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In everyday life, there seem to be two antecedents of empathic concern: (a) perceiving the other as in need and (b) valuing the other’s welfare. This chapter considers each of these antecedents, as well as other possible ones—perceived innocence, similarity, and perspective taking. Cognitive abilities required to perceive need are specified, raising the possibility that only humans have the capacity to experience empathic concern. It is suggested that valuing another’s welfare naturally leads to perspective taking, allowing the latter to serve as a proxy for the former in laboratory research. Valuing of the other’s welfare is linked to human parental nurturance, which is emotion-based and goal-directed. Neurochemistry and neurophysiology of parental care and empathic concern are considered. Individual differences, including gender differences, are viewed as moderators rather than antecedents of empathic concern.

This Conclusion explores how the imperative “to eat well” has been an undercurrent, a connecting thread, linking disparate arguments about food and formation within the figures and texts explored. Gastronomy inevitably carries with it a set of social, physiological, and intellectual valences regarding the power of nourishment in human development. The simplicity of the phrase “eat well” obscures the complex of ideologies in which a community gathers and to which its individuals are held accountable. The phrase thus evokes a process of growth and development, at once essentially materialistic and profoundly symbolic. What else is gastronomy, then, but a kind of socializing curriculum, a system for incorporating ambient cultural values into one’s own person? A meal materializes the porous boundary between our individual bodies and the social body in which we participate. Drawing upon theorists such as Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, this conclusion considers whether the trope of milk and solid food might be wrested from its traditional and more restrictive use in regulating bodies and minds. Is it possible to imagine a new Pauline gastronomy that focuses not on power exerted but rather on the vulnerability shared between eater and feeder?

This concluding chapter reflects on the development of German melodrama in the aftermath of World War II. It traces a sense of disillusionment with the Nazi “deployment of sexuality” in films and how it had prepared the ground for the renewed postwar cultivation of domesticity and feminine nurturance in West Germany. The return to private life and to puritanical mores in the postwar era was partly a response to the attack on “bourgeois” sexual morality that had been carried out by the mass culture of the Third Reich. Turning against nudity and licentiousness in the early 1950s could be represented and understood as a turn against Nazism. Thus, this “reprivatization” and newly conservative culture left its mark on West German melodramas of the 1950s.

This chapter considers a number of solutions to the conundrum concerning the identity of parents for children born through the new reproductive technologies. Each solution presents a different test for determining who can exercise parental rights. The first involves using biology as the basis for parenthood; the second accords primary parent status solely to the mother, thus elevating the “mother-child dyad” over other family forms; the third uses intent as the basis for recognizing parenthood; and the fourth suggests that parenthood must be determined based on a combination of biology or adoption and nurturance. The chapter explains how these solutions can be used to ilustrate the significance of classifying parents for reproductive technology purposes, along with the implications of such redefinitions for the child's interests.

Culture and gender are closely intertwined with biological factors creating predispositions for sex and gender development. However, sociocultural factors are critical determinants leading to gender differences in roles and behaviors that may be modest but culturally important. Culture has profound effects on gender-related behavior, values, identity, roles, and how these are regarded in various social contexts. Culture governs the socialization of children, the tasks children are taught, the roles adult men and women adopt, and the expectations that govern women’s and men’s attitudes and behaviors. Culture provides the context in which gender roles, identity, and stereotypes unfold as well as parameters regarding sexual behavior. Culture affects variation in gender-related behaviors between individuals within a cultural group as well as variation between cultures. Culture can maximize, minimize, or even eliminate gender differences in social behaviors and cognitions. Indeed, it is impossible to separate gender and culture.

This chapter focuses on an ethical gender regime produced by the bounce-back effect of ethical actions, as in the chivalry of butch lesbians and the maternity of nurturing males. Subject texts include Bound.