In addition to protecting agents’ autonomy, consent plays a crucial social role: it enables agents to secure partners in valuable interactions that would be prohibitively morally risk otherwise. To do this, consent must be observable: agents must be able to track the facts about whether they have received a consent-based permission. I argue that this morally justifies a consent-practice on which communicating that one consents is sufficient for consent, but also generates robust constraints on what sorts of behaviors can be (...) taken as consent- communicating. (shrink)

Is privacy the key ethical issue of the internet age? This coauthored essay argues that even if all of a user’s privacy concerns were met through secure communication and computation, there are still ethical problems with personalized information systems. Our objective is to show how computer-mediated life generates what Ernesto Laclou and Chantal Mouffe call an “atypical form of social struggle”. Laclau and Mouffe develop a politics of contingent identity and transient articulation (or social integration) by means of the notions (...) of absent, symbolic, hegemonic power and antagonistic transitions or relations. In this essay, we introduce a critical approach to one twenty-first-century atypical social struggle that, we claim, has a disproportionate effect on those who experience themselves as powerless. Our aim is to render explicit the forms of social mediation and distortion that result from large-scale machine learning as applied to personal preference information. We thus bracket privacy in order to defend some aspects of the EU GDPR that will give individuals more control over their experience of the internet if they want to use it and, thereby, decrease the unwanted epistemic effects of the internet. Our study is thus a micropolitics in in the Deleuzian micropolitical sense and a preliminary analysis of an atypical social struggle. (shrink)

An account of the specific ill of Native American mascots—that is, the particular racism of using Native Americans as mascots, as distinct from other racist portrayals of Native Americans—requires a fuller account of the function of mascots as such than has previously been offered. By analyzing the history of mascots in the United States, this article argues that mascots function as symbols that draw into an artificial unity 1) a variety of teams existing over a period of time and thereby (...) 2) a community of individuals who are thus able to use that team as their own symbolic locus of unification.This unification of teams and their concomitant communities is accomplished by appeal to a symbol that facilitates a particular fantasy of collective identity. The usage of Native American mascots is racist not only because it involves stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans, but (more specifically) because it treats Native persons simply as a means to symbolic unification—and not, importantly, as members of the community they thus serve. In other words, in these cases mascots work as unifying signifiers precisely by being the purely instrumental facilitator of a group's collective fantasy of itself. (shrink)

Despite the acknowledgement of the moral significance of consent there is still much work to be done in determining which specific sexual encounters count as unproblematically consensual. This paper focuses on the impact of deception. It takes up the specific case of deception about one’s self. It may seem obvious that one ought not to lie to a sexual partner about who one is, but determining which features of oneself are most relevant to the consent of one’s partner, as well (...) as the lies which it follows would be impermissible to tell, is complicated. It is argued here that deception about one’s morally valenced character traits, those we think of as virtues and vices, are particularly problematic. This is true regardless of whether knowing the truth about those traits would have made a difference to one’s partner’s consent. Attention is then drawn to a range of types of lies that one ought not to tell. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012, Mawhinney 1998), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

In 2016, National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick made headlines for refusing to stand during the playing of the national anthem prior to his games. He explained in an interview that his act was a protest against pervasive police violence against black people in the United States: "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away (...) with murder". Widespread fan condemnation of Kaepernick quickly followed—and continued into the next year, as fans, commentators, and even the president of the United States accused Kaepernick and other players who... (shrink)

The dynamism between otherness and differences with identity and equivalence provides key ideas for analyzing the process of gender individuation by artistic works. In this article I discuss the problem of artistic and aesthetic reactions to homogeneous cultural patterns of masculinity, which is characterized by the concept of "toxic masculinity" in pop-cultural, sociological, psychological and gender studies discourses. One common theme is that "toxic masculinity" encompasses harmful standards that generate antagonisms and diminish multi-figure masculinity to a singular "socially acceptable" level (...) at the expense of children, women and men - and thus society as a whole. The artist's task is to reveal this noxiousness, and to highlight the value of the coexistence of a variety of forms of masculinity in terms of its diversity, thereby helping to mitigate the consequences of disruptive gender relations. (shrink)

I attend to the temporal schema of open/closed by examining its elaboration in Bergson's philosophy and critically parsing the possibilities for its destabilization. Though Bergson wrote in a colonial context, this context barely receives acknowledgement in his work. This obscures the uncomfortable resonances between Bergson's late work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and the temporal narratives that justify French colonialism. Given Bergson's uptake by philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze, and by contemporary feminist and political theorists (especially “new materialists”), (...) a critical re-examination is called for. The Two Sources not only introduces a new dichotomy into Bergsonian philosophy—that of open/closed—it puts an end to the movement of duration by defining its possibilities as goals already given in advance. By turning the tools of Bergsonian critique onto The Two Sources, I propose an alternative to the open/closed—that of the “half-open”—creating in this way the conditions for decolonizing duration. (shrink)

The recent nationalist movements in liberal democratic states such as the US, the UK, and Germany have been related to xenophobia. The rise of Trumpism brands Muslims and Mexicans as outsiders, while part of the motivation behind Brexit was animosity towards non-Britons like Poles and Muslims. The question is how are nationalism and xenophobia related. According to Ronald Sundstrom, nationalism shelters xenophobia by creating obstacles that prevent immigrants and refugees from attaining a sense of civic belonging. He uses the metaphor (...) of sheltering to suggest that xenophobia becomes a byproduct of nationalism in the right conditions. I think this is a misunderstanding of the relationship between nationalism and xenophobia. In this essay, I do three things: first, I articulate Sundstrom’s argument explaining how each of the three obstacles works to produce an environment of xenophobia; then I consider what reforms might look like, yet these reforms would no longer leave us with something that we can recognize as nationalism; lastly, I argue that nationalism just is the modern day manifestation of xenophobia and so they are inseparable social phenomena. (shrink)

Liberal multiculturalism was introduced to support integration and anti-racism, but everyday racism continues to be a fact of life. This paper analyzes first some frameworks and problems that race and racism raise, and discusses two common liberal approaches for solving the problem of racism: the individualized conception of dignity and the social conception of multiculturalism. I argue that the ontological and epistemological assumptions involved in both of these approaches, coupled with the absence of the political-progressive notion of «race» in Germany, (...) in fact obscure important paths against racism. Lastly I introduce a politico-existential position from Cornel West and conclude that racism should be seen as a failure of a democratic process rather than a problem of race. (shrink)

We want to know what gender is. But metaphysical approaches to this question solely have focused on the binary gender kinds 'men' and 'women'. By overlooking those who identify outside of the binary--the group I call `genderqueer'--we are left without tools for understanding these new and quickly growing gender identifications. This metaphysical gap in turn creates a conceptual lacuna that contributes to systematic misunderstanding of genderqueer persons. In this paper, I argue that to better understand genderqueer identities, we must recognize (...) a new type of gender kind: critical gender kinds, or kinds whose members collectively resist dominant gender ideology. After developing a model of critical gender kinds, I suggest that 'genderqueer' is best modeled as a critical gender kind that stands in opposition to `the binary assumption', or the prevalent assumption that the only possible genders are the binary, discrete, exclusive, and exhaustive kinds 'men' and 'women'. (shrink)

Posthumanist critics such as Braidotti—informed by the antihumanisms of Foucault, Irigaray, and Deleuze—seek to respond to advanced capitalism by promoting what they take to be a radical transformation of what it means to be “human,” a way of conceiving being human that is thoroughly and consistently post-anthropocentric. Braidotti calls out advanced capitalism’s global economy as being inconsistently post-anthropocentric. In response, I first lay out ways through which posthumanists can find corroboration in Asian religious thought, such as in Zhuangzi and classical (...) Chan (Zen) Buddhism. I simply put forth, basically side by side, posthumanist positions on subjectivity and flourishing and parallels in Zhuangzi and Chan. This may strike some as sophomoric, which is in part what I hope to illustrate: just how easy it is to find corroboration in these Asian religious resources. This leads to my second issue. Given such conveniently available resources, what might this tell us about limitations in posthumanist Humanities and posthumanist critical theory as developed so far? I seek to bring out both a possible covert form of Orientalism in posthumanism and a myopic methodology in excluding Religious Studies in general as paradigmatic of posthumanist Humanities. (shrink)

In this paper I borrow from Maria Lugones’ work on playful “world-traveling” and W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness” to make the case that humor can facilitate an openness and cooperative attitude among an otherwise closed, even adversarial audience. I focus on what I call “subversive” humor, that which is employed by or on behalf of those who have been continually marginalized. When effectively used, such humor can foster the inclination and even desire to listen to others and, if (...) only for brief moments, adopt their point of view. To be able to see oneself as others see you can also be a desirable capacity, because along with such multidimensional seeing comes an epistemic advantage lacking in those who have no need nor desire to see as others do, especially if the vision of the others happens to be from below where one perceives that the promises of our explicit ideals are constantly being implicitly broken. Such humor is aesthetic, pleasurable in and of itself, and not amenable to scientific dissection. But it is also a skill that can be honed into a powerful tool of persuasion in circumstances where straightforward arguments are less effective. It can raise consciousness about the lived experiences of those suffering under systemic oppression and foster world travelling. Subversive humor encourages audiences, especially those who contribute to what Jean Harvey calls “civilized oppression”, to playfully travel across worlds and “tarry along” with the perspectives of the marginalized. (shrink)

امریکا و جهان در روند فروپاشی از رشد جمعیت بیش از حد هستند, بیشتر از آن برای قرن گذشته, و در حال حاضر همه از آن, با توجه به مردم جهان 3. مصرف منابع و علاوه بر این از 3 میلیارد بیشتر ca. ۲۱۰۰ تمدن صنعتی را سقوط خواهد کرد و در مورد گرسنگی ، بیماری ، خشونت و جنگ در مقیاس سرسام آور را به ارمغان بیاورد. زمین از دست می دهد حداقل 1 درصد از خاک خود را در (...) هر سال ، به طوری که آن را نزدیک ۲۱۰۰ ، بیشتر از مواد غذایی خود را در حال رشد ظرفیت از بین رفته است. میلیاردها خواهد مرد و جنگ هسته ای است اما برخی دیگر. در امریکا ، این است که شدیدا با مهاجرت گسترده و تولید مثل مهاجر شتاب ، همراه با سوء استفاده ممکن است توسط دموکراسی ساخته شده است. طبیعت فاسد بشر به خوبی به رویای دموکراسی و تنوع در یک کابوس جرم و فقر تبدیل می شود. چین ادامه خواهد داد به پایمال امریکا و جهان ، تا زمانی که آن را حفظ دیکتاتوری که محدودیت خودخواهی. علت اصلی سقوط ، ناتوانی روانشناسی ذاتی ما برای انطباق با دنیای مدرن است که مردم را برای درمان افراد نامربوط به عنوان اینکه منافع مشترک دارند ، هدایت می کند. ایده حقوق بشر یک فانتزی شیطانی است که توسط چپی ها به منظور جلب توجه از تخریب بی رحم زمین توسط یک بسته مادری 3rd ترویج شده است. این, به علاوه جهل از زیست شناسی اساسی و روانشناسی, منجر به هذیان مهندسی اجتماعی از حدی تحصیل کرده که کنترل جوامع دموکراتیک. تعداد کمی از درک که اگر شما کمک یک نفر به شما آسیب شخص دیگری--هیچ ناهار رایگان وجود دارد و هر آیتم تنها هر کسی مصرف از بین میبرد زمین فراتر از تعمیر. در نتیجه ، سیاست های اجتماعی در همه جا ناپایدار هستند و یک به یک تمام جوامع بدون کنترل دقیق در خودخواهی به هرج و مرج یا دیکتاتوری سقوط می کنند. حقایق اساسی ترین ، تقریبا هرگز ذکر شد ، این است که منابع کافی در آمریکا و یا جهان وجود ندارد به بلند کردن درصد قابل توجهی از فقیر از فقر و نگه داشتن آنها وجود دارد. تلاش برای انجام این کار غیر امریکا و از بین بردن جهان است. ظرفیت زمین برای تولید مواد غذایی روزانه کاهش می یابد ، همانطور که کیفیت ژنتیکی ما است. و در حال حاضر ، مثل همیشه ، تا بحال بزرگترین دشمن فقیر فقیر دیگر و نه غنی است. بدون تغییرات چشمگیر و فوری ، هیچ امیدی برای جلوگیری از سقوط آمریکا یا هر کشوری که به دنبال یک سیستم دموکراتیک است ، وجود ندارد. (shrink)