Yesterday was 40 days after the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a particularly significant point in the Islamic mourning cycle. 40 day commemorations of protesters’ deaths were especially important in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This time, there were so many protesters, so widely dispersed, that the Basiji seem to have been unable or unwilling to take control.
“Tehran was our town today,” exclaimed a 26-year-old woman. “We had more courage and the police less courage.”
(Thanks, AK.)
Gendered products week continues with some gendered chocolate. Ah yes, you’re probably thinking, chocolate is very gendered. It’s the quintessential girlie indulgence, after all. But not ALL chocolate….
How are they failing women soldiers? According to the Government Accountability Office, they’re failing them in many ways. Here’s one small example:
“I tried several times to use the mental health services. I was told that women don’t go to combat so we shouldn’t need counseling.”–Female Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran
For more, see here. (Thanks, Maura!)
In, that is, a situation like that in the Gates case. Should we hope it isn’t like Boston Police officer Barrett’s reaction?
In Barrett’s e-mail, which was posted on a Boston television station’s Web site, he declared that if he had “been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.”
Or is it just much wiser to assume the police officer is a racist and sexist bigot wanting to hurt you if you exhibit any non-compliance?**
Barrett maintains he isn’t really a racist. After all, some of his friends are people of color. This does make me wonder whether he has dehumanizing ways of thinking about the many different kinds of people he encounters. Are white students “spoiled, useless brats”? White women “stupid suburban bitches”? (Actually, he seems to think in more concrete metaphors but I’m not going to try to imagine them.)
Anecdotes have so little evidential value in cases where we are raising general questions. Still, they can remind us of alternatives that sometimes do happen. With topics like these, I’m often reminded of driving down a California freeway with a white, male visitor from Oxford; this was some time ago, and we were going to an APA in Los Angeles. It was about 10 o’clock at night and yes, he was driving and we were speeding. We got pulled over by a police officer in an unmarked police car (so unfair). When told we were substantially over the speed limit, my friend, using an impeccable Oxford accent, explained that he was a visitor to the country and couldn’t be expected to know the laws. The policeman nicely agreed and said he understood. We drove on.
Seriously, that did really happen. I think the police officer did suggest we slow down.
** We should notice that the implications of this question are a bit odd. It doesn’t really ask if we should assume all police officers are racist, sexist violent bigots. That seems to me a very offensive assumption to make about all the members of a group. Rather, it’s about what’s the more protective assumption to make in certain situations. There are plenty of situations in which it is wise to assume that any X you encounter could hurt you even when you know that most X’s are not dangerous. This could extend from unknown people out late at night to abandoned luggage at airports or unlabeled medicine.
Lani just sent us this one from Feministing:
Although the state Legislature submitted a budget with a 20 percent reduction to the $20.4 million the state provides to agencies that offer domestic violence services, Schwarzenegger slashed the funding by 100 percent Tuesday.
For Catalyst, which relies on state funding for nearly 35 percent of its operating budget, the affect will be “devastating,” Executive Director Anastacia Snyder said.“We’re still in shock,” Snyder said Wednesday afternoon. “We were bracing for the 20 percent cut, but did not believe the governor could, with a clear conscience, cut 100 percent of funding for services that keep women and children safe and alive.”
If you’re a resident of California, please click on Stop Family Violence’s action alert to urge lawmakers to reinstate funding for the programs that save women’s lives. If you’re not in CA – pass this on to someone who is! You can also post the following message to your Facebook account, or tweet it: CA Gov Eliminates funding for Domestic Violence Programs. Lives will be lost. You can help! CA residents click http://bit.ly/3jKQSo
I’m pretty cynical, but eliminating ALL state funding shocks me.
Flaffer has sent us this horrendous story from Iran.
MEMBERS of Iran’s feared Basij militia forcibly marry female virgin prisoners the night before scheduled executions, raping their new “wives” and making it religiously acceptable to execute them, a self-professed member of the paramilitary group says.
The anonymous militiaman, exposing a part of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s religious regime in Iran, told The Jerusalem Post that at age 18 he was “given the honor to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death”.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran it is illegal to execute a woman if she is a virgin, the former guard said.
Another very good reason we all need to remember the struggles still going on in Iran.
It’s fair to say that a large portion of my teenage years were spent poring over the pages of NME, and I don’t doubt this is still true of many young women now.
Important news, then, of the magazine appointing its first female editor, Krissi Murison:
“It’s definitely a good thing and is ridiculously overdue,” said Andrew Collins, a former NME staffer and broadcaster. “It helps erase the strange notion that this is just a boys’ game. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, really. If you have a woman near the top it is more likely to inspire younger, female writers”.
Let’s hope so!
Gendered products week continues with an item familiar to UK readers but (as far as I know) still unfamiliar to US readers. (I’ve no idea at all about elsewhere– do tell!)
For people who are reading through a number of posts here, this post might seem obvious. But a lot of people don’t seem to do that much. So it might be worth looking at a strikingly common thread, which could be called “Should you just suck it up?”
Last night I mentioned to j in response to a comment here that an Hispanic administrator at my uni had mentioned to me how she learned the value of just sucking it up. (She was then head of our Affirmative Action program, so you can imagine how that worked.) Then I turned to CNN.com and saw Colin Powell had talked about being the victim of racial profiling a lot and having to just suck it up. The very same expression.
So here’s the common thread: Being less powerful and sucking it up.
Sotomayor: she just sucked it up in the hearing and got through! A lot of garbage was thrown at her.
Gates: Should he have just sucked it up?
The C-section case: It is horrible and outrageous that she’s lost her child because she didn’t just suck it up, and do it during childbirth.
In case you haven’t heard yet, a Sudanese woman has been sentences to 40 lashes for wearing trousers. That’s the focus of most of the reporting, and definitely of the headlines. That lets the reader view it through the familiar lens of “appalling backwards country treats women horrendously”. But the headline above captures something important that all too easily gets lost.
The woman, Lubna Hussein – a former journalist who now works for the United Nations – has invited journalists and observers to the trial.
She was arrested in a restaurant in the capital with other women earlier this month for wearing “indecent” clothing.
She said 10 of the women arrested, including non-Muslims, later each received 10 lashes and a fine of $100.
Ms Hussein and two other women asked for a lawyer, delaying their trials.
Now Ms Hussein has printed 500 invitation cards and sent out e-mails, saying she wants as many people as possible to attend her hearing on Wednesday.
She says she has done nothing wrong under Sharia law, but could fall foul of a paragraph in Sudanese criminal law which forbids indecent clothing.
“I want to change this law, because this law doesn’t match in constitution,” she told the BBC.
“It is important that people know what is happening,” Ms Hussein is reported to have written on the invitations she circulated.
(Thanks, Jender-Parents.)
You know, I think I may declare this Gendered Products Week (in honour of which I’ve created a new gendered products category). J-Bro just sent me this lovely story about a nice girly gun you can get. It’s got some pink. And buying it actually does give money to a good cause.
This looks to me like a nightmare story. The doctors and nurses wanted to perform a C-section; the mother refused it. The baby was delivered vaginally and was perfectly fine.
Because she refused the C-section and acted distraught, the mother was not allowed to take the child home. Refusing the C-section counted as abusing and neglecting her baby.
And now the mother’s been refused a reinstatment of her parental rights because, it seems, she’s had a lot of trouble coping with the fact that her daughter has been in foster care since her birth
Here’s the court sanctioned description of what’s happened. There’s a fairly short explanation in the NY Times. I am not sure the writer has the details all correct. She also doesn’t seem to have much sense of how symptoms of mental illness can arise as a result of being put in an insane, dehumanizing and emotionally excruciatingly painful situation.
Many of us surely have been in the situation in which nothing we said was considered as anything other than a sign of compliance or non-compliance. And heaven help you if you are non-compliant. It’s not entirely easy to keep behaving sanely in such an insane situation. In fact, if one of these people catches you on the phone, you might even be so stupid as to pretend you don’t know what they’re talking about. And that would be really bad, because that could pretty much kill your chances of getting the baby back. After all, it shows it was insanity that led you to refuse the C-section. And the people making the decisions believe in preventive termination of parental rights. Though the mother hasn’t actually harmed the child in any way, they describe her as abusive because they think her mental state is that of an abusive mother.
I hope that someone reading this carefully will discover it isn’t as bad as it seems to me. I do think the crucial question is about assessing the behavior of someone in one of these awful situations where one’s status as a full human being with some knowledge and understanding has been thoroughly wiped away. That and preventive termination of parental rights.
Miranda Fricker has, many will know, written wonderfully about the consequences of epistemic injustice.
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I’ve just seen that an earlier reference to this story appear as a comment on this post. Thanks, Hippocampa.
Approved by the senate committee: 13-6.
And the 6 are all Republicans. I can’t wait to see what effect this has on the Hispanic vote.
A link to my pink tape post led me to something even more wondrous: gendered earplugs!!
I suppose one could maintain that the skull screws aren’t definitely gendered as male. ..
The US is now allowing asylum on grounds of domestic abuse.
In addition to meeting other strict conditions for asylum, abused women will need to show that they are treated by their abuser as subordinates and little better than property, according to an immigration court filing by the administration, and that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country. They must show that they could not find protection from institutions at home or by moving to another place within their own country.
(Thanks, Jender-Parents!)
The answers to the below question might well reveal it was a mistake to ask it. Still, it would be fun. OK, fun for a philosophy professor at least.
This is your final essay question. Your answer must be at least 2000 words. Remember to use spell check and word count. All outside sources MUST acknowledged.
PRESIDENT OBAMA has nominated Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. It would seem a brilliant choice. Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human Genome Project. [As a very religious man who has written about belief in the Christian faith] he is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion.
But most scientists who study the human mind are convinced that minds are the products of brains, and brains are the products of evolution. Dr. Collins takes a different approach: he insists that at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components — including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc. Dr. Collins has written that “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.”
Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?
How would you decide the question asked at the end? Discuss the issues with reference to the course readings, particularly Descartes, Hume and Kant. Remember that since this is a philosophy course, your answers are NOT to be justified with reference to the Bible or other religious texts.
Hint: Consider whether the philosophers think we have immortal souls, free will, genuine altruism and so on.
And who said philosophy is not revelant? The thing is, one might be just a bit uncomfortable with their relevance to the choice of the NIH Director. I mean, we’ve already had Bush’s ethical council that debated stem cell research and other bio-ethical questions. Do we really want to continue the confusion that the separation of church and state could avoid?
Now, having read way too much about Sotomayor’s comment about a wise Latina woman, we might feel that Collins should not be stuck with the odd comment or two. However, he has reiterated on a number of occasions his belief that science in effect leaves explanatory gaps for religion to fill, if I’ve got him right.
I’m indebted to an Intro class that wanted to look at scientific alternative to Gazzaniga’s The Ethical Brain for the internet searches that led us to Collins and his arguments. I’m not sure the issues are clear cut. PLEASE wade in!
Just about all the text of the question comes from the NY Times. Not the bits about word count or Descartes, Hume, and Kant, of course.
In a discipline where we don’t seem to be able to imagine any conferences other than those topped by old farts (to use Calypso’s term), maybe we should pause to see someone doing something just a little different:
h/t to Blackfolk
Of *course* tape needs to be gendered. What was I thinking to not expect this? Interestingly, the pink girls’ tape was about 30% cheaper than the regular clear kind. I’d like to think this is an attempt at a creative and progressive response to the pay gap, but somehow I doubt that.
And yes, Dear Reader, I did buy it for Jender-Son. I am nothing if not cheap.
Feminism, Science, and Values
June 25-28, 2010
The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
In June 2010, the International Association of Women Philosophers (http://www.iaph-philo.org/ ) will be meeting at The University of Western Ontario. This will be the organization’s first meeting in Canada and only its second meeting in North America. Co-hosted by the Rotman Institute for Science and Values and the Department of Philosophy, the conference is scheduled to take place just before the international conference on science and values organized by the Rotman Institute.
The members of the conference organizing committee are: Gillian Barker, Ariella Binik, Samantha Brennan, Helen Fielding, Katy Fulfer-Smith, Elisa Hurley, Tracy Isaacs, Carolyn McLeod, Karen Nielsen, Kathleen Okruhlik, and Angelique Petropanagos.
The organizing committee invites papers from all areas in philosophy, though we especially welcome papers related to the theme of the conference, Feminism, Science, and Values. We also welcome papers from graduate students. Abstracts should be submitted in English, French, or Spanish. Spanish abstracts will be refereed by the IAPH executive instead of the conference program committee.
There are many possible topics, the following being just a small sample:
. Questions about the content of science; the evaluation of hypotheses; the uses of science; the idea of “value-free science”; the regulation and control of science; the funding of science; science as oppressor of the disadvantaged; science as a liberator of the disadvantaged; science for the people; science and democracy; the “collapse” of the is/ought distinction; the relationship between ethical and epistemic norms; the role of ethics in deciding what sorts of science to pursue; the role of science in the resolution of ethical questions.
. Questions about concepts of sex/gender, race, intelligence, sexuality, sociobiology, health and disease, normalcy, etc., possibly discussed via specific examples and case studies.
. Feminist work on questions in value theory, in either the field of ethics or aesthetics
. Historical studies of the relationship between science and feminist thought.
. Discussions of philosophy’s role in supporting modes of thought that perpetuate bad practices and discussions of philosophy’s emancipatory potential for women and others.
Submissions of long abstracts (750-1000 words) are invited (for eventual presentation of papers that are no more than 3000 words and 20 minutes maximum reading time). We also welcome proposals for panel presentations. For panel proposals, please send a title, a one paragraph description of the panel, names and contact information for all participants, and abstracts for each of the papers on the panel.
Please email all materials as double-spaced Word or RTF attachments, prepared for anonymous review, which requires that you remove all identifying-author tags from your document content and file properties. Send the e-mail to iaph2010@uwo.ca and include within it (not the abstract) your full contact information.
More information will be available about the conference on our website, http:www.uwo.ca/iaph2010 (coming soon).
*Deadline: Midnight Eastern time August 15, 2009.*
– Elisa A. Hurley
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
The University of Western Ontario
Talbot College 328
London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7
(519) 661-2111, ext. 81583
http://publish.uwo.ca/~ehurley3/
So there you are, you and a husband with a two bedroom apartment in Manhattan and
1. A baby soon to arrive
2. A need for two studios, since both of you are artists
3. A bengal cat
4. A large closet.
Here’s the solution: the baby gets the closet, the cat gets the second bedroom and you find studios somewhere else. If you have a problem with that, then you haven’t dealt with a bengal cat who was there first!.
From the NY Times:
While many accidental sellers are forced into the market for job-related reasons, others are led afoul by the stork.
“Right now, we might put the baby in the closet,” said Elizabeth Demaray, 41, of the compromise she and her husband, Hugo Bastidas, 51, may be forced to make when their first child arrives next month. …
Last year, Ms. Demaray, a sculptor and assistant art professor, and Mr. Bastidas, a painter and art professor, moved to East 116th Street near Lenox Avenue, to a two-bedroom condominium that he also uses as an art studio.
But the 1,200-square-foot space is not big enough for the couple, his canvases, a baby and an exceptionally vocal Bengal cat that must be sequestered in its own bedroom at night if the humans are to sleep…
“If we wind up staying, we’re going to have to find a studio space for both of us, probably somewhere toward Lower Manhattan or possibly Jersey City,” Ms. Demaray said. “But the cat won’t work in the closet.”
