Some feminists have argued that the “master's tools” cannot be utilized for feminist projects. When read through the lens of non-ideal theory, Judith Butler's reevaluation of “autonomy” and “universality” and Peaches's engagement with guitar rock are instances in which implements of patriarchy are productively repurposed for feminist ends. These examples evince two criteria whereby one can judge the success of such an attempt: first, accessibility and efficacy; second, that the use is deconstructive of its own conditions.

The lies about the reasons for the U.S. war against Iraq provoked no mass public outcry in the United States against the war. What is the process of justification for this war, a process that seems to need no reasons? Mann argues that the process of justification is not a process of rational deliberation but one of aesthetic self-constitution, of rebuilding a masculine national identity. Included is a feminist reading of the National Defense University document Shock and Awe.

This article outlines the issues addressed by feminist philosophy of art, critically surveys major developments in the field, and concludes by considering directions in which the field is moving.

Although the character of the “lady detective”is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but ratherbecause the concept of greatness is sociallyconstructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create a “great”character,theauthor cannot (...) just endowher with certain attributes; she must actively work to overcome her audience’s tendency to import structures of oppression into the story, and she must wrestle against the conventions of the genre. In doing so, however, authors risk setting their stories in a wholly different genre. (shrink)

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and (...) Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis holds that both artworks and selves are ”culturally emergent entities." Culturally emergent entities are distinct from and not reducible to natural or physical entities. Artworks are thus not reducible to their physical media; a painting is thus not paint on canvas and music is not sound. In a similar vein, selves or persons are not reducible to biology, and thought is not reducible to the physical brain. Both artworks and selves thus have two ongoing and inseparable ”evolutions”—one cultural (...) and one physical. Rather than having fixed ”natures” that remain stable for any purpose other than numerical identity, artworks and selves have ”careers” due to their cultural evolution that change with the course and flux of history, interpretation and reinterpretation. The question for this essay is how a Margolisian encultured artist, who is also an individual ”self," can construct an identifiable ”career” that is both from culture and develops culture constructively in a way that involves an individual, as well as collective, contribution. In answering this question I will provide a theory that shows how Margolis’ work on the artist as cultural agent leaves room for creative innovators within a cultural context. In short, I claim that Margolis’ idea that a person is a thinking-and-doing practitioner that emerges from and works within a cultural context does allow for the agent to use that same context to acquire the tools and skills necessary to make something new. I will then consider how this innovation might be possible by making recourse to some theories of creativity from neuroscience and psychology. This essay will focus on Margolis’ theory of the creative artist as cultural agent as supplemented with an account of the nature of the human being as a raw set of genetic materials and capacity for acquiring cultural competence. My claim is that this is the site for an adequate account of how some encultured persons are able to create exceptional innovations in artistic domains and others are not. I agree with Margolis that it is true that innovation is not possible by any pre- or non-encultured self but I also think that extremes of cultural mastery and innovation, as in the case of highly creative and innovative artists, are not possible without an inborn potentiality to develop to a high level of cultural ability under the right conditions. This is not to deny Margolis’ theory of artists as cultural agents. Indeed, I accept Margolis’ view of the deep importance of culture to the development of the self and to the creative artist wholeheartedly. I also agree that this is a crucial aspect of artistic agency and creativity that has been given short shrift in analytic aesthetics. My intention here is only to answer one question that is still left unanswered after understanding and acknowledging the importance of culture: How do we account for the disparity in ability in cultural agents and artists that cannot be attributed to cultural training and socio-historical factors? How do we account for the existence of the exceptionally creative artist in a situation where the cultural and socio-historical factors are roughly equivalent for others who demonstrate lesser amounts of creativity? (shrink)

Shame in the deep sense of fear of exposure of human vulnerability (and not in the narrower sense of individual transgression or fault) has been identified as one mood or disposition of philosophical thinking. Philosophical imaginary, disciplinary identity and misogynistic vocabulary testify to a collective, underlying, unprocessed shame inherent to the (Western) philosophical tradition like Le Doeuff (1989), Butler (2004) and Murphy (2012) have pointed out. One aspect of collective philosophical shame has to do with disgust of or denial of (...) embodiment insofar as it poses a threat to ideals of sovereignty and rationality (Nussbaum 2006). Embodiment reveals finitude, being dependent and exposed to others (Sartre 1984; Merleau-Ponty 2012; Landweer 1999; Zahavi 2014), and ultimately points to human vulnerability as rooted in an experience of fear of shame (Gilson 2016). If the inability to process shame of embodiment has resulted in disembodied notions of the human being that may lead to defensiveness, aggression or violence, how can a constructive processing of shame based on an embodied notion of the human being result in a way of philosophical thinking that is more vulnerable? And how can philosophical thinking that has its point of departure in vulnerability, neither in the sense of the victim nor the hero but as a self-conscious emotion, lead to philosophical dialogues that can unsettle vicious cycles of shaming and blaming and are productive for deepening philosophical reflection? Susan Brison’s (2002) work on sexual violence will finally be discussed as an example of such a philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that philosophical practice in the Western world, in particular analytic philosophy, suffers from problems that contribute to its lack of diversity in two senses: the exclusion of women and minorities, and a narrow choice of subjects and methods. This is not fruitful for philosophical exchange and the flourishing of philosophical thought. Three contributing factors are covered: a flawed execution when instilling intellectual humility; the gaslighting of women in philosophy; and an overemphasis on a narrow conception of intelligence. (...) The conclusion calls for a more humane and socially aware practice of philosophy. (shrink)

Susan Faludi's Backlash, first published in 1991, offers a compelling account of feminism being forced to repeat itself in an era hostile to its transformative potentials and ambitions. Twenty years on, this paper offers a philosophical reading of Faludi's text, unpacking the model of social and historical change that underlies the “backlash” thesis. It focuses specifically on the tension between Faludi's ideal model of social change as a movement of linear, step-by-step, continuous progress, and her depiction of feminist history in (...) terms of endless repetition. If we uphold a linear, teleological ideal of social change, I argue, repetition can only be thought of in negative terms—as a step backwards or a waste of time—which in turn has a negative and demoralizing impact within feminism itself. To explore an alternative model of historical time and change, I turn to the work of feminist philosopher Christine Battersby, who rethinks repetition through the Kierkegaardian mode of “recollecting forwards,” and the Nietzschean notion of “untimeliness.” I suggest that Battersby's philosophical reconceptualization of historical repetition, as a potentially creative, productive phenomenon, can be of great utility to feminists as we enact and negotiate the dynamics of backlash politics. (shrink)

: Based on the premise that ugliness looms large in both cultural and women's consciousness of vaginas, I create a representation of the vagina's beauty as rich and sweet. Smell, taste, and touch play predominant roles as I use scholarly analysis and my own autobiographical narratives and poems and poetic language in order to redress the vagina's culturally inherited ugliness.

In this paper, I juxtapose the work of two contemporary feminist philosophers: Christine Battersby and Adriana Cavarero – both working within the Continental tradition – to show how they go well beyond feminist critique to produce different images of self-identity and conceptions of the political. Both reject traditional positions on selfhood but also stress the materiality of bodies and provide alternatives to the work of post-structuralists, such as Judith Butler. My aim is to draw out some of the politico-legal implications (...) of their differing images of selfhood. In the final section I then apply both their approaches to the concept of self to ask how their respective arguments can inform contemporary political questions regarding privacy and dissensus. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTranslated into English in 2004, Vladimir Jankelevitch’s book Music and the Ineffable has made a significant impact in anglophone musicology. I argue that the figure of the feminine is central to his understanding of music and musical ineffability, and use feminist philosophers’ interpretations and critiques of the figure of the feminine in his close friend and colleague Emmanuel Levinas’s work to unpack the gender politics of Jankelevitch’s book and the secondary literature on it. I focus on the figure of the (...) feminine in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, which are works we have evidence Jankelevitch read. There, Levinas describes the feminine as a “form of being” that is “inexhaustible, infinite” and thus “refuses thematization positively”. This is nearly identical to Jankelevitch’s definition of musical ineffability as “fertile inexplicability”. Not only is Jankelevitch’s concept of musical ineffability identical to Levinas’s concept of the feminine, it is also couched in gendered terms throughout Music and the Ineffable. “Musical ineffability” in Jankelevitch’s sense is thus a parallel to Levinas’s concept of the feminine. I then read Jankelevitch and his interpreters in musicology through feminist scholarship on Levinas to show how the former two succumb to the same ultimately patriarchal flaws as the latter. For example, just as Levinas prioritizes paternity and the reproduction of patriarchy, muiscologist Carolyn Abbate uses Jankelevitch as the white masculine other in which musicology recognizes itself as both different and the same. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the concept of originality as it relates to the concept of genesis developed by Deleuze in his early essay ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant's Esthetics’. Using the exhibition of Tim Bennett's as a starting point, it brings together two accounts of originality, the first postmodern one represented by Rosalind Krauss's ‘The Originality of the Avant-garde’ and the second genetic kind found in Deleuze's aforementioned essay, to show how originality and genesis might correspond, paying (...) close attention to the transcendental innovations of Kant's aesthetic tradition to which both concepts belong. (shrink)

This essay argues that feminist theory has focused, in the main and for too long, on theories of the body, in a legitimate reaction to a Western masculine coupling of beauty with a female or idealized maternal body and the sublime with male creativity. In consequence, there are few productive feminist accounts of female or maternal beauty. However, Virginia Woolf’s writings about beauty, mothers and the body, if read through the lens of post-Lacanian theory - particularly the work of Luce (...) Irigaray and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger - do offer a moving and positive feminist account of women and beauty. The essay analyses Woolf’s ideas about beauty in general, before focusing on To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out in relation to the writings of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen. (shrink)

Drawn from a larger research project exploring discourses of ability and gender, this paper identifies a narrative theme, ‘Girls Find God’, emerging both from teen-orientated television dramas and as a topic of discussion among participants in an online forum, www.smartgirls.tv. It considers the relationship between teens and the media, and the implications for the development of cultural identities and practices. Identifying some key tenets of television dramas which have a girl’s connection with the supernatural at their core, and exploring reflections (...) of on-line forum participants, I argue that the ‘Girls Find God’ narrative goes beyond a simple reinforcement of some historically inscribed relationships between divinity, gender and genius. While it is true that connectedness and service are maintained as the inevitable direction of girls’ talents and reinforced by a divine authority, this narrative also provides a locus for negotiation of what such hegemonic inscriptions might mean in contemporary contexts for girls. (shrink)