Reading classical male philosophers through a feminist lens January 31, 2009

Feminists may read philosophers in new and important ways.  Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this is Annette Baier’s reading of Hume, in which she strongly resists the traditional individualist readings of him and  reveals the extent  to which Hume saw society as important in the development of the varieties of human excellence.  Jenny Lloyd and Jackie Taylor are two people who have also contributed to this understanding of Hume.

Nancy Tuana’s series, ReReading the Canon, has encouraged feminists to embark on such re-understandings, and I’m wondering whether readers of this blog have thought about feminist readings of the classical philosophers, either in that series or elsewhere.  If so, which have been particularly helpful to you, do you think?  Or helpful to the community’s more accurate understanding of the philosopher?

The historical re-reading can overlap with another kind of re-reading, one in which feminists provide a critique of a topic in philosophy and its standard treatment.  Here too often the themes of the critique can show up in work the guys produce and when it does it arguably gets a much more sustained audience.  Readers might want also to mention when and when  this has happened.

And if you are an editor of a volume in the Re-reading series, please feel free to mention your authors!  (The same goes if you are one of the authors.)

How can we make higher education more inclusive? January 31, 2009

It’s a long post, but I could really do with your thoughts!

Suppose a university or college wanted to review the inclusivity of the curriculum.  Not recruitment, or admissions, or student support, but the core learning, teaching and assessment activities.  What might that mean? And how should it be presented to busy academics? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but it’s easy to get bogged down in bureaucratic language, so I wanted to see if I could articulate some basic claims that might be behind such an initiative.  My starting point is the thought that

• although there are many similarities among students and the people teaching them, there are also many differences;
• some of these differences are culturally and politically significant in ways which have affected people’s access to, and success within, higher education;
• these inequalities are not inevitable – they are, in part, the result of barriers created by practices and policies in learning, teaching and assessment;
• we should be working to identify and remove such barriers.

Given this starting point, I take the ‘inclusivity’ of the curriculum to be the extent to which it draws in a wide range of people and enables them to learn to the best of their ability.  So I’m thinking about members of all kinds of groups traditionally underserved by higher education.  The kinds of barriers which would make a curriculum less inclusive, then, might include

• drawing syllabus content throughout a degree programme from a narrow understanding of the subject or discipline, to the exclusion of critical or marginalised perspectives (see Jill Gordon’s paper What Can White Faculty Do – sadly not available for free unless you have access via an institutional library);
• using ‘high stakes’ delivery or assessment, which only gives students one opportunity to participate or to demonstrate their achievement and leaves no room for them to learn from mistakes;
• relying heavily on a single method of delivery (for instance, the traditional lecture) or a single method of assessment (for instance, the traditional written exam) (see Making your teaching inclusive);
• assuming that students already understand the cultures and norms of higher education in your country – or of specific disciplines – and so failing to make expectations clear;
• using illustrations, examples and language which reinforce stereotypes or convey the message that some ways of being are ‘normal’ and others ‘abnormal’;
• stereotyping students from particular groups and (even unwittingly) treating them differently as a result (see our other posts on implicit bias and the American Psychological Association on racism and psychology) ;
• only offering opportunities for further research or study at times which are inaccessible for students with caring commitments or who need to earn money alongside their studies;
• allowing offensive behaviour or speech to go unchallenged in a way which makes people feel humiliated, excluded or silenced.

Are there other reasons to pursue this work – or reasons not to pursue it?  Are there other barriers that seem obvious to you?  What kinds of evidence would help establish the nature of the barriers?  Or is this the wrong way to think about it?

If you work in higher education, how could you raise these issues with colleagues?  And how do you think the conversations would go?

Marie Stopes would have loved it. January 30, 2009

For Stopes on the topic, see here. For the book, see here. Thanks (?), lp.

Good things January 30, 2009

Wanting to feel good about Obama again? Head on over to Feministe. Reflect on the fact that the very first bill he signed was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and check out the photographic contrasts they call attention to (and see how pleased Obama looks). Then read about all the ways that the stimulus bill is good for women, even if it’s not all we’d like it to be.

Glory Be! January 29, 2009

Even my state is no longer red!

 

Released by Gallup Jan. 28, 2009:

“Feisty Working Women” January 29, 2009

Gail Collins is celebrating today’s signing – by Obama – of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act [See Jender's post on her here.]  She mentions several other FW women who took action that has  made work  conditions better for other women, though too often not for themselves.

Another was Eulalie Cooper, a flight attendant who sued Delta Air Lines in the mid-’60s when she was fired for being married. …

Patricia Lorance, an Illinois factory worker, went to court after her union and employer secretly agreed to new seniority rules that discriminated against the women who had been promoted in the post-Civil Rights Act era of the 1970s. …

Ledbetter’s real soul sister is Lorena Weeks of Wadley, Ga. Weeks, now 80, had worked two jobs to support her orphaned siblings, then struggled with her husband to set enough money aside to assure their children would be able to go to college. A longtime telephone employee, she applied for a higher-paying job overseeing equipment at the central office. Both her union and the management said the job was unsuitable for a woman because it involved pushing 30-pound equipment on a dolly, even though Weeks regularly toted around a 34-pound typewriter at her clerical job.  Weeks v. Southern Bell helped smash employers’ old dodge of keeping women out of higher-paying positions by claiming that they required qualifications only men could fulfill.

 

How to reinforce stereotypes in the classroom… January 28, 2009

Context: a discussion of personal injury cases in a tort law class…

Student:  Wasn’t P v. Q the one where the victim’s sexual performance was affected?
Lecturer:  No, P v. Q was an infection.  And anyway, the victim was a woman.

…laughter all round, except not from me.

At the time, I took the lecturer to be implying one of two things:  (a) only men have (or do?) ’sexual performance’ so if the victim was a woman there could have been no effect on sexual performance, or (b)  women also have/do ’sexual performance’ but even if it was affected it wouldn’t count as an injury.

Help me out, here: is there a way to understand this such that it doesn’t reinforce some pretty scary stereotypes about women and sex?

Family Planning Provisions Stripped from Bill January 28, 2009

It’s been confirmed by that family planning provisions are indeed being stripped from the stimulus bill. Obama’s people say that he still supports them, but wants them put in a different bill. Planned Parenthood insists they should be in this bill, because they are urgently needed and because they will save states money. If you agree with Planned Parenthood, go here to take action.

Facebook Horrors January 28, 2009

You know how it goes… You sign up for Facebook, and pretty soon people you knew back in school are asking to “friend” you. You think “I couldn’t stand this person back then, but I should give them a chance. I wouldn’t want to be judged on who I was back in high school. I’ll bet I’d really like them now– I’m sure we have a lot in common.” Next thing you know you’ve got “friends” who are fans of Fox News, Joe the Plumber and Benjamin Netanyahu, and who spend inauguration day “with a stomach ache because the Democrats are going to ruin the country”. Oh, and they love the Left Behind series (with no hint of irony), and have written books about angels. Aaarghhhhh. What do you do? Un-friend them? Write bitchy (possibly gloating) comments? My response has generally been to cringe, then quietly congratulate myself on the good taste that led me to dislike these people even back when I was young and had bad taste in other matters. Share your thoughts, and your facebook horror stories!

Yay Iceland! January 28, 2009

OK, they haven’t been doing so well lately financially, But they’re well out ahead of the pack on this one. They look likely to get the world’s first openly gay Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir. Hurrah!

(Of course, the confluence of economic crisis and social progress reminds me of the Onion’s great “Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress”. Bad Jender. Stop thinking of that.)

But back to the celebrating: Hurrah– another barrier falls! But, wonderfully, the Icelanders themselves apparently don’t consider her sexual orientation at all newsworthy.

“No one has ever talked about Johanna (Icelanders always use first names) as a gay person,” an Icelandic friend and a prominent journalist told me this morning. “She’s not hiding it either, the name of her spouse is on her Parliament and Ministry web pages, it’s just that nobody cares about it, any more than people cared in 1980, when Vigdis Finnbogadottir ran for president, that she was a woman and a single mother to boot.

“Johanna is very smart and not afraid to tackle difficult issues, and I think she can unite us,” my friend added. “Reasonable, sane people are not going to care about people’s gender or color. They just want the best person for the job.”

Derek Dye, The Abstinence-Only Clown January 27, 2009

Really. (Thanks, lp.)

Recession and Women January 27, 2009

An article in the Observer suggests that women may be hit especially hard by the recession. (There’s also a bunch of unconvincing pop psychology waffle with almost no evidence suggesting that women wouldn’t have got us into this mess.)

One overlooked aspect of the downturn engulfing the UK is that it is a feminist issue. The default view is that male workers are the main victims of recessions, with women relegated to the role of supportive housewives, consoling their redundant menfolk. This crunch will be different: it is shaping up to be Britain’s first fully feminised recession. If the gender aspect of the economic crisis is ignored, it could jeopardise the progress towards equality at work, and threaten the financial independence many women prize and have struggled to achieve, as well as making families more vulnerable through the loss of a large chunk of household income….
In previous recessions, such as the 1980s downturn in the UK, women provided a backstop against male job loss because the sectors in which they typically worked, such as retail, catering and services, were not badly affected, but this time around it is precisely those areas of the economy that are in the front line.

Thanks for the link, Chris!

Oh noes!!! January 27, 2009

UPDATE: Damn. Looks like they’re caving under criticism, and under Obama’s urging to cave. That really pisses me off.

Funding for contraception? Noooo, we can’t have that! Looking closely at this kind of uproar really does give the lie to the thought that right-wingers who oppose abortion are just concerned about the foetuses. If they were, they wouldn’t mind helping people to prevent the creation of foetuses that they don’t want to create. It’s also pretty rich for them to claim not to see how preventing unwanted pregnancies could be a financially good idea, given the never-ending criticism of those welfare moms supposedly sponging off the state by popping out babies just to get more cash.

Financial Effects of Divorce on Men and Women January 27, 2009

One tricky thing about teaching feminist philosophy is that facts about the world really matter. So, for example, when you teach Okin on family structures and the effects of divorce, you can’t rest content with the statistics she uses– your students will quickly point out that they’re 20 years out of date. Even if you get stats from 5 years ago the students balk. And one of the places they balk most, I find, is on the claims about men’s post-divorce income improving while women’s decline. They will insist that now this is different because men pay so much maintenance and divorce settlements are fairer. Well, for at least a little while (and at least in the UK)*, you can cite this article, sent in by lp.

A few extracts:

Divorce makes men – and particularly fathers – significantly richer. When a father separates from the mother of his children, according to new research, his available income increases by around one third. Women, in contrast, suffer severe financial penalties…

Jenkins’s research found that the incomes of “separating husbands” rise “immediately and continuously” in the years following a marital split. “The differences between the sexes are stark,” he said. “But this is not so much a gender thing as a parent thing. The key differences are not between men and women, but between fathers and mothers.”…

Jenkins found that the positive effect on men’s finances is so significant that divorce can even lift them out of poverty, while women are far more likely to be plunged into destitution. Separated women have a poverty rate of 27% – almost three times that of their former husbands…

Maintenance paid by former partners also has little impact, said Jenkins, as just 31% of separated mothers receive payment from the father of their children.

*Note that this study is actually based on data collected 2001-2004. But that’s the way studies are– and it’s all the more reason to be as up-to-date as possible. The stuff that came out in 1990 is actually based on older data.

Breast feeding, milk pumps January 26, 2009

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on breast feeding and the politics of breast pumps.  There’s a lot of data about the history and evolution of recent breast feeding practices, particularly in an industrialized economy.   The author’s concern:  what  can look like the liberation of women may be the imposition of masculinist work standards.

 Still, the latest electronic pumps even imitate suckling patterns!

(Thanks to Calypso for the info.)

“Top One Hundred Gender Studies Blogs” UPDATED January 25, 2009

Update:  There are some really good blogs on the list but, as alert commentators have pointed out, there are some very negative features.  Thanks to those who are uncovering the problems.

=======================================================

Well, who knows how good any of these lists are, but this one has some interesting entries.  People in the dark about feminism might find some light with #19. 

Of course, #23,  which is FP, doesn’t need describing here.

I’m glad we’re in the company of the blogs on the list that I know, but there are plenty I can’t vouch for.  I expect readers will quickly know whether they want to return.

a feminist ‘masterpiece’ showing in NYC January 25, 2009

It’s Jeanne Dielman by Chantal Ackermann.  At the Film Forum.

Some critical notices:

“A LANDMARK! A MAJESTIC MOVIE! Akerman fills her movies with patterns and textures of ordinary life, the stuff other films never even notice. Today the film’s observational strategies — its long takes and scrupulous framing — practically amount to a lingua franca of international art film, discernible in the works of artists from Todd Haynes to Gus Van Sant. Adapting to the pace of Dielman can seem like a matter of recalibrating one’s biorhythms. Nothing can quite prepare the first-time viewer for the force of Akerman’s concentration, for the film’s overwhelming concreteness or the horrifying logic of its ending.”
– Dennis Lim, The New York Times
Click here to read entire review

“FEEL THE URGENCY OF GETTING YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR NETFLIX QUEUE AND RUNNING TO THE THEATER!
Like Citizen Kane, not merely a masterpiece but also a landmark work.
A PRISTINELY RESTORED PRINT!”
– Amy Taubin, Artforum
Click here to read entire review

Showing through the 29th.  At the Film Forum; you can buy tickets online here.

Thanks, jj-son.

Yet again, “What do women want?” January 25, 2009

An eight-page article in the NY Times today addresses the latest research in what is said to be ‘postfeminist sexology.’ I’m not going to try to summarize the material, but I’d recommend reading and saving the article. It may be the research is at a very early stage and a lot may change soon, but it’s already addressing questions in a way that readers may find increases their understanding of themselves. At the same time, the research is to some extent involved in an idea of sex as a biological phenomenon, and some readers will think the most important questions hardly get a look in.

So let me take one example: it appears that women respond with increased blood flow to the vagina in response to a wider range of stimuli than men do, but that there also seems to be a far greater discrepancy between such arousal and experienced desire. There is a much closer correlation between arousal and felt desire in men.

Now I can remember somewhat similar results being taken to show that women are just not as self-aware, etc. That isn’t the kind of explanation this more sophisticated research is looking at. Here’s one alternative explanation: vaginal arousal has a protective function, since it makes penetration less likely to damage one. So vaginal arousal may be cued to the presence of sex, not the presence of desire. Importantly, this would mean that a woman’s body’s being prepared for sex is no indication of willingness.

Another hypothesis is that what for women sexual desire may be particularly reacting to is being desired, a feature whose erotic power may not have much longevity to it.

If you read the article, do remember that it’s written by someone who is himself an outsider to the research. And of course, thinking about different factors that may enter into the construction of women’s sexuality is enormously difficult. Still and all, there are new perspectives on the topics.

Bring your child to work? January 25, 2009

UPDATE: One of the leaders in setting these programs up has written in (see comments below). She notes that these programs are generally made available to ALL employees, so my worry below was misplaced. She also gives some useful links, and offers to help universities set this sort of thing up.

There’s a New York Times article on workplaces that allow employees to bring their babies (and sometimes pre-school kids) to work. There are a variety of ways that they manage this, and they’re interesting to read about. But two things struck me: (1) Of course (this is the NY TImes!), the focus was on well-paid professionals; (2) It’s presented as a “maternity leave alternative”– which is part of the story but only part. The actual article mentions (though doesn’t say much about) men taking up this option as well; and mostly discusses employees who do this well beyond common US maternity leave allowances. What are your thoughts in general, and what are your thoughts about the potential for this in academia?

Rosa Sat January 25, 2009

A wonderful song by Chicago songwriter Amy Dixon-Kolar. Enjoy. (Thanks, lydia!)