Feminist Philosophy

Women and other oppressed and deprived people sometimes collude with the forces that perpetuate injustice against them. Women’s acceptance of their lesser claim on household resources like food, their positive attitudes toward clitoridectemy and infibulation, their acquiescence to violence at the hands of their husbands, and their sometimes fatalistic attitudes toward their own poverty or suffering are all examples of “adaptive preferences,” wherein women participate in their own deprivation. This book offers a definition of adaptive preference and a moral framework for responding to adaptive preferences in development practice. The book defines adaptive preferences as deficits in the capacity to lead a flourishing human life that are causally related to deprivation and argues that public institutions should conduct deliberative interventions to transform the adaptive preferences of deprived people. It insists that people with adaptive preferences can experience value distortion, but it explains how this fact does not undermine those people’s claim to participate in designing development interventions that determine the course of their lives. The book claims that adaptive preference identification requires a commitment to moral universalism, but this commitment need not be incompatible with a respect for culturally variant conceptions of the good. She illustrates her arguments with examples from real-world development practice. Its deliberative perfectionist approach moves us beyond apparent impasses in the debates about internalized oppression and autonomous agency, relativism and universalism, and feminism and multiculturalism.

Women have historically been prevented from living autonomously by systematic injustice, subordination, and oppression. The lingering effects of these practices have prompted many feminists to view autonomy with suspicion. This book defends the ideal of feminist autonomy. The book proposes that behavior is autonomous if it accords with the wants, cares, values, or commitments that the actor has reaffirmed and is able to sustain in the face of opposition. By this account, autonomy is socially grounded yet also individualizing and sometimes socially disruptive, qualities that can be ultimately advantageous for women. The book applies the concept of autonomy to domains of special interest to women. It defends the importance of autonomy in romantic love, considers how social institutions should respond to women who choose to remain in abusive relationships, and argues that liberal societies should tolerate minority cultural practices that violate women's rights so long as the women in question have chosen autonomously to live according to those practices.

This book deals with bioethical issues relevant to women across the life span. “Gender justice” is the starting point and the end point of the author’s approach to the issues addressed. The first section offers an overview of bioethics, critiques prevalent approaches to bioethics and models of the physician-patient relationship, and sketches distinguishing aspects of women’s health care. Classical pragmatists and feminist standpoint theorists are enlisted in support of “an egalitarian perspective”, and positions on the moral status of fetuses and those already born are examined. The second section identifies topics that are directly or indirectly related to women’s health; these include prenatal testing, childbirth and newborn decisions, treatment of minors and the elderly, assisted reproduction, abortion, eating disorders, domestic violence, breast and gynecological cancer, end of life care, and research on women. Brief cases illustrate variables related to each topic. Empirical and theoretical considerations follow each set of cases; these are intended to precipitate more expansive and critical examination of the questions raised. The book concludes with discussion of an egalitarian ideal to be pursued through an ethic of virtue or supererogation rather than obligation. By embracing this ideal, according to the author, moral agents support a more demanding level of morality than guidelines or laws require.

Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, the book addresses the ways in which the devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities for flourishing. The book describes two different forms of “moral trouble” prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them, and that are referred to as “burdened virtues.” These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer’s own well being. It is suggested that eudaimonistic theories should be able to account for virtues of this sort.

In this book, a major feminist philosopher engages the work of the actor and director who has progressed from being the stereotypical “man's man” to pushing the boundaries of the very genres—the Western, the police thriller, the war, or boxing movie—most associated with American masculinity. Her highly appreciative encounter with the films directed by Clint Eastwood revolve around the questions “What is it to be a good man?” and “What is it to be, not just an ethical person, but specifically an ethical man?” Focusing on Eastwood as a director rather than as an actor or cultural icon, she studies Eastwood in relation to major philosophical and ethical themes that have been articulated in her own life's work. In her fresh and revealing readings of the films, the author takes up pressing issues of masculinity as it is caught up in the very definition of ideas of revenge, violence, moral repair, and justice. Eastwood grapples with this involvement of masculinity in and through many of the great symbols of American life, including cowboys, boxing, police dramas, and ultimately war—perhaps the single greatest symbol of what it means (or is supposed to mean) to be a man. The author discusses films from across Eastwood's career, from his directorial debut with Play Misty for Me to Million Dollar Baby. Her book is not a traditional book of film criticism or a cinematographic biography. Rather, it is a work of social commentary and ethical philosophy. In a world in which we seem to be losing our grip on shared symbols, along with community itself, Eastwood's films work with the fragmented symbols that remain to us in order to engage masculinity with the most profound moral and ethical issues facing us today.

Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation.

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways—from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other’s perspectives. Medina’s epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.

This book offers a sustained analysis of the concept grounding Irigaray's thought: the constitutive yet incalculable interval of sexual difference. In an extension of Irigaray's project, it takes up her formulation of the interval as a way of rereading Aristotle's concept of topos and Bergson's concept of duration. A sexed hierarchy is diagnosed at the heart of Aristotle's and Bergson's presentations. Yet beyond that phallocentrism, this book points out how Aristotle's theory of topos as a sensible relation between two bodies that differ in being and Bergson's intuition of duration as an incalculable threshold of becoming are indispensable to the feminist effort to think about sexual difference. Reading Irigaray with Aristotle and Bergson, it is argued that the interval cannot be grasped as a space between two identities; it must be characterized as the sensible threshold of becoming, constitutive of the very identity of beings. The interval is the place of the possibility of sexed subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and is also a threshold of the becoming of sexed forces.

Julia Kristeva's writings on the female subject and on feminist politics continue to trouble many of her readers; as yet, there exists no unified response to her ideas in contemporary feminism. Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought offers a novel and engaging appraisal of Kristeva's recent work that recuperates her significance for a feminist project. Drawing on her recent texts on revolt, female genius and freedom, the book provides a detailed assessment of the diverse feminist responses to Kristeva's key ideas, and it demonstrates how feminism's troubled relations with Kristeva can only be understood by attending to the plurality and heterogeneity of contemporary feminist positions. As the book suggests, any feminist appropriation of Kristeva's ideas requires a reading against the grain, as well as careful attention to their positioning along the fault-lines that run through contemporary feminism. While considering Kristeva's ambivalence about the importance of feminism, the book provides a sympathetic account of her radical philosophy of feminine heterogeneity, her concern with singularity and freedom, and the deeply ethical orientation of her work towards conditions of otherness. It argues that while conceptualising feminism in such a way can be profoundly unsettling, it also keeps feminism's plural and diverse theory and practice alive.