Could the content of philosophy be gendered? June 19, 2011

I always caution students and colleagues in other departments that philosophers often ask questions that they cannot answer.  I think, though, that the material below, however simplistically put, might make us take the question more seriously than perhaps we may do ordinarily.

There is a starting point in this reflections, and it comes from Jenny Lloyd’s The Man of Reason.  Lloyd argued that, among other things, the role of the isolated ego in philosophy (e.g., the Cartesian Ego) reflected and may have been supported by philosophers’ own removal from any of the material duties in life.  All those were left to the women (or, in Oxford colleges, one’s scout).

We now have nearly four decades of feminist critiques of mainstream philosophy as embodying a bio-social position that places women as outsiders.  Furthermore, if we look at the differences between mainstream philosophy and feminist philosophy, we can see some remarkable differences that may reflect different social settings for many men and women. The human being in today’s philosophy of mind appears to spring into existence fully formed at about 25 years of age. He has acquired his concepts by relatively solitary causal interactions with the world, and much of the results of his interactions are fully contained in his head. It may be, as some have argued, that mind contents can be found outside his head in records he keeps in a diary or even indeed in his ways of moving in the world. Nonetheless, he is by and large alone.

The self of feminist philosophy is largely very different. She often knows that Descartes was wrong, as Annette Baier has argued, to hold that the human mind is whole and entire unto itself. She cannot be the whole respository for the normativity that is needed for a theory of concepts, for example. Her intellectual thriving is dependent on social inputs, corrections and co-constructions. She is going to be less worried by books such as The Invisible Ape, that argues that individuals by themselves are much less good at getting truths than we have thought, because the idea of individuals going it alone was not her idea.

Finally, when the NY Times announces a new theory of reason as inherently social, she can say that she’s been there and done at least quite a bit of that. She may, however, resist the accompanying trope that we need knowledge of other minds because we want to control others and protect ourselves. That thought is much more common in mainstream philosophy than feminist philosophy.

As the NY Times tells us, “Darcia Narvaez, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame and a contributor to the journal debate, said this theory “fits into evolutionary psychology mainstream thinking at the moment, that everything we do is motivated by selfishness and manipulating others, which is, in my view, crazy.””

The sunday cat acknowledges US Father’s Day June 19, 2011

One does get the sense that for the dad, playing is conditional on not moving from his spot.

Was Ayer’s philosophy of no use? June 18, 2011

The followiing is from AN Wilson, the eminent novelist and essayist; the full text is in this week’s New Statesman.  If we want to think about how philosophy may be limited by being white, then we might also find some relief from such serious reflections in  some other questions about philosophy and its neglect of full human experience.  This one should, like Wilson’s reflection, follow on a good dinner with lots of wine:

I remember one evening, a quarter of a century ago at New College, Oxford, sitting next to A J Ayer at dinner. I was the most junior of college lecturers; he was the Wykeham Professor of Logic and a renowned philosopher. He told me that no medieval philosopher was worth reading and he was proud to be able to say that he had not read one word of Thomas Aquinas.

Ayer was a genial man but his arrogance could take your breath away….

As the evening wore on, wine flowed and it would not be possible to outline his argument (if it existed) in any detail. But I do remember what he said at the end of the dinner: “Even logical positivists think love is important!”

No doubt he had trotted out a recitation of his non-creed – namely that most aesthetic, moral and spiritual judgements were “meaningless”. But if even logical positivists thought that love was important, was it not strange that they had not set their nimble minds to saying why they thought it was important and what they thought it was?

Cycling home under the starry Oxford night sky, I felt that there were more interesting philosophical questions and answers in Dante’s Comedy than in Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Love dominates our lives. Its rampages dislocate the heart. Sometimes, it seems linked to sexual desire; sometimes, it seems different. Religion, especially the Christian religion, uses the word to describe the life and activity of God. But when we are kept awake by the thought of the beautiful face of the girl (N.B.) we currently adore, is this love at war with the love of God or is it, as Dante apparently thought, somehow connected? What use was a philosophy that refused to ask such questions, let alone provide an answer?

It is interesting, and not at all surprising, that a feted British man of letters still thinks of himself as sleeping with girls.  Still, AN Wilson is an outsider to academic  philosophy, and in fact rather a decided one at that, I believe.  So to that extent, his position is occupiable by many feminists.

The whiteness of philosophy: Is philosophy the problem? Addition June 18, 2011

Added Prologue:

My sense from many of the comments on this post. as of Sunday the 19th morning,  is that people are reading it in a very different way than I had hoped. I may not change that, but since I took out quite a lead-in, putting it back may help something.

First of all, the blog setting: There have been a lot of posts recently on this blog and Leiter’s about the scarcity of black philosophers in our profession; many of them are referred to in the post mentioned at the bottom of this one.. A number of explanations of this lack have been offered; in reporting them, I’m not endorsing them or the supposed facts on which they are based. One is racism, though some people seem to be unaware of any racism. Another is that black students in general do not have the sort of financial family setting that makes undertaking a risky profession a reasonable idea. Another has been that black students just don’t much like philosophy, along with the fact that black philosophers are largely ignored. My sense was that some people thought that that was just too bad. The absense of blacks wouldn’t be a reason for changing anything in the millennia-old discipline.

Faced with such an array of conjectures, one might wonder why the idea that there is something wrong with philosophy isn’t among them. That would be interesting. It’s got to be valuable to critique a discipline, even if we decide eventually that’s wrong.

Let me say that the last sort of explanation I like is one that says the problem is to be located in the individuals left out. There’s a whole range of explanations of the low numbers of women in philosophy that appear to what’s different in some pretty deep way about women; they often strike me as a distraction, and they provide an excuse for ignoring sexism. But that isn’t what Mills is doing, which is why his arguments were appealing to me. He is really doing what is a very traditional kind of critique that aligns characteristics of a discipline with the social setting of its practitioners and suggesting that those from very different social settings might find the enterprise unappealing. Of course, the social setting is that of different races, but when he wrote the piece, color made a huge and systematic difference to social position, and perhaps still does.

Within philosophy this critique is seldom done in mainstream philosophy. So we might ask whether there is any plausibility to attempting it. I think there is. I am going to put the material backing this thought in another blog. 

———————————–

Are there some ways in which philosophy is so imbued with whiteness that we should expect people of color at best to think it is very unclear why one would find this field  interesting?  Might the natural reaction for many people of color be to see philosophy as a kind of pretence which, through years of subordinate positions, they have seen time and time again?

Since I’m a white woman, I am hardly the person to come up  with a reliable answer by meself.***  Charles Mills in 1994 took up a similar question, and his answer is worth a look, to say the least.

To anticipate a question:  why say that what Mills argues shows that it is philosophy that should change?  Philosophical theories purport very often to tell us how things are, for example what a theory of mind is and why we need one, or what the important problems for knowledge claims are, and so on.  If Mills is right, the claims really ought to be relativized to how white people like to think of things.  At the very least, philosophy might be very enriched by its practitioners trying to adopt that perspective, even if only occasionally.  And a whole lot of people might be delighted to see us stumble out of the cave.  Or horrified.  :)

Mills 1994 article, “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,”  occurs in Teaching Philosophy (vol 17, Issue 3, 1994). Here are two of the important claims he makes.  In giving these snippets, I’m leaving out a very great deal of his detailed and revealing text:  do read it for yourself.

1.  The personal experience of sub-personhood:

An illustration:  The enunciation of the Cartesian sum can be construed as one of the crucial episodes of European modernity. Here we have vividly portrayed the plight of the individual knower torn free from the sustaining verities of the dissolving feudal world, which had provided authority and certainty, and entering tentatively into the cognitive universe of an (as yet unrecognized) revolutionizing individualist capitalism, where all that is solid would melt into air. So the crucial question is posed: “what can I know?” And out of this, of course, comes modern epistemology, with the standard moves we all know, the challenges of skepticism, the danger of degeneration into solipsism, the idea of being enclosed in our own possibly unreliable perceptions, the question of whether we can know other minds exist, the scenario of brains-in-a-vat, etc. The Cartesian plight—represented as an allegedly universal predicament—and the foundationalist solution of knowledge of one’s own existence, thus becomes emblematic, a kind of pivotal scene for a whole way of doing philosophy, and involving a whole program of assumptions about the world and (taken-for-granted) normative claims about what is philosophically important.

Contrast this with a different kind of sum, that of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of the black experience, Invisible Man.Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1972). ¹⁶ What are the problems facing this individual? Is the problem one of global doubt? Not at all; such a doubt would never be possible, because the whole point of subordinate black experience, or the general experience of oppressed groups, is that the subordinated are in no position to doubt the existence of the world and other people, especially that of their oppressors. One could say that those most solidly attached to the world are the only ones with the luxury of doubting its reality, while those whose attachment is more precarious, whose existence is dependent on the good will or ill temper of others, are precisely those compelled to recognize that it exists. One is a function of power, the other of subordination. If your daily existence is largely defined by oppression, forced intercourse with the world, it is not going to occur to you that doubt about your oppressors’ existence could in any way be a serious or pressing philosophical problem; this will simply seem frivolous, a perk of social privilege.

2.  Philosophy as white guys jerking off:

Thus there will be a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when you get right down to it,  the peculiar features of the African-American experience—racial slavery, with its link between biological phenotype and social subordination, and chronologically located in the modern epoch, ironically coincident with the emergence of liberalism’s proclamation of universal human equality—will be no part of the experience represented in the abstractions of the European or Euro-American philosopher.

And those who have grown up in such a universe, asked to pretend that they are living in the other, will be cynically knowing, exchanging glances which signify “There the white folks go again.” They know that what is in the books is largely mythical as a generalstatement of principles, that it was never intended to be applicable to them in the first place, but that,as part of the routine, within the structure of power relations, one has to pretend that it does.

Thus there will be a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys jerking off…A lot of moral philosophy will then seem to be based on pretense, the claim that these were the principles that people strove to uphold, when in fact the real principles were the racially exclusivist ones.   (My stress.)

Readers interested in other recent posts on racial diversity in philosophy will find a number of references to them in this post by Stoat.

***changed in light of comment 2.

CNN: UN Passes Gay Rights Resolution June 17, 2011

Hooray! Hooray!

You can read about it here. I’ll just point out Clinton’s statement of something (arguably) necessarily true and substantive:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made gay rights a key focus of the State Department’s human rights agenda, expressing her view that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.”

Normalizing disordered eating June 17, 2011

Glorification of eating disorders — and the bodies that result from them — in the media is nothing new. But what’s surprising (to me, at least) is the extent to which disordered attitudes toward food and eating in young women are increasingly portrayed as “normal”. Fighting with or hating your body, agonizing over every calorie: these seem to be morphing into standard gender stereotypes, rather than signs of illness. Don’t all young women do this? Isn’t it “perfectly normal”?

As an example, the good people at Yoplait apparently felt that these attitudes were innocuous enough to be a good way of selling yogurt. They recently debuted this commercial, which has since been pulled after numerous complaints (WARNING: the material in this commercial may be triggering for those with eating disorders — watch with caution; ANOTHER WARNING: many of the comments on this video are offensive, and may be hurtful — read with caution)

The Huffington Post has more on the controversy surrounding this commercial here.

Conference: Feminism and Bias June 17, 2011

HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITÄT ZU BERLIN, GERMANY

INSTITUT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE

SYMPOSIUM SERIES: FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY AND…

THE INAUGURAL EVENT ON

BIAS

25 – 26th August 2011

Location: Kleiner Senatssaal (Humboldt-Universität Main Building, Unter den Linden 6, Berlin)

The concept of bias has played a key role in shaping feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. It is not, however, an uncontested concept. Feminist philosophers disagree amongst themselves on how the concept should be understood, and whether bias is inevitable. They further disagree on how feminists should respond to and deal with bias. For instance, are biases always detrimental to our knowledge seeking activities? Or, can certain explicit biases (like feminist and anti-racist ones) make our epistemic practices more robustly truth-seeking?

More recently, political and ethical discussions have started making use of the concept of bias. Both philosophers and psychologists alike have begun examining certain sorts of widespread implicit biases about members of stigmatised social groups. The holders of these biases are generally unaware of them, and often have sincere and explicit egalitarian beliefs. On one understanding, implicit biases are unconscious prejudices that unduly affect our ways of both positively and negatively perceiving, evaluating, and interacting with others. The recognition and analysis of such biases has wide-ranging consequences for feminist philosophy and politics, as well as for every other movement seeking social justice. Implicit biases may explain why members of particular groups still find it hard to ‘make it’, despite the lack of overt obstacles to positions of power and authority. Given its centrality to a number of feminist debates, this conference examines the notion of bias (broadly conceived).

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

Louise Antony (University of Massachusetts, Amherts, USA) “Different Voices or Perfect Storm? Explaining the Dearth of Women In Philosophy”

Jennifer Saul (University of Sheffield, UK) “Formal Equality of Opportunity and Affirmative Action”

Matthew Drabek (University of Iowa, US) “A Model of Feedback Bias in the Social Sciences”

Catherine Hundleby (University of Windsor, Canada) “Bias and Fallacies of Argumentation: The Case of Androcentrism”

Kristen Intemann (Montana State University, US) & Inmaculada de Melo‐Martín (Weill Cornell Medical College, US) “Bias and the Commercialization of Scientific Research: Can a Feminist Conception of Impartiality Help?”

Peter Kirwan (University of California, Irvine, US) “Implicit Bias: Mapping the Dark Matter of Social Psychology”

Heidi Lockwood (Southern Connecticut State University, US) “Why does Diversity Matter in the Academy”

Susanne Pohlmann (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) “Accountability and Underpinning Attitudes of Biased Beliefs”

This conference also serves as the inaugural event for the new Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Symposium Series Feminist Philosophy and…. It will be followed by further regular events on topics relevant and of interest to feminist philosophers and all philosophers working on issues to do with social justice. Planned future topics include Feminist Philosophy and: Gender, Pornography, Race, Sex work.

Attendance is free but places are limited. To register, email feminism-hu@gmx.de by 11th August 2011. For further information about the Symposium Series and the event on Bias, please contact Prof. Dr. Mari Mikkola (mari.mikkola AT hu-berlin.de).

CFP: Climate change June 17, 2011

Special Issue on Climate Change
March 15, 2012 submission deadline
Volume 28, Number 3, Summer 2013
Guest Editors: Nancy Tuana and Chris Cuomo
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy seeks papers for a special issue on Climate Change. We welcome new feminist scholarship on the scientific, ethical, epistemological, economic, and cultural dimensions of current global climate change, as well as case studies that critically engage specific questions in local, regional, national, and/or global contexts. In addition to essays developing feminist analyses of the science, ethics, and politics of climate change, we encourage investigations of the gendered, neo-colonial, and other power-laden frameworks which shape the discourses and power flows that influence various parties’ understandings of and responses to climate change.
There has been a great deal of work in the natural and social sciences on various aspects of climate change, and there is increasing acknowledgement in the literature that extreme weather events and ecological disasters tend to have greater negative impacts on women, girls, and those who lack economic and social power. Nonetheless, little attention has been given to the complex ways in which hegemonic conceptions of gender, race, nation, and knowledge are implicated within institutional frameworks of climate policy, media representations of scientific knowledge, and suggestions of planetary redemption through “eco-engineering,” carbon markets, or profit-generating green technologies.
In addition to critical case studies focused on specific regions or trends, some questions and issues that might be considered in this special issue include (but are not limited to) feminist analyses of the following topics:

* Geopolitics of climate change treaties and political processes
* Ethics and politics of approaches to climate justice, including cosmopolitanism, human
rights, human security, indigenous rights, and eco-centric perspectives
* Critical analyses of industrial, scientific, policy and activist discourses
* Climate change denial and epistemologies of ignorance
* Intersections and tensions of development ethics and climate ethics
* Epistemologies and ethics of climate modeling, including economic models
* Naturalization of fossil fuel dependence and consumerism
* Climate change and the resurgence of reactionary notions of population control
* Critical analyses of the influence of popular media, from misinformation to education

Deadline for submission: March 15, 2012
Papers should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography, prepared for anonymous review, and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words. For details please see Hypatia’s submission guidelines.
Please submit your paper to manuscript central. When you submit, make sure to select “Climate Change” as your manuscript type, and also send an email to the guest editors indicating the title of the paper you have submitted: Chris Cuomo: cuomo AT uga.edu, Nancy Tuana: ntuana AT la.psu.edu

CFP: Homophobia (*Note deadline) June 16, 2011

APA members, take note!  This cfp is especially easy to meet for those philosophers who have related work on the back burner.  Those of us who’ve written for APA Newsletters can attest that they are good homes for a pleasant combination of rigorous and yet conversational writing.

From Talia Better–

 The deadline for the Fall APA GLBTTQ Newsletter is fast approaching. We would like to devote the next letter to discussions of homophobia: what is it? What is the best way to think of it? How do we combat it? How does it intersect and interact with racism and sexism? How is it related to trans-phobia? Essays on practical confrontations with homophobia would also be welcome: what ways of combating it have worked in your experience? As this is an informal setting, it would be excellent if people would be willing to share ideas in development, unusual approaches to these questions, anything that would spark a good debate or some new thinking a topic of importance to us all. Please contact me at wilkerw@uah.edu if you have any relevant work related to this topic. Although the deadline is actually July 1, I would welcome any thoughts or ideas by about July 15, and then we can work out details later.

 Also, any of you who have published articles or books on GLBTTQ themes in the past year, please forward along publication information and a short abstract so we can all see what you’ve done!

 Thanks,

 William Wilkerson, Newsletter Editor

Distinguished Woman Philosopher 2011 – Jennifer Saul‏ June 16, 2011

Via  Maeve M. O’Donovan, Executive Secretary, Eastern Society for Women in Philosophy:

The Society for Women in Philosophy is happy to announce that the winner of the 2011 Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award is Jennifer Saul (University of Sheffield).

Jenny Saul has demonstrated courage and leadership, and she is leading feminists forward to new ways of thinking and connecting. We applaud Dr. Saul’s willingness to take a public stand against sexism everywhere, especially in our profession. She is one of the founders of and co-bloggers for Feminist Philosophers, an excellent, trans-continental forum for highlighting gender-bias in the academy. The Feminist Philosophers blog has become a wonderful example of collective feminist work that has led to other initiatives like the “Gendered Conference Campaign,” “What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy?” and “What are we Doing about What it is Like” message boards. Dr. Saul has also directed SWIP UK, helped to implement the ‘woman-friendly initiative award’ and will be co-chairing the SWIP/British Philosophical Association‘s Sub-Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. Her work on implicit bias has done much to bring in allies to the advancement of women in philosophy, including many who would not ordinarily consider themselves feminist. Her scholarship in Philosophy of Language is also most notable and there is much praise for her book, Feminism: Issues and Arguments. Dr. Saul has done a great deal to make all our lives better and, as both a mentor and scholar, her colleagues have found her to be most worthy of the Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award.

• Rosemarie Tong, Mecklenburg County Medical Society Distinguished Professor of Health Care Ethics, Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, UNC Charlotte, co-chair, Distinguished Woman Philosopher Committee
• Jennifer Scuro, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair, Philosophy and Religious Studies (effective September 2011), Director, Women’s Studies Program, The College of New Rochelle,  co-chair, Distinguished Woman Philosopher Committee

CFP: Feminist bioethics in Rotterdam June 16, 2011

FAB 2012 CONGRESS: CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS

ROTTERDAM, JUNE 25-27, 2012

The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics is pleased to invite proposals for panels and papers for presentation at the 2012 Congress. The Congress theme is Generations: Imagining the Future to Promote Health and Justice.  Submissions on any topic in feminist bioethics are welcome.

Paper abstracts should be 300 words, accompanied by both a descriptive title for the paper proposed and 2-3 keywords. Proposed panels should include a 300-word description of the overall topic and objectives of the panel, as well as a panel title and the titles of all the papers to be included in the panel.  All submissions should include the names, e-mail addresses, and full affiliations of all authors.  In cases of panels and co-authored papers, please identify a corresponding author. One or two submitted papers may be selected for plenary presentations. If you wish your paper to be considered for a plenary, please submit the full paper and indicate that you seek review for a plenary.

The conference organizers welcome submissions from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, the social sciences, critical cultural studies (gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, race studies, etc.), law, public health, and others. We particularly encourage submissions from early career researchers.  Please provide enough detail for reviewers to be able to assess your proposal for a paper or panel from the abstract. The abstract should include a clear statement of method, thesis, and conclusion, and indicate what participants will learn from your presentation.

The theme of Generations should be interpreted broadly. Topics may include, but should not be limited to:

- New social patterns in reproduction (reproductive tourism, assisted reproductive technologies, surrogacy, etc.)

- The distinctive moral status and needs of children

- Caregiving across generations (eldercare, child care, etc.)

- Intergenerational justice

- Reproductive rights and justice

- Access to maternal and child health care

- Re-imagining the family and familial responsibilities

- Environmental justice across generations

- Re-imagining the future

- Adoption and the creation of families

- The value and social meaning of biological ties between generations

- Prolonging life

- The next generation of feminist bioethics

- Sustaining and shaping communities over time

 Submissions (in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format) should be e-mailed to FAB.Rotterdam2012@gmail.com by December 1, 2011. This e-mail address should only be used for communications concerning submissions, and not for general conference or FAB inquiries.

 Vol 6, no.2 of the International Journal for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (IJFAB) will be based on the proceedings of the 2012 FAB Conference.  All papers presented at the conference, or whose abstracts were accepted, will be eligible for inclusion in this issue of IJFAB. Once abstracts are accepted, they will be forwarded to the Editorial Office of IJFAB, which will follow up with instructions to authors about submission and review processes. To be included in the conference issue papers must submitted in IJFAB style to the Editorial Office no later than August 15, 2012. The issue will appear in November 2013. FAB encourages all conference presenters to submit their papers to IJFAB for review. Authors who do not wish to have their papers reviewed for inclusion in IJFAB should indicate this when submitting an abstract.

SWIP UK Panel at the Joint Session June 15, 2011

Virginity as a Commodity
Emma C. Bullock, University of Birmingham

Forgiveness and Feeling
Crystal L’Hôte, Saint Michael’s College, Vermont (USA)

Intimate Materiality & Transgressing Gender Politics: Spinoza as Anonymous Translator for Margaret Askew Fell Fox
Christina Rawls, Duquesne University

The John Mayer Interview, or How to Start Dating Separately from your Dick
Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, University of Michigan

Full information can be found here.

Open racism in philosophy June 15, 2011

Last week, when the profession briefly focused its online attention on racism in philosophy, there were quite a few expressions of scepticism about the negative experiences black philosophers were reporting.  Then some white philosophers started speaking up, off the blogs, saying “hey, nobody should be surprised, given the racist things that some leading white philosophers openly say”.  They hesitated, however, to say this on the blogs.  Well, I’m here to say it on this blog: in addition to the fact, often discussed here, that we probably all harbour unconscious racism, there ARE leading philosophers who don’t hesitate to openly express racist views.*  I have been present when this happened.  (To my great shame, I was a timid and terrified student and had no idea what to do or say.)  We can’t fix a problem if we don’t talk about it.

We also can’t fix it if we don’t talk about what to do.  A good start would be for everyone to think a bit about what to do if they encounter such a situation: it’s hard to know what to do, but it’s important to do *something*.  I urge you, then, to visit this site about bystander training.

*I’m not saying that this is widespread, and I don’t think that it is (though surely unconscious racism is, just because we’re humans living in racist societies).  Most, though definitely not all, of the white philosophers in these discussions, were shocked to hear of open racism in the profession.

The worst places in the world to be a woman June 15, 2011

The results of a Thomson Reuters Foundation global survey on the world’s most dangerous places to be a woman have been released. The survey was set up to mark the launch of TrustLaw, an organization which aims to provide free legal advice and assistance to women and women’s aid groups worldwide. The top five most dangerous places to be a woman, according to the results, are (in order): Afghanistan, Congo, Pakistan, India, Somalia.

The survey’s methodology is questionable — 213 “gender experts” from around the world were asked to evaluate overall “perception of risk” as well as specific risk factors. Still, it’s nice to see that research like this is being carried out (and that it’s getting some media attention).

The report from the study, available on the TrustLaw website, makes for chilling reading.

Feminist philosophers, fetaldex and AJOB June 14, 2011

As readers of Inside Higher Ed and the Leiter Reports know, Hilde Lindemann has resigned from the editorial board of the American Journal of Bioethics, citing a number of concerns. Chief among them is the editors’ decision to accept and run a “Target Article” describing a Letter of Concern (both at the hotlink), signed by 32 scholars including Hilde Lindemann, as a case study in unethical bioethics. The ensuing coverage has considered many interesting questions, including the accuracy of Lindemann’s comments in her resignation letter, the accuracy of the editors and authors of the Target Article who have defended their choices and their various online posts since, the standards of evidence in bioethics and so on. Potentially lost in this otherwise quite gripping discussion is the actual subject of the initial Letter of Concern, which is of interest to so many feminist philosophers: fetaldex.org:

Purpose: This website seeks to raise ethical concerns about the prenatal use of dexamethasone (a Class C steroid) when it is given to pregnant women to attempt to prevent female fetuses from developing genitals that are atypical, and when it is given by clinicians to also prevent females from being psychologically “masculnized,” i.e., tomboyish, more aggressive than average girls, and ultimately lesbian of bisexual in sexual orientation.

An excellent plain-language introduction to this topic is provided via this article at Time magazine.

So if you’re wondering why so many of your friendly neighbourhood feminist philosophers are signatories on the LOC taking so much criticism, that’s why!

Shame: still a feminist concern June 13, 2011

One of my very first encounters with feminist philosophy was with Sandra Bartky’s writing on shame.  I was put in mind of that when Shelley Tremain recently sent in the following comment, and thought it was food for thought for a new discussion topic:

I want to add something to the discussion about shame and disabled people. I think it is very important not to underestimate the impact of shame on disabled people’s lives. Shame is one of the deepest sources of oppression with which many disabled people must contend. Many disabled people receive government assistance as their only source of income, and for this they are made to feel ashamed. Disabled people as a group, on the whole, are regarded as asexual, and because of this many, if not most, disabled people have low self-esteem and self-worth and feel a sense of shame. Disabled people’s bodies are vilified, regarded with disgust, and represented in the media, literature, popular culture, etc. as ugly, and for these (and a host of other) reasons disabled people, understandably, feel shame. Denying that disabled people are made to feel ashamed of themselves is a denial of many of the most fundamental ways we are oppressed.

It has been decades since I first read Bartky’s work on shame.  There is much to be said about shame, but I struggle with the search for antidotes.  Those who make us feel shame are also most likely to chide us for suffering from it.  Part of Shelley’s point is that at the least, misrecognition of shame is to be avoided.  And some of the sources she identifies in her comment are the product of the wrong ideals; for example, receiving government assistance is a source of shame in a culture in which people with lucky and uneventful lives hold up extreme individualism and self-sufficiency as an ideal for everyone, while fancying they live up to this ideal.

Tremain’s and Bartky’s combined insights clarify my own resistance to the simplistic characterization I have heard before, that your ’guilt’ is the view others hold of your wrongdoings, whereas ‘shame’ is your view of yourself.  This neat map carries the implication that if shame is internal to you, then you are in control of its removal.  But our shame, its creation and its denial by others can also be products of oppressive practices, including the doubly-binding demand that we get over it.  I smile ruefully at the memory of Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in her book, Bright-Sided, that one is expected to be cheerful in the presence of breast-cancer, running for change and drinking Shiraz labled “Hope” with an image of a pink ribbon.  I phoned my mother yesteday, and we joked that her shame after having a breast removed was so 1980s of her, wasn’t it?  She recalled how her posture changed when she first went out after recovering from mastectomy.  “I tried to walk with my shoulders forward so the difference in my bra cups wouldn’t be so noticeable.” 

She marveled that she’d never told anyone that before.  Shame, it turns out, is better recognized.

World Blood Donor Day June 13, 2011

Tomorrow (June 14) is World Blood Donor Day.

If you’re able to do so, please consider giving blood. It’s a simple gift that can mean the difference between life and death for those who receive it. (And women are statistically more likely to need a blood transfusion than men, so you can think of yourself as doing something practical to help out the sisterhood.)

If you’re in the US, you can get information about where to donate here.

If you’re in the UK, the information can be found here.

If you’re in Australia, go here.

If you’re in Canada, you can look it up here.

(The World Blood Donor site has information for various other countries, or you can google the name of your country + blood and the blood service is usually the first hit.)

It won’t be too bad, you’ll be glad you did it, and they’ll give you a cookie when you’re done. Off you go.

An open call for reasons to stay June 13, 2011

This is cross-posted from What is it Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy, which doesn’t allow comments. Leave your responses in the comments here!

I am about to start my PhD at an excellent Leiter ranked program. I have a BA and and MA from excellent schools. I have worked closely with ground breaking philosophers in my field. I have published, I have an excellent teaching resume, phenomenal letters of recommendation, and moreover I love my job. I am a good philosopher, and I am thinking about leaving philosophy.

I have been a secretary and a chauffeur. I have been disingenuously promised research assistantships and letters of recommendation, in return for dinner dates and car rides. I have been asked if I was married while my colleagues have been asked what they think. I have been told that I’m both cute and idiotic. I have passed on professional opportunities because I am a woman, and no one would believe that I deserved those opportunities — accepting would make me seem like a slut, since men make it on merit, and women make it in bed. So, ironically, I have been praised as professional for having passed on professional opportunities. I have been the lone woman presenting at the conference, and I have been the woman called a bitch for declining sexual relations with one of the institutions of hosts. I think I have just about covered the gamut of truly egregiously atrocious sexist behaviour. So I just have this one question that I think I need answered: Is the choice between doing
philosophy, and living under these conditions, or saving yourself, and leaving the discipline?

This is an open call for reasons to stay.

CFP: FEMMSS June 12, 2011

FEMMSS 4: Call for Proposals – REVISED SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Paper proposals are invited for the fourth conference of the Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics and Science Studies (FEMMSS) to be held at The Pennsylvania State University, May 10-12, 2012.

We welcome new participants and perspectives from across the academy and outside it that provide feminist discussion on any topic in epistemologies, methodologies, metaphysics, or science studies.  Note the following broad themes of recent and ongoing interest:

• Practicing & teaching science as a feminist
• Gender, justice & climate change
• Liberatory approaches to science policy
• Feminist perspectives on cognition, logic, argumentation & rhetoric
• Liberatory methodologies
• Knowledges of resistance
• Experience, authority & ignorance
• Science, technology & the state
• Public philosophy

 REVISION: Proposals must be submitted using the EasyChair conference system.  

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: Please register at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=femmss4. Enter an abstract of 250-300 words plus bibliography in the “abstract” section, then 3-10 keywords in “keywords” space. Upload a CV of no more than 3 pages in .pdf format or Word (.doc or .docx) into the space for a “paper.” Submissions are due by August 1. 

 (If you have any difficulty with the system contact Cate: hundleby@uwindsor.ca.)

PANEL OR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS:  Please compile these into one submission.  For each presenter include a CV and abstract as above, but also include a sentence or two at the top of the abstracts explaining the general purpose for the session.

Dr. Catherine Hundleby
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Cross-appointed to Women’s Studies
Fellow, Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric
University of Windsor
MAILING ADDRESS:
Department of Philosophy
University of Windsor
401 Sunset Avenue
Windsor, Ontario
Canada N9B 3P4

PHONE: 253-3000, ext. 3947
E-MAIL: hundleby [at] uwindsor [dot] ca

CFP: Analytic Feminism at Central APA June 12, 2011

The Society for Analytical Feminism invites submissions for a session at the 2012 Central Division APA meetings.

Society for Analytical Feminism Session at the Central Division APA
Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois
February 15-18, 2012

The Society seeks papers that examine feminist issues by methods broadly construed as analytic, or discuss the use of analytic philosophical methods as applied to feminist issues. Reading time should be about 20 minutes. Authors should submit either  (1) a paper, or (2) an extended abstract, as detailed as possible (up to 1000 words) accompanied by a bibliography. Please delete all self-identifying references from your submission to ensure anonymity.   Send submissions as a word attachment to Robin Dillon (rsd2 [at] lehigh.edu).

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2011.

Graduate students or underfunded professionals whose papers are accepted will be eligible for the Society’s $250 Travel Stipend. Please indicate on a separate page (or in your covering letter) if you fall into one of these categories.

The Society for Analytical Feminism provides a forum where issues concerning analytical feminism may be openly discussed and examined. Its purpose is to promote the study of issues in feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to feminist issues, and to provide a means by which those interested in Analytical Feminism may meet and exchange ideas. The Society meets yearly at the Central Division meetings of the APA and frequently organizes sessions for the Eastern Division and Pacific Divisions. Information can be found on our website.