In this article on Elizabeth Grosz's philosophy and its implications for discussions about feminist theory, I first suggest that Charles Darwin plays a particular role in Grosz's recent ontological thought. This role is to provide help in joining together two incompatible sources in her work: Gilles Deleuze's monistic ontology of a constant flow of new differentiations, on the one hand, and Luce Irigaray's thought of sexual difference as the primary ontological difference, on the other. I argue that Grosz's intellectual project (...) has developed into a grand general theory of change in which both Darwin and Irigaray are turned into ontologists in a Deleuzian vein. I then point out that Grosz's ontology also includes a political aspect, which manifests in the fact that Grosz redescribes Darwin through interpreting him primarily as a theorist of “event” and the unexpected. However, through an analysis of the discussion on Grosz between Luciana Parisi and Jami Weinstein, I speculate whether Grosz's ambition to provide a total and complete explanation of change encourages the tone of feminist discussion toward one of explanation rather than intervention. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

_Essays on Beauvoir’s influences, contemporary engagements, and legacy in the philosophical tradition._.

This paper juxtaposes Deleuze's notion of the virtual alongside Oyama's notion of a developmental system in order to explore the promises and perils of thinking bodily identity as indeterminate at a time when new technologies render bodily ambiguity increasingly productive of both economic profit and power relations.

In 1977, Michel Foucault suggested that legal approaches to rape define it as merely an act of violence, not of sexuality, and therefore not distinct from other types of assaults. I argue that rape can not be considered merely an act of violence because it is instrumental in the construction of the distinctly feminine body. Insofar as the threat of rape is ineluctably, although not determinately, associated with the development of feminine bodily comportment, rape itself holds a host of bodily (...) and sexually specific meanings. (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)

In this dissertation, I argue that an account of epistemic injustice sensitive to interlocking oppressions must take us beyond injustice to human knowers. Although several feminist epistemologists argue for the incorporation of all forms of oppression into their analyses, feminist epistemology remains for the most part an anthropocentric enterprise. Yet insofar as a reduction to animal irrationality has been central to the epistemic injustice of both humans and animals, I propose that in addition to axes of gender, race, class and (...) sex, feminist epistemology must register the animal-human dichotomy as a fundamental driving mechanism inherent in epistemic injustice. From the perspective of a truly liberatory epistemology, I thus argue for an expanded account of epistemic injustice that is both 1) sufficiently attentive to the way injustices to human knowers continue to rely on animal oppression and 2) that accommodates epistemic injustices against animal knowers. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to flesh out gender by drawing connections between the experience of pain and the experience of womanhood. The article builds upon two themes in feminist work (the constitution of woman through her effacement, and the inscription of gender on the body) and proposes to analyse `effacement' in terms of an embodied sense of being `gutted out', or made `immaterial'. I use this imagery of `gutting out' to suggest that effacement is experienced through the body, (...) and in terms of the presence of pain rather than merely in terms of lack or absence (of voice or subjectivity). Thus I share the view that gender is performed through inscriptions on the body, but I argue that this work of gendering involves hurting and injuring women's bodies; and it is this pain that I attend to in the article. I draw upon Scarry's analysis of the body in pain as a symbolic framework to discuss the pain of womanhood in terms of the annihilation of the self as it is engulfed in a mass of hurting flesh. (shrink)

Surgeons who perform sex reassignment surgeries define their goals and evaluate their outcomes in terms of two kinds of results: aesthetic and functional. Since the neogenitals fashioned through sex reassignment surgeries do not enable reproductive function, surgeons must determine what the function of the genitals is or ought to be. A review of surgical literature demonstrates that questions of what constitute genital form and function, while putatively answered in the operating room, are not answerable in the discourses of clinical evaluation (...) used to define them. When the genitals—the word itself derived from the Latin genitas meaning to beget—are not reproductive, the question of their function shifts away from the biological and into other registers: pleasure, intimacy, sociality. As condensed sites of meaning and meaning-making around which selves, affects, resources, anxieties and futures are organized, the genitals signify in excess of the categories of “aesthetic” and “function” that surgeons use to assess them. Not reducible to either aesthetics or function, but constitutive of them both, this excess appears in surgical texts in the form of imagined futures of social and sexual engagement and demonstrates a powerful means by which properly sexed bodies are created. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s idea of lived body has played a significant role in understanding selfconstruction and has raised issues about the relationships between the private sense and the public world. Merleau-Ponty argues that the lived body and the world are constructed reciprocally. This notion is acknowledged to be a rich source for feminist thought. Yet there is as much criticism as support of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy from feminists such as Grosz (1994, 1995), Sullivan (1997, 2000, 2001, 2002) and Young (1989). Shannon Sullivan vigorously (...) criticises Merleau-Ponty’s lived body as an anonymous body which erases particularities and results in domination. This paper defends Merleau-Ponty’s notion by clarifying the meaning of anonymity in terms of the understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s lived body as an “author”, and as such as incorporating the capacity to resist anonymity, and sustain particularity and difference, through an ongoing process of authoring his/her own lived experience. Ken Plummer’s notion of sexual story-telling is used to elaborate the elucidation. In conclusion, the educational implications of resisting anonymity are considered and envisaged in terms of promoting tolerance of difference and assertion of particularity by encouraging and developing the capacity to construct the self through an ongoing process of both responsive and responsible self-authoring. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , May 2010, Volume 10, Edition 1. (shrink)

Feminist and trans theory challenges "the" binary sex/gender system, but can create a new binary opposition of subversive transgender versus conservative transsexual. This paper aims to shift debate concerning bodies as authentic/real versus constructed/mutable, arguing that such debate establishes a false dichotomy that may be overcome by reappraising scientific understandings of sex/gender. Much recent biology and neurology stresses nonlinearity, contingency, self-organization, and open-endedness. Engaging with this research offers ways around apparently interminable theoretical impasses.

This paper addresses two related topics: 1. The disanalogies between elective cosmetic practices and sex reassignment surgery. Why does it seem necessary for me – an aging professional woman – to ignore the blandishments of hairdressers wielding dyes and dermatologists wielding acids and scalpels? Why does it not seem equally necessary for a transgendered person to repudiate sex reassignment procedures? 2. The role of the body in identity and agency. How do phenomenological insights regarding the constitution of selfhood in relation (...) to the interplay between the body image and corporeal know-how contribute to an account of the agency of transgendered individuals? Studying several paintings by contemporary feminist artist Jenny Saville has advanced my thinking on these topics. Saville’s imagery is an invaluable aid to reflection on these issues because she uses her painterly technique, which critics often dub “virtuoso,” to represent lived human bodies. In her work, viewers encounter representations of subjectivized, agentic corporeity, as distinct from inert, objectified flesh. Moreover, her sympathetic engagement with nonconformist, devalued bodies helps to reconfigure the standard gestalts of the human body that viewers typically carry with them and thus to convert fear and/or disgust into appreciation and understanding. In this paper, I consider three of Saville’s paintings. Plan, Saville’s self-portrait as a nude female whose body has been prepped for liposuction, conveys the pathos of this procedure. Matrix is a nude portrait of self-described “gender variant visual artist” Del LaGrace Volcano. In the words of one critic Saville’s depiction of Volcano’s nude intersexed body “restores beauty to the primitive [female] genital organ.” Passage, another nude portrait of an intersexed individual, is an image of vibrant sexuality despite the presumptively jarring juxtaposition of breasts and a penis. I argue that conceiving the agentic subject as a rational deliberative capability that uses a conjoined body as the instrument of its will makes it impossible to theorize the agency of transgendered people. In contrast, when agentic subjects are understood as embodied subjects and embodiment is understood as a dimension of practical intelligence, the agency of transgendered individuals is intelligible. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature and limits of player embodiment within digital games. We identify a convergence between everyday bodily actions and activity within digital environments, and a trend towards incorporating natural forms of movement into gaming worlds through mimetic control devices. We examine recent literature in the area of immersion and presence in digital gaming; Calleja’s (2011) recent Player Involvement Model of gaming is discussed and found to rely on a probematic notion of embodiment as 'incorporation'. We go on (...) to further reflect on the nature of player involvement in digital gaming environments by applying insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It is argued that digital embodiment differs so significantly from primordial embodiment that any idea of total immersion is simply fantasy. We subsequently argue that digital game media nonetheless provide us with unique opportunities for exploring the nature of distinctively human forms of embodiment, and so we need more complete and more reliable phenomenological descriptions of the experiences associated with computer games. (shrink)

Through a close reading of Judith Butler's 1989 essay on Merleau-Ponty's “theory” of sexuality as well as the texts her argument hinges on, this paper addresses the debate about the relation between language and the living, gendered body as it is understood by defenders of poststructural theory on the one hand, and different interpretations of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology on the other. I claim that Butler, in her criticism of the French philosopher's analysis of the famous “Schneider case,” does not take its (...) wider context into account: either the case study that Merleau-Ponty's discussion is based upon, or its role in his phenomenology of perception. Yet, although Butler does point out certain blind spots in his descriptions regarding the gendered body, it is in the light of her questioning that the true radicality of Merleau-Ponty's ideas can be revealed. A further task for feminist phenomenology should be a thorough assessment of his philosophy from this angle, once the most obvious misunderstandings have been put to the side. (shrink)

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. Key words: phenomenology; existentialist phenomenology; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); sporting embodiment; the lived-body; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

Recursion or self-reference is a key feature of contemporary research and writing in semiotics. The paper begins by focusing on the role of recursion in poststructuralism. It is suggested that much of what passes for recursion in this field is in fact not recursive all the way down. After the paradoxical meaning of radical recursion is adumbrated, topology is employed to provide some examples. The properties of the Moebius strip prove helpful in bringing out the dialectical nature of radical recursion. (...) The Moebius is employed to explore the recursive interplay of terms that are classically regarded as binary opposites: identity and difference, object and subject, continuity and discontinuity, etc. To realize radical recursion in an even more concrete manner, a higher-dimensional counterpart of the Moebius strip is utilized, namely, the Klein bottle. The presentation concludes by enlisting phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth to interpret the Klein bottle’s extra dimension. (shrink)

This article examines an episode of Chilean history during the days of the dictatorship of General Pinochet: Ingrid Olderock’s life and her criminal actions against people such as Alejandra Holzapfel and others. I use a secular framework for ethical evaluations of human behaviour related to armed conflicts in Latin America. In that context, I engage the following steps. First, I describe Ingrid Olderock’s life, briefly summarising some facts about her educational and political environment based on Nancy Guzman’s Ingrid Olderock: The (...) Madame of the Torture Dogs. This description is complemented by chronicles recently published by Alejandra Matus. Second, I suggest that the ‘commander’ concept (a concept arising within the ethical distinction between active and reactive actions by Gilles Deleuze) helps to assess the case at hand. Finally, I follow the main idea that human activities can be determined without having a transcendent system of values – an idea traditionally linked with Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s viewpoints, as declared by Deleuze. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray’s writings on Nietzsche’s philosophy belong to the groundbreaking interpretations of his work and they also confirm the continued relevance of his philosophy. Unlike most male-centric philosophers, Nietzsche not only saw that sexual difference was becoming one of the major philosophical issues of our age. He was also keenly aware of how it permeated our philosophical tradition with its dualistic models, which is one reason for Irigaray’s interest in it, as has been widely discussed in feminist/queer philosophical research into (...) her Nietzsche interpretation. Another common denominator of Nietzsche and Irigaray are their philosophies of the body. Interpreters of Irigaray have pointed out how her conception of embodied, sexuate being calls for a new way of philosophical thinking, and Stegmaier interprets the liberation from prejudices we encounter in Nietzsche’s works as a “liberation of philosophy.” How can the liberation of philosophy be understood in the way we practice philosophical thinking? In the following interpretation of Irigaray’s book The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, I show how it offers a theory and a practice of embodied philosophical thinking, which I will discuss in light of new phenomenological methodologies of embodied thinking. Irigaray’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Marine Lover is both critical and constructive as apparent in her interpretation of Dionysus and Ariadne. On the one hand, this couple represents for her the patriarchal tradition of philosophy that she claims Nietzsche is still stuck in, and on the other hand, it also represents a liberation from resentment and misogyny in relations of the sexes. The notions of listening to oneself and to the other, being touched and tearing, enable such a liberation, both on the level of relations of the sexes and on the level of philosophical dialogues and thinking that Dionysus and Ariadne also represent. The water/ocean in the title of Marine Lover indicates how this is a philosophical text that displays an explicit processing and articulation of feelings, emotions, and affects in philosophical thinking. (shrink)

In her book To be Born, Luce Irigaray offers a novel philosophy of the child. Instead of viewing the child as a bearer of rights and in need of adequate care as is common in contemporary philosophies of childhood, Irigaray presents the child as a metaphor of a new human being which represents natural belonging. The rearticulation of the human has been ongoing in Irigaray’s philosophy from its beginnings with its efforts to give voice to the excluded, silenced, repressed feminine. (...) Irigaray’s phenomenological restructuring of subjectivity in her philosophy of sexuate difference is taken to a new level with her philosophy of the child. Her conception of the child is interpreted here in light of the experiential and affective turn within phenomenology and cognitive sciences about philosophical thinking as embodied and embedded thinking for a new era. Irigaray sheds light on the silencing and repressing of the child within us in an effort to enable us as adult beings to think from and with it. Philosophical thinking needs to be more consciously connected with the embodied sources of thought that are already present in early infancy and continue to be present in adult thinking as neglected or repressed experiential and affective layers of thought. Irigaray’s philosophy of the child is a basis for a methodology of embodied philosophical thinking such as has been developed within Claire Petitmengin’s microphenomenology and within Eugene Gendlin’s methodology of philosophical thinking from the felt sense. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2022.

An introduction to philosophy of language since Frege, focusing on the 20th century.

This article examines Sheila Jeffreys’ analysis of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act (GRA) and her critique of trans identities. Situating her position within a wider radical feminist perspective, I suggest that her arguments against the GRA are grounded in a problematic understanding of sex and gender. In so doing, I defend how sex and gender are understood in the GRA. Furthermore, I show that radical feminist concerns about sex reassignment surgery and the complicity of trans individuals with stereotypical gender norms (...) are unwarranted. By highlighting the importance of attending to the embodied dimensions of sex and gender, I offer a partial defence of the UK’s GRA. In particular, I note the benefits that it can offer to trans individuals, although I suggest ways in which the GRA can be improved. Finally, I challenge radical feminists who see trans theory and identities as inimical to the goals of feminism. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of (...) love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

This article critically examines the ways in which the trope of prosthesis has been used in recent theory to understand human-technology relationships. Analyzing the trope from a number of angles, including disability, factory labor practices, mass production, and marketing, the author scrutinizes ways in which technologies are simultaneously wounding and enabling in ways for which the prosthesis trope cannot account.

The contentious topic of female circumcision brings together medical science, women’s health activism, media, and national and international policy-making in pursuit of the common goal of eradicating such practices. Referring to these diverse and heterogeneous practices as ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM), eradicators have then condemned them as ‘barbaric’ and medically harmful to female bodies and sexuality. In presuming that bodies can be separated from their cultural contexts, the anti-FGM discourse not only replicates a nature/culture dualism that has been roundly questioned (...) by feminists in science studies and cultural studies, but has also perpetuated a colonialist assumption by universalizing a particular western image of a ‘normal’ body and sexuality in its quest to liberate women and girls. I use my own story as a circumcised woman to highlight the entanglements of body and culture as presented in these feminist theories of female bodies. (shrink)

This article details the making of community and bodies in online environments, specifically the online pro-anorexia community. Building community among members of these groups is particularly fraught because tensions over claims to authenticity permeate these groups. Because these are embodied practices and online spaces are presumably disembodied, participants constantly grapple with authenticity, largely through the threat of the ‘wannarexic’. Participants manage these tensions through engaging in group rituals and deploying individual tools that attempt to make the body evident online. This (...) article documents the way in which tensions around authenticity and embodied practices are managed through treatment of the wannarexic. (shrink)

Through illustrating the similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural contexts (such as `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery), feminist theorists seek to reveal the instability of essentialist binaries which distinguish various groups as culturally, ethnically and morally `different'. They also aim to query how the term `culture' is employed differentially on the basis of embodied axes such as race and nation. However, in emphasizing overarching commonalities between practices, feminist cross-cultural comparisons risk collapsing into economies of sameness (...) that elide the complex relations of power through which such practices have been constituted. They can also fix the imagined subjects of these practices in troubling ways. Using the ubiquitous `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery binary as an example, this article explores the difference it might make to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus on relationality rather than commonality. As a means to reorient feminist cross-cultural approaches which depend on assertions of similarity or sameness, it argues for the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinking through relational webs. (shrink)

This article is a phenomenological exploration and description of certain selected aspects of living the specificities and conundrums posed by what is usually, if problematically, called a ‘phantom limb’. Using my own body as an ‘intimate laboratory’, I attend to the dynamics and mutability of the supposed ‘phantom’, both during the post-operative period of the above-the-knee amputation of my left leg as well as after I began to use and incorporate my prosthetic leg. Throughout, I explore the reversible aspects of (...) my two legs as ‘phantom’ and ‘real’, present and absent, and visible and invisible — paying attention, as well, to the lived and linguistic sense we make of our bodies in ‘parts’ and our bodies as ‘whole’. (shrink)

This article seeks to consider the policing of anti-fracking protests at Barton Moss, Salford, from November 2013 to April 2014. We argue that women at Barton Moss were considered by the police to be transgressing the socio-geographical boundaries that establish the dominant cultural and social order, and were thus responded to as disruptive and disorderly subjects. The article draws upon recent work on pacification, which views police power as having both destructive and productive dimensions, to consider the impact of police (...) violence on women involved in protest. We seek to explore the ways in which this violence impacts not only on those involved in protest but also those on the peripheries. The article suggests that the threat and use of sexual violence by police towards women aims to enforce compliance within the protest movement and to send a message, specifically to those on the fringes of the movement, that protest is illegitimate and inherently dangerous. As such, sexual violence forms part of the social production and construction of gender and is instrumental in the making and remaking of subjectivities. The case study suggests that police brutality towards women at Barton Moss, therefore, operated as a disciplinary function to regulate acceptable forms of protest and acceptable forms of femininity. (shrink)

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. (shrink)

This paper explores the conscious visual experience of seeing race. In everyday occurrences, racialized seeing involves the capacity for a subject to simply “see” that someone she encounters belongs to a racial category. I bridge research in analytic philosophy of perception and accounts from phenomenologists and critical race theorists on the lived experience of racialized seeing. I contend that we should not trust our visual experiences of racialized seeing because they provide, at best, incomplete information on a target’s racial identity. (...) I make a case for a version of perceptual learning that I think both captures actual experiences of racialized seeing and is empirically plausible. Finally, I follow work of critical race theorists in suggesting that normative constraints surrounding racial identity and privilege are built into our experiences of racialized seeing. Both types of racialized seeing are subject to social norms and practices and, thus, aid in perpetuating racial hierarchies. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that our ordinary English words man and woman are “gender terms,” and gender is distinct from biological sex. That is, they believe womanhood and manhood are not defined even partly by biological sex. This sex/gender distinction is one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century on the broader culture, both popular and academic. Less well known are the reasons to think it’s true. My interest in this paper is to show that, upon investigation, the arguments (...) for the sex/gender distinction have feet of clay. In fact, they all fail. We will survey the literature and tour arguments in favor of the sex/gender distinction, and then we’ll critically evaluate those arguments. We’ll consider the argument from resisting biological determinism, the argument from biologically intersex people and vagueness, the argument from the normativity of gender, and some arguments from thought experiments. We’ll see that these arguments are not up to the task of supporting the sex/gender distinction; they simply don’t work. So, philosophers should either develop stronger arguments for the sex/gender distinction, or cultivate a variety of feminism that’s consistent with the traditional, biologically-based definitions of woman and man. (shrink)

Are women (simply) adult human females? Dictionaries suggest that they are. However, philosophers who have explicitly considered the question invariably answer no. This paper argues that they are wrong. The orthodox view is that the category *woman* is a social category, like the categories *widow* and *police officer*, although exactly what this social category consists in is a matter of considerable disagreement. In any event, orthodoxy has it that *woman* is definitely not a biological category, like the categories *amphibian* or (...) *adult human female*. -/- In the first part, a number of arguments are given for the view that women are adult human females; the second part turns to rebutting the main objections. Finally, a couple of morals are briefly noted: one for activist sloganeering, and one for ameliorative projects that seek to change the meaning of ‘woman’. (shrink)

In this article I examine an important episode in the growth of ‘mindfulness’ as a biomedical modality in Britain: the formation and establishment of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) by John Teasdale and his colleagues Mark Williams and Zindel Segal. My study, focusing on Teasdale’s contribution, combines ethnographic, oral historical and archival research to understand how mindfulness was disseminated or, to use a term sometimes used by mindfulness practitioners themselves, ‘transmitted’. Drawing on theoretical support from Max Weber, Michel Foucault and Gilles (...) Deleuze, I argue that transmission had a very specific form within the Buddhistic milieu that Teasdale occupied and within which he developed MBCT. To ‘transmit’ mindfulness was to transmit an experiential essence; a type of subjectivity that was seen as perennial, universal and radically distinct from its historical context. In tracing the recurring metaphysical, metaphorical and visual tropes of mindfulness and its transmission, I attempt to understand how Teasdale was embedded in both local and global networks of discourse and practice, and how his life and work contributed and depended upon an assemblage whose elements (institutional, technical, conceptual, textual) straddled empiricist psychology and religious mysticism. I also examine how authority, experience and knowledge were closely interwoven in the birth of British mindfulness, coming together to form an affectively compelling ‘diagram’ that shaped the way mindfulness was practiced and disseminated. In doing so, I aim to open up the possibility of studying the history of the human sciences from a new perspective: one which places an emphasis on the emotional impetus generated by metaphysical assumptions. (shrink)

This article illuminates a tension internal to Elizabeth Grosz's provocative theory of the irreducibility of sexual difference: while it establishes sexual difference as an ontological force of differentiation, it simultaneously delimits the forms sexual difference can take as fixed and uncrossable. This model thus privileges cissexual difference while invalidating trans modes of embodiment and identification, a move that perpetuates antitrans logic and practices while impoverishing feminist conceptions of the generativity of sexual difference. This article examines the uses of transsexuality throughout (...) Grosz's work on sexual difference, evaluating her claim that sexual difference is irreducible alongside her insistence that transsexuality is an impossible attempt to assume a bodily sex other than that assigned at birth. Illustrating how Grosz's account narrows the generativity of sexual difference down to unchangeable dimorphic sex, this article argues that fixed dimorphic sex is not simply irreducibly given but is the effect of normative schemas. If the power of sexual difference lies in its capacity to generate difference, it need not be constrained to an immobile binary of sexually specific bodies whose morphological possibilities are fixed. This article thus argues for the capacity of sexual difference itself to become otherwise than solely cisgender. (shrink)

In this article, I extend the feminist use of Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of memory and forgetting to consider the contemporary externalization of memory foregrounded by transgender experience. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals argues that memory is “burnt in” to the forgetful body as a necessary part of subject-formation and the requirements of a social order. Feminist philosophers have employed Nietzsche’s account to illuminate how gender, as memory, becomes embodied. While the account of the “burnt in” repetitions of gender allows (...) us to theorize processes of embodied identity on an individual level, analyzing gender today requires also accounting for how gender is externalized. I take up this question through the specific examples of identity documents and sex-segregated bathrooms. Returning to Nietzsche’s call to practice a resistant forgetting, I conclude by exploring the distinct strategies required to disrupt externalized memory. These strategies include contesting the use of past gender assignments in data collection and rewriting architectural reminders of gender. (shrink)

This paper surveys critical discourse studies to the present and claims that, to avoid lapsing into comfortable orthodoxy in its mature phase, CDS needs to reassert its transformative radical teleology. The initial part of the paper reasserts the need for a strong social theory given the materialist and context-bound nature of discourse in daily activity. From this basis, the paper then characterizes the “new times” in which contemporary discourse occurs, and briefly surveys those issues typically analyzed, namely political economy, race (...) and gender, and critical literacy. By considering people's ordinary lives, the paper then suggests that subject and agency, and calculative technologies of management deserve, and new modalities need, more research. Transdisciplinarity is encouraged, particularly with social psychology and critical management studies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part I evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part II defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part III examines Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the (...) view from nowhere, a totalizing God’s-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorized virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This... (shrink)

Feminist phenomenology has contributed significantly to understanding the negative impact of the objectification of women’s bodies. The celebration of thin bodies as beautiful and the demonization of fat bodies as unattractive is a common component of that discussion. However, when one turns toward the correlation of fat and poor health, a feminist phenomenological approach is less obvious. In this paper, previous phenomenological work on the objectification of women is paralleled to the contemporary encouragement to discipline one’s body in order to (...) pursue better health. Similar ideologies of free choice in the face of bodily habits run through discussions of health and beauty. The paper uses the work of Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir as well as the contemporary feminist phenomenologists Diaprose, Bartky, Bordo, Young, Grosz, and Carel to explore how women are constrained by health testing and health normalization. It argues that despite the apparent benefits of a focus on modifying health habits, feminists have good reason to be wary of the good health imperative. (shrink)

This article argues that the failure of certain theories of reflexive identity transformation to consider more fully issues connected to gender identity leads to an overemphasis on the expressive possibilities thrown up by processes of detraditionalization. By ignoring certain deeply embedded aspects, some theories of reflexive change reproduce the `disembodied and disembedded' subject of masculinist thought. The issues of disembodiment and disembeddedness are explored through a study of the work of Pierre Bourdieu on `habitus' and the `field'. The idea of (...) habitus yields a more dynamic theory of embodiment central to a feminist understanding of gender identity as a durable but not immutable norm. The idea of the `field' provides a more differentiated analysis of the social context in which the reflexive transformation of gender identity unfolds. This in turn offers a way of thinking of possible transformations within gender identity as uneven and non-synchronous phenomena. (shrink)

This article analyses Christian Petzold's exemplary 2014 film Phoenix, tracking a new development in Holocaust cinema that focuses on phenomenological narratives of embodied experience of trauma. It examines the film through the cinematic representation of the traumatised body. While there is no dearth of scholarly inquiries into the relationship of trauma and the body and how it is mediated through film, these are often more concerned with the way in which the body becomes a projection screen for repressed or collective (...) trauma and less about the lived conditions of individual trauma. The present analysis offers a rethinking of the traumatised body as one beset by the condition of disorientation. As a methodological guide, it turns to Sara Ahmed's pivotal phenomenological study Queer Phenomenology. (shrink)

In this article, I report on a Bulgarian female migrant caregiver's “life-story,” especially focusing on her relationship with an old Italian woman, on the care practices performed in her favor in Italy, and on her daughter and parents still living in Bulgaria. I chose to do it by means of an anthropological approach based on experience as field of mediation between personal dimensions and historical and social processes and therefore centered on the body conceived as historical product, the influence of (...) political and social forces on shaping human lives, and finally interest in the specific link between bodies and work. From this analysis, based on language and narratives, I think useful cultural aspects may emerge about “gender” and care practices, regarding the two women linked by an assistance relationship, and the activities/strategies used by the Bulgarian caregiver to fulfill her family obligations. (shrink)

In this essay, Miriam argues for a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the radical feminist theory of sex-right and compulsory heterosexuality. Against critics of radical feminism, she argues that when understood from a phenomenological’ hermeneutic perspective, such theory does not foreclose female sexual agency. On the contrary, men's right of sexual access to women and girls is part of our background understanding of heteronormativity, and thus integral to the lived experience of female sexual agency.

Drawing primarily from the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, the author suggests that a postmodern approach to identity can be used to challenge the essentialism that pervades both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory, and thus move feminist psychology in a more emancipatory direction. A major premise of this paper is that an engagement with postmodernism redirects our attention to symbolic constructions of femininity and to the sociopolitical grounding of experience.

Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, 1 use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn tojewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Harauiay's reading of vampires, retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.