Hospitals have adopted a rhetoric of family-centered maternity care, and one of the ways in which they show their commitment to it is through the integration of the husband-as-coach model of childbirth into delivery practices. I argue that this model's widespread popularity testifies less to the culture's endorsement of a woman-centered approach than to healthcare's appropriation of “natural” childbirth as a site for the production and reproduction of patriarchal and capitalist power.

The Asian American identity is intimately associated with upward class mobility as the model minority, yet women's earnings remain less than men's, and Asian American women are perceived to have strong family ties binding them to domestic responsibilities. As such, the exact class status of Asian American women is unclear. The immediate association of this ethnic identity with a specific class as demonstrated by the recently released Pew study that Asian Americans are “the highest-income, best-educated” ethnicity contrasts with another study (...) that finds Asian American women have the highest suicide rates in the United States. To understand these contrasting statistics, this article explores Asian American women's sense of authenticity. If the individual's sense of authenticity is intimately related with one's group identity, the association of the Asian American identity with a particular class ambivalently ensnares her as dichotomously inauthentic—as both the poor Asian American woman who fails to achieve economic upward mobility and the model minority Asian American woman who engages in assimilation practices. Feminist philosophers understand that identities change, but exactly how these transformations occur remains a mystery. The article ends with three speculations on the difficulties for practicing and recognizing individual acts that transform one's group identity. (shrink)

The emancipation of women has become a strong critical discourse in Bengali literature since the 19th century. Only since the second half of the 20th century, however, have female writers markedly stepped out of the shadow of their male colleagues, and the writings on women become more and more often articulated by women themselves. In this article, I focus on particular concepts of femininity in selected texts of two outstanding writers of different generations, a prose writer, and a woman poet: (...) Mahasweta Debi (b. 1926) and Mallika Sengupta (1960–2011). Analyzing Mahasweta’s female characters, I focus on the issue of the double marginalization of dalit tribal women; we can find here impacts of intersectional discrimination of class, gender and caste. Debi is very radical in her social criticism but is quite reluctant to accept the label of feminism. Mallika, on the other hand, represents a movement among the female writers of her generation that openly declares her support for feminist ideologies, which can be demonstrated on some of the examples referred to here. Another important strand of Mallika’s constructions of femininity are archetypal images — mythological metaphors of femininity (in the Hindu context) which may in some cases be interpreted in accordance with difference feminism, in others as a critique of the essentialized and dichotomous concepts of masculinity and femininity. While Mahasweta’s emancipation drive is more deeply grounded in her field research and journalistic activism in the tribal areas she writes about, Mallika’s has been more strongly linked with the academia and has joined the theoretical feminist discourse. Through a close reading the women’s emancipation discourse of these two protagonists in Bengali literature, we can speak of a shift from a practical, concrete criticism, to a theoretically founded radicalism. (shrink)

The posthuman is a multidimensionally hybrid figure: it denotes both the post-biological or technological being that mostly inhabits science-fiction stories as well as the ensuing reconceptualisation of what it means to be human. Even within these conditions, it remains hybrid: posthuman beings are mixes of organic and non- organic materials while posthuman conceptualisations combine philosophical and technological perspectives. This dissertation claims that the profoundly hybrid nature of the posthuman forces its texts – whether fictional or theoretical – to adopt similarly (...) hybrid statuses. More concretely, on the one hand, its fictional nature forces the presence of fiction into theoretical texts, which mainly materialises intertextually. On the other hand, the posthuman’s philosophical extent as well as its hybridity as a being make it highly probable for theory and philosophy to manifest in posthuman-featuring fiction. This last phenomenon – which will be the focus of my presentation - may operate through three mechanisms: intertextuality, where theories of the posthuman are referred to in fiction; reflexive discourse, where philosophical reflection or theoretical content are conveyed by various narrative devices indirect speech, amongst others); and double referentiality, where philosophical reflection emerges out of the science-fictional juxtaposition of a cognitively estranging world with the actual world. The dissertation exemplifies the first aspect with the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell 2 and the Belgian play Cocon!, which both feature characters named Haraway. The second and third aspects are described through the analysis of three novels: LoveStar by Andri Snær Magnason, The Possibility of and Island by Michel Houellebecq and Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. (shrink)

Domestic violence is a serious issue, and the costs for business of failing to address the impacts of domestic violence in the workplace are high. New technologies and economic shifts towards services sector industries are fast dissolving the boundaries between the workplace and the home in many national labor markets. Moreover, companies are now expected to meet higher standards of behavior in fulfilling their responsibilities to employees and wider society. These developments present challenges for ethical reasoning about the limits of (...) employer responsibility in relation to domestic violence. While a number of possible approaches have something to contribute, this paper argues that feminist theories provide the most useful framework for ethical reasoning about the issues domestic violence raises for business organizations. The practical value of such reasoning is then illustrated by applying the organizing framework developed by Yuan et al. to examine how recurring domestic violence-related initiatives can be integrated as routine practices in firm operations. The paper thus provides a structured qualitative study of theory and practice for dealing with the impacts of domestic violence in the workplace. (shrink)

I am grateful to Criminal Law & Philosophy for organizing this symposium on my book, Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis (OUP 2009)—and am especially indebted to Professors Kinports and Cowan for their careful, generous, and challenging engagements with my arguments. I am relieved to find that Professors Kinports and Cowan are mostly positive in their evaluation of the book’s merits and delighted to find their critical reflections have offered me the opportunity to think more deeply about the project I (...) undertook in the book.I found much with which to agree in both commentaries. Indeed, I will have little to offer in response to Professor Kinports’ article until the end of my own comments here, except to note that I found her critique of prosecutors-as-community-representatives as illuminating as it was disheartening. Perhaps one way to increase the likelihood that prosecutors might someday act as genuine representatives of their communities (in whole or in part) wou .. (shrink)

In this paper I question the tendency within some feminist circles to criticise attempts to develop typologies that delineate different feminist theoretical perspectives. I agree that many of the criticisms are valid, but only if typologies are viewed in a particular way. This particular way is when typologies are regarded as ahistorical, all-encompassing entities containing discrete categories that are designed for the once and for all fixing of individuals and their work in one box. Reading Max Weber through Karl Mannheim's (...) work on the sociology of knowledge, I argue that typologies, as ideal-types, are indispensable, socially situated practical tools for measuring similarities, differences and developments in thought within and across time and space. Despite being noted as an “attractive” argument by at least some of those who are otherwise critical of typologies (for example, Liz Stanley and Sue Wise), I believe that the “attractiveness” of this particular position has not been granted serious consideration. (shrink)

The proponents of critical pedagogy criticize the earlier Neo‐Marxist theories of education, arguing that they provide only a ‘language of critique’. By introducing the possibility of human agency and resistance, critical pedagogists attempt to develop not only a pedagogy of critique, but also to build a pedagogy of hope. Fundamentally, the aim of critical pedagogy is twofold: 1) to correct the pessimistic conclusions of Neo‐Marxist theories, and 2) to transform a ‘language of critique’ into a ‘language of possibility’ . Then, (...) what political projects do critical pedagogies present to us? What alternative visions of schooling do critical pedagogies offer against the mainstream pedagogy? The purpose of this paper is to identify main projects of critical pedagogy, and to explore overarching politics that underlie the field of critical pedagogy. Although there are diverse theories and approaches in critical pedagogy, three overarching projects can be identified, which I call: 1) the project of experience, 2) the project of anti‐system, and 3) the project of inclusion. Based on an examination of the general trends and characteristics of these three projects of critical pedagogy, I argue that three prominent politics that underlie the field of critical pedagogy are culturalist politics, self/identity politics, and grassroots politics. In trying to better understand why and how critical pedagogy has developed the political stances as it has, the last part of the paper links these three politics to the historical developments of the New Left and the New Social Movements. (shrink)