This essay critically examines a suggestion proposed by some Confucianists that Confucianism and Care Ethics share striking similarities and that feminism in Confucian societies might take “a new form of Confucianism.” Aspects of Confucianism and Care Ethics that allegedly converge are examined, including the emphasis on human relationships, and it is argued that while these two perspectives share certain surface similarities, moral injunctions entailed by their respective ideals of ren and caring are not merely distinctive but in fact incompatible.

This thesis draws on poststructuralism/postmodernism to present a feminist investigation into the human body, its modes of (self)identification, and its insertion into systems of bioethics. I argue that, contrary to conventional paradigms, the boundaries not only of the subject, but of the body too, cannot be secured. In exploring and contesting the closure and disembodiment of the ethical subject, I propose instead an incalculable, but nonetheless fully embodied, diversity of provisional subject positions. My aim is to valorise women and situate (...) them within a reconceived ethics which takes account of the embodied feminine. My project entails an analysis and deconstruction of the binaries of those dominant strands of postEnlightenment thought that shape epistemology, ontology, and ethics, which in turn set the parameters of modern bioethics. More importantly, it goes on to reclaim a radical sexual difference beyond the binary, in which the female is no longer the other of the male. My enquiry, then, is strongly influenced by the discursive approach offered by both Foucault and Derrida in differential ways, but I counter their indifference to feminist concerns by qualifying their insights in the light of strategies developed by Irigaray and Spivak, among others. The main method of investigation has been through library research of primary and secondary sources in mainstream and feminist philosophy, and in bioethics. In addition, archival work in both textual and iconographic collections was carried out at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. The contribution made by this thesis is to go beyond modernist feminisms - which would simply revise and add women into existing paradigms - to radically displace and overflow the mechanisms by which women are devalued. And in developing a postmodern critique around some issues in bioethics, I have suggested a new ethics of the body which precedes the operation of moral codes. (shrink)

The recent surge in academic theorizing of the nation and nationalism has made it difficult to isolate the actual phenomena from their constructions as objects of theory. This is all the more difficult because most contemporary theories are grounded in unacknowledged political agendas that to a significant extent generate the theories independently of the phenomena. Chapter 1 focuses on “antinational-ist” theories of the nation—theories that deny the reality of nations or fundamentally delegitimate them as retrogressive or inherently oppressive political forms. (...) Such a theory rejects the nation primarily because it is inconsistent with the theorist's uncritically assumed political ideology. In Chapter 2, I examine theories that do not reject the nation, but rather control its form—again in line with a particular political agenda or ideology. Such a theory allows the reality and/or legitimacy of nations, but only after theoretically misconstruing them as consistent with the theorist's specific ideology or by limiting approval to only those nations that are in line with this ideology. I stress the important practical consequences of this: when backed by powerful institutions and forces, such a theory of the nation supports the coerced transformation of minor or post-colonial nations to fit it. These critiques expose the complexities of nations and nationalisms that most theories fail to register, due to their limiting assumptions. In Chapter 3, I develop an account of the nation sufficiently comprehensive to capture this complexity. Perhaps most importantly, my account does not reduce the nation to just one type of social force, political relation, identity characteristic, narrative structure, or “false consciousness”—which virtually all other theories do. All “unity” associated with the nation is partial: any presumed universal unity is always cut by gaps or discontinuities. A nation exists where the discontinuities are bridged by some alternate connector, by another type of relation. I then consider the relationship of nation to race, gender, and sexuality, as well as to state and ethnicity. Finally, I develop a novel concept of national “self-determination” as conceptual self- definition, not territorial control. (shrink)