Topics in Feminist Philosophy

The topic of sex change in our bisexual society touches upon not only main basis of human existence but also questions of evolution as a whole, of humankind persistence. Is sex change a humane act or do we herewith sacrifice the culture and health of human population for the sake of individual principles? Today, theproblem of sex change has turned from purely medical to a sociocultural one. It brings up a number of important and complex issues for physicians, and for (...) society as a whole. It is necessary to undertake the efforts upon their solution on miscellaneous levels ‐ from practical to general philosophic one. What is the principal difference in surgical sex change and other body changes, such as plastic operations etc? Is a person free to make decisions about changing his or her body like he or she is when changing hairstyle, clothes etc? Who is responsible for answering these questions? We offer another, in comparison with traditional, approach to determination of the indication to change sex in case of various dissociations of sexual identity (for instance, transsexualism). The presented strategy is designed with some elements of synergetic modeling. A different cultural and ideological approach to the problem of sex change lies in the foundations of this strategy. Since we are referring not just to sexual, but also sexual. (shrink)

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-protective epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience (...) daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-protecting epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

In this article, Bailey analyzes the relationship between ethical vegetarianism and white racism. This plays out in the dreaded comparison of animals with people of color and Jews as exemplified in the PETA campaign and the need for human identification with animals in ethical vegetarianism. To support the viability of ethical vegetarianism, Bailey resolves the dread of this comparison by locating ethical vegetarianism as a strategy of resistance to classist, racist, heterosexist, and colonialist systems of power that often rely on (...) the assumptions of speciesism to ground these axes of oppression. The author carries out this argument to contextualize African American responses to animal welfarism and ethical vegetarianism. (shrink)

The aim of this study is an analysis of the possible adaptive consequences of delivery of low birth weight infants. We attempt to reveal the cost and benefit components of bearing small children, estimate the chance of the infants’ survival, and calculate the mothers’ reproductive success. According to life-history theory, under certain circumstances mothers can enhance their lifetime fitness by lowering the rate of investment in an infant and/or enhancing the rate of subsequent births. We assume that living in a (...) risky environment and giving birth to a small infant may involve a shift from qualitative to quantitative production of offspring. Given high infant mortality rates, parents will have a reproductive interest in producing a relatively large number of children with a smaller amount of prenatal investment. This hypothesis was tested among 650 Gypsy and 717 non-Gypsy Hungarian mothers. Our study has revealed that 23.8% of the Gypsy mothers had low birth weight (<2,500 g) children, whose mortality rate is very high. These mothers also had more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths than those with normal weight children. As a possible response to these reproductive failures, they shortened birth spacing, gaining 2–4 years across their reproductive lifespan for having additional children. Because of the relatively short interbirth intervals, by the end of their fertility period, Gypsy mothers with one or two low birth weight infants have significantly more children than their ethnic Hungarian counterparts. They appear to compensate for handicaps associated with low birth weights by having a larger number of closely spaced children following the birth of one or more infants with a reduced probability of survival. The possible alternative explanations are discussed, and the long-term reproductive benefits are estimated for both ethnic groups. (shrink)

With its implicit vilification of materiality, the notion of objectification has failed to produce a coherent and effective ethical analysis of heterosexual sex work. The concept of derivatization, grounded in an Irigarayan model of embodied intersubjectivity, is more effective. However, queer sex work poses new and different ethical challenges. This paper argues that although queer sex work can entail both objectification and derivatization, the former is not ethically objectionable, and the latter, although the cause for some justified ethical concern, must (...) be analyzed within the context of structural sexual injustice. (shrink)

In Reference re E.I. the Supreme Court of Canada was asked to assess the constitutionality of the federally administered maternity and parental leave benefit regime. This social programme has been a key site of feminist struggle in Canada, with attention focused in recent years on whether the benefit, as delivered, was an equality-enhancing regime. This note examines the way in which the questions posed to the Supreme Court of Canada were framed in a manner that obscured the essential equality dimensions (...) of the issue before the Court. It is argued, however, that, notwithstanding the relatively formal division of powers answer that the Court was called upon to give, the decision is a promisingly substantive reflection on the debate over the most effective means to recognize the care-giving labour of Canadian parents through the delivery of this benefit. (shrink)

Philosophers of earlier ages have usually spent time in considering thenature of marital, and in general familial, duty. Paley devotes an entire book to those ‘relative duties which result from the constitution of the sexes’,1 a book notable on the one hand for its humanity and on the other for Paley‘s strange refusal to acknowledge that the evils for which he condemns any breach of pure monogamy are in large part the result of the fact that such breaches are generally (...) condemned. In a society where an unmarried mother is ruined no decent male should put a woman in such danger: but why precisely should social feeling be so severe? Marriage, the monogamist would say, must be defended at all costs, for it is a centrally important institution of our society. Political community was, in the past, understood as emerging from or imposed upon families, or similar associations. The struggle to establish the state was a struggle against families, clans and clubs; the state, once established, rested upon the social institutions to which it gave legal backing. (shrink)

This article reflects on the convergence of revolutionary anti-capitalism and moral fundamentalism in the contemporary Islamic revival. It is concerned more generally with the recurrent appeal to fundamental value — of a sexual, genealogical or economic kind — in the history of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist movements. Exploring the tradition of Islamist philosophies of finance, the article suggests that Islamic political theology is unique in its ability to separate absolute law from territory . Transgressing the boundaries of nation-state postcolonialism, it thereby (...) relocates absolute value, and hence absolute prohibition, in the realm of the sexual and the divine. (shrink)

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this essay, Cornell first invokes the concept of 'imaginary domain' to challenge the legal legitimacy of heterosexism in any form. She then claims that the imposition of heterosexism on the imaginary is a trauma whose severity can be grasped only with the help of psychoanalysis. Second, she argues that we cannot understand or undermine the power of heterosexist ideas without an alternative ethic of love. In beginning to think about a love that would necessarily pit itself against heterosexism, Cornell (...) draws on Jacques Derrida's metaphor of the lovance. (shrink)

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

: This article critiques Elizabeth Grosz's understanding that queer theory is unproductive insofar as it disrupts the specific identities of gay and lesbian. Reconsidering ideas about desire, the body, and identity that Grosz takes from Gilles Deleuze's work on Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza, this essay argues that, despite her productive reworking of homophobia in terms of "active" and "reactive" forces, Grosz's application of Spinoza is only partial. Focusing on Spinoza's evaluation of bodies, the essay both critiques Grosz's approach to (...) experimental desire and observes Spinozist preoccupations in order to talk about the experimental body. It concludes that if Grosz were to attend more seriously to the Spinozist imperative to analyze a body in terms of its capabilities—that is, its power to be affected—the epistemological basis of her argument would change. It would be difficult to dismiss the plurality and sensibility of a queer body or its challenge to lesbian and gay as the source of a primary identity. (shrink)

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of "woman" that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a "feminine" language is either groundlessly utopian or entails a biological essentialism.

This note examines the case of a group of gay men who, having engaged in consensual sexual acts together, became known as the `Bolton Seven' following their conviction in 1998 for offences of buggery and/or gross indecency. More particularly the note scrutinises the implications of the ages of the participants (one of whom, at 17 $\tfrac{1}{2}$ , was unable to give lawful consent to sexual intercourse with a man) in the light of the enactment of Part I of the Sex (...) Offenders Act 1997 which introduces a system of compulsory registration by some convicted and cautioned sex offenders with the police (including men convicted of, or cautioned for, buggery or gross indecency). The note explores the justification for inclusion of these offences within the remit of the1997 Act together with the cultural construction of gay men as predatory and as constituting a risk to younger members of society. It also analyses some of the effects of the registration requirement in terms of it constituting a potential violation of fundamental rights such as equality and respect for private life. This discussion is located particularly within the context of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 in the U.K. (shrink)

This essay provides an analysis of the terms by which the question of extending civil marriage to same-sex couples has been posed, advanced, and resisted in Canada and the United States in the past few years. Denike draws on feminist theories of justice to evaluate the strategies and approaches of initiatives to reform the laws governing the state's recognition-and lack thereof-of personal relationships of dependency and care. She also examines the political opposition to such reforms and the challenges posed for (...) advancing human rights for gays and lesbians in the face of social and political prejudice against same-sex marriage. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's argument that women need a feminine divine is placed in the context of her analyses of the interconnection between man's appropriation of woman as his "negative alter ego" and his identification with the impossible ego ideal represented by the figure of God. As an alternative, the "feminine divine" is conceived as a realm with which women would be continuous. It would allow mediation between humans, and interrupt cannibalizing appropriations of the other.