Awais Khan’s literary excellence “In the Company of Strangers” revolves around the female characters, in which he engages in the complicated themes of relationships, social expectations, self-fulfilment, women empowerment, and feminist creation. Through his writings, having portrayed different age groups and social classes with great sensitivity, he presents his groundbreaking work as a vital platform to give extended voice to the featured stories that would ordinarily not be heard in mainstream anglophone Pakistani literature. Through the novel under analysis, the writer (...) reinforces the literary landscape of the country, adding the depth and complexity of stories that shine the light on the manifold diversities of women's experiences. By employing the idea of ‘gender’ proposed by Simon de Beauvoir and Judith Butler respectively, this paper aims to unmask the patterns of female self-drive and marks of domestic violence intricated in the structures of endocentric capitalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an analysis of gender-unfair usages and gender-fair strategies as they may be observed in the Italian language. First, I contextualize the topic within the contemporary debate and analyze how linguistic uses are unfair and become vehicles of stereotypes. Subsequently, I provide an overview of the strategies that can be adopted in Italian, which may be broadly categorized as giving visibility to or obscuring genders. Next, I present a series of compelling arguments in favour of using (...) visibility strategies. I conclude by arguing that the most effective strategy for challenging androcentrism in language and gender stereotypes is to make gender identities visible. (shrink)

In ‘How Androcentric is Western Philosophy?’ (The Philosophical Quarterly, 46 (1996), pp. 48–59), I criticized five claims for the androcentrism of philosophy. In her ‘How Androcentric is Western Philosophy? A Reply’ (ibid., pp. 60–6), Susan Mendus finds my arguments faulty in a number of ways. Much of her criticism has to do with the distinction introduced in my article between pervasive and non-pervasive androcentrism. Pervasive androcentrism in a philosophical theory calls for substantial reform, complete rejection or replacement (...) by a feminist alternative. Non-pervasive androcentrism requires merely a renunciation of some androcentric themes from a philosophical theory. The difference is analogous to the one between a regime, law or idea we judge to be totally or mostly bad and would like to discard completely, and a regime, law or idea we think should be corrected here and there, but is generally worthwhile and after some amendments could be usefully maintained. (shrink)

My contribution to this Symposium focuses on the links between sexuality and reproduction from the evolutionary point of view.' The relation between women's sexuality and reproduction is particularly importantb ecause of a vital intersectionb etweenp olitics and biology feminists have noticed, for more than a century, that women's identity is often defined in terms of her reproductive capacity. More recently, in the second wave of the feminist movement in the United States, debates about women'si dentityh ave explicitlyi ncludeds exuality;m uch (...) feminist argument in the late 1960's and early 1970's involved an attempt to separate out an autonomous female sexuality from women's reproductive functions. It is especially relevant, then, to examine biological arguments, particularlye volutionarya rgumentst, o see what they say about whether and how women's sexuality is related to reproduction. We shall find that many evolutionarya rgumentss eem to supportt he direct linkingo f female sexualitya nd reproductionY. et I will argue that this supporti s not well-groundedI. n fact, I think evolutionarye xplanationso f female sexuality exemplify how social beliefs and social agendas can influence very basic biological explanations of fundamental physiological processes. In this paper, I shall spend some time spelling out a few examples in which assumptions about the close link between reproduction and sexuality yield misleading results, then I shall conclude with a discussion of the consequences of this case study for issues in the philosophy of science. (shrink)