Gender, race, and sexuality are not just identities; they are also systems of social organization – i.e., systems of privilege and oppression. This article addresses two main ways privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, heteronormativity) are relevant topics in and for philosophical aesthetics: (i) the role of the aesthetic in privilege and oppression, and (ii) the role of philosophical aesthetics, as a discipline and a body of texts, in constructing and naturalizing relations of privilege and oppression (i.e., white heteropatriarchy). The (...) first part addresses how systems of privilege and oppression use the aesthetic. I will discuss various ways race, gender, and sexuality, as both embodied identities and broader social institutions, work with and through “the aesthetic”. The second part addresses racism and (hetero) sexism in the discipline of aesthetics. Both in its history and its present practice aesthetics’apparent neutrality on questions of privilege and oppression is actually evidence of its investment in systems of privilege and oppression. (shrink)

This paper aims to understand the relationship between ignorance and vulnerability by drawing on recent work on the epistemology of ignorance. After elaborating how we might understand the importance of human vulnerability, I develop the claim that ignorance of vulnerability is produced through the pursuit of an ideal of invulnerability that involves both ethical and epistemological closure. The ignorance of vulnerability that is a prerequisite for such invulnerability is, I contend, a pervasive form of ignorance that underlies and grounds other (...) oppressive forms of ignorance. Thus, undoing such forms of ignorance requires working toward a particular form of vulnerability: epistemic vulnerability. (shrink)

In the context of the perpetual reproduction of consumerism in contemporary western societies, the varied and often contradictory principles of third wave feminism have been misunderstood or redefined by the dominant economic discourse of the markets. The lack of homogeneity in the theoretical debates of the third wave feminism seems to be a vulnerable point in the appropriation of its emancipatory ideals by the post-modern consumerist narratives. The beauty norm, particularly, brings the most problematic questions forth in the contemporary feminist (...) dialogues. In this paper I will examine the validity of the concept of empowerment through practices of the body, practices that constitute the socially legitimized identity of women in a consumerist western society. My thesis is that the beauty norm is constructed as a socio-political instrument in order to preserve the old, patriarchal regulation of women’s bodies. Due to the power of invisibility of the new mechanisms of social control and subjection, the consumerist discourse offers the most effective political tool for gender inequality and a complex discussion about free will and emancipation in third wave feminism debates. This delicate theoretical issues question not only the existent social order, but the very political purposes of contemporary feminism. (shrink)

Some exceptional and surprising mistakes of scholarship made in the writings of a number of feminist academics (Ruth Bleier, Ruth Hubbard, Susan Bordo, Sandra Harding, and Rae Langton) are examined in detail. This essay offers the psychological hypothesis that these mistakes were the result of political passion and concludes with some remarks about the ability of the social sciences to study the effect of the politics of the researcher on the quality of his or her research.

I show how much psychiatric disability is informed by trauma, marginalization, sexist norms, social inequalities, concepts of irrationality and normalcy, oppositional mind-body dualism, and mainstream moral values. Drawing on feminist discussion of physical disability, I present a feminist theory of psychiatric disability that serves to liberate not only those who are psychiatrically disabled but also the mind and moral consciousness restricted in their ranges of rational possibilities.

: Disability theory privileges masculinist notions of presence, visibility, material "reality," and identity as "given." One effect of this has been the erasure of "sensibility," which, it is argued, inscribes, materializes, and performs the critique of binary thought. Therefore, sensibility must be re-articulated in order to escape the "necessary error" of identity implicit in accounts of cultural diversity, and to dialogue across difference in ways that dislocate disability from its position of dis-value in feminist thought.

: Green consciousness is a holistic worldview based in many ancient and still-current principles and wisdoms, holistic worldview, and one that offers alternative conceptions of human and non-human subjectivity, of humans' relationships with each other and with non-human nature. Its principles are elaborated not only in environmentalist philosophies but also in some forms of popular culture. Shrek retells ancient earth-based myth, specifically around its imagination of greenness as an emblem of the life force, its respect for the feminine principle, its (...) refusal of hierarchy and split consciousness, its endorsement of the happy body and communal ecstasy, and its ringing celebration of diversity. (shrink)

In this paper, I report on a quasi-case study of U.S. presidential identity based on Donald J. Trump’s presidency, demonstrating that Trump is considered by the American public as an antithesis of presidentiality. I then discuss the insights from this study on several critical issues that face identity studies, an expansive area of investigation which has attracted the attention of students from a diverse range of disciplines. I demonstrate that identity is a set of attributes the formation of which is (...) based on the mission of the group and the expected behaviors of members of that group, that the construction of identity is largely a bottom-up and gradual process, and that identity is both preexisting and emergent. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline the cumulative network model of the self. This model articulates the self as relational, recognizing social relations as constitutive of the self. The theory arises out of concerns about the individualistic paradigms of two main frameworks in the analytic philosophical literature on personal identity, namely, the psychological and the animalist approaches to personhood and is explicitly inspired by feminist theories on relational autonomy and self. I argue that “relationality” is not only social, but that the (...) self is relational throughout, psychologically, physically, biologically, culturally, semantically, as well as socially. Hence, the self is a network of relations. The model also aims to recognize that temporality or historicity is constitutive of the self, that the self is a process, not a static three-dimensional thing. Hence, the self is a cumulative network. (shrink)

This article surveys recent work on some issues in the ethics of food consumption. It is a companion to our piece on food justice and the ethics of food production.

Inspired by posthuman feminist theory, this paper explores young people’s entanglement with the bio-technological landscape of image creation and exchange in young networked peer cultures. We suggest that we are seeing new formations of sexual objectification when the more-than-human is foregrounded and the blurry ontological divide between human and machine are enlivened through queer and feminist Materialist analyses. Drawing upon multimodal qualitative data generated with teen boys and girls living in urban inner London and semi-rural Wales we map how the (...) digital affordances of Facebook ‘tagging’ can operate as a form of coercive ‘phallic touch’ in ways that shore up and transgress normative territories of dis/embodied gender, sexuality and age. We conclude by arguing that we need creative approaches that can open up spaces for a posthuman accounting of the material intra-actions through which phallic power relations part-icipate in predictable and unpredictable ways. (shrink)

Consumer culture and neoliberal political economy are often viewed by social psychologists as topics reserved for anthropologists, economists, political scientists and sociologists. This paper takes an alternative view arguing that social psychology needs to better understand these two intertwined institutions as they can both challenge and provide a number of important insights into social psychological theories of self-identity and their related concepts. These include personality traits, self-esteem, social comparisons, self-enhancement, impression management, self-regulation and social identity. To illustrate, we examine how (...) elements of consumer culture and neoliberal political economy intersect with social psychological concepts of self-identity through three main topics: ‘the commodification of self-identity’, ‘social categories, culture and power relations’ and the ‘governing of self-regulating consumers’. In conclusion, we recommend a decommodified approach to research with the aim of producing social psychological knowledge that avoids becoming enmeshed with consumer culture and neoliberalism. (shrink)

Green consciousness is a holistic worldview based in many ancient and still-current principles and wisdoms, holistic worldview, and one that offers alternative conceptions of human and non-human subjectivity, of humans' relationships with each other and with non-human nature. Its principles are elaborated not only in environmentalist philosophies but also in some forms of popular culture. Shrek retells ancient earth-based myth, specifically around its imagination of greenness as an emblem of the life force, its respect for the feminine principle, its refusal (...) of hierarchy and split consciousness, its endorsement of the happy body and communal ecstasy, and its ringing celebration of diversity. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that one of the most intense ways women are encouraged to enjoy sublime experiences is via attempts to control their bodies through excessive dieting. If this is so, then the societal-cultural contributions to the problem of eating disorders exceed the perpetuation of a certain beauty ideal to include the almost universal encouragement women receive to diet, coupled with the relative shortage of opportunities women are afforded to experience the sublime.

This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. lnterrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscrihes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding]acques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.

This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaes-thetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

This dissertation develops and defends a conception of sexualized violence that is rooted in philosophical theories of violence, and at the same time helps us understand the way that violence is connected to various kinds of oppression, namely, the oppression of women. It argues that sexualized violence, which is typically theorized through related notions of physical violation and psychological trauma, is best understood in terms of its moral quality. Sexualized violence against women is fundamentally a moral problem insofar as it (...) disrupts victims' ability to grow and develop in relationships with others, to conceive and meet responsibilities to and emerging from those relationships, and well as the ability to challenge unjust social norms, practices and institutions that in part constitute who we are. This moral quality of violence is investigated through an engagement with the concept of moral integrity, arguing that integrity is grounded in authenticity, understood through the existential-phenomenological tradition. Integrity-as-authenticity paves the way for understanding sexualized violence as a form of moral disintegration, where the dynamism and flexibility required of authentic selfhood is frustrated. Understanding violence and victimization in this way, I argue for a robust notion of advocacy as part of our response to victims. Advocacy--giving voice--will require the development of new concepts and language adequate to the experiences of victims, it will also require the cultivation of spaces and relationships where victims can speak, and it may require that we lend our voices to and for victims. (shrink)

This article invites disability scholars to “get fat,” that is, to support the goals of the fat justice movement. I argue that the contemporary politics of fatness can productively be read through the lens of disability studies’ social model. At the same time, I mobilize feminist critiques of the social model to push fat disability studies toward a more in-depth engagement with the topics of health and illness. Additionally, I contend that feminist scholars’ accounts of our personal relationships to fatness (...) and disability can make crucial contributions to our scholarly work. These arguments take shape within a new interpretive framework that I introduce: “setpoint epistemology,” which brings together the feminist disability studies notion of “sitpoint theory” and the scientific concept of “setpoint theory.”. (shrink)

With its implicit vilification of materiality, the notion of objectification has failed to produce a coherent and effective ethical analysis of heterosexual sex work. The concept of derivatization, grounded in an Irigarayan model of embodied intersubjectivity, is more effective. However, queer sex work poses new and different ethical challenges. This paper argues that although queer sex work can entail both objectification and derivatization, the former is not ethically objectionable, and the latter, although the cause for some justified ethical concern, must (...) be analyzed within the context of structural sexual injustice. (shrink)

By reading the analyses of mysticism found in Beauvoir and Irigaray with and against some medieval women's mystical texts, the paper articulates a possible space for the divine within feminist thought.

I will begin by noting two of the many convergences between my approach and that of Shaun Gallagher in his paper for the Socially Extended Mind workshop (Gallagher 2011). First, his insistence on the enactive – or what we could call the “dynamic interactional” – character of mind, countering the somewhat static view of classical EM (Extended Mind); and second, the move to a distributed notion of judgment, countering the lingering individualism of classical EM.

If we are to find the criteria for critical analyses of social arrangements and processes not in some abstract, universalist framework, but from the guiding ‘self-interpretations’ of the societies in question, as contemporary contextualist and ‘communitarian’ approaches to social philosophy suggest, the vexing question arises as to where these self-interpretations can be found and how they are identified. The paper presents a model according to which there are four interdependent as well as partially autonomous spheres or ‘levels’ of socially relevant (...) self-interpretation that have to be taken into account equally in order to provide a sound basis for social and political criticism. Thus, it is from the tensions and incoherences between (A) social ideas and doctrines, (B) social institutions and practices, (C) individual beliefs and convictions, and (D) body-practices and habits that social pathologies can be identified and possible solutions can be envisaged. (shrink)

This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaesthetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine claims that Carol Gilligan's work is "essentialist," and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any general claim about women or girls.

: This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members' capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.

Scholars across disciplines recognize sport as an institution perpetuating sexism and bias against women in light of its masculine ideals. However, little philosophical research identifies how a masculine environment impacts women’s possibilities in sport. This paper shows that socially structured masculine ideals of athletic excellence impact recognition of women’s athletic achievements while contributing to contexts endangering respect and self-respect. Exploring athletic disrespect reveals connections to more broadly harmful sport practices that include physical and sexual violence. Thus, the practical concern is (...) that sport’s masculine ideals might undermine women’s pursuit of athletic excellence in more harmful ways than previously recognized. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that moral failures increase compensatory behaviors, such as prosociality and even self-punishment, because they are strategies to re-establish one’s positive moral self-image. Do similar compensatory behaviors result from violations in normative eating practices? Three experiments explored the moral consequences of recalling instances of perceived excessive food consumption. In Experiment 1 we showed that women recalling an overeating (vs. neutral) experience reported more guilt and a desire to engage in prosocial behavior in the form of so-called self-sacrificing. (...) In Experimental 2 this logic was applied to actual spontaneous helping behaviors towards an experimenter, with participants who recalled an overeating (vs. neutral) experience exhibiting more such helping in the laboratory. Experimental 3 expanded the investigation to self-inflicted pain: Overeating (vs. neutral) recall led to higher levels of self-punishment as indicted by longer time periods spent engaging in the cold-pressor task. In sum, failures in normative food consumption can be viewed as moral transgressions that elicits both interpersonal and intrapersonal compensatory behaviors aimed at restoring a positive moral self-image. (shrink)

This paper considers phenomenological descriptions of health in Gadamer, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Svenaeus. In these phenomenologies of health, health is understood as a tacit, background state that permits not only normal functioning but also philosophical reflection. Nietzsche’s model of health as a state of intensity that is intimately connected to illness and suffering is then offered as a rejoinder. Nietzsche’s model includes a more complex view of suffering and pain as integrally tied to health, and its language opens up the (...) possibility of many ‘healths,’ providing important theoretical support to phenomenological accounts of the diversity and complexity of health and illness. (shrink)

In this article, identity politics is understood as a form of politics stressing collective but malleable group identities as the basis of political action. This notion of identity politics also allows thinking of identity as intersectional. The focus of this article, and a problem related to identity politics, is that when discussed in the context of the neoliberal order, identity politics has a tendency to become harnessed by the ethos of vulnerability. Some implications of the ‘vulnerabilizisation’ are considered in the (...) field of education, which is a field currently thoroughly affected by neoliberalism. Therefore, it is also important to look closer at the relationship between identity politics and the ethos of vulnerability. In addition, we re-consider poststructuralist thinking as a theoretical and political approach to see what it can offer in terms of re-thinking identity politics and in analyzing the ethos of vulnerability. When categories of vulnerability keep expanding into various psycho-emotional vulnerabilities defining subjects that can be known and spoken about, it is crucial to ask whether we regard these changes as educationally and politically progressive. The article discusses some problematic policies in educational environments and the phenomenon of trigger warnings. (shrink)

Amy Allen’s insightful and nuanced feminist critical-theoretical account of the politics of our selves could be strengthened with a more complex and differentiated account of power and of gender, and of the social as a site of multiple conflicting and contesting relations. Such an account would adhere more consistently to Allen’s own project of understanding subjects to be constituted through both relations of power and relations of interdependence and mutuality, care and solidarity. The development of this account, and of a (...) situated account of desire or motivation, is essential for a feminist critical theory of self and social transformation. (shrink)

This paper will examine the experience of and drive for bodily invisibility in women through the theoretical approaches of phenomenology and social constructionism. An examination of the social disruptions of bodily invisibility and the compulsive avoidance of such instances, particularly with respect to the fastidious maintenance of body comportment and appearance within the narrow parameters afforded by social norms, will lead to an exploration of the conflation of biomedicine with the beauty industry.

This paper explores the conditions under which feminine beautification constitutes a feminist practice. Distinguishing between the process and product of beautification allows us to isolate those aesthetic, interapos;Subjective, and embodied elements that empower rather than disempower women. The empowering characteristics of beautification, however, are difficult and perhaps impossible to represent in a sexist context; therefore, while beautifying may be a positive experience for women, being viewed as a beautified object in current Western society is almost always opposed to women's equality (...) and autonomy. (shrink)

This paper responds to the sense of “crisis” or “trouble” that dominates contemporary feminist debate about the categories of sex and gender. It argues that this perception of crisis has emerged from a fundamental confusion of theoretical and political issues concerning the implications of the sex/gender debate for political representation and agency. It explores the sense in which this confusion is manifest in a debate between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler.

Fitness and recreation centres populate today’s modern urban communities and cater to a wide range of people seeking health, fitness and social connection through physical activity. While women’s experiences in these spaces have received some scholarly attention from feminist scholars and scholars of the body, little research has explored women’s lived experiences of the change room. In this paper, I argue that everyday spaces such as change rooms and locker rooms are important spaces in which social understandings of the female (...) body manifest. In such spaces, the materiality of the body and the social meanings ascribed to the female body are illuminated and negotiated by those who inhabit and move through them. Using Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as theoretical guides, I discuss how it is for women to see and be seen in a public change room, and how these spaces illuminate the complex relationship women have with their bodies in contemporary society. (shrink)

: In this paper, I argue that one of the most intense ways women are encouraged to enjoy sublime experiences is via attempts to control their bodies through excessive dieting. If this is so, then the societal-cultural contributions to the problem of eating disorders exceed the perpetuation of a certain beauty ideal to include the almost universal encouragement women receive to diet, coupled with the relative shortage of opportunities women are afforded to experience the sublime.

This article involves a critical examination of the recent paradigm shift in the appraisal of women's dress. Whereas in the past, female fashion was criticized primarily in terms of its impractical and restrictive nature and more `functional' and `natural' modes of dress were advocated, in recent times the legitimacy of the notion of `functional' or `natural' dress has been challenged. As theorists such as Wilson, Sawchuck and Hollander have pointed out, to assume that there is a `natural' mode of dress (...) which reflects the body `as it really is' wrongly presupposes that the body pre-exists culture when in fact it is always inescapably encoded by cultural norms. However, as is argued in the article, while recent theorists have revealed the naivete of the functionalist paradigm upon which previous critiques of fashion have been premised, their alternative conception of liberatory dress as that which highlights the constructed nature of the body is equally as problematic insofar as it leaves unchallenged the reduction of self-identity to image which the advertising and fashion industries now endorse and promote. In championing the idea of dress as a parodic play in which the body of the wearer is denaturalized, postmodern theories of fashion display an unwitting complicity with our contemporary culture of the spectacle which privileges the cult of appearance over all other sources of identity formation. (shrink)

In this article, we use qualitative methodology to explore how 15 low‐income women of diverse sociocultural location construct and experience health and weight gain during pregnancy, as well as how they position themselves in relation to messages pertaining to weight gain, femininity and motherhood that they encounter in their lives. Discussing the findings through a feminist poststructuralist lens, we conclude that the participants are complex, fragmented subjects, interpellated by multiple and at times conflicting subject positions. While the discourse of maternal (...) responsibility (i.e. managing personal behaviours for the baby's health) is very much in evidence in their narratives, embodied experiences of pregnancy, lived experiences of financial constraints and religious beliefs provided some with an alternative discourse and resistant subject position. Participants also had mixed emotions about weight gain; they recognized the need to gain weight in order to have a healthy pregnancy, but weight gain was also not welcome as participants reproduced the dominant discourse of obesity and the discourse of ‘feminine’ bodily norms. Based on our results, we advocate for change to recent clinical guidelines and social discourses around pregnancy and weight gain, as well as for policies that provide pregnant women with a range of health‐promoting resources. (shrink)

: This paper responds to the sense of "crisis" or "trouble" that dominates contemporary feminist debate about the categories of sex and gender. It argues that this perception of crisis has emerged from a fundamental confusion of theoretical and political issues concerning the implications of the sex/gender debate for political representation and agency. It explores the sense in which this confusion is manifest in a debate between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler.

Drawing on Hegel, Judith Butler argues that the subject is the product of its desire for subject-ion. The subject, its gender, and even the sexed body itself come into being through reiterating or parodying preexisting norms and discourses of power. Butler rejects the realities of substance and a fixed human nature that would limit the possibilities of performativity. I summarize and assess Butler’s proposals, highlighting both the value and the drawbacks of her theory. I then show how John Paul II’s (...) understanding of meaning and of the body as tasks takes up what is positive in Butler. He escapes the pitfalls of her thought, however, by retaining both metaphysics and revelation. He argues that the subject exists as substance or suppositum, which defends it against the encroachment of power. He also insists on the importance of human nature, which makes the human person to be the kind of substance who can form herself through the God-given task of creative action directed toward meaningful self-gift. Lastly, John Paul II emphasizes that the divine power of God enables the person to transcend the power dynamics of the culture of death. (shrink)

In this paper, I use interview data drawn from ethnographic work on a Division 1 collegiate cross country team at a large midwestern university in the United States to demonstrate the ways that possessive individualistic discourses around hard work are embodied in classed subjectivities. I find that middle class women, the products of concerted cultivation, tend to focus on the display of hard work, and have anxiety around the value of their production of a hard-working identity. Working class women tend (...) to treat the experience of being disciplined as an athlete as a fortunate opportunity to build physical capital, using the hard work to benefit them as athletes rather than to build their identities. These different attitudes, affected by social class, interact with a dominant discourse around hard work demonstrating the interaction between agency and structure when it comes to forming identities. (shrink)

During the past two decades, the traditional concept of masculinity has been challenged by the pervasive spread of metrosexual attitudes and practices through Western cultures. This article examines an extreme aspect of this trend through a multimodal reading of an online advertisement for male mascara. Using social semiotic theory and methodologies based on functional grammars, the analysis reveals that the advertisement's producers are treading a fine line in their verbal and visual discursive choices, trying to create a dialectic that encourages (...) men to be consumers of feminine-style products while also allowing them to maintain the qualities that have traditionally been gendered as masculine. (shrink)

This dissertation contributes to the development of philosophy of disability by drawing on disability studies, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and philosophy of biology in order to contest epistemic and ontological assumptions about disability within biomedical ethics as well as within philosophical work on the body, demonstrating how philosophical inquiry is radically transformed when experiences of disability are taken seriously. In the first two chapters, I focus on epistemological and ontological concerns surrounding disability within biomedical ethics. Although disabled people and their advocates (...) have been quite vocal regarding their views on disability and in critiquing bioethicists’ approaches to issues that affect them, the interests, knowledge, and experiences of disabled people have had minimal impact on discussions within biomedical ethics textbooks. The risks of making problematic assumptions about disability are high within this subfield insofar as bioethicists impact practices within medical facilities, public policy, and, through student engagement with their texts in biomedical ethics courses, the views of potential health care professionals. All of these, in turn, affect the care provided to disabled people and potential/actual parents of disabled children. Chapter three raises ontological issues related to disability theory, examining the role of the impairment/disability distinction in framing discussions of the body as well as the status of experience. I discuss two approaches to incorporating subjective experiences of the body in disability, arguing that neither is sufficient. I examine debates within feminist theory on questions related to experience. I argue that a feminist phenomenological approach that builds on Merleau-Ponty’s work offers the best way to address bodily experiences in disability theory. The assumptions that disability theorists and Merleau-Ponty make about disability are often at odds. Chapter four points out the ableism in Merleau-Ponty’s use of a case study and considers some of the oversights within Phenomenology of Perception. In spite of my critique, I argue that his approach to phenomenology—with appropriate modifications—is useful not only for theorizing the experiences of disabled people but also for addressing other types of marginalized embodiment. Chapter five applies this method to body integrity identity disorder (BIID), arguing that combining Merleau-Ponty’s insights with those of disability theory allows us to address lived experiences of BIID and to identify assumptions about disability within research on this condition. (shrink)

This essay examines an aesthetics of disgust through an analysis of the work of Scottish painter Jenny Saville. Saville's paintings suggest that there is something valuable in retaining and interrogating our immediate and seemingly unambivalent reactions of disgust. I contrast Saville's representations of disgust to the repudiation of disgust that characterizes contemporary corporeal politics. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn and Julia Kristeva, I suggest that an aesthetics of disgust reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to (...) critically attend to the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body. (shrink)

Contemporary feminist interest in the persistent underrepresentation of women in top professions suggests an implicit approval of the competition required to achieve these posts. Competition, however, seems to be in tension with feminist opposition to domination and oppression. This paper outlines the dimensions of this tension and examines three attempts to resolve the incompatibility. The first two try to separate the undesirable elements of competition from the positive by way of the competitiveness/competition and the challenge/scarcity distinctions. I argue that these (...) distinctions fail to alleviate worries about competition, particularly in the context of the professions. Meanwhile, the third reconciliatory attempt offers a pragmatic argument for compatibilism based on the value of women's participation in the professions. Although this pragmatic argument has some merit, I argue that it significantly overestimates the amount of competition acceptable for feminist participation. The end result is that, within the context of the professions, competition remains fundamentally in tension with feminism. (shrink)