The SWIP (US) online newsletter is out! There’s lots of good stuff to be found, but I was particularly intrigued by this question in Chris Cuomo’s Editor’s Note:
If professors outside the medical and professional schools continue to become more and more underpaid, philosophy departments are sure to become increasingly “diverse” and “woman-friendly.” If men began to flee the humanities due to low pay, would that be good for women? Would it be good for philosophy?
Go grab something red to wear to show your support for ending the silence about violence against women of colour (especially if you’re in the US). And check out this website for more things to do.
Today is UK Women’s No-Pay Day. (Thanks for the tip, Jender-Parents.)
If you’re a UK resident or citizen, go sign the petition at the Fawcett Society!
This book by Louise Sloan has been making the rounds lately. Check out the interview at Salon here, and the mention by Jessica at Feministing here.
Some responses to this book have really surpised me. Apparently women who become single moms by choice are different from other kinds of single mothers, i.e. more morally degenerate. Who knew?
The most surprising bit of mud that has been slung in this debate so far can be found here. The claim is that no woman should choose single motherhood. Single motherhood is a terrible, tragic thing that sometimes happens to people, but no woman should knowingly choose such a life for herself or her child. And the reason? Beyond the predictable canon of moral degeneracies and social dysfunctions, there is this: That a woman who chooses to become a single mother is treating her child like the latest fashion accessory. Immediately, the image of a small underarm dog in an expensive purse springs to mind. Only certain kinds of woman sport these doggie bags: rich women. So this makes me think. Is the attack an assault on liberal ideology and a changing conception of the family, or is it an assault on single women who can support themselves, their families, and their choices? (Never mind that portraying women like Sloan as wealthy princesses is a huge mistake. Sloan devotes an entire chapter of her book to the question of whether or not this choice is an affordable one.)
A tough, tough question, as we’ve discussed before. Through the wonderful new Feminist Philosophy Draft Exchange, I learned that Kate Norlock has now done us all a wonderful service. Here’s what she did:
I … added a page…which tabulates thejournals listing on Philosophers’ Index which have published articleswith “feminism” in the descriptor. It yielded a ‘ranking’ of sorts,or at least a rough idea of frequency.
Kate’s done us all a great service. Go check it out! Note: I’ve realised that my methodological comment was wrong, so I’ve removed it.
Many philosophy professors first encountered this form of question as about the kind(s) of truth that philosophy aims to uncover and clarify. Or so I would suppose. Certainly for my peer group, there was also a strong and uncomfortable sense that philosophy is somehow irrelevant, but for some of us at least that was just one more very hard problem. And against it we could balance thousands of years of human enquiry.
Yet so fast has been the change in the philosophical community that for many of us – again I am assuming – Anita Allen’s concerns about what philosophy is are now deeply important. Perhaps this is due to the fact that enough women are in philosophy and have experienced its exclusionary nature without being co-opted by it. We know that acceptance involving passing is at best a painful tool to use.
Or so it seems here and now, and other takes would be very welcome. But all this is a lead up to another version of the title question. While Allen’s statement
I feel that philosophy is hoisting itself by its own petard. Its unwillingness to be more inclusive in terms of issues, methods, demographics, means that it’s losing out on a lot of vibrancy, a lot of intellectual power.”
clearly in some ways rings true, I’m wondering whether the exceptions are also significant. To say this is not to defend philosophy against the charges of sexism and racism, but I’m wondering now how uniform the field is.
What exceptions, you might ask. Well, a lot of philosophy of mind has gone empirical while at the same time taking some account of the phenomenological tradition. And though the now closely related cognitive psychology is hardly a feminist stronghold, it seems a lot better than philosophy has been. A consequence is that there are more women at conferences, though journal publication remains significantly exclusive. Perhaps ethics has also changed; the cadre of female virtue ethicists, for example, is certainly notable.
Such changes can actually lead one to despair, since they can make the socially regressive attitudes of philosophy departments all the clearer. And such attitudes obviously create a very major problem for combating the field’s racism. But one might wonder whether the field is starting to fracture in a way that at least creates opportunities feminist department members might be able to use to more the field further forward.
Is it time to think about strategizing perhaps more broadly? Any recommendations? Additions? Objections?
The Philadelphia Inquirer has an interesting interview with Anita Allen, philosopher and law professor, about her view of philosophy and her experiences as both philosopher and law professor. It makes for depressing reading. At the time of the interview, Allen was about to give the keynote address to the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers.
“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them. The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow. Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy?”I feel that philosophy is hoisting itself by its own petard. Its unwillingness to be more inclusive in terms of issues, methods, demographics, means that it’s losing out on a lot of vibrancy, a lot of intellectual power.”Despite delight at the birth of the collegium, the existence finally of a “critical mass” of black female philosophers, she admits “philosophy still feels to me like an isolated profession. I don’t think I would encourage a black woman who has big ideas necessarily to go into philosophy,” Allen says. “Why? What’s the point? Go out and win the Pulitzer Prize! Don’t worry about academic philosophy. On the other hand, I would like to see that world open up to more women and women of color.”
And to some extent Allen seems hopeful:
“My hope,” Allen says of the Nashville gathering, “is that this meeting will be for black women philosophers what the first meeting of black women lawyers was for us in the early ’90s. . . . We have now arrived. And I think women in philosophy can also arrive.”
See below for more on the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers. Thanks, Sally, for the article!
The Collegium of Black Women Philosophers has now met! This photo is organizer Kathryn Gines and first US black woman PhD in philosophy, Joyce Mitchell Cook.
You can read about it here. We’d really love to get a first-hand report on this. If any of our readers attended, we’d like to hear about it. One way to tell us would be to put some comments on this post. Another way– which we’d be really excited about– would be to write a guest post for us, either anonymously or not. If you’re interested, just click on contact and let us know!
In her recent reivew of Susan faludi’s “The Terror Dream,” Michiko Kakutani writes
This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name.
We (Jender) blogged about the Faludi book a while back, and the point here is not whether, as the present review points out, there are counter-examples to Faludi’s generalizations, but rather the opening sentence of the review.
If there were a class in how to write bad reviews, it could start with “Announcing your bias in the first sentence,” and use Kakutani’s sentence as an excellent example. It implies:
1. Feminisim has a bad name
2. There’s something like a whole genre (“sort”) of tendentious, self-important and sloppy feminist books.
Really? Thanks to the efforts of so many people, the first may be true in some (large?) circles. But don’t we need some evidence for the second? Dare one suggest that MK is the sort of reviewer who gives journalism a bad name when she writes tendentious, self-important and sloppy comments like this?
Quote from a scientist, discussing behavior of worms that have been genetically manipulated to be attracted to “the same sex”. So what it is to act and think like a “boy” is to be attracted to “girls”. Problematic enough (especially since the claim is that these *worms* act and think like boys, which seems to me pretty insulting to boys). But it gets more so:
There are no true females and only one in 500 nematodes is male. Most are hermaphrodites, with both male and female organs. Jorgensen and White loosely refer to hermaphrodites as females because they produce offspring.
What it is to be a “girl” is to produce offspring. So, being “a girl” is a matter of reproductive ability, and acting like “a boy” is a matter of who you’re attracted to. Good to know.Still, the study seems to show that, at least for some worms, sexual orientation is genetically “hard-wired” in the brain. This may be interesting and useful once we free it from the desperate attempt to describe it in terms of ill-defined sex/gender categories.
Many thanks for Pandagon’s link to Punkassblog
The Bingo card is larger and clearer on the linked site, but see below for what I could get onto the page here.
It’s up at Cubically Challenged, and it looks great! Very sadly, I haven’t had the time to properly look through it. But if you do, and you have some recommendations, do put them in the comments to this post.
The Document the Silence Project aims to end the lack of attention to crimes of violence against women of color in the US. They have an important event coming up on October 31, and I’d urge you to participate:
Recent events in the United States have moved us to action. Violence against women is sadly, not a new phenomenon in our country or in the world, however, in the last year women of color have experienced brutal forms of violence, torture, rape and injustice which have gone unnoticed, received little to no media coverage, or a limited community response. We are responding to:
The brutal and inhumane rape, torture, and kidnapping of Megan Williams in Logan, West Virginia who was held by six assailants for a month.
Rape survivors in the Dunbar Housing Projects in West Palm Beach, Florida one of whom was forced to perform sexual acts on her own child.
A 13 year old native American girl was beaten by two white women and has since been harassed by several men yelling “white power” outside of her home
Seven black lesbian girls attempted to stop an attacker and were latter charged with aggravated assault and are facing up to 11 year prison sentences
In a Litany of Survival, Audre Lorde writes, “When we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.” These words shape our collective organizing to break the silence surrounding women of color’s stories of violence. We are asking for community groups, grass-root organizations, college campus students and groups, communities of faith, online communities, and individuals to join us in speaking out against violence against women of color. If we speak, we cannot be invisible.
Join us and stand up to violence against women!
Be bold, be brave, be red. Wear red on October 31, 2007. Take a picture or video of yourself and friends wearing red. Send it to: beboldbered@gmail.com. We’ll post it!
Take Your Red to the Streets! Know of a location where violence occurred against a woman of color? Have a public location where you feel women of color are often ignored? Make violence against women of color visible by decorating the space in red. Be sure to send us pictures and or video of your display!
Rally! Gather your friends, family, and community to rally. Check out the Document the Silence website for the litany we’re asking participants to read together on October 31st. Be sure to send us pictures and/or video of the event! You could even gather where you created a display!
For more Information on how to Host a RED Rally, please click on the page “How to Host a Red Rally.”
Share your story of silence. Share your own story of silence by uploading it to the Document the Silence website (http://documentthesilence.wordpress.com/). You can send a story in any form you’d like – as a written statement, video clip, movie, documentary, or visual art.
For more information, go here.
From an email I just received:
This is just a reminder that the deadline for the 2007 FWSA essay
competition is just over a week away (1 November, 2007).We are inviting entries from students who are doing innovative and
interdisciplinary work which is ground in feminist theory, and welcome
entries from students from any discipline and at any stage of their studies
at a UK or Irish university. The prize for the winning essay is £200 and one
year’s FWSA membership; the top six entries will be published in a special
issue of the Journal of International Women’s Studies.Essays should be between 4000-8000 words, and should be submitted
electronically as a single MS Word document, including bibliography and
cover sheet (which can be downloaded from www.fwsa.org.uk/essay.htm).The deadline for submission is 1 November, 2007 and entries can be submitted at any time between now and then.
We had 40 entries last year, with a good mix of undergraduate and
postgraduate entries, and we would like to achieve an even higher number of
entries this year from across the disciplines. I would be grateful if you
could display and circulate the attached poster as widely as possible in
order to promote the competition. Also, if you are a member staff, please
encourage your students to submit essays or dissertations; if you are a
student, and you have a piece of work that you enjoyed writing and were
pleased with, then please think about submitting it.For further information about the competition, or about previous winners,
please go here.
or you can e-mail fwsa@fsmail.net .We’re looking forward to reading the entries later this year!
Best wishes
Karen Throsby (on behalf of the FWSA executive committee)
Question for the day: Can/should someone who is pro-reproductive rights/pro-choice say “there are too many abortions”?
Well, here’s an argument (from Ann Furedi, chief executive of BPAS, the UK charity providing abortion and contraceptive care) that such a claim is incompatible with being truly pro-choice:
“There are many positive reasons why abortion numbers can increase – because women are more easily able to access the services they need, because more abortion care is funded by the NHS, and because more women now believe abortion is an acceptable option if they are faced with an unintended pregnancy.”If you are opposed to abortion in principle, these changes will be unwelcome, but if you believe that women should be able to make decisions about their reproductive future, then these are positive changes.”Of course its better to prevent an unwanted pregnancy than to end one in abortion. I’ve never met a woman in a BPAS abortion clinic who didn’t want to not be there. No woman aspires to have an abortion.”But abortion is not in itself the problem. The problem is the unwanted pregnancy and abortion can be the solution to that for many women. There’s no right or wrong number; we need as many abortions as are necessary to solve the problem pregnancies that women face.”
Everything Furedi says seems right. But if it’s true that it’s better to prevent an unwanted pregnancy than to have an abortion, and also true (as I’m sure Furedi would agree) that we could do a better job of preventing unwanted pregnancies through increased knowledge about and access to contraception, then it also seems true that there are too many abortions. Surely we’d be better off with fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions.
I think this apparent puzzle hinges on what possibilities we’re comparing with the real world when deciding whether “there are too many abortions” is true. Here are two options:
(1) To evaluate the truth of “There are too many abortions”, we should compare the actual world with one in which everything is the same but fewer women get abortions. If that world is better, then there are too many abortions. No pro-choice person should agree that there are too many abortions on this reading– because that would mean it would be better to have just as many unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions.
(2) To evaluate the truth of “There are too many abortions”, we should compare the actual world with all of the other options that include fewer abortions. If some of those are better, then “there are too many abortions” is true. Plenty of pro-choice people could agree with “there are too many abortions” on this reading. A world with fewer unwanted pregnancies due to better contraceptive access is better than the actual world, for example.
The problem is that when a pro-choice person says “there are too many abortions”, it’s far too easy to be misinterpreted, quoted out of context, and interpreted as wanting to restrict access to abortions. So can a pro-choice person agree that there are too many abortions? Yes, on the right understanding of the claim. Should they do so, strategically speaking? Maybe not, unless explain themselves very well, and they’re very confident that all their reasons will be properly quoted. With an ambiguity this big and important, one needs to be careful.
We have better sex. Thanks, Calypso, for the empirical confirmation.
The Canadian Philosophical Association Equity Committee now has a blog! Go check it out. It looks like they could use some more readers who are actually sympathetic to feminism.
The Guardian this weekend contained reviews (here, here, here and here) of the following books, which looked to be interesting:
Haven’t read any of them, but they’re on the ‘to read’ list! (and if you don’t get round to reading the books, the reviews themselves, linked above, are interesting)
Alternet has an article discussing a survey which shows women in childbirth not being properly informed about medical interventions, and being given medical interventions without their consent. All bad, I agree completely. But there’s a trend running through the piece which suggests that if women were able to have skillful helpers for natural childbirth everything would go according to plan. Take these quotes for example:
unless you are willing to research in depth, shop around for care providers and advocate stubbornly for what you want, you probably won’t have the labor you expect.
Despite the relative health of women in the United States, many women are not getting the uncomplicated births they might expect.
The fact is that childbirth is inherently unpredictable. Telling women that if they shop around hard enough for the right midwife, and work hard enough on their relaxation techniques and positions they’ll have a great uncomplicated time is SERIOUS misinformation. It’s the sort of thing that makes women blame themselves if something goes wrong and they end up desperately needing an intervention, or if they change their minds and decide they really would like pain relief after all. I’ve read far too many stories of women who feel like failures because of these things. Frankly, I am the only woman I know whose first birth went exactly according to plan, and that was because it was a planned caesarean. (And I have lots of friends who had midwives and doulas.) I strongly believe that women should be given natural childbirth as a real option, and given all the assistance they need for it. But suggesting that if they make this choice everything will be just as they plan is wrong.
Apparently there is now a woman doll which will moan with pleasure only if the human being interacting with it manages to do the right things– which change randomly every time. The idea of using a doll for sex with doll orgasms as one’s goal is a fascinating development of the using things as people theme. It’s not actually clear whether anyone would really do this– the piece is apparently the work of an artist, although it’s being presented at Arse Electronica, a porn and technology event. There’s obviously there’s something nice about emphasising the importance of thinking about one’s partner’s pleasure, and so a part of me thinks a sex toy like this is a nice (though somehow creepy) idea. However, its (male) maker seems to think that it does a good job of replicating female sexuality. One idea he emphasises is that female sexuality is complex and changeable, and that seems true enough. But I’m not so thrilled with the idea that women are just random in their responses, or with this:
He designed Moaning Lisa specifically for Arse Elektronika, with help from conference organizer Kyle Machulis, to demonstrate the videogame-like properties of the human body.
Somehow human being as videogame doesn’t seem like much of an advance in our thought. Especially since he insists that males are not like videogames:
“Male sex sensors are biased, and not as spread out” over the body, Ganucheau said. “Sure, there are deviances in distribution, but overall it’s not as dynamic as a female. I find that if you go straight for male genitalia, the norm is that you’re guaranteed to get someone off.”This situation, he asserted, would make for a pretty boring game. You grab the genitals and you win every time.
As Annalee Newitz of Alternet notes, not all men would agree with this vision of their sexuality. More generally, I tend to think that very few people’s sexual responses (male or female) could be accurately characterised as completely random or nearly wholly predictable. Though, of course, all this reminds me of Irigaray’s claims about women having sex organs all over their bodies. (In my cynical and uncharitable moments, I have sometimes reflected on how much more fun this would make such things as twiddling one’s thumbs.) And, finally, I feel obliged to note that the picure below is just kind of icky.
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