Lesbian parents: legal fiction? August 31, 2009

Or not.  Though that’s what some think of the very excellent step to allow lesbian parents who have had a child by IVF treatment both to be registered on the birth certificate.

critics say the change would be detrimental to family values.

Boo to those family values; hurrah to the inclusive ones:

Home Office Minister Lord Brett said: “This positive change means that, for the first time, female couples who have a child using fertility treatment have the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts to be shown as parents in the birth registration.

“It is vital that we afford equality wherever we can in society, especially as family circumstances continue to change. This is an important step forward in that process.”

The Sunday cat acknowledges that cats can learn tricks August 30, 2009

but only in Russia!

More tricks  are in this video:

I’ve seen the troup above and, as I remember, there was a lot of cats-going-from-A-to-B.   Now, it is wonderful to get cats to run on demand from A to B, but it isn’t necessarily all that great to watch.  A more intense performance from another troup can be found  here.

Madonna booed for opposing discrimination August 29, 2009

I’ve never been one to jump on the Madonna bandwagon, though I’ve been mildly interested in the various feminist discussions of her. But I think it’s good that, when performing with Roma (Gypsy) musicians in Romania she made a note of the discrimination that they suffer:

“It has been brought to my attention … that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and Gypsies in general in Eastern Europe,” she said. “It made me feel very sad.”

And that was enough to get thousands booing her. I can’t begin to say how disgusting I find that.

(Many non-Europeans probably don’t know much about anti-Roma discrimination. Amnesty has information here.)

Discrimination? Nah. August 28, 2009

I’m sure there’s a good reason that only breastfeeding women are forbidden from taking unauthorised bathroom breaks. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)

Roundtable: Feminism and Politics August 28, 2009

The Centre for Ethics, Social & Political Philosophy of the Higher Institute for Philosophy of the K.U.Leuven presents:

A Roundtable Discussion On

Feminism & Politics:
Gendering the Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy

With Judith Squires (Bristol), Etienne Balibar (Nanterre/Irvine), and Margaret Moore (Queens)

Wednesday September 16th at 4pm
Kardinaal Mercierzaal, H.I.W, K.U.Leuven

In a world of rapid changes and deep transformations with consequences we cannot yet begin to oversee, one thing appears unchanged: deep and persistent inequalities structured around the nexus of gender, race, class and capital. Although there have been some major steps forward in some realms of our lives and some parts of the world, this deep-seated inequality continues to exist on many levels. In this roundtable discussion, three political philosophers who have made it their business to address the political state we are in, will focus on gender, and its multiple intersections with contemporary politics. Each one of them has engaged deeply with feminist thought and practice, considering feminism not only as a useful but as a necessary perspective when discussing politics. However, current debates in political philosophy pay little attention to this perspective, in spite of the work that is being done by feminist academics and activists alike. This discussion does not just aim to put feminism on the map, but rather to demonstrate the urgency and importance of doing so in the face of the political challenges posed to us by globalisation.

Registration Required by September 10th (free) : anya.topolski@hiw.kuleuven.be

The website is here.

The Importance of being familiar August 26, 2009

In academia and elsewhere, as we have noted  many times, there are biased reactions that one can trigger through being identified as a woman.  The general mechanism might be the same for, say, Asians, but the specifics might well be different.

There are other biasing reactions that women and Asians together might trigger that would have  much more of the same content.  We’ve looked at these less, but we did note that insiders have considerable advantages over outsiders at least because the good performances of insiders tend to be remembered more positively for longer periods of time.

We’re grateful to reader L.A. for sending us another example.  Things that are easier to process are ranked better on scales of truthfulness, liking and so on: 

Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation

Alter  & Oppenheimer

Processing fluency, or the subjective experience of ease with which people process information, reliably influences people’s judgments across a broad range of social dimensions. Experimenters have manipulated processing fluency using a vast array of techniques, which, despite their diversity, produce remarkably similar judgmental consequences. For example, people similarly judge stimuli that are semantically primed (conceptual fluency), visually clear (perceptual fluency), and phonologically simple (linguistic fluency) as more true than their less fluent counterparts. The authors offer the first comprehensive review of such mechanisms and their implications for judgment and decision making. Because every cognition falls along a continuum from effortless to demanding and generates a corresponding fluency experience, the authors argue that fluency is a ubiquitous metacognitive cue in reasoning and social judgment.

My library doesn’t have the article on line yet, and I’m hesitant to do much interpreting without reading.  But even the abstract is very interesting.  Facility in processing causes (to some extent) more  positive reaction. I’m pretty sure this has been found to hold true in other areas, such as art.  Over some range of cases, the brain’s reaction to the familiar  and the pleasurable can be at least very similar, if I’m remembering correctly. 

In any case, women giving papers, for example, might be well advised to try to think about how to present their work to moderate the  problems the lack of familiarity of their person and their ideas present.

Or not.  At what point does one decide it isn’t worth it?  What do you think?

Edward Kennedy 1932-2009 August 26, 2009

During years of political madness, Kennedy often enough remained sane and  insightful.  Heart-sick at his responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, we liberal boomers knew he could not be the true hero we’d hoped his brothers would be.   We’ve since learned, I think, that there are far fewer of those than we may then have thought.

I like these comments from the NY Times:

Born to one of the wealthiest American families, Mr. Kennedy spoke for the downtrodden in his public life while living the heedless private life of a playboy and a rake for many of his years.  Dismissed early in his career as a lightweight and an unworthy successor to his revered brothers, he grew in stature over time by sheer longevity and by hewing to liberal principles while often crossing the partisan aisle to enact legislation. A man of unbridled appetites at times, he nevertheless brought a discipline to his public work that resulted in an impressive catalog of legislative achievement across a broad landscape of social policy.  …

In 2002, he voted against authorizing the Iraq war; later, he called that opposition “the best vote I’ve made in my 44 years in the United States Senate.”

It is quite a blow not to have his strong voice during the health care debates.

Why does airline security need to know if I’m male or female? August 25, 2009

I’m increasingly irked at the number of times I’m asked to check boxes that say “male” or “female.” Sometimes, there’s a rationale. My university tracks this information in order to see how we’re complying with gender equity rules. This makes sense to me. Other times, such as my driver’s license, it makes no sense. Nor can I figure out why it matters to US airline security. According to CNN, “many air travelers will be asked their birth dates and genders when making airline reservations….It’s the latest “publicly visible” expansion of Secure Flight, a program that transfers responsibility for checking air passengers’ identities from the airlines to the federal government.” The full story is here.

The Glamour of a Real Stomach August 25, 2009

I learned from Broadsheet about the above photo in Glamour Magazine, which has prompted a groundswell of positive reactions, and even prompted Glamour’s editor to say this shows a huge demand for real-looking women, which they plan to meet. Broadsheet is skeptical about whether this represents the beginning of a real change. I tend to think that change is slow, but it’s got to be a move in the right direction. Let’s hope they follow it up with women who differ in *lots* of ways from the usual models.

We knew this already but… August 25, 2009

…the Observer provides some up to date statistics on the dismal underrepresentation of women in top FTSE 350 jobs in the UK (perhaps useful for the start of term if you want to present your feminist philosophy class with some empirical stuff on gender inequality).

I found interesting the tactic Harriet Harman is using to press for more equal representation:

A company in the grip of the old-boy network is never going to be successful in the modern world. If they can’t see half the population as worthy of a say, then they are in the grip of structural prejudice. What does it say about a company that they have an all-male board? It is backward-looking and old-fashioned.”

Bad on the gender equality front = bad PR.

Finally, girls can use calculators! August 24, 2009

First geography, now this. Just wait till they start making pink particle accelerators. (Thanks, Jender-Mum!)

Some Second Wave Feminists and Transphobia August 24, 2009

As someone who counts herself as too young to be a baby boomer, too old to be Gen X, I came of age as a feminist at the end of the Second Wave. (I’m also never sure how useful the “wave” talk is but that’s another issue.) And while I think I understand the limits that the lack of race, class, and disability analysis had on second wave work, I think I can also understand how focussing on one form of oppression might make others less obvious or visible. In the case of race, class, and disability, the main problem, it seems to me, was one of exclusion. But in the case of trans issues, it’s much more than that. One sometimes finds a kind of hostility verging on hate that I just can’t fathom. This came to mind recently reading a piece in the Guardian by Germain Greer on Caster Semenya. In it Greer writes, “Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be… some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man’s delusion that he is female.” I thought the days of sex essentialism were long gone but I guess not. Kate Bornstein has a response here.

A different twist on sex/gender and sports August 24, 2009

In the endless discussions of Caster Semenya (for a really excellent one see here), the claim is often made that women would never pose as men for sporting purposes as they’d only lose if they competed against men. There’s nothing like a real-life counterexample fo knock down such a myth. So I give you Rena Kanokogi, who posed as a man 50 years ago to win a judo championship. She was stripped of her medal once her sex was known, and became a campaigner for equality, eventually getting women’s judo added to the Olympics. Her medal has now been restored.

Thanks, CR!

“Why Women’s Rights are the cause of our times” August 24, 2009

The title to this post announces the central theme of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.  The remarkable  publication reflects what we noted just recently in comments on one of the articles; namely, the realization that the key  to solving many of the political problems in the world lies with the too often powerless. 

The subtitles in the magazine range from the positive (a multi-media presentation):

How educating girls and empowering women can help fight poverty and extremism

To the less positive:

Why has development in India and China led to even more discrimination against girls?

Along with the questioning:

How a hybrid ideology — one that advocates the use of force to liberate Muslim women from persecution and burkas — evolved online.

One gets the sense that a lot of this impetus for this edition is due to Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.  Multi-kudos to them and the NY Times.

I’ve mentioned perhaps half of the articles.  Taken together they set an agenda.  YES!

About Mothering August 23, 2009

We’ve posted a lot on mothering, pressures on feminist philosophers as mothers, and models of good and bad mothering.  I was reading today about a mother who could easily be an object lesson for us all.  Maybe the story is familiar; certainly condemnation of people with similar stories is all too common.

She went through two  divorces, having started in a possibly bigamous relationship at 18 when she was three months pregnant by her partner.   One divorce, several years of single parenting, another marriage and divorce, so again a single parent, now with  two children!  And all the while she’s working and going to school.  Her son sent off to live with her parents for his  high schooling.  She’s white, but both children are bi-racial, though the second race is different in each case.

Clearly, she’d have a hard time getting a license to foster children, still less to adopt!

And what do you think the children grew up to be like?  Well, the son is now president of the US.  And a recent article describes some of the ideas and ideals she communicated to him:

Running through Dr. Soetoro’s doctoral research, as through all her work, was a challenge to popular perceptions regarding economically and politically marginalized groups; she showed that the people at society’s edges were not as different from the rest of us as is often supposed. Dr. Soetoro was also critical of the pernicious notion that the roots of poverty lie with the poor themselves and that cultural differences are responsible for the gap between less-developed countries and the industrialized West. …

…   She helped to pioneer microcredit programs that made small amounts of capital available to weavers, blacksmiths and other low-income groups — people who would otherwise have had no access to credit.

It’s worth pointing out that though microenterprise is fairly well-known today — and Indonesia now has one of the world’s largest microcredit programs — it was pretty radical stuff when Ann Soetoro was doing her work. But then, she had a habit of swimming against the current. …

There is a final lesson from her work that is worth remembering: No nation — even if it is our bitterest enemy — is incomprehensible. Anthropology shows that people who seem very different from us behave according to systems of logic, and that these systems can be grasped if we approach them with the sort of patience and respect that Dr. Soetoro practiced in her work.

Her doctoral dissertation, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, is going to be published this fall by Duke University Press.

Moral:  There is more than one way to be a great mother.

I can’t find out whether she breast fed her children though, something which has proved a controversial topic here.

Wait — Clinton also conducts foreign policy?? August 23, 2009

I picked up my trusty Washington Post today, saw the big photo of Hillary Clinton on the first page of the Outlook section, and was braced for another dumb opinion regarding her clothing, hair or skin. And to my shock, the bulk of the story was about how she’s reshaping U.S. foreign policy.

It’s like finding out school’s cancelled for snow.

Cultural Variation in Maths Gender Gap August 23, 2009

A surprisingly large number of people are willing to uncritically accept the idea that boys outperform girls at the top end in maths performance, and that this is genetically determined (despite problems for it that we’ve noted before). Rob has pointed us to this very interesting article about cross-cultural variation. One fascinating thing is that some of the best countries for girls’ performance are Islamic ones. The authors of the original article speculate:

While of course highly speculative, these cross-country data are consistent with the hypothesis that mixed-gender classrooms are a necessary component for gender inequality to translate into poor female math performance, although it is difficult to distinguish single-sex classrooms from Islamic religion in the data.

The Sunday cat salutes Cooper, the photographer cat August 23, 2009

Just think:  With the appropriate role models, we might all scale those impossible heights.

So bring your kitties over to see Cooper, the Seattle cat, who goes out to record his very own perspective.  One day a week he wears his own special camera as he checks out his neighborhood.

His blog is here.

A great video is here.

And a collection of his pics here.

Thanks to Calypso for the find.

Live Self-Esteem! August 21, 2009

What is it to be masculine? August 21, 2009

A recent photo essay poses the question. “What is it to be masculine?” Philadelphia photographer Chad States photographs his subjects in the poses and settings they find most masculine. He finds his subjects using craiglist and leaves his ads gender neutral so that women and transmen feel free to reply. While there are some interesting responses, sadly the philosopher, naked but for socks, reports that he is masculine because “I abandon women after taking their love.” Another of the men says he is masculine when he “dominates in his field of study.” Cool though that the project includes transmen, who notably sound less stupid.