Stanley Fish v. Feminist Theory & Cognitive Neuroscience June 30, 2008

Whew!

The connection is a matter of conjecture, but three things are not:

1.  Stanley Fish’s remark in the NY Times about how boring the run-up to the elections is turning out to be.  And his comment:

 It’s often been said that once a woman or an African-American wins the presidency, the obstacles attached to gender and race will just fade away. They already have. I’m not saying that no one will vote against Obama because he’s black; but everyone gets voted against for something, and now that we have gotten quite used to Obama, voting against him because he’s black will be just another ordinary exercise of prejudice, not a special or particularly notable one.

Let’s leave aside the extraordinary idea that the obstacles have faded and look at the claim that follows.  Since “everyone gets voted against for something,” a racist vote against Obama is just par for the course? What is so very hard to understand about the effects of racism or sexism? Voting against someone because you do not like the way they stare into the camera is very different from participating in a prejudice that ends up with a group of people most of whom are disadvantaged in comparison with those who escape the prejudice.

2. Feminist standpoint theory holds that those who live as a subordinate group can understand the world in ways not accessible to the normal understanding of the subordinating person. 

3.  Cognitive neuroscience has explored the many ways in which our capacities to, for example, move through a complex environment are grounded in neural connections almost all of which are below our awareness.  This morning I was thinking of an old example of Elizabeth Anscombe’s:  Someone is coming down a stair and stumbles at the end; they say, “O, I thought there was another step” even though no such thought would have occurred to them.  What this captures is the way that our bodies can embodied expectations of which we are usually unaware, but which it seems right to count as expectations about the environment.

So here’s the conjectured connection:  a lot of us have a knowledge of the effects of living as objects of prejudice and we have a deep bodily-based sense of it.  The expectations are often ones that feminists may spend a lot of effort to bring out and understand.  But the understanding itself is so hard to communicate  because it is a matter of connections that are often part of our quite fundamental ways of coping with our environment. 

The chances of Stanley Fish’s getting it are not that great unless he makes more of an effort than he seems to have done so far.  But we’ve tried to help here and here.

Here’s how it goes: a real tale from academia June 29, 2008

First of all, you need to know that I created a PRETTY GOOD THING. My close male colleague, MN, and I also run A JOLLY NICE GROUP.  And they are connected in that MN helped me  with the PGT and it benefits the JNG, though in fact it helps a lot of others too.

So MN was at a conference and asked me to send him an email flyer about the  PGT, which I did.  PGT, we all agreed, should be open to everyone and I didn’t want it to look like it would have a dominating administrative structure or anything.  The long and the short of it is that I referred faculty to myself (“Contact Dr. jj if you are interested”) but put in an unassuming title, like ‘university coordinator.’  BIG MISTAKE, because MN also sent the  email flyer to our faculty listserv with his return address and everyone who didn’t recognize my name assumed I was a secretary.  “Dear Ms. jj….”

But that’s not a huge deal and I just started to use a more authoritative title, so people could understand why I was actually making some of the decisions.

However, last week MN revealed that he received a letter when the notice went out.  The letter congratulated him on building the PGT, and went onto the issue of his appointing me to the position.  The letter actually vents a lot of academic ill will and slams my character and accomplishments, from publications to promotions, claims I used female charms (e.g., wooed the provost) to get some things, and so on and so forth.  Wow!  I certainly was amazed that anyone would think that wooing would win me anything.  Even if I were inclined to use that, I’m far past the age where that’s a very promising strategy.  But there it is.  And maybe “wooing” was a metaphor?  For paying them money?!?!?

The letter was anonymous, of course.

The interesting question is who is upset about what.  MN is very upset about the letter, and revealed it only because someone else was attacking the PGT.  (A “I don’t know who you all think you are” sort of attack from a department chair in an unpleasantly public way.) 

I reckon that  if  the flyer  had gone out to the faculty under my name with MN as the coordinator, I would have been still assumed to be the secretary.   It’s the sexism, from the assumption that MN gets all the credit, to the idea that I was wooing people to get privileges that is what’s gotten to me.  The hate is hopefully fairly localized; I know the sexism is not.

Mind you, I haven’t actually read the full anonymous hate letter. 

So is this sort of experience typical for women when they get visible power in their society?  Gosh!  Whatever would make one think that?!?

 

 

Ssshhhh! The sunday cat June 29, 2008

is falling asleep.

Who cares if a professor is a woman or a man? And an addition June 27, 2008

Maybe if you are a journalist taking a week-long science course at MIT, having a female teacher makes a HUGE difference.  Want to generalize from that?  Well, maybe.

Here’s the NY Times’ Judith Warner:

I was attending a journalism workshop called “Frontiers of Brain Science.” The other participants were all real science writers, people who don’t have to rack their brains to remember the meaning of the word “ion.”

…

At M.I.T., we were mostly spoken to by men, various kinds of men, of different ages and with different speaking styles, and we interacted with them with typical reportorial formality. Some were more popular with us than others; some were more engaged with us than others. Some spoke right over our heads; some reached even me with perfect clarity.

Something very different happened, however, on the two occasions when we were spoken to by women. The atmosphere in the room changed. We all became more familiar. We asked more questions. We interrupted more. We made sounds of assent or dissent; we questioned methods, concepts, base assumptions. It was as though, with the women, the boundaries dissolved. We were all immediately drawn into relationships.

…

I know that there was no conscious desire on anyone’s part to talk back to them or treat them with less respect. But one woman in particular, Rebecca Saxe, a young, dynamic professor of neurobiology at M.I.T. who gave a riveting presentation on social cognition — “how we reason about the desires and intentions that motivate others’ actions” — was interrupted so much by her super-engaged audience that she didn’t have time to get through essential portions of her talk.

If you don’t teach, you might want to know that the “container model of education” – the professor is to pour knowledge into the students’ mind by lecturing – is not very admired. A thoroughly engaged classroom is considered a wonderful goal to aim at, at least in the US. Every book on improving university teaching I have seen has such engagement as a primary mark of fine teaching.

Of course, women profs can drone on with the best of them. It’s so interesting, though, that the journalists saw the women in this example present knowledge in terms of a personal engagement.

Addition: There are great observations in comments (1) and (3). Let me try to add to the discussion by quoting a bit more of the article. The second part seems to me really worth thinking about. The author, it should be said, worries about the sort of reaction she records.

How much of this had to do with the fact that the women tended to speak more relationally (“I think,” “I feel”), I don’t know. I don’t know if it was created by the fact that the women — to varying degrees — turned the story of their work into personal narratives.
…

“What did you think?” I breathed to a fellow female fellow, as we filed out of the classroom for lunch.
“I have a crush on her [Saxe - jj],” she said. The women around us made approving noises.
“It was her passion and energy and approach that was infectious,” she later explained in an e-mail. “I really had an emotional reaction to her, and found myself day dreaming about being her friend.”

Take back the blogosphere? June 27, 2008

I went to a very interesting event this week, organised by Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy.  A bunch of left liberal bloggers got together to talk about how blogging might engage with and have an impact on national (UK) politics.

The second part of the session (read more about what went on in the first part, and see pics here) addressed the question ‘where are all the women bloggers?’.  Some of the points raised and issues aired in the lively discussion:

• there seemed to be a failure, by some male bloggers, to properly reference or acknowledge their discussion of topics raised by female bloggers.
• it was suggested that women - especially feminist bloggers – might be put off blogging by the nasty trolling that might occur.
• it was mentioned that sometimes women’s comments were ignored or not properly addressed in threads of some of the blogs.
• that feminist blogging is seen as separate from ‘mainstream’ political blogging was discussed as a problem.
• it was asked how men might engage with women bloggers, given the complaints of, on the one hand,giving insufficient attention to women’s or feminist’s bloggings from male political bloggers, and on the other, their alleged ‘hijacking’ of debates or comment threads (answer: respect required!). For more on this topic, see the post at the F word, here.

In the spirit of the discussion, and of drawing attention to women bloggers (and on the viral linkage, ourselves!), here are some left liberal blogs by women, that I discovered at the session. If you have such a blog, or know of others please do share the links in the comments!

• Penny red (left feminist commentary)
• Sadie’s Tavern (lefty politics)
• Angela Saini (commentary on news from journalist and science writer)
• Ariane sherine (‘Comment is Free’ writer’s own blog on recent news, writings, and more)

 Also at the session, and on the women bloggsters scene:

• Cath Elliott
• Natalie Bennett (of Carnival and Philobiblon fame, see also here).

( And for UK politics junkies, see this:

• Westmonster (comment from the corridors of parliament))

Updated: More from the comments-

From JJ:

1.http://www.talkleft.com/
Jeralyn Merritt and her main writers are lawyers; they are interested particularly in issues about criminal law and politics

2.http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
This is a widely admired blog and well cited in the blogsphere.
I’ve heard from good sources that Digby is a woman. While not a feminist blog, its take on things is at least congenial to a feminist approach

From QuestionThat:

Clairwil (http://clairwil.blogspot.com/)
Cheryl (http://bettertobefree.blogspot.com/)
Trixy (http://more-to-life-than-shoes.blogspot.com/)

Ambush predator (http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/)

 

(Updated from comments, thanks! Keep the links coming!)

 

Philosophical Insults June 27, 2008

Thanks, Roberta, for avoiding your lecture notes and finding this!

Take a movie break: “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman” June 27, 2008

 Flying is out on DVD this month, and lucky feministphilosophers got a screener for reviewing.  When this was a feature at Sundance, the buzz was that it was about “gender issues,” but it’s both more and less than that.  Flying is Jennifer Fox’s episodic autobiographical documentary about her own search for what it means to be a woman, and to be happy, two fundamental philosophical questions treated deeply at somes times, trivially at others, with a good dose of humor lightening up the self-indulgence.  If that’s the way you’d describe conversations with girlfriends over a bottle of wine, it’s no coincidence. Such chats with her friends in multiple countries are half the film.

 

 In an interview Jennifer Fox said she was a “typical modern woman trying to make sense of my life by talking to other women,” and although she was way off the mark with regard to how typical she is, the project of talking to other women to make more sense out of life is both instantly relatable and innovative.  The six-episode series begins with what Fox calls her personal crisis: entering her forties, lacking the milestones of other women – marriage, kids, long-term relationship – and touched off, in the first episode, at the moment she calls her married lover and gets his wife on the phone (which is interesting, but I’m just saying, not a universal experience).

 

 Fox embarks on the project of interviewing the women she knows, and at times, passing the camera to them to interview her, in a collaborative effort to make sense of how to be women, and to be happy, which are not always the same things.  The series has been compared to Sex and the City (oh, please), to soap operas, to Annie Hall, etc., but in the spirit of feministphilosophers, I reject the comparisons.  This show is its own animal, going to the source to ask real women around the world about their experiences with sex, abortion, birth control, divorce, abuse, love, motherhood, marriage, and friendship.  Philosophers will smile sympathetically when I say Fox suffers from Nussbaum syndrome, i.e., this worthwhile project could still use more editing and goes longer than it needs, but at least in a series, each episode gets to end with a cliffhanger! Excellent.  Worth a viewing, and for another week, $3 from each DVD sale will benefit the organization, Our Bodies, Ourselves.

 

Female terrorists June 25, 2008

Time magazine reports, here, on the deployment of women suicide bombers. In sending us the link (thanks!), Time described the article as ’shed[ing] some light on the cycle of hopelessness some Iraqi women find themselves in, and wonders what their motives are, if not political or religious.’

Brief overview: the piece focuses on one woman, Hasna (not her real name) who undertook a suicide bombing mission, after her brother died in a failed attempt. It is suggested that her motivations were not primarily religious or political, but that rather her state of grief and hopelessness was what made her vulnerable to undertaking terrorism.

First off, it is of course very difficult to imagine what kind of social context and mind set would make suicide bombing seem like a good option. And the article does indeed show that situations of desperation and distress can contribute to the willingness of individuals to put themselves forward for such a role. It’s hard to see a choice stricken by such emotions as unproblematically free. And a context in which such a role is a preferred option in itself casts doubt on the choice; the other options must indeed seem pretty hopeless.

But in reading the piece, I was reminded of some work by Marilyn Friedman on the way that female suicide bombers are regarded by their extremist peers, and how they are portrayed in the media. One of her claims is that, amongst the extremists,there is often a discrepancy between the regard for male and for female suicide bombers; the women are not esteemed as martyrs in the way that the men are. The last line of the Time article suggests as much: “God is great!” says the cameraman. “The stupid woman did it.”

Friedman also claims that from the outsider perspective and in the media, it is frequently the case that the women are regarded as coerced and mere puppets. And whilst it seems pretty clear that, in this case, Hasna’s grief played a key role in motivating her, it is also pretty clear that she wasn’t simply swooped upon by extremists in her state of vulnerability: she was previously helping her brother to prepare for his mission; and it seems she had to persuade the extremists with whom she was to work: ‘The group was initially skeptical — they had never worked with a woman, and felt certain she would lose her nerve at the last moment’.

To see her as entirely coerced, then, seems to make invisible the quite significant agency that she must have exercised to undertake a terror bombing attack. Perhaps it’s simply easier not to acknowledge that women might strongly hold extremist beliefs, and be willing to engage in terrorist action… Hmmm. Many complicated issues. What do readers think?

Final gender-equality related note: part of the problem with detecting female suicide bombers, it seems, is that policemen cannot search women. Yet it is difficult (‘frowned upon’) for women to join the security forces…

On the unexpected variety in human choices … June 25, 2008

The NY Times today contains a feature about Pashe Keqi, the last of Albania’s sworn virgins. 

The practice of the sworn virgin occurred “under the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a code of conduct that has been passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more than five centuries. Under the Kanun, the role of women is severely circumscribed: Take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman’s life is worth half that of a man, a virgin’s value is the same – 12 oxen.”

In a land of war and disease, women might take on the role of a man to replace a dead father, to avoid an arranged marriage, or just to live a better life.  Their assumption of the role was very thorough and they ranked, behaved and were accepted as a man.

Pashe Keqi’s observations on her choice:

“Back then, it was better to be a man because, before, a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” says Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of Raki and smoking cigarettes. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men and are even more powerful, and I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

Borrow a Person June 25, 2008

The Living Library sounds like an exercise in objectification– volunteers are classified as ‘Gay Person’, ‘Immigrant’, ‘Police Officer’, etc, and customers come in to borrow them for 30 minute chats. In fact, it’s meant to be– and apparently turns out to be– a fascinating, innovative experiment in achieving understanding between people from different sorts of lives. Here’s a bit of Gay Person’s story:

Earlier in the day, Alternative Medicine Therapist… had said to me that she was learning a lot about her own prejudices from readers and her words came flooding back when I found two young black men waiting for me at the desk. As I sat down with them I braced myself for a stream of invective when one them gently asked, “Do you experience homophobia often?” It surprised me to find myself saying yes and we began one of the most fascinating conversations I have had for a long time. They said that they both had often had strongly anti-gay opinions. I said that if I saw them on the top deck of the night bus I’d probably go back downstairs. And once that had broken the ice, the conversation became an exhilarating opening of hearts. It was a shame we didn’t have more time to talk – 30 minutes can pass very quickly – but I left with real hope. If all young people were like this, I felt, the world would soon be a better place.

Of course, there are lots of problems, perhaps foremost amongst them the way it may shore up idea that a single individual can serve as representative of a whole group, or the apparent presupposition that there will be no overlap between groups (e.g. no Gay Immigrant). But it still sounds like a valuable start toward provoking dialogue, and these problematic assumptions can of course be explicitly discussed in the conversations.

Thanks for the link, lydia!

The 59th Carnival of Feminists June 25, 2008

It’s here.  Congratulations to Jender for the post of hers that was chosen!

Does philosophy have a woman problem? (Snort!) June 24, 2008

Collecting some news from comments and adding in a bit of our own, we draw your attention to:

1.  The Bad:  The four volumes of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics have no female authors.  At all.”But,” we hear frequentlly, “there aren’t any women doing metaphysics.  The lie is given to this by:

2.  The Good: A conference at Leeds on Ontology with excellent women metaphysicians from Cornell, Yale, Leeds and Toronto.  Cheers for the organizers, one of whom has been a frequent commentator here.

3.  The getting better.  First, the bad news.  The Society for Philosophy and Psychology is having its annual conference this week in Philadelphia.  There are no women philosophers among its invited speakers.  On the main program there are two women giving ‘contributed’ papers and one female commentator.**  The male philosophers on the main program total 29 (approximately).  There’s also a two-session workshop before the conferences in experimental philosophy, and there are no women philosopherss.

But then there’s good news.  When it was apprised of the problem of low representation of women, the Society’s executive committee determined to create a committee on diversity to try to understand philosophy’s exclusionary practices and to retify the problems they have caused, at least in the Society and in the field.

**There was a second woman asked to comment, we are told.  She declined the paper they offered, but said she’d consider a different one.  And that was the end of the correspondence. 

(Edited in response to Sally’s correction.)

Picturing America June 23, 2008

Thanks to today’s Guardian, I learned about the US project, Picturing America.  Schools can apply for it and in return they receive 40 pictures of American arts/crafts for the school.  Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association, it is spearheaded by John Updike. 

So the thought of Updike determining the national treasures sent off alarm bells.  I went and looked at the announcement and then the official site.  And then I tried to find some critical commentary other than the “great opportunity” boilerplate stuff.  There is none.  None?!?  The NY Times doesn’t even mention it.  Somewhere around 25,000 schools have the kit; NY City alone has about 1,700.  And no critical comment?  And I really searched, using both popular and university search engines.

It is not that it is really bad.  In fact, there’s enough there to mildly irritate the anti-PC people.  But the representation of women?  One women painter and one women photographer.  So suppose they allotted  2 places for women, 2 for blacks, 2 for native americans and 2 for Hispanics.  That would leave…. .  Well, I’m so sick of counting conference participants that I didn’t do the sums, but 2 out of 40 for over 50% of the human race.  OK, maybe so women have been typically as excluded from art as from philosophy, but still.  Not even a little Georgia O’Keefe? 

Too late?  Then why the 1963 Dibenkorn?

And then the pictures are taken to illustrate great American themes.  Forget “as American as motherhood and apple pie.”  Domesticity in any form isn’t one of them.  Nor religion in fact.  Of course, not wealth.  Well, have a look.

And let us know what you think.  I am particularly concerned that for many children it carries the messages I got as a child.  Which is that the production of American art is seriously disconnected from ordinary folk.  You know, the non-elitists, and particularly the mothers and sisters and daughters.

 

Here’s the announcement and here’s The website.

 And finally I broke down and did count.  Out of the list of 40 named artists, it is really true that only 2 are women.  Looks like a philosophy conference!

 

Load-Shedding in Bangladesh June 23, 2008

We received the news of electricity shortages in Bangladesh from our friend, KW.  A visit to her blog is highly recommended! 

Here’s a picture of her students from the Nari Jibon project that we featured here.

As  you can see, the picture was taken during a load-shedding period..

Maybe there are some nuggets of wisdom June 23, 2008

in this article arguing that women just don’t want to do engineering and so-called “hard science”. But somehow I doubt it when the evidence draws on the “fact” that philosophy has tons of women in it, and when the list of the 5 countries offering women the most financial security and the most family-friendly policies includes the US (nothing says “family friendly” and “financially secure” like a lack of guaranteed health coverage, maternity leave, and childcare). Wow, that’s some nifty science for ya. And some spectacular journalistic fact-checking. (Thanks, Heg!)

Sunday cat: the impossibility of perfection June 21, 2008

Sometimes sharing is too hard.

Turn the sound off before you start it!

“Homosexual-led persecution of church” June 21, 2008

A joke, right? We all know the attitude of many Christian churches is too close to persecution of homosexuals; see here and here, for example.  How could such malign actions possibly be going in the other direction? 

And plenty of religious groups opposed even secular “gay acceptance” activities, thus trying to prevent efforts to diminish the cruel and sometimes lethal persecution gays do suffer.

But, no, some people apparently actually maintain that homosexuals are persecuting churches. And the nature of the persecution is quite ironic. Most persecution is at least ostensibly to get rid of something. But homosexuals are persecuting churches in order to join them and to get them to stop their discriminatory behavior.  As NPR, quoted by the blog linked to immediately above, put it:

In recent years, some states have passed laws giving residents the right to same-sex unions in various forms. Gay couples may marry in Massachusetts and California. There are civil unions and domestic partnerships in Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Oregon. Other states give more limited rights.

Armed with those legal protections, same-sex couples are beginning to challenge policies of religious organizations that exclude them, claiming that a religious group’s view that homosexual marriage is a sin cannot be used to violate their right to equal treatment. Now parochial schools, “parachurch” organizations such as Catholic Charities and businesses that refuse to serve gay couples are being sued — and so far, the religious groups are losing.

When suing for your civil rights is presented as persecuting, watch out! You may well be in the Orwellian land of the far right.

Update: the VA and health care for women vets June 21, 2008

Thanks to Ms for this update on women vets’ health care,which we discussed here:

Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake said on Friday that the agency is working to improve the health care offered to women vets. The announcement follows an internal VA study that found that female veterans have more difficulty obtaining quality outpatient healthcare than their male counterparts.

“We are making a full-court press to ensure that women veterans receive the highest quality of care,” Peake said, according to the Associated Press.

There has been a consistent air of understatement in the announcements about women and health care. Have a look at travelvet’s comments in our previous post and see if that looks like a story about her having “more difficulty.” “Incapable of getting care needed to save her life” is more like it.

Where do emotions come from? June 20, 2008

Theories of the mind can be regulatory and incorporate normative models that are used to evaluate and control.  So while theories of mind are not necessarily directly a topic of feminist inquiry, they certainly are indirectly.

The following, I have to say, is a pretty unexpected theory of emotion, at least from my point of view.  The idea is that emotions have to do with the control of sensory input.  Fear makes one much more capable of picking up cues in the environment, while disgust dampens down sensory input.

Add to this the fact that emotions are very easily shared – the sight of a frightened person can arouse fear in the viewer – and one has the interesting hypothesis that groups sharing an emotional reaction are also sharing changes in sensory experience.

 
Abstract from:  Nature Neuroscience
Published online: 15 June 2008 | 

Expressing fear enhances sensory acquisition

Joshua M Susskind, Daniel H Lee, Andrée Cusi, Roman Feiman, Wojtek Grabski & Adam K Anderson

 

---

Abstract

It has been proposed that facial expression production originates in sensory regulation. Here we demonstrate that facial expressions of fear are configured to enhance sensory acquisition … when subjects posed expressions of fear, they had a subjectively larger visual field, faster eye movements during target localization and an increase in nasal volume and air velocity during inspiration. The opposite pattern was found for disgust. Fear may therefore work to enhance perception, whereas disgust dampens it. These convergent results provide support for the Darwinian hypothesis that facial expressions are not arbitrary configurations for social communication, but rather, expressions may have originated in altering the sensory interface with the physical world.

The authors are in the dept of psychology at the University of Toronto. The publication that has accepted the paper is about as good as one can get.

Reporting misconduct June 19, 2008

Feminists say that sexual harassment in academia is underreported, but do we know it is?

I do not know if rigorous research on this issue has been done, but Nature reports today on scientific research integrity and some of the lessons revealed suggest something we feminists have long know:  whistle-blowers can have a very tough time.  Scientific misconduct and sexual harrassment are very different, but the report suggests academic cultures do not encourage the reporting of bad news and they can fail miserably in self-regulation. 

First of all, the conclusion:

Nearly one generation after the effort to reduce misconduct in science began, the responses by NIH scientists suggests [sic] that falsified and fabricated research records, publications, dissertations and grant applications are much more prevalent than has been suspected to date. Our study calls into question the effectiveness of self-regulation. We hope it will lead individuals and institutions to evaluate their commitment to research integrity.

 
And one of the researchers’ recommendation described against a background of concealment:

Protect whistleblowers

Careful attention must be paid to the creation and dissemination of measures to protect whistleblowers. Responders to our survey said that reporting would be most likely to improve if institutions and the federal government increased the whistleblower protection. Indeed, more than two-thirds of whistleblowers, in a Research Triangle Institute study, experienced at least one negative outcome as a direct result of their actions. Plus, 43% reported that institutions encouraged them to drop the allegation.

The article is fully available online.