Speaking of Using Your Powers to Make the World More Better February 5, 2013

The Border House is a great blog about video games and social identity.

They have a recent post up entitled, “TransMovement: Freedom and Constraint in Queer and Open World Games”
(All the blockquotes here are from the Border House article by Samantha Allen)

When Bethesda Games’ Todd Howard previewed the open world role-playing gameSkyrim, he famously promised that the player would be able to traverse any visible geography. His breathless assurance of the player’s ultimate freedom has already come and gone as an internet meme: “You see that mountain? You can climb it.”

In it, the author mentions a video game (that you can play right in your browser without downloading anything) called dys4ia.

I want to contrast this ultimate freedom of movement with the mechanics of movement in Anna Anthropy’s much-discussed game dys4ia, which she describes as “an autobiographical game about my experiences with hormone replacement therapy.”

It’s articles like this that make me think there is lots of potential for philosophy and video games to get together and make sweet, sweet knowledge.  Especially in regards to social justice and oppression.

I’ll confess that I seem to enjoy the rampant freedom of open world games just as much as anybody. But, for cisgender gamers, the supreme motility of open world games often functions as an exaggeration of a freedom of movement that they may already enjoy in the physical spaces of non-game worlds.

In her 1980 essay, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young thinks through the style of movement typical of women in the United States. Women, in her view, do not “make full use of the body’s spatial and lateral possibilities” unlike men who are able to move freely, with long strides and swinging arms (Young 1980, 142).

I’m not arguing that all games should constrain player motion so that the much-stereotyped white, male, cisgender game-playing teenager can understand my experience as a transwoman. I do want to resist, however, game critics’ tendency to think of the open world, “ultimate freedom” genre as the evolutionary endpoint of video games as a medium. Different styles of movement produce different emotional effects and both should be available to us as players and as game-makers. To regard “fun” as the ultimate litmus test for the success of a video game is to sell short the emotive capacity of the medium itself.

I also want to call attention to the implicit masculinity of the open world genre, not to dismiss it entirely, but rather to point out the ways in which freedom of movement can be experienced differently by people outside the largely white, male cisgender realm of video game preview and review culture. [...] Because I don’t equate fiction with reality, I can’t hold Far Cry 3 accountable for neocolonialism. I can point out, however, that it’s a reflection of an implicit masculinism, the seductiveness of which is facilitated by the mechanics of movement in the open world genre of games. Let’s enjoy our fictional worlds and our innocent-because-virtual power fantasies. But let’s also try to be a little more nuanced and reflexive in our approach to going anywhere and doing anything.

Resource: Reading List for Non-Western Feminism January 24, 2013

Because We’re Still Oppressed reblogged a reading list of Non-Western Feminism readings.  Check it out here!

 

From the OP:

It is my intention to put together a non-western feminism course syllabus for submission to my Women’s Studies department. In that spirit, I have collected a list of texts on non-western feminism, mostly in the voices of non-western women, to serve as a starting point for developing this syllabus.

I’m sharing this list with Tumblr because too often “feminism” is understood through a western lens, and this includes African-American and Latin@ feminism, as practiced in the academy. Positions at the margins of feminism, developed from theoretical frameworks that do not rely on western epistemology are necessary to disrupt the theoretical assumptions that we have grown too comfortable with.

Further, it is my intention that, as this list circulates tumblr through reblogs, more texts will be added to it so that space can be made for voices that are all too often unheard, new voices can be added to the feminist “canon,” and we can recognize the very real need for feminisms that arise in contexts outside the american and the western theoretical.

Women and the History of Analytic Philosophy December 5, 2012

I will be teaching a new (for me) upper-level History of Analytic Philosophy course in the spring. I’d like to make sure I have some works by women philosophers, including feminist philosophers if possible, on my reading list. Could our readers lend me their expertise and make some suggestions? Some of the topics I plan to cover are listed below, though I’m entirely open to additions or revisions:

Moore on epistemology and analysis

Russell on logic and language

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Logical Positivism

(Btw, I’ve already thought of Marie McGinn and/or Cora Diamond for the Wittgenstein stuff.)

Your suggestions are much appreciated!

Femen: Ukraine’s Topless Warriors November 28, 2012

Interesting piece on today’s Atlantic front page about these bold feminist activists based in Ukraine:

Founded in Kiev in 2008 to protest the country’s burgeoning sex industry (“Ukraine is not a brothel!” was the slogan of their first — and still clothed — demonstration, which aimed to dissuade foreigners from visiting prostitutes in the capital), Femen has since evolved into a vanguard of militant activists who have dubbed themselves the storozhevyye suki demokratii (the “watch-bitches of democracy”) and “modern-day Amazons,” some of whom demonstrate topless to, says their website ”defend with their chests sexual and civic equality throughout the world.”

The article ends with this remark: ‘Just what de Beauvoir would have thought of topless demonstrations is anyone’s guess.’ Perhaps our erudite readership would care to weigh in? This seems unduly dismissive about the possibility of anticipating and reconstructing the views of a very important philosopher.

Can this be right? October 7, 2012

In last week’s Stone, Gary Gutting discusses Haidt’s new book on our righteous minds. There’s something that strikes me as questionable about a lot of what he says, even though I don’t really work in ethics. I’d love to hear what others think.

Some background: Haidt thinks our capacity to reason evolved as a capacity to convince others. We are not truth-seekers so much as power seekers, though in groups we can get an emergent and very powerful rationality. What this is going to mean is that our moral thinking is much more a matter of rationalized gut instinct (heavily culturally influenced) than anything else.

In the case mentioned by Gutting below, Haidt recounts working at home when his wife interrupts him to say exasperatedly that he should not put his dirty dishes where she prepares the baby’s food. Haidt replies instantly that he didn’t have time to put them anywhere else since the elderly dog needed to go out as soon as he was finished.

The truth is that he put the dishes down and the dog needed to go out, but there was a good time gap between the two. He misrepresented the situation to get her to think he was not to be blamed.

Now Gutting says:

Haidt doesn’t take such philosophers seriously, I suspect, because they don’t proceed like empirical scientists, testing their ideas through experiments. He’s right — and many philosophers agree — that ethicists should take account of the recent explosion in sophisticated experimental work on morality. But it’s important to realize that Haidt’s own discussion requires him to move beyond empirical studies and in the direction of traditional philosophy.

One way Haidt does this is by confirming experimental results with real-life experiences. For example, he tells how, while he was writing an account of experiments showing how people put forward obviously bad arguments to support their intuitions, he himself did that very thing in an argument with his wife. Much of the force of Haidt’s case depends on such concrete examples (and as a fascinated reader, I found myself frequently supplying them from my own experience). Without such examples, we would well question the relevance of simplified and controlled laboratory experiments to the complexities of unmanaged real life. Haidt is convincing largely because his experiments resonate so well with what we find in our pre-scientific experience.

What could be wrong with this? One thing is that we should be puzzled by this “our”. And I think it is puzzling on two counts. On the one hand, the example is one I at least cannot relate to at all for perhaps telling reasons. On the other hand, there seem to be some serious questions to raise about what is going on when one’s own categories of ordinary experience match up very well with those of the theoretician, as Gutting’s do with Haidt’s. These are points I’ll return to below.

Another problem is that it is far from clear that very good experimental psychological research does get confirmed by our views about our ordinary experience. As the authors of the Invisible Gorilla say:

We all believe that we are capable of seeing what’s in front of us, of accurately remembering important events from our past, of understanding the limits of our knowledge, of properly determining cause and effect. But these intuitive beliefs are often mistaken ones that mask critically important limitations on our cognitive abilities. . . . As we go through life, we often act as though we know how our minds work and why we behave the way we do. It is surprising how often we really have no clue.

At the least then, Gutting’s view of the relation between philosophy and experimental psychology is controversial.

Now back to the two-fold query about who the “our” is. I must stress that Haidt cites an example and gives absolutely no reason for us to think that it is typical of his life. Still, I have to say that I am tired of hearing men illustrate points by telling stories of how they subverted their wives’ concerned about nutrition, health, safety or similar things. Furthermore, though I am certainly no stranger to trying to find excuses, prevaricating over something that is in fact a concern of my partner’s about our child’s welfare is not something I can relate to well. It doesn’t build the sort of relationship that in general I strive to have with people I’m close to. (Please see my comment #9.)

I assume that I’m not alone in what I just said, and I’m not just trading stories about personal psychology. Rather, I’m raising a question about agreements.

There’s a second and, I think, more serious point. I’ve probably recalled in previous posts saying at a fairly large philosophy meeting that I thought the quality of a childhood was not to be judged just in terms of its effects on the adulthood; rather, a good childhood was constitutively part of a good life. All the guys – there were mostly guys – agreed that I was just being irrational, despite my saying that probably around 50% of the human race were not just nurturing people through a childhood merely to build good adults. The next day I woke up to the NY Times’ reviews of Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, and really for the first time was able to have a cluster of concepts that provided some unity to a large segment of my experience. (This is not to say that I think Gilligan is unproblematic; rather, she was looking at morality in a way that used concepts for which my experience was, at it were, ready and waiting.)

I think we are here at the problems of hermeneutical injustice, as Miranda Fricker has framed it. From Lorraine Code, commenting on and quoting Fricker: “Thus in Thus in societies ordered according to hierarchical structures of power and privilege (i.e. in most known societies), the idea is that unequal power relations

can skew shared hermeneutical resources so that the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on … whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly … [with] at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render [their experiences] intelligible. (148)”

I cannot describe the number of times cognitive neuroscience has enabled me to bring into more general discourse thoughts that are largely relegated to the (relatively) outsider literature of feminist philosophy.

Christine Overall in the New York Times June 18, 2012

Nice to see another feminist philosopher writing for The Stone.

As a young woman in my 20s I pondered whether or not to have children. Is there a way, I wondered, to decide thoughtfully rather than carelessly about this most momentous of human choices?

It’s a tough decision because you can’t know ahead of time what sort of child you will have or what it will be like to be a parent. You can’t understand what is good or what is hard about the process of creating and rearing until after you have the child. And the choice to have a child is a decision to change your life forever. It’s irreversible, and therefore, compared to reversible life choices about education, work, geographical location or romance, it has much greater ethical importance.

Meat-Eating and Male Critics May 5, 2012

As many of you know, the Sunday Times has had a contest to write the best essay defending meet eating. It came to a conclusion this weekend, and the winners are announced.

We mentioned before its all-male panel of judges. And in fact the ethicist recognizes concerns about diversity, in a rather odd context:

Reader Responses

The contest is sexist and racist

The panel [of judges] consists of all white men. . . . And so the cycle of prejudice continues in which white male elite perspectives dominate the production of social facts. LORI GRUEN, A. BREEZE HARPER, CAROL J. ADAMS

The contest is harmless

This is a panel of five, for heaven’s sake, for a meaningless contest. How diverse can it be? Why should anyone care how diverse it is? ETHICSALARMS.COM

So we decided to go to the Gruen, Harper and Adams piece to see why they thought diversity would be an improvement.

One fact is that one is starting out from a biased position with all-men panel, since our culture identifies men with meat-eating. Secondly, A group of white western men are going to bring partial and fairly shared perspective to what is in fact a global problem. Third, when one picks for fame – as the ethicist said she was doing – one tend to create a circle which the men close.

Interesting reasons, hardly meant to be inclusiveexhaustive (thanks, SH). What do you think?

Feminist philosophers on the radio April 25, 2012

Feminist philosophers Meena Dhanda and Nancy Bauer, on the BBC. Enjoy!!

Margaret Whitford Obituary April 17, 2012

Diana Knight has written an obituary for the much-missed feminist philosopher Margaret Whitford here.

(Many thanks to Christine Battersby for the link!)

CFP Updated for SAF2012 at Vanderbilt U April 15, 2012

Conference of the Society for Analytical Feminism

Special Conference Theme –

Take it to the Bridge:

Crossing between analytic and continental feminist philosophies

October 4-7, 2012

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Submission deadline: May 30, 2012

Take it to the bridge: 1. (In music) A phrase that often connotes a change of key, a connecting but distinctive series of notes

The Society for Analytical Feminism invites long abstracts (1000-1500 words) on all topics in feminist philosophy.  Accepted papers will be given 30 minutes of presentation time.

Analytical approaches to feminist topics are happily invited as usual.  In addition, special consideration will be given to abstracts that bridge feminist analytical and continental approaches, including the history of the analytic/continental “divide” in philosophy, mutually informing applications of analytic and continental philosophical methods to specific questions, analyses of the work of philosophers who bridge analytic and continental traditions or of collaborations between analytic and continental philosophers, methodological debates about the study of philosophy, including the value of different traditions, theoretical accounts of pluralism in philosophy.

Plenary speakers

Brooke Ackerly, Vanderbilt University

Amy Allen, Dartmouth College

Samantha Brennan, Western University, Canada

Sharon Crasnow, Norco College

Heidi Grasswick, Middlebury College

Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University

Anita Superson, University of Kentucky

Naomi Zack, University of Oregon

Submission information

Send abstract in MSWord as an attachment via email to the chair of the program committee at <safcon2012 [at] gmail.com>.  Please delete self-identifying information from abstract.  Include in body of e-mail: name, title, contact information, and, if applicable, institutional affiliation.

For questions about local arrangements, including accessibility, at Vanderbilt University, contact Marilyn Friedman: <marilyn.friedman@vanderbilt.edu>.

Generous support for the conference has been provided by the Philosophy Department and the Dean of Arts & Sciences of Vanderbilt University.