In this article, Bailey analyzes the relationship between ethical vegetarianism and white racism. This plays out in the dreaded comparison of animals with people of color and Jews as exemplified in the PETA campaign and the need for human identification with animals in ethical vegetarianism. To support the viability of ethical vegetarianism, Bailey resolves the dread of this comparison by locating ethical vegetarianism as a strategy of resistance to classist, racist, heterosexist, and colonialist systems of power that often rely on (...) the assumptions of speciesism to ground these axes of oppression. The author carries out this argument to contextualize African American responses to animal welfarism and ethical vegetarianism. (shrink)

The Platonic dialogues contain passages that seem to point in quite opposite directions on the question of the moral equality of women with men. Rep. V defends the view that sexual difference need not be relevant to a person’s capacity for philosophy and thus for virtue. Tim. 42a-c, however, makes incarnation in a female body a punishment for failure to master the challenges of embodiment. This paper examines the different ways in which two subsequent Platonists, Proclus (d. 485 CE) and (...) Theodore of Asine (d. c. 360 CE), dealt with this tension. (shrink)

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

In adolescent sex education, the contemporary debate has developed into two camps: the paternalistic view and the liberal view. I argue that both sides of the camp have been too focused on actions and behavior and are assuming a heteronormative background. This dissertation argues that the way to take care of the self is through exercises, techniques, self-discipline, and self-cultivation—what the ancient Greeks called áskēsis. By applying áskēsis to sex education, students will gain the character of taking care of the (...) sexual self and have a robust outlook of themselves via sexuality. After looking at countless syllabi, I reduce three different moral foundations that underlie existing sex education programs. The first are paternalistic sex education programs. However, empirical research shows that gender discrepancies and heteronormativity are presented as inevitable. The second model is what I call liberal-consequentialist sex education, which emphasizes avoiding negative consequences such as unwanted pregnancies and STIs. This model is an improvement since it empowers students with essential knowledge such as anatomy and sexual mechanics. But this model is still limited because it fails to discuss many forms of sexuality and gender while embracing heteronormativity. The third model is what I call liberal-deontological sex education, which teaches sexual consent. While this model definitely improves on the previous two models, there is still something lacking. Most importantly, this model fails to address the gender inequality at the root of the problematic power dynamics. For example, if to receive consent is to garner a yes, then all men have to do is manipulate woman to get that yes. These three models focus on a person’s behavior, but sexuality is much deeper. Therefore, we need another model that implements áskēsis. For simplicity, I analyze áskēsis to three components: the sexual emotions, the sexual mind, and the sexual body. A comprehensive sex education program helps students train the moral sexual character by disciplining whether those components are coming from their authentic character, or if these ideas were simply societal expectations. This model, thereby, helps students question their own social mores and help formulate their sexual subjectivity. (shrink)

I explore how the Buddhist icon Kuan Yin is emerging as a point of identification for trans people and has the potential to resolve a tension within feminism. As a figure that slips past the male/female binary, Kuan Yin explodes the dichotomy between universal and particular in a way that captures the pragmatist and feminist emphasis on doing justice to concrete, particular lives without becoming stuck in an essentialist quagmire.

Argues that there are original positions to be found in the work of Latin American philosophers. This book brings the history of Latin American philosophy to an English-speaking audience through the prominent voices of Mauricio Beuchot, Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg, María Luisa Femenías, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Oscar R. Martí, León Olivé, Carlos Pereda, and Eduardo Rabossi. They argue that Spanish is not a philosophically irrelevant language and that there are original positions to be found in the work of Latin American philosophers. (...) Part I of the book looks at why the history of philosophy has not developed in Latin America. A range of theoretical issues are explored, each focusing on specific problems that have hindered the development of a solid history. Part II details the complex task of writing a history of philosophy for a region still haunted by the specter of colonialism. Arleen Salles is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and the coeditor (with Jorge J. E. Gracia) of Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century: The Human Condition, Values, and the Search for Identity. (shrink)

The argument of this dissertation is that despite the intellectual gendered burden of the problem of disembodiment I define, it can be employed from within the limitations of a gendered account in feminist philosophy of the continental-realist type. I formulate the problem of disembodiment as rooted in the notion of the boundless (apeiron) associated with femininity. Both boundlessness and disembodiment are subject to radicalization in Plato (chōra) and Plotinus (to hen). Read as a dyad, they culminate in a tendency towards (...) gendered disembodiment, mediated by Plato’s soul-body dualism. The dissertation seeks to compare the gendered dimension of disembodiment in the work of Plato and Plotinus and that of the non- philosophers François Laruelle and Katerina Kolozova. “Part I. The Problem of Boundlessness: Radicalizing Disembodiment” is divided in three chapters, which present an intellectual history of the problem of boundlessness as femininity. I survey the problem of boundlessness as drafting relations between elements and principles and femininity in Greek mythology (Chapter 1), Plato’s cosmology (Chapter 2), and Plotinus’ metaphysics (Chapter 3). I argue that the relation between death and the female was ambivalent by the time of the Anaximandrean apeiron and that it became a subject of radicalization via Plato’s chōra and Plotinus’ One, mediated by the notion of the Indefinite Dyad and the doctrine of divided matter. The problem of boundlessness was subject to conceptual radicalization that led to hierarchical metaphysics and deepened the division between body and soul via the association of femininity, reproductivity and matter. “Part II. The Problem of Disembodiment: Revising Boundlessness” is divided in two chapters focusing on the contemporary relevance and importance of the problem of disembodiment as a way of revising boundlessness. I present and explain the legacy of the Platonic chōra and the Plotinian One and what they as a dyad entail for contemporary continental philosophy. I offer (Chapter 4) a trajectory for a continental feminist philosophy interpretation of disembodiment by combining continental feminist philosophy, non- philosophy and new realism. With the aid of Laruelle’s non-philosophy, I explain how and why chōra and the One can be used for/from continental feminist philosophy, followed by a presentation of how chōra and the One are revised in continental philosophy from non- philosophical and new realist perspectives. I then develop (Chapter 5) a continental feminist philosophical interpretation of and approach to the problem of disembodiment from a realist perspective by problematizing continental and feminist philosophical anti-realism. The approach presented is itself an argument in defence of a feminist engagement with disembodiment and the dissertation’s contribution: a non-philosophical contribution to the problem of disembodiment via a continental feminist-realist philosophical approach. The approach is offered through the intersection of continental feminist realism and non- philosophy, and partially new realism. My conclusion is that an affirmative project and consideration of disembodiment for continental feminist philosophy is possible via a non- philosophical and new realist reconsideration of the One. (shrink)

Addressing central questions in the debate about Foucault's usefulness for politics, including his rejection of universal norms, his conception of power and power-knowledge, his seemingly contradictory position on subjectivity and his ...

The bodies of non-White girls are hyper-visible in humanitarian discourses. This article engages in theoretical reflections around the articulation of Whiteness through the body of the third world girl. I curate and examine an archive of texts and visuals from menstrual hygiene and female genital mutilation (FGM) awareness campaigns to show how the figure of the third world girl is materialised simultaneously as deserving of care/protection and as a contaminant/imperfection. These apparently contradictory registers of legibility are possible due to the (...) reiteration of the non-White female body as ontologically dirty, incomplete and an imperfect representation of full humanity. The third world girl then is the constitutive outside of Whiteness, and her production as such conjoins humanitarian protection codes with penalising political regimes. The latter is reflected by new border patrolling initiatives in the US and UK, launched specifically to identify victims of FGM. Such exercises of state power craft racialised bodies for constant interrogation, prodding and, ultimately, ejection. These bodies then become the loci of benevolent necropower and experience slow social death. (shrink)

In this essay, I connect the sexual victimization of women, children, and pet animals with the violence manifest in a patriarchal culture. After discussing these connections, I demonstrate the importance of taking seriously these connections because of their implications for conceptual analysis, epistemology, and political, environmental, and applied philosophy. My goal is to broaden our understanding of issues relevant to creating peace and to provide some suggestions about what must be included in any adequate feminist peace politics.

Examines the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. This book is the first to examine the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Because of their association with reproduction, embodiment, and the survival of the species, women have been confined to the cyclical time of nature—a temporal model that is said to merely repeat itself. Men, on the other hand, have been (...) seen as bearers of linear time and as capable of change and progress. Fanny Söderbäck argues that both these temporal models make change impossible because they either repeat or repress the past. The model of time developed here—revolutionary time—aims at returning to and revitalizing the past so as to make possible a dynamic-embodied present and a future pregnant with change. Söderbäck stages an unprecedented conversation between Kristeva and Irigaray on issues of both time and difference, and engages thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Plato along the way. “Revolutionary Time makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary feminist and continental philosophical thought. By engaging Kristeva and Irigaray in depth alongside one another, and making time the guiding thread for reading their work, the author generates insights that are not to be found elsewhere in the existing literature. Through its development of the concept of revolutionary time, the book offers rich resources for thinking about temporalization in its existential, ontological, and political dimensions, in ways that are particularly valuable for feminist projects of change and political transformation.” — Rachel Jones, author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. (shrink)

Drawing on (auto)ethnographic research—on the process of becoming a marathon swimmer, this paper argues that conventional characterisations of marathon swimming as being ‘80 per cent mental and 20 per cent physical’ reprise a mind–body split that at worst excludes women and at best holds them to a masculine standard. This in turn draws the focus towards sensory deprivation, bodily suffering and overcoming, to the exclusion of the pleasures of swimming, beyond the expected ones such as the challenge of swim completion. (...) By exploring instead the ‘shifted sensorium’ of marathon swimming, and examples of the autotelic pleasures of swimming, this paper argues that training changes the way swimming body feels, and that it is these changes that enable a swimmer to feel ‘at home’ in an environment to which it does not naturally belong. This focus on the sensory aspects of swimming, and its unexpected pleasures, both highlights the ways in which those pleasures do not flow unproblematically to women, and brings to light alternative and politically provocative ways of experiencing the gendered sporting body. This highlights the contingency, however constrained, of even the most entrenched ways of thinking about bodies, both within and outside sport. (shrink)

Este artículo explora la problemática del cuerpo desde una perspectiva de género. Primero, se estudia la evasión filosófica del cuerpo, así como su inadvertida asimilación a lo femenino. Segundo, se examina la negación capitalista del cuerpo y la posibilidad de entender la diferenciación entre las lógicas de explotación y de expropiación a través de una previa diferenciación entre cuerpos. Se propone finalmente hacer un análisis de la exclusión general del cuerpo como una exclusión particular de lo femenino y de lo (...) popular y se sugiere que el advenimiento de los cuerpos promulgado desde el movimiento feminista, especialmente en su vertiente latinoamericana, traen consigo un potencial democrático y emancipador. (shrink)

This article offers a critical analysis of representations of loneliness and singlehood, embodied in the narrative of the ‘old maid’s’ lonely death. The study contributes to a complex understanding of single women and the resignification of emotions conventionally ascribed to this category. By bridging the gap between two rarely linked bodies of knowledge – singlehood and the sociology of emotions – the authors do not ask what loneliness is, but, following Sara Ahmed’s work, rather what loneliness does. To this end, (...) this article employs a content analysis of versatile media texts, focusing on the acclaimed television series Six Feet Under, a polysemic text which juxtaposes both conservative and subversive meanings. The study contributes both to the vibrant discussion of social emotions as well as to the existing critical scholarship about singlehood, and seeks to challenge the limited set of representations attached to single women, and hegemonic ideals of family and solitary life. (shrink)