Bioethics and Women: Across the Life Span
by Mary Brody
Mahowald, Oxford University Press, 2006
Gender injustice in health care is the rationale for this book. Classical pragmatists and feminist standpoint theorists are enlisted in support of its egalitarian perspective. Topics include prenatal testing, childbirth, treatment of minors and elderly, assisted reproduction, abortion, eating disorders, domestic violence, breast and gynecological cancer, end-of-life care, and research on women. Brief cases illustrate variables related to each topic. Empirical and theoretical considerations follow each topic. Empirical and theoretical considerations follow each set of cases; these are intended to precipitate more expansive and critical examination of the questions raised. |
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Women's Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment
by Bonnie Mann
Oxford University Press, 2006
Women's liberation and the Sublime is a passionate report on the state of feminist thinking and practice after the linguistic turn. The author argues that in the 1980's, feminist work in the academy became forgetful of both women and nature, and exchange an engaged politics for the intensity of sublime experience in its postmodern form. Beyond a critical assessment of masculinist notions of sublime, the author gives us a positive account of sublime experience in a feminist voice which exposes the irrevocable relationships of dependency that bind us to the natural world and to one another. |
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Grenzfiguren: Kultur, Geschlecht und Subjekt bei Hegel und Nietzsche
by Patricia Purtschert
Campus Verlag, 2006
Exploring the constructions of the "feminine" and the "savage" (as the "Other") in the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche, Purtschert examines what she calls the "limit-figures" of modern philosophy and argues that they can not be ignored as irrelevant. Rather, they make it possible to think the limits of history, morality and the human as such and are thus constitutive of a subject, which appears to be human--and is intrinsically male and European.
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Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues
by Sandra Harding
Illinois University Press, 2006
The book argues that philosophy and practices of today's Western science, contrary to its Enlightenment mission, work to insure that more science will only worsen existing gaps between already advantaged and disadvantaged groups around the world. The essay here, drawing on feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial studies, propose ways to reconceptualize the sciences in the global social order.
A session at the 2006 Eastern APA in Washington D.C. featured discussion of the book by James Maffie, Alison Wylie, and Eduardo Mendieta, with responses by Harding. |
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Socializing Care: Feminist Ethics and Public Issues
eds., Maurice Hamington and Dorothy C. Miller
Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, Feminist Constructions Series
Socializing Care dispels the criticism that care ethics cannot be extended to issues of social justice. Contributors to the volume demonstrate how the ethics of care factors into a variety of social policies and institutions, and can indeed be useful in thinking about a number of different social problems. Divided into two sections, the first looks at care as a model for an evaluative framework that rethinks social institutions, liberal society, and citizenship at a basic conceptual level. The second explores care values in the context of specific social practices (like live kidney donations) or settings (like long-term care), as a framework that should guide thinking. This collection demonstrates how society would benefit from a more serious engagement with care ethics. To view the contributors of this publication, click on the book. |
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Is Philosophy Androcentric?
by Iddo Landau
Penn State University, 2006
The title is slightly inaccurate, since the book doesn't ask whether philosophy is androcentric (the androcentricity of philosophy is clearly pointed at already in the introduction), but rather examines how androcentric philosophy is. To do so, the book examines seven major arguments for the androcentricity of philosophy, and suggests that although philosophy is androcentric, it is so to a significantly lesser degree than frequently claimed. The discussion aims to be clear and easy to follow and thus suitable also for undergraduate classes. |
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Prostitution Policy: Revolutionizing Practice Through a Gendered Perspective
by Lenore Kuo
New York University Press, New Edition, 2005
In this text, the author combines extensive feminist social science, cultural, philosophical and legal studies research to tackle issues raised by heterosexual prostitution in the U.S. Chapter I is an explicit discussion of the feminist theories and feminist policy methodologies that are utilized in the book. The rest of the book, in effect, exemplifies how these theories and methodologies generate a specific prostitution policy. While Kuo considers the recent 'feminist sex wars' and related 'feminist prostitution wars,' her analysis quickly moves beyond theoretical discussions to formulate a developed and specific prostitution policy that is explicitly shaped by her own theoretical commitments. She reviews the different traditional legal approaches to prostitution (criminilization, legalization, and decriminalization) but ultimately argues for a unique and radically transformed form of decriminalization that is necessarily tied to legal oversight of facilitation and mandatory social services. Alison Jaggar has said of the book, "Kuo's uniquely comprehensive and systematic proposals prove an indispensable standard for all future discussions of adult heterosexual prostitution policy." This book is especially useful in demonstrating how supposedly 'abstract,' theory impacts directly on practice. |
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Luce Irigary and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference
by Alison Stone
Cambridge University Press, 2006
This book offers a feminist defense of the idea that sexual difference is natural, based on new interpretation of the later philosophy of Luce Irigaray. The book defends Irigaray's unique for of essentialism and her rethinking of the nature/culture relationship. Stone also shows how Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference can be reconciled with Judith Butler's performative conception of gender. Stone approaches this by rethinking sexual difference in relation to German Romantic philosophies of nature. This is the first sustained attempt to connect feminist conceptions of embodiment to German Idealist and Romantic accounts of nature. This book is not only an interpretation of Irigaray, but also presents an original feminist perspective on nature and the body. It will encourage debate on the relations between sexual difference, essentialism, and embodiment. |
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Moral Issues in Global Perspective
Vol. I: Moral & Political Theory, Vol. 2: Human Diversity & Equality, Vol. 3: Moral Issues
by Christine M. Koggel
Broadview Press, 2006
Now available in three thematic volumes,the first volume surveys a number of traditional Western liberal approaches to moral theory, human rights, justice, and democracy, as well as contemporary critiques of these approaches. With nineteen new essays, three of which were written especially for this edition, this volume covers the necessary theories for understanding moral issues in a global context. The second edition of Moral Issues in Global Perspective is a collection of the newest and best articles on current moral issues by moral and political theorists from around the globe. Each volume seeks to challenge the standard approaches to morality and moral issues shaped by Western liberal theory and to extend the inquiry beyond the context of North America. Covering a broad range of issues and arguments, this collection includes critiques of traditional liberal accounts of rights, justice, and moral values, while raising questions about the treatment of disadvantaged groups within and across societies affected by globalization. Providing new perspectives on issues such as war and terrorism, reproduction, euthanasia, censorship, and the environment, each volume incorporates work by race, class, feminist, and disability theorists. |
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 Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writing
edited by Angela Cotton
SUNY Press, 2007
Bringing together criticism on both African American and Native American women writers, this book offers fresh perspectives on art and beauty, truth, justice, community, and the making of a good and happy life. The essays draw on interdisciplinary, feminist, and comparative methods in the works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Leslie Silko, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Paula Gunn Allen, Luci Tapahonso, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams, making them more accessible for critical consideration in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and critical theory. The levels of complex, cultural play between Native American and African American women writers in America, and pave the way for innovative hermeneutic possibilities for reassessing writers of both traditions. |
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 Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique
by Lisa H. Schwartzman
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006
Questions about relevance and value of various liberal concepts are at the heart of important debates among feminist philosophers and social theorists. Although many feminists invoke concepts such as rights, equality, autonomy, and freedom in arguments for liberation, some attempt to avoid them, noting that they can also reinforce and perpetuate oppressive social structures. In Challenging Liberalisms Schwartzman explores the reasons why concepts such as rights and equality can sometimes reinforce oppression. She argues that certain forms of abstraction and individualism are central to liberal methodology and that these give rise to a number of problems. Drawing on the work of feminist moral, political, and legal theorists, she constructs an approach that employs these concepts, while viewing them from within a critique of social relations of power. |
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Queering Freedom
by Shannon Winnubst
Indiana University Press, 2006
"Radically reorienting, challenging, provocative, this book moves progressive philosophy, feminist and queer theory, critical discussions of race and racism forward. Prophetically, it calls for an interrogation of all our oppositional theory and politics, offering new and alternative visions."
--bell hooks
In Queering Freedom, Shannon Winnubst examines contemporary categories of difference—sexuality, race, gender, class, and nationality—and how they operate within the politics of domination. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and others, Winnubst engages feminist theory, race theory, and queer theory as she sheds light on blind spots that have characterized thinking about freedom. Winnubst turns away from the language of rights, identity politics, and liberation toward bodies and experiences to calibrate normative ideas of time and space. Her views operate at the very limits of freedom, which contain individuals within strict boundaries that they are forbidden to cross. Winnubst develops strategies of "queering freedom" to undo the more subtle spatial and temporal norms and shatter structures of domination. This thoughtful and provocative work challenges the cornerstones of contemporary philosophies about the body and its politics. |
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 The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror
by Alyson M. Cole
Stanford University Press, 2006
Condemnations of “victim politics” are a familiar feature of America public life. Politicians and journalists across the ideological spectrum eagerly denounce “victimism.” Accusations of “playing the victim” have become a convenient way to ridicule or condemn. President George W Bush even blamed an Islamic “culture of victimization” for 9/11. The Cult of True Victimhood shows how the panic about domestic and foreign victims has transformed American politics, warping the language we use to talk about suffering and collective responsibility.
With forceful and lively prose, Alyson Cole investigates the ideological underpinnings, cultural manifestations, and political consequences of anti-victimism in an array of contexts, including race relations, the feminist movement, conservative punditry, and the U.S. legal system. Being a victim, she contends, is no longer a matter of injuries or injustices endured, but a stigmatizing judgment of individual character. Those who claim victim status are cast as shamefully passive or cynically manipulative. Even the brutalized Central Park jogger came forth to insist that she is not a victim, but a survivor. Offering a fresh perspective on major themes in American politics, Cole demonstrates how this new use of “victim” to derogate underlies seemingly disparate social and political debates from the welfare state, criminal justice, and abortion to the war on terror. |
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 Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction
by Vivian M. May
Routledge, 2007
Born into slavery in 1858, Anna Julia Cooper was a renowned scholar, educator and activist who called for critical consciousness and collective action on the part of all marginalized people. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, Vivian M. May examines Cooper's visionary politics and defiant philosophy to reveal her radical methodology of dissent. May reveals that by developing a border-crossing, intersectional approach, Cooper successfully argues for theorizing from experience, develops inclusive methods of liberation, and crafts a vision of a fundamentally egalitarian social imaginary. May explores Cooper’s extraordinary life and writings on subjects as wide-ranging as capitalism and slavery, the Haitian revolution, Black feminism, and Pan-Africanism, showing how across six decades of work, Cooper helped to lay the foundations of modern-day race and gender studies. |
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 The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global
by Virginia Held
Oxford University Press, Paperback Coming Soon
The Ethics of Care assesses the ethics of care as a distinct moral approach and promising alterative to more familiar moral theories. It show how it is relevant to political and global concerns as well as to the more personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. It discusses the feminist grounds of the ethics of care and why it can be a morality with universal appeal. It examines what we mean by 'care,' what a caring person is like, and how the ethics of care focuses on caring relations rather than simply the virtues of individuals. It proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can be meshed with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. It considers the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues, including how expansive or not markets should be, and the limits of law. It connects the ethics of care with civil society, and considers its implications for human rights and international relations. |
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The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy
edited by Linda Martin Alcoff & Eva Feder Kittay
Blackwell Publishing, 2006
Over the past thirty years, philosophy has become a vital arena for feminists. Recent feminist work has challenged canonical claims about the role of women and has developed new methods of analysis and critique, and in so doing has reinvigorated central areas of philosophy. The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy is a definitive introduction to the field, consisting of fifteen newly-contributed essays that apply philosophical methods and approaches to feminist concerns. From analyses of women in the history of philosophy to the relation of feminism to topics such as pragmatism, epistemology, political philosophy, aesthetics and phenomenology, the Guide is an excellent resource for those who wish to explore how feminist philosophy is transforming the very nature of philosophical inquiry. |
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 The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity
by Tracy McNulty
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
The meaning of hospitality in Western thought—from the Bible to Derrida. The evolution of the idea of hospitality can be traced alongside the development of Western civilization. Etymologically, the host is the “master,” but this identity is established through expropriation and loss—the best host is the one who gives the most, ultimately relinquishing what defines him as master. In The Hostess, Tracy McNulty asks, What are the implications for personhood of sharing a person—a wife or daughter—as an act of hospitality? In many traditions, the hostess is viewed not as a subject but as the master’s property. A foreign presence that both sustains and undercuts him, the hostess embodies the interplay of self and other within the host’s own identity. Here McNulty combines critical readings of the Bible and Pierre Klossowski’s trilogy The Laws of Hospitality with analyses of exogamous marital exchange, theological works from the Talmud to Aquinas, the writings of Kant and Nietzsche, and the theory of femininity in the work of Freud and Lacan. Ultimately, she contends, hospitality involves the boundary between the proper and the improper, affecting the subject as well as interpersonal relations. |
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 Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
edited by Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss
Penn State University Press, 2006
More than sixty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir identified the importance
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings to feminist theory. His
exploration of the relationship between the body and the space it inhabits is
key to modern phenomenological thinking. But there has been little
agreement on how Merleau-Ponty’s ideas ultimately impact feminist
philosophy. Does his emphasis on physical subjectivity lend a certain agency to
all bodies, regardless of sex? Or do Merleau-Ponty’s specific
descriptions of physical experience betray an intrinsic bias toward a male
heterosexual point of view? The essays presented here by Dorothea Olkowski
and Gail Weiss attempt to situate Merleau-Ponty in the larger context
of feminist theory, while impartially evaluating his contributions, both
positive and negative, to that theory. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sonia Kruks, Helen Fielding, Beata Stawarska, Judith Butler, Vicki Kirby, Jorella Andrews, Laura Doyle, Johanna Oksala, David Brubaker, and Ann Murphy. |
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