This paper has two goals. The first is to argue that the field of bioethics in general and the literature on ideal vs. nonideal theory in particular has underemphasized a primary problem for normative theorizing: the role of conditioning principles. I define these as principles that implicitly or explicitly ground, limit, or otherwise determine the construction and function of other principles, and, as a result, profoundly impact concept formation, perception, judgment, and action, et al. The second is to demonstrate that (...) ableism is one such conditioning principle and that it undermines the field of bioethics and the practice of biomedicine from achieving the aim of justice as fairness. After briefly addressing the history and critiques of principlism in bioethics, I lay out and defend my account of conditioning principles. I then argue that ableism is one such principle and demonstrate it at work through an analysis of a storied debate between Eva Kittay, Peter Singer, and Jeff McMahan. In conclusion, I contend that the ethical and philosophical dangers of conditioning principles are too easily exacerbated by ideal theory frameworks, and I do so by demonstrating how they are especially liable to generate epistemic injustice, especially contributory and hermeneutical injustice. (shrink)

Los argumentos neurocientíficos focalizados en demostrar diferencias sexuales en el cerebro gozan de una gran popularidad. Algunas de las conclusiones de dichos experimentos han derivado en propuestas neuroeducativas que promueven la educación segregada por sexos. Estas propuestas carecen del rigor necesario para poder ser aplicadas. No sólo porque los estudios neurocientíficos están lejos de poder aseverar diferencias sexuales significativas en el cerebro, sino porque falta un diálogo crítico entre las ciencias que fundamente estrategias educativas adecuadas en el ámbito de las (...) diferencias sexuales del cerebro. Concluimos que es necesario establecer un diálogo entre los diferentes ámbitos que conforman la neuroeducación, porque solamente de este modo se pueden fundamentar modelos educativos democráticos donde la igualdad de género sea un valor irrenunciable. (shrink)

This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. We started with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gender body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time (...) become actualised in girls’ habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos are presented: room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and the dance of the not-yet. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place, and the virtual potential of movement. (shrink)

Under the Canadian labour laws that govern workplace safety, wage, and other work conditions, ‘family’ workers are not covered by the law under special rules for agriculture. Among other legal exclusions, the family farm exclusion contributes to a dearth of basic work, health, and safety standards in the sector, despite the commercialization and industrialization of family farming activities. Through a focus on Alberta, Canada—where farm labour rules have only applied to agriculture since 2016—this article explores the family exclusion in relation (...) to family farming experiences with work and risk, based on interviews with farm operators, their family members, and farm employees in Alberta. While some participants continued to press for exemptions for farms from labour rules under the rationale that there is intrinsic safety within families, the findings also reveal how other participants have begun questioning this rationale, despite their overall support for the family farm exemption in Alberta. Using the lens of legal geography and critical perspectives on the family, we argue that the family is a significant but under-examined dynamic in the legal regimes governing farm labour and agricultural safety and health. Together, the law and dominant narratives about family farming treat farm operations as hyper-private domains, where operators have disproportionate power to dispose of their own work and the work of others how they wish. These legal geographies of hyper-privacy contribute to the indecent work conditions that characterize farm labour systems in Alberta and other jurisdictions. (shrink)

The resurgence of interest in the meaning of citizenship has encouraged debate on its gendered character, especially the relationship between public and private. Informed by such analyses, this article considers the political organizations, in this case in Australia, formed to reclaim maternity care from medical dominance and to promote women's choices as childbearers. As activists, mothers have carved out a new form of politics, transforming their ‘private’ experiences into issues of public contention. Challenging established categories, they have sought to improve (...) their social rights through educating the public and changing professional and institutional practices – for example, asserting their ‘right’ to birth at home and breastfeed in public places. I argue that neither this project, nor that of feminism's emphasis on achieving equality in the public sphere, has been adequate, for gender equity requires intermeshed social, economic and political rights. By conceptualizing mothers as a political collectivity with distinctive, though not homogeneous, interests and needs, the article indicates ways to extend current theoretical frameworks, including postmodernist feminist debates on gender-justice and the politics of differentiated citizenship. (shrink)

The notion that rape is an act of violence rather than sex is a central tenet in rape crisis support and education. A therapeutic benefit of this conceptualisation of rape is that it counters shame and guilt by affirming that the victim was not a complicit partner in an act of sex. However, this conceptualisation has recently been criticised for not capturing what makes rape an especially serious kind of wrong. This raises an apparent dilemma for rape crisis support. Recent (...) work in analytic moral philosophy on the nature of rape offers a way to resolve this dilemma. It is argued that rape is not sex, but is nonetheless sexual. This distinction allows for a charitable reformulation of the central tenet in rape crisis support, which can facilitate the dual therapeutic aims of countering the sense of shame and of recognising the especially serious kind of the harm suffered by the victim. (shrink)

Equality policies in Spain have increasingly developed since the creation of the National Women’s Agency (1983). Over a ten‐year period Spain has achieved European standards in equality policies in terms of institutions, budget and legitimization. In a short time Spain moved from a dictatorship to European Union membership, which has brought about enormous changes regarding women’s roles and rights. Other relevant changes concern the political organization of the state: the 1978 Constitution sets a model of regional administrative autonomy, neither centralized (...) nor federal, in which each region has developed gender institutions. Gender‐equality policies constituted the framework for the development of gay and lesbian policies. Both gender equality and gay and lesbian policies have evolved differently at the national and regional levels, with a trend of inclusiveness, more creative policies and institutions at the regional and local levels. In the meantime, the national debate has concentrated on same‐sex marriage, while sexuality is not a topic within gender equality policies. This paper argues that the progressive inclusiveness of lesbians within the equality agenda and the new intersectional perspectives, alongside gay marriage shows an evolution of Spanish citizenship models, largely influenced by the European Union context. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author articulates two Hobbesian models of interpersonal power relations that can be used to understand gender relations: what he will call the dominion model and the deference model. Hobbes himself analyses the relation between men and women through the dominion model. The author lays out Hobbes's model of interpersonal power relations as dominion, including his application of the model to the case of gender relations. The centerpiece of Hobbes's method is his “state of nature” thought experiment. (...) Hobbes's analysis is radical insofar as he understands familial relations according to the general model of interpersonal relations just outlined, without any reference to sui generis principles. The author indicates some shortcomings of the dominion model for grasping contemporary social life. The much‐celebrated social contract between equal male citizens is quietly underpinned by the sexual contract, a contract of domination between men and women. (shrink)

Interrogating the oft-stated emotion of ‘guilt’ amongst young female activists, I develop a theoretical account of why young women seem to be more burdened with such negative emotions than young men. Drawing on feminist theorising, I posit that young women’s emotional accounts of activist work highlight the retraditionalisation of gender under neoliberal modernity. I provide evidence of the gender-differentiated demands that heightened forms of reflexivity place on women, young women in particular. I then consider alternative conceptions of politics, grounded in (...) the work of Hannah Arendt, and extending my own earlier work on relational agency (Kennelly, 2009). Drawing on phenomenology to offer an account of political engagement grounded in the lived experiences of activists, I suggest that social movements might be bolstered through a deepened understanding of the role played by webs of relations and world-building practices, without losing sight of the gendered implications of such a turn. (shrink)

Conceptions of citizenship which rest on an abstract and universal notion of the individual founder on their inability to recognize the political relevance of gender. Such conceptions, because their ‘gender-neutrality’ has the effect of excluding women, are not helpful to the project of promoting the full citizenship of women. The question of citizenship is often reduced to either political citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of political participation, or social citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of economic (in)dependence. (...) The paper argues for the recognition of citizenship as gendered, and as an ethical, that is non-instrumental, social status which is distinct from both political participation and economic (in)dependence. What unites us as citizens, in our equal membership of the political community, need not rely on a conception of us as ‘neutral’ (abstract, universalized, genderless) individuals undertaking one specific activity located in the public realm, but can take account of the diverse ways in which we engage in ethically-grounded activities on the basis of our different genders, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and other differences, in both the public and private realms. A convincing feminist conception of citizenship necessarily involves a radical redefinition of the public/private distinction to accommodate the recognition of citizenship practices in the private realm. The paper builds on the observation that the concept of ‘citizenship’ is broader than the concept of ‘the political’ (or ‘the social/economic’), and contends that feminism provides us with the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity, which applies to both men and women. The recognition of gendered subjectivity opens the way to the recognition of the diversity of citizenship practices. It is not that women need to be liberated from the private realm, in order to take part in the public realm as equal citizens, but that women – and men – already undertake responsibilities of citizenship in both the public and the private realms. (shrink)

This paper queries the absence of disabled voices in contemporary citizenship literature. It argues that the language and imagery of the citizen is imbued with hegemonic normalcy and as such excludes disability. Feminist perspectives, such as those which argue for a form of maternal citizenship, largely fail to acknowledge disability experiences. Exclusionary practices are charted and links are made between gender, race and disability in this process. A citizenship which acknowledges disability is fundamental to re-imaging local, national and international collectivities.

Choice feminism is a popular form of contemporary feminism, encouraging women to embrace the opportunities they have in life and to see the choices they make as justified and always politically acceptable. Though this kind of feminism appears at first glance to be tolerant and inspiring, its narratives also bring about a political stagnation as discussion, debate and critical judgement of the actions of others are discouraged in the face of being deemed unsupportive and a ‘bad’ feminist. Choice feminism also (...) encourages neoliberal values of individualism and consumerism, while downplaying the need for political and collective action against systematic inequalities. Yet in order to succeed in creating change for women, debate needs to occur, and not all decisions can be supported if they act to further inequality and a patriarchal status quo. In this article, I would like to argue for the continued need to engage politically with other feminists and with the status of the movement as a whole, by critiquing choice feminism and looking empirically at how discussion and dissent can be silenced by the choice narrative. The empirical data in this article will focus on online discussions of naming on marriage to illustrate the wider theoretical argument. (shrink)

This essay analyses how Australian postcolonial discourses, influenced by both Republicanism and Reconciliation, deploy the trope of woman to signify political change in both feminist and cultural debates about belonging, national legitimacy and sovereignty. I point out that white feminist rejection of the Queen in favour of embracing indigeneity is itself complicit with a history of ‘incorporating’ and assimilating indigeneity – a complicity that is sublimated in favour of a triumphant rejection of Imperial white womanhood. The essay looks at a (...) contemporary Australian novel, media depictions of Paul Keating's ‘embrace’ of Queen Elizabeth II (as a kind of captivity narrative), critical whiteness studies’ ‘rejection’ of the Queen and the misrecognition of Australia's distinct characteristics as a ‘settler culture’ (that incorporates indigeneity) within Australian feminist debates and claims of ‘transgression’ that are made for interracial relationships in Australia. (shrink)

The “Home” is ideologically understood as a place of safety and refuge. Such an account cloaks violence against women. The voices of battered women can disrupt that dominant construction of the space of the home, a construction typified by the work of Gaston Bachelard. The space that Bachelard presupposes and theorizes as given is in fact being-produced, cleaned, and organized by people who themselves may not find in it any solace or respite.

: The "Home" is ideologically understood as a place of safety and refuge. Such an account cloaks violence against women. The voices of battered women can disrupt that dominant construction of the space of the home, a construction typified by the work of Gaston Bachelard. The space that Bachelard presupposes and theorizes as given is in fact being-produced, cleaned, and organized by people who themselves may not find in it any solace or respite.

In her recent book Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson makes a powerful but pragmatic case against the abuses experienced by employees in conventional corporations. The purpose of this review-essay is to contrast Anderson’s pragmatic critique of many abuses in the employment relation with a principled critique of the employment relationship itself. This principled critique is based on the theory of inalienable rights that descends from the Reformation doctrine of the inalienability of conscience down through the Enlightenment in the abolitionist, democratic, and (...) feminist movements. That theory was the basis for the abolition of the voluntary slavery or self-sale contract, the voluntary non-democratic constitution (pactum subjectionis), and the voluntary coverture marriage contract in today’s democratic countries. When understood in modern terms, that same theory applies as well against the voluntary self-rental or employment contract that is the basis for our current economic system. (shrink)

This article argues that access to meaningful sexual experience should be included within the set of the goods that are subject to principles of distributive justice. It argues that some people are currently unjustly excluded from meaningful sexual experience and it is not implausible to suggest that they might thereby have certain claim rights to sexual inclusion. This does not entail that anyone has a right to sex with another person, but it does entail that duties may be imposed on (...) society to foster greater sexual inclusion. This is a controversial thesis and this article addresses this controversy by engaging with four major objections to it: the misogyny objection; the impossibility objection; the stigmatisation objection; and the unjust social engineering objection. (shrink)

This article intervenes in a critical debate about the use of consent to distinguish sex from rape. Drawing from critical contract theories, it argues that sexual consent is a cruel optimism that often operates to facilitate, rather than alleviate, sexual violence. Sexual consent as a cruel optimism promises to simplify rape allegations in the popular cultural imagination, confounds the distinction between victims and agents of sexual violence, and establishes certainty for potential victimizers who rely on it to convince themselves and (...) others that their partners implicitly or explicitly agreed to sex. In each of these cases, the power of consent rests in its tendency to obscure sexual violence in a set of questions around victimhood and agency, rather than to clarify whether or when it has occurred. Following in the critical contract tradition, this article argues that the optimistic attachment to the clarifying power of consent helps to explain the persistent commitment to better sexual consent as a ‘solution’ to the problems of rape and sexual violence, and that this ‘solution’ is insufficient to the task. (shrink)

While the common law may result in justice between heterosexual intimate partners in particular claims for a beneficial interest in the family home, it does so on its own terms—terms drawn up according to contractarian principles reflecting male sex-right, that subsist even as the world and the institution of marriage (and marriage-like relationships) have changed. This paper uses examples from the case law across four common law jurisdictions to expose the terms on which the contractarian nature of intimate partner trusts (...) permits claims for a distribution of intimate partners’ property, and how it excludes. In particular, it identifies the pervasiveness of the sexual contract in subsuming women’s expression of individualism to those of her intimate partner, and the implications of this for the derivation of a property interest in the family home. (shrink)

This paper explains how the practice of ‘no platforming’ can be reconciled with a liberal politics. While opponents say that no platforming flouts ideals of open public discourse, and defenders see it as a justifiable harm-prevention measure, both sides mistakenly treat the debate like a run-of-the-mill free speech conflict, rather than an issue of academic freedom specifically. Content-based restrictions on speech in universities are ubiquitous. And this is no affront to a liberal conception of academic freedom, whose purpose isn’t just (...) to protect the speech of academics, but also to give them the prerogative to determine which views and speakers have sufficient disciplinary credentials to receive a hearing in academic contexts. No platforming should therefore be acceptable to liberals, in principle, in cases where it is used to support a university culture that maintains rigorous disciplinary standards, by denying attention and credibility to speakers without appropriate disciplinary credentials. (shrink)

Most opponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryonic stem cell technologies base their arguments on the twin assertions that the embryo is either a human being or a potential human being, and that it is wrong to destroy a human being or potential human being in order to produce stem cell lines. Proponents’ justifications of stem cell research are more varied, but not enough to escape the charge of obsession with the status of the embryo. What unites the two (...) warring sides in ‘the stem cell wars’ is that women are equally invisible to both: ‘the lady vanishes.’ Yet the most legitimate property in the body is that which women possess in their reproductive tissue and the products of their reproductive labour. By drawing on the accepted characterisation in the common law of property as a bundle of rights, and on a Hegelian model of contract as mutual recognition, we can lessen the impact of the tendency to regard women and their ova as merely receptacles and women’s reproductive labour as unimportant. (shrink)

This paper examines two different ways of understanding the concept of bodily integrity and their political implications. In Drucilla Cornell's use of the concept, the body cannot be separated from the mind. Protecting bodily integrity means protecting possibilities of imagining the self as whole. Martha Nussbaum's theorizing is based on a liberal way of conceptualizing subjectivity, in which the mind and the body are separate, and bodily integrity is used to refer to physical inviolability.

This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body subject. Stressing the importance of embodiment to feminist agency (without reifying an essential female body), I argue that bodies inhabit specific social, historical and discursive contexts which shape our corporeal experience and our opportunities for political contestation. Beginning with the assertion that we cannot think of agency without the body, I examine a historical instance of feminist agency in which women’s bodies were central to the (...) articulation of political dissent, namely the British suffragette movement. In particular, I focus on the suffragette career of Mary Leigh and argue that it represents a feminist agency derived from corporeal performance. Through daring acts of protest which drew attention to the comportment and capacities of their bodies, suffragettes like Leigh contested the constitution of the political domain and the nature of citizenship. (shrink)

: A pronatalist perspective on maternal bodies renders the adoptive maternal body queer. In this essay, I argue that the queerness of the adoptive maternal body makes it a useful epistemic standpoint from which to critique dominant views of mothering. In particular, exploring motherhood through the lens of adoption reveals the discursive mediation and social regulation of all maternal bodies, as well as the normalizing assumptions of heteronormativity, "reprosexuality," and family homogeneity that frame a traditional view of the biological family. (...) As participants in motherhood who resist "repro-narrativity," " reprosexuality," and essentialism, adoptive maternal bodies have the potential to both queer our notions of normal mothering and normalize our notions of queer mothering. (shrink)

A pronatalist perspective on maternal bodies renders the adoptive maternal body queer. In this essay, I argue that the queerness of the adoptive maternal body makes it a useful epistemic standpoint from which to critique dominant views of mothering. In particular, exploring motherhood through the lens of adoption reveals the discursive mediation and social regulation of all maternal bodies, as well as the normalizing assumptions of heteronormativity, “reprosexuality,” and family homogeneity that frame a traditional view of the biological family. As (...) participants in motherhood who resist “repro-narrativity,”“reprosexuality,” and essentialism, adoptive maternal bodies have the potential to both queer our notions of normal mothering and normalize our notions of queer mothering. (shrink)

South African law has traditionally denied property sharing rights to people in non-marital intimate partnerships, but a series of new cases has created the possibility of enforcing universal partnership contracts to claim a share in partnership property. However, evidential biases within these progressive cases reflect a historical disdain for women’s contributions to relationships and a widespread reluctance to believe women’s testimony about the existence of agreements to share. These biases bear strong resemblances to the gender stereotypes which have been the (...) subject of feminist critique in rape law. Central to both rape and universal partnerships is the issue of consent or agreement between men and women. This, in turn, depends on social beliefs about male and female entitlements in the realms of sex and intimate relationships. The paper highlights the commonalities and parallels between the legal treatment of women’s evidence about the existence of contracts on the one hand, and the prejudice faced by complainants in rape cases. (shrink)

Commercial surrogacy arrangements now cross borders; this paper aims to reevaluate the traditional moral concerns regarding the practice against the added ethical dimension of global injustice. I begin by considering the claim that global surrogacy serves to satisfy the positive reproductive rights of infertile first-world women. I then go on to consider three powerful challenges to this claim. The first holds that commercial surrogacy involves the commodification of a good that should not be valued in market terms, the second that (...) it involves the exploitation of the labor of disadvantaged women, and the third that it depends on the illegitimate privileging of positive rights over negative rights. I reject the first of these challenges and argue that global surrogacy arrangements are indeed exploitative on the dual basis of what I call intracontractual injustice and intercontractual coercion. The latter, I contend, depends on a preexisting negative rights violation, which cannot be permitted for the sake of satisfying another's positive reproductive entitlement. I conclude not in favor of a global ban but with suggestions on how developing nations that permit commercial surrogacy might better protect the negative reproductive rights of their female citizens, thereby making them less vulnerable to exploitation. (shrink)

This is a detailed encyclopedia entry on sex and sexuality, explaining the main issues and debates in philosophy about them.

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 329-343, December 2013.

Argues that love plays an essential—if often implicit—role in Hegel's mature theory of moral subjectivity and political community.

From its earliest beginnings, political thought has grappled with the problem of those who both do and do not belong to the city, those who cannot be exactly included or excluded, that is to say, with the problem of difference. Most often this emerges first as the problem of what to do with women. Communitas is an intense engagement with central figures in the history of political thought – Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau – but also a remarkably efficient avoidance of women (...) and difference. Even as he deals with Augustine, who cannot stop discussing begetting and desire, and Hobbes, who insists on the maternal right of nature, Esposito's attention remains fixed on the fraternal violence rather than parental sex as the founding of community, and the result is a strangely phallic work. (shrink)

Feminists have noted the injustice of the institution of marriage and the asymmetric power dynamics within gender-structured marriages. Recently, feminists have found an unexpected supporter of this struggle against marriage in some liberal political theorists. I argue that this new wave of interest in the wrongness of marriage within liberalism reveals shortcomings from a feminist perspective. While some liberals fail to realise that instead of being disestablished, the institution of marriage should be radically reformed, others do not recognise that such (...) a reform should be theorised by starting from our non-idealised conditions of gender inequality and from an analysis of how the institution of marriage intersects with other spheres of gender injustice. This article provides recommendations for the radical reform of marriage by following some methodological premises of feminist theory. To illustrate how the reform of marriage should be theorised, it focuses on the intersection between the sphere of gender injustice represented by immigration and that of marriage. (shrink)

I offer an unorthodox argument for the thesis that prostitution is not just a normal job. It has the advantage of being compatible with the claim that humans should have full authority over their sexual life. In fact, it is ultimately the emphasis on this authority that leads the thesis that prostitution is a normal job to collapse. Here is the argument: merchants cannot (both legally and morally) discriminate whom they transact with on the basis of factors like the ethnicity (...) or the religion of their client; but if prostitutes are ‘sex merchants’, then they cannot (both legally and morally) discriminate whom they have sex with on the basis of these factors. Yet everyone should have the full discretionary power to refuse to have sex under any circumstances. (shrink)

In response to three papers about sex and disability published in this journal, I offer a critique of existing arguments and a suggestion about how the debate should be reframed going forward. Jacob M. Appel argues that disabled individuals have a right to sex and should receive a special exemption to the general prohibition of prostitution. Ezio Di Nucci and Frej Klem Thomsen separately argue contra Appel that an appeal to sex rights cannot justify such an exemption. I argue that (...) Appel’s argument fails, but not for the reasons Di Nucci and Thomsen propose, as they have missed the most pressing objection to Appel’s argument: Appel falsely presumes that we never have good reasons to restrict someone’s sexual liberty rights. More importantly, there is a major flaw in the way that all three authors frame their positive accounts. They focus on disability as a proxy for sexual exclusion, when these categories should be pulled apart: some are sexually excluded who are not disabled, while some who are disabled are not sexually excluded. I conclude that it would be less socially harmful and more productive to focus directly on sexual exclusion per se rather than on disability as a proxy for sexual exclusion. (shrink)

The paper examines the effects of intersecting social divisions on constructions of multi‐layered citizenships and the politics of belonging in contemporary Britain. It starts with conceptual clarifications of the notions of citizenship, belonging and intersectionality and then turns to examine contemporary politics of belonging in contemporary Britain, focusing on the current debate on the ‘death of multiculturalism’ and on ‘social cohesion’. It illustrates how the use of civic and democratic values as signifiers of belonging can end up as exclusionary, rather (...) than inclusionary in that discourse. (shrink)

Cet article est la traduction française de l’introduction du livre d’Ayelet Shachar, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», avec la permission de l’éditeur, tirée de The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Traduction de Martin Provencher.This paper is the French translation of Ayelet Shachar’s introduction, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», digitally reproduced by permission of the publisher from The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge, (...) Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Translation by Martin Provencher. (shrink)

This article explores objections made against ideal theorizing in political philosophy by two prominent contemporary critical theorists: Axel Honneth and Charles Mills. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth...

In this essay I distinguish four different modes of feminist critique of reason. Discussing the work of authors such as Keller, Irigaray, and Butler, I point out that the issue of masculine connotations has been addressed with regard to different concepts-or at least different aspects-of reason. In view of a tendency to overdraw the objections, I suggest to reformulate the feminist critique of reason. I also argue that a rediscovery of those philosophical concepts of reason that do not restrict this (...) term to instrumental rationality might be useful for this purpose. (shrink)

This article explores obstacles to understanding the history and contemporary experiences of women in Scotland, and to the development of feminist research in Scotland. It is argued that explanations which invoke Scottish male chauvinism and misogyny alone are insufficient, and that the marginalization of women in Scotland is produced both by male domination within Scotland, and by English cultural and political hegemony within the UK. The article comments on the relationship of the concept of ‘Britishness’ to that of ‘Scottishness’ (and (...) other identities within the UK) and illustrates how the frequent confusion of ‘British’ with ‘English’ serves to obscure Scottish experience. It is also argued that the place of Scotland within the British state has led to the creation of an institutional framework that disadvantages women, and a system of government that excludes women. This implies that feminist debates on the state in Britain require a specific focus on the form of the British state, and in the context of constitutional change in particular this is important for the development of future strategies. It is argued that the double marginalization of women in Scotland is not just a problem in relation to the development of feminist research, but is also a political problem in that it contributes to a degree of alienation from feminism in England. The article concludes by arguing for the necessity of recognition of difference, but also for dialogue, as the basis for feminist alliances in different parts of the UK. (shrink)

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

: Events surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States raise compelling moral questions about the effects of war and globalization on children in many parts of the world. This paper adopts Sartre's notion of freedom, particularly its connection with materiality and intersubjectivity, to assess the moral responsibility that we have as a global community toward our most vulnerable members. We conclude by examining important first steps that should be taken to address the plight of children.

This article critiques the way in which three feminist authors reinscribe traditional liberal values when seeking new ways of thinking about the nation. It suggests that in rejecting affective or embodied metaphors, such as community or kinship, the authors fall into the trap of reinscribing values which have historically excluded women and ethnic or racial minorities from full participation in the polity. The article argues for a rejection of the affect/rationality model which underpins these arguments and suggests that new metaphors (...) for the nation will emerge as those who have been excluded claim a place in the polity. (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.

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.