Socialist Feminism Conference July 25, 2008

I’ve just been sent an announcement for this interesting conference:

On October 3-6, 2008 Radical Women is hosting The Persistent Power of Socialist Feminism conference at The Women’s Building in San Francisco.

The conference features activists and scholars from Central America, Australia, China, and the U.S. The agenda includes panel discussions, keynote speakers such as civil liberties attorney Lynne Stewart, organizer-training workshops and strategy sessions. Topics include: multiracial organizing in a society divided by racism, the dynamic leadership of youth and queers, a labor revival ignited by immigrants and women of color, and the need for an independent grassroots feminist movement.

In today’s tumultuous political climate, we hope this event will produce concrete plans to energize and focus the women’s movement on the many issues that affect us all. The event is open to all genders.

Philosophical Insults June 27, 2008

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

CFP: Feminist Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition June 15, 2008

Society for Analytical Feminism
Feminist Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition

CALL FOR PAPERS
SAF Session at the Central Division APA Meetings
Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois
February 18-21, 2009
NOTE DATE CHANGE!

The Society for Analytical Feminism invites submissions for a session at the 2008 Central Division APA meetings to be held in Chicago in February 18-21, 2009. Please note that this is a different date than you may be used to!

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. You may submit papers as a word attachment to sharon.crasnow@rcc.edu (preferred) or mail four copies to:

Sharon Crasnow
925 Archer Street
San Diego, CA 92109

The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2008.

CFP: From the Margins to the Center: Feminist Disability Studies and/in Feminist Bioethics June 5, 2008

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

TO A SPECIAL ISSUE OF

 

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FEMINIST

APPROACHES TO BIOETHICS (IJFAB)

Vol. 3, no. 2, Fall, 2010       

 

From the Margins to the Center:

Feminist Disability Studies and/in Feminist Bioethics

 

Guest Editor,  Shelley Tremain

 

In recent years, work done in mainstream bioethics has been challenged by the emerging field of disability studies. 

 

A growing number of disability theorists and activists point out that the views about disability and disabled people that mainstream bioethicists have articulated on matters such as prenatal testing, stem cell research, and physician-assisted suicide incorporate significant misunderstandings about them and amount to an institutionalized form of their oppression. 

 

While some feminist bioethicists have paid greater attention to the perspectives and arguments of disabled people than other bioethicists, these perspectives and arguments are rarely made central.  Feminist disability theory remains marginalized even within feminist bioethics. 

 

This issue of IJFAB will go some distance to move feminist disability studies from the margins to the center of feminist bioethics by highlighting the contributions to and interventions in bioethics that feminist disability studies is uniquely situated to make.

 

The guest editor seeks contributions to the issue on any topic related to feminist disability studies and bioethics, including (but not limited to):

 

•                     Critiques of bioethics by feminist disability theorists from within feminist bioethics

 

•                     The relevance of feminist disability studies in developing countries

 

•                     What’s still missing from feminist arguments in the debates about stem cell research and other forms of biotechnology

 

•                     The importance of perspectives of disabled embodiment in feminist bioethics

 

•                     How the critiques of bioethics advanced in disability studies are gendered

 

•                     The integration of political analyses of disability into feminist bioethics

 

•                     The critique of  notions of normalcy embedded in (feminist) bioethics

 

•                     The reevaluation of feminist approaches to care from a feminist disability studies perspective

 

 

Articles should be 3,000 - 8,000 words in length.  Shorter pieces written for the Commentaries section of the issue should be 2,000-3,000 words in length. 

 

All submissions should be double-spaced, prepared for anonymous review (no identifying references in the body of the text or bibliography), accompanied by an abstract of 150 words, and prepared in accordance with the journal’s style guidelines which are posted on the IJFAB website (www.ijfab.org .).  

 

Contact information  – email address, street address, and affiliation (if applicable) –  should appear on a separate page which also includes a statement verifying that the work has not been previously published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. 

 

Submissions should be sent as email attachments in Microsoft Word or rtf to Shelley Tremain at s.tremain@yahoo.ca

 

The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2009.  The guest editor strongly encourages authors to contact her before completing their submissions.

What we’re up against June 4, 2008

The CFP: An International Conference on Human Rights and Biomedicine.
The invited speakers: 10 men and 1 woman.
So, Robin Fiore wrote in expressing her disappointment at the sex/gender imbalance, and calling attention to the fact that women might have particularly important insights on topics in biomedicine (especially since, though she didn’t call attention to it, one of the suggested topics was “the protection of foetuses”.)

The reply:

Dear Robin (if I may),
Thank you for the interesting opinion. The conference organizers have extensively discussed the conference themes and speakers in advance. We agreed to select academics with an outstanding scientific reputation in their field of expertise. Secondly, for dialectic reasons we invited speakers with rather controversial ideas. Although the organizers recognize the scientific relevance of e.g., organ donation and clinical trials from a feminist perspective, our aim is - with all respect - to discuss the themes from a broader perspective. To comfort you, I can say that we have also had some suggestions to include shamanism and health care rights as a conference theme, but I
fear that the response would not be that overwhelming as it is now. Secondly, two other invited speakers were women but to capable/willing to write a contribution for the conference book, a precondition for invited speakers. Nonetheless, I feel confident that our colleague and friend Deirdre Madden will intrigue the audience, which exists for 61 percent of women! Finally, the organizers are open for your suggestions to organize a parallel session on femenist ethics.

Now, obviously part of the problem is linguistic. But linguistic error does not explain the apparent equation of feminism and shamanism. Or the thought that feminism is not a sufficiently broad perspective to be represented when discussing such things as “protection of foetuses”. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the CFP and the way that the Fiore’s email was handled, write to m.ghari@erasmusmc.nl and let him know. Fiore tells me, by the way that in the past conferences like this have been responsive to complaints of this sort. And she advises that it’s important not to provide cover for their lack of high-profile women speakers by organising a panel presentation with women and/or feminists. (And definitely not shamanists.)

The organisers are being invited to respond to this post in comments.

Update: As you can see in the comments, the organisers have now responded very positively. Hurrah! Well done everyone.

Trying to cross the analytic/continental divide May 25, 2008

Many of us were at the SWIP UK Conference on Embodiment and Identity over the weekend in Hull. I’ll be blogging more about it later, and perhaps some of the rest of us will too! But here I just want to talk methodologies. Feminist philosophers often criticise more mainstream philosophers as not sufficiently open to new methodologies. But I think it’s important to talk a bit about how genuinely difficult it is to engage with methodologies that are not one’s own. I’m a very analytic philosopher, and the SWIP conference gave me quite an immersion in continental philosophy. It was really exciting– lots of great people, lots of fascinating stuff that was very new to me, lots of wonderful energy. But I also spent a lot of time feeling like I was in a different world, with a language I don’t know and a culture that is unfamiliar. Sometimes I couldn’t understand anything at all that was going on. Sometimes, usually when detailed examples were used, I got a lot out of it. But sometimes it was something in between– I kind of got what was going on, or thought I did. Then someone started talking about water having ‘agency’, and everyone in the room was nodding sagely. It was already several replies into a question, and the queue was long, so I decided not to query further. But it gave me a real sense of the difficulty of simply asking people to be more inclusive with regard to methodologies. It’s just HARD to engage with things when you really don’t understand what’s going on– and doubly so when some of the words are ones that you yourself use differently. (If it hadn’t been for that example, I might well not have realised that clearly something different was being meant by the familiar word ‘agency’.) Do others have thoughts, experiences, advice on the topic of crossing this divide?

“esoteric ramblings about white-skin privilege” May 10, 2008

A Deeper Black By Ta-Nehisi Coates appears in the May 1 edition of The Nation.  It’s an unfavorable review of Shelby Steele’s book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win.    In it Coates presents a picture of Obama’s supposedly ‘post-racial’ candidacy as not that at all; it shows instead ‘a deeper black,’ which is due to Obama’s acceptance of his ethnic identity and his construal of that as on a par with other ethnic identities.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple of days and have wondered whether there’s a comparable shift that women can make or that some women have already made.  And then this morning I received noticer of a new APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, which has a number of valuable, thoughtful articles on race and gender.  I suddenly realized that in effect the Coates review poses a question for feminist philosophy that we might do well to be aware of.  The question isn’t easy to formulate, and indeed there might be different versions of it, but its basis can be found in this comment:

This is the blackness of Barack Obama. It is an identity that asserts itself without conscious thought. It has no need of marches and placards. It rejects an opportunistic ignorance of racism but understands that esoteric ramblings about white-skin privilege do not move the discussion further. It does not need to bluster, to scream, to hyperbolize. Obama’s blackness is like any other secure marker of identity, subtle and irreducible to a list of demands.

And now I’m wondering whether my attitude toward the ubiquitous sexism of the academy is a good model or analogue for the experience of racism, as I realize I had assumed it was.  If the place of racism is  much more complicated in the lives of black students than we others might have thought, what implications does that have for our teaching?  Is Coates’ comment about irrelevant esoteric rambling something we should be taking to our methodology?  Or on a par with other students’ complaints about our wordy and out of date texts?  These questions are just that: questions.  What do you think?

Two more quotes may give you a fuller picture of what Coates is saying:

This is why all the fuss over how much or how little Obama addresses racism misses the point. Obama mentions white racism about as often as black people actually think about white racism–which is to say rarely.
… Survey the average voter in Harlem, Detroit or West Baltimore, ask her to rank her presidential concerns and see where “reparations” or “abolishing the Confederate flag” compares with, say, “healthcare” or “ending the war.” In the wake of Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, the pundits swooned, marveling specifically at Obama’s willingness to say that those who fled inner-city America, who opposed affirmative action, were not racist.
… To see Obama’s point as a mark of courage or even a concession, you’d have to imagine a black America that woke up, every morning, thinking only about welfare and affirmative action. …

… there is nothing “postracial,” “postblack” or “transcendental” about it. … Indeed, it is a deeper black, the mark of a less defensive, more self-assured African-American leadership. Our forebears, God bless them, held blackness like an albatross, which they sought to affix around the neck of white America. But this generation, Obama’s generation, holds blackness like a garland, sure in the knowledge that the only neck it belongs around is our own.

 

An important shift in academic philosophy? Updated April 6, 2008

[See update at the end.]

At a time in which many feminist philosopers are very worried that the percentage of women in philosophy is at best static, the New York Times tells us, “In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined.”  And that means many more philosophy majors.

Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts.

The impact on the demographics of the profession appear potentially extremely important:

Nationwide, there are more colleges offering undergraduate philosophy programs today than a decade ago (817, up from 765), according to the College Board. Some schools with established programs like Texas A&M, Notre Dame, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now have twice as many philosophy majors as they did in the 1990s.

“WHAT!?!” a philosophy professor might be tempted to ask. But as the first quote might indicate, what we may be seeing is at least as much a shift in philosophy as in the students:

Barry Loewer, the department chairman, said that Rutgers started building its philosophy program in the late 1980s, when the field was branching into new research areas like cognitive science and becoming more interdisciplinary. He said that many students have double-majored in philosophy and, say, psychology or economics, in recent years, and go on to become doctors, lawyers, writers, investment bankers and even commodities traders.

As the approach has changed, philosophy has attracted students with little interest in contemplating the classical texts, or what is known as armchair philosophy. … Other students said that studying philosophy, with its emphasis on the big questions and alternative points of view, provided good training for looking at larger societal questions, like globalization and technology.

“All of these things make the world a smaller place and force us to look beyond the bubble we grow up in,” said Christine Bullman, 20, a junior, who said art majors and others routinely took philosophy classes. “I think philosophy is a good base to look at a lot of issues.”

Do notice that what is going on here is not some simple matter of “If you give them applied, trendy philosophy, then they’ll take the courses.”  Cognitive Science at Rutgers is hardly that.

And in yet another case, feminist philosophy has been an important and unacknowledge pioneer.

[Update:  O, bother!  Questions about reality intrude again.  See the acute Noumena's comments.  Can you contribute to our understanding?]

Report on the CSW panel at the Pacific APA March 31, 2008

Sharon Crasnow has put up a report of the Committee on the Status of Women’s meeting in Pasadena.  Have a look here.

Conference: Embodiment and Identity March 20, 2008

Keynote speaker: Linda Alcoff
May 22nd - 23rd 2008

This conference aims to explore the role the body plays in constituting aspects of our individual and social identity. The claim that biology fixes identity has been hotly contested in recent decades, but its apparent abandonment has led to intense theoretical debate over the role of the body in constituting both individual subjectivity and categories of social identity. We will be focusing particularly on gendered, cultural and racial identity, disability and identity, and identities reached by degrees of bodily modification. In each case attention will be paid to the role of social others in constituting the meaning and recognition bestowed on bodily physiognomies. The common assumption that such categories of identity are required for social participation, political agency and constructions of subjectivity, will be subjected to critical scrutiny.

Conference webpage, including booking form, can be found here.

Val Plumwood Memorial March 17, 2008

Friends and admirers of Val Plumwood might like to know that a blogsite for her has been started with updates re her funeral and memorial service arrangements (she still has not been buried due to complications surrounding private burials), and spaces for people to post tributes, memories, and information about her work.

CFP: Transgender Studies and Feminism March 13, 2008

For a Special Issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities Edited by Talia Mae Bettcher and Ann Garry.

The recent publication of The Transgender Studies Reader (ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, New York: Routledge, 2006) marks a watershed in the development of trans studies. Arising in the early nineties in close relation to queer theory, trans studies is characterized by the coming-to-voice of trans people, long the theorized and researched objects of sexology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and even feminist theory. Sandy Stone’s groundbreaking “The Empire Strikes Back: A PosttranssexualManifesto” sought the end of monolithic accounts of trans people (authored by non-trans) to reveal a multiplicity of trans narratives told by trans people themselves.

By recognizing trans people as flesh and blood humanbeings with particular access to experiences of “transness” and transphobic oppression, as its starting point, trans studies opens up a way of theorizing “transgender”–for trans and non-trans people alike–that ideally resists, rather than reinforces, mechanisms of transphobia. This raises important questions in feminist theory and politics. How can feminist theory best understand transphobia and trans resistance? Where do feminist and trans politics meet? Where are the overlaps and gaps, the points ofconnection and disconnection? 

Hypatia invites submissions to a special issue on transgender studies and feminism, which recognizes the emergence of trans studies.We welcome articles that investigate the relations between feminism and transgender studies. Articles exploring the intersections of multiple oppressions are especially welcome, as are submissions that come from subject-positions outside the United States (and North America more generally). We seek a collection of papers that is international in scope.We also welcome articles that focus on issues specific to trans studies,trans politics, and trans people. This includes (but is hardly limited to) the following: medical regulations of trans bodies; transphobic violence ;transphobia in housing, employment, education, medical treatment, and the like; sexual violence against trans people; critiques and concerns about various views within trans studies or politics, tensions between queer theory and trans studies.

Submissions need not be limited to the discipline of philosophy; we encourage interdisciplinary submissions. Regardless of disciplinary orientation, all submissions need to be theoretically sophisticated.Submissions that show a sensitivity to the interrelations among theory,politics, and real impacts upon flesh and blood human beings are especially welcome.

Papers should be no more than 8000 words, prepared for anonymous review, andaccompanied by an abstract of no more than 75 words. Please provide a cover letter identifying your paper as a submission for the special issue“Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities.”

The deadline for submissions is 15 April, 2008. Papers should be submitted by electronic attachment in Word to Ann Garry at agarry AT calstatela.edu.Submissions should follow Hypatia guidelines.Please address all correspondence, questionsand suggestions to Ann Garry or Talia Bettcher at tbettch AT calstatela.edu.

APA: Feminist Philosophy Reception March 11, 2008

Ásta Sveinsdóttir has just alerted us to this very enjoyable sounding event, to be held at the Pacific APA:

 The Bay Area Feminism and Philosophy Workshop (BayFAP) and the Pacific Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy (P-SWIP) invite you to a reception for feminists and their friends: Friday, March 21, 5:30-7:00 pmSanta Rosa Room, Pasadena Hilton HotelPlease stop by for conversation, light nibbles, and a drink (cash bar).  A  similar gathering held during the Pacific APA in San Francisco was a great success.  We are hoping to make it a tradition by repeating it this year.   This event is made possible by the generous support of the University of San Francisco, P-SWIP, and Mills College.We hope to see you there! Jackie Taylor BayFAP, University of San Francisco; Ásta Sveinsdóttir BayFAP, San Francisco State University; Shelley Wilcox BayFAP, San Francisco State University and Temple University; Chris Bellon P-SWIP, CSU Sacramento; Amy Coplan P-SWIP, CSU Fullerton.

UNESCO’s International Network of Women Philosophers March 11, 2008

This organization, you’ll see at the site  linked to below,  is concerned with some problems that are dear to the hearts of many readers here, such as the fact that women have little presence at philosophy meetings.

I’m not at all sure that it is at present a resource for our  readers, but it might represent an  exciting opportunity.  If  you have more knowledge of what is going on with the Network, please let us know.

(Many thanks to Calypso, who passed this on.)

—————————————–

International Network of Women Philosophers sponsored by UNESCO

UNESCO has the pleasure to announce the creation of the Website of the International Network of Women Philosophers, an information portal available to women philosophers throughout the world and to other friends of philosophy.

Dear Women Philosophers,
Dear All,On the occasion of 8 March, International Women’s Day, it is our pleasure to welcome you to the website of the International Network of Women Philosophers sponsored by UNESCO is now available online at the following address: www.unesco.org/shs/philosophy/women_philosophers.This new information portal has been designed for the members of the Network, for women philosophers themselves, as well as for their friends, independent of gender or discipline.Its aim is to be useful and informative, but, above all, to create genuine links within the philosophical community at national, regional and international levels. It ails to provide you with full information regarding the Network, its founding members, its objectives, its structure. It also contains a directory of women philosophers working in different countries throughout the world and who now number more than 1200. We are very happy that they are the first users of this website.It is now then up to you to takes possession of this website, to enrich it, to share it, and to make it your own, with the constant objective of working in favour of the practice of philosophy by women.

The International Network of Women Philosophers sponsored by UNESCO is your own network. It belongs to you just as the future of philosophy belongs to youx.

We invite ou to use this new website to help make the primary mission that UNESCO’s Constitution exhorts us to engage in, that of intellectual and moral solidarity, into a tangible reality!

Have a nice visit!

Pierre Sané
Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences

Moufida Goucha
Chief of the Human Security, Democracy and Philosophy Section

Have you written something on war and/or peace? March 5, 2008

Then consider submitting it (quickly!) for the Sharp Prize.  Here’s what Carol Gould wrote to the (US) SWIP  mailing list:  

Please consider submitting an essay for consideration
for the Sharp Prize on issues relating the philosophy of war
and peace. I’m chair of the committee this year and it
would be great to have some submissions from feminist
philosophers. Here’s the info (note that you need to act
quickly!):

FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP MEMORIAL PRIZE

Most recent awardee: 2007 Jeff McMahan, “The Morality and
Law of War”

Deadline for submission for 2009 Prize: March 15, 2008.

Summary

This prize is awarded to the best unpublished essay or
monograph on the philosophy of war and peace submitted for
the competition.

Process: The winning entry is selected by a committee of 3-6
members, appointed by the Chair of the APA’s Committee on
Lectures, Publications, and Research, in consultation with
LPR committee members.

Frequency: Every 2 years (odd years)

Award Amount: $1,500

Last Award: 2007

Next Award: 2009

Background

The Frank Chapman Sharp Memorial Prize was established in
1990 with funds donated by Eliot and Dorothy Sharp and
several other members and friends of the Sharp family to
honor the memory of Eliot’s father. Frank Chapman Sharp was
President of the Western Division of the APA in 1907-08 and
was a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of
Wisconsin from 1893 until his retirement in 1936. Dr. Sharp
was born in 1866 and died in 1943.

Submission Procedures

APA Members and student associates are eligible to submit
unpublished essays or monographs for the prize. Manuscripts
should be between 7,500 to 75,000 words (between 30 and 300
double-spaced typed pages), and not published OR committed
for publication at the time of the award. Undergraduate
entrants must be philosophy majors (or something close);
graduate students must be enrolled in, or on leave from, a
graduate program in philosophy. Authors must be current
members of the APA in good standing. Send four (4) copies of
the paper, with the title and author’s name and affiliation
on a separate page. Any identifying references in the body
and footnotes of the manuscript should be removed. Deadline
for submission: March 15, 2008. Submissions should be sent
to: Sharp Memorial Prize, American Philosophical
Association, 31 Amstel Avenue, University of Delaware,
Newark, DE 19716.

Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology February 13, 2008

…now has a new website. Here is their announcement:

The recently formed Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology is pleased to announce the launch of our website. SIFP was formed by Professors Bonnie Mann and Beata Stawarska, both faculty members in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon; Dr. Sara Heinämaa, Senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland, Professor of Women’s Studies at the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Oslo, Norway, and International Adviser of SIFP; and Dr. Eva Maria Simms, Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University and the National Adviser of SIFP. Please visit the new website, located here, for more information about the society and our activities, to create a “scholars page,” join our listserve, and more!

SIFP’s activities have been made possible through funding from the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Philosophy.

Women in Philosophy February 12, 2008

For women the philosophy profession has real problems, starting with problems of exclusion.  Perhaps foolishly optimistically, I’ve thought that making the problem more visible would help. 

And I’ll confess upfront:  My idea of fun at an APA would be to combine the style of a Cristo and Jeanne Claude project with a philosophical version of the Guerrilla’s Girls statement.  Not that anyone at an APA meeting would notice, so a bunch of us might have to put on some sort of  costume (from “Cats!”) and perhaps act a bit menacing in the hall ways.

OK, maybe not that.  Still, see  if you can get some ideas from this:

And for Christo and Jeanne Claude:

see the Reichstag wrapped in silver cloth:

Or The Gates in Central Park:

Stanley Fish gets it right…almost! February 4, 2008

Stanley Fish has not been singled out here as the commentator to believe, as you can see from here and here.  In fact, the first is a reaction to an essay of his which makes the current one in the NY Times still more surprising.  For from someone who seems unable to discern how priviledged his life has been we have a very strong  and thorough denouncing of the Hillary-haters, inside and outside the press.

The hatred is not news.  Fish is using the appearance of an article by Jason Horowitz at Men.Style.com, which investigates Hillary-haters, to point out how “looney-tunes” it has become.  He emphasizes the extent to which it has entered the mainstream media:

Respected political commentators devote precious network time to deep analyses of her laugh. Everyone blames her for what her husband does or for what he doesn’t do. (This is what the compound “Billary” is all about.) If she answers questions aggressively, she is shrill. If she moderates her tone, she’s just play-acting. If she cries, she’s faking. If she doesn’t, she’s too masculine. If she dresses conservatively, she’s dowdy. If she doesn’t, she’s inappropriately provocative.

None of those who say and write these things is an official Hillary Clinton-hater (some profess to like and admire her), but they are surely doing the group’s work.

In his most damning remark, he compares Hillary Clinton-hating to anti-semitism - not in its scale of damage, but in its utter disconnection with the facts.

So what is lacking in Fish’s comments?  It is in his account of its cause:

Horowitz observes that there is an “inexhaustible fertile market of Clinton hostility,” but that “the search for a unifying theory of what drives Hillary’s most fanatical opponents is a futile one.” The reason is that nothing drives it; it is that most sought-after thing, a self-replenishing, perpetual-energy machine.

And this comment leads him to his comparison with anti-semitism. But the two are radically disanalogous in the following way: We do not yet understand why groups of people get declared outside the boundary of those a dominant group accepts. It’s clear groups of human beings are capable of declaring other groups unacceptable as human beings, but we do not understand sufficiently how deeply it goes and whether this capacity is inborn or not. But we do have a very good idea of at least part of what is driving Hillary Clinton’s haters, beyond her obvious connection with her hated 60’s-type husband. She is a strong and brilliant woman whose current quest for power is extremely threatening and entirely unwomanly.

And the theorists who would have foreseen this outburst of villification?   Feminists.

Simone de Beauvoir’s bottom January 14, 2008

Let me begin by stating that I am not a hater of the human form. If pushed, I will confess to thinking that there should be more, not less, public nudity for a variety of reasons. Nothing, for instance, beats the sensation of sun on skin. And what better way to learn that one’s thighs, upper arms, tummy, chest, breasts, labia, or penis are entirely normal and not hideously deformed than by looking at other ordinary folks with their clothes off? (See for yourself by visiting a nudist beach, or Betty Dodson’s online Genital Gallery - nsfw.) Nevertheless, I was disappointed to discover Le Nouvel Observateur celebrating the centenary of de Beauvoir’s birth by printing a nude photograph of de Beauvoir, viewed from behind. Prominent French feminist group, Les Chiennes de Gard, were likewise annoyed, and protested outside Le Nouvel Observateur’s office, wearing dog masks, brandishing placards, and demanding to see naked photographs of various male bottoms, including those of Levinas, Sartre, and Le Nouvel Observateur’s director. In a meeting with the feminists, the editors defended their decision by claiming that the picture aptly represents the scandal de Beauvoir caused in her time, with her unconventional views and non-conformist lifestyle. That’s as maybe. The problem, as Les Chiennes Gard pointed out, is that no male philosopher would be depicted in this way. Sartre, e.g., was just as unconventional and non-conformist as de Beauvoir, but it’s highly unlikely that we’ll get to see his naked arse on the front page. Ditto Bertrand Russell. Nude pictures of his unmentionables are not forthcoming, despite his suberversive opinions having rendered him jobless and declared unfit to teach the young. Moreover, the odds are somewhat stacked against women in philosophy. Whilst I do not, for one minute, wish to accuse all men working in the discipline of misogyny and sexism, it is still true that one’s femaleness can make it hard to get one’s work taken seriously. Feminist philosophy is similarly marginalised. The main academic journals are reluctant to publish it, and the specialist feminist journals, such as Hypatia, traditionally receive lowly rankings in the lists of the great and the good. Within this context, the celebration of de Beauvoir’s centenary with a picture of her backside, says less about the scandalous nature of her work, and more about the low regard in which female philosophers and feminists are held. For these reasons, I join Les Chiennes Gard in calling for more naked photos of the philosophical male’s posterior.  (Thanks for the tip, Evelyn!)

Hypatia and Hirsch Numbers January 12, 2008

O.K., let me start with some apologies for drawing attention to some recent discussion on the philosophical blogosphere of Hirsch-scores and author impact analysis through citation indices. This sort of thing often smacks as the kind of posturing that I find troubling in the philosophy profession. However, citation scores for published articles are certainly one possibility for future research assessments in the U.K, and maybe even Australia.

But let me get to the point.A 2005 paper by J.E. Hirsch, “An Index to Quantify An Individuals Scientific Research Output”, proposes to generate a “Hirsch” number for a researcher according to how many citations that researchers’ papers receive. (You can find details of how its calculated here). There is also a down-loadable program called”Harzing’s Publish or Perish” (here) which uses Google Scholar to calculate Hirsch Numbers. Now, some philosophers have been playing around with this programme recently to create lists of Top Epistemologists, Departmental Rankings, and most recently, and of most relevance to this post, Journal Rankings.

The reason I’m posting is that, in light of lots of the concerns that we have on this blog about publishing feminist philosophy (see the posts under this category), and in particular, the ESF’s low ranking of Hypatia and the problem of getting others to recognise the value of being published in that journal (see here), the result of the Journal Rankings are quite interesting.Gregory Wheeler (over at Certain Doubts), who ran the statistics for Journal rankings by Hirsch numbers, used the same ESF list which gave Hypatia a low rank. By Hirsch numbers, of the 75 journals listed, Hypatia comes in 26th (see the spread sheet linked on Wheeler’s post), and ahead of the following selective list of well known journals which the ESF ranked higher: The Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, American Philosophical Quarterly, Law and Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.And of well known journals given the same ranking by the ESF, it scores a higher Hirsch number than: The European Journal of Philosophy, The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and Ratio amongst many others.

It’s obvious that the Publish or Perish programme has obvious flaws, and the reasons why Hypatia scores well may have much to do with the limited choices Feminist philosophers have when trying to place an article. I’ll leave you to ponder the reasons why Hypatia scores well by Hirsch numbers, but I have to say that seeing this left me feeling cheered up and thumbing my teeth at the ESF. And since the future of some important research assessments is certainly looking citation shaped, it leaves me feeling a little optimistic too (but I am a bit of a Pollyanna).