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The Shape of Lesbian and Gay Subordination

Cheshire Calhoun

in Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement

It is argued that lesbian and gay subordination differs substantially in form from gender and racial oppression. In particular, it does not materialize in a disadvantaged place that would sharply ... More

It is argued that lesbian and gay subordination differs substantially in form from gender and racial oppression. In particular, it does not materialize in a disadvantaged place that would sharply reduce the access of lesbians and gay men as a group to basic social goods. Instead, lesbians and gays are systematically displaced to the outside of civil society so that they have no legitimized place, not even a disadvantaged one. The displacement occurs because of the requirement that all citizens adopt at least the appearance of a heterosexual identity as a condition of access to the public sphere. Various aspects of this displacement are addressed in detail.Less

 PATTERNS OF AUTONOMY ACKNOWLEDGMENT, AND ADVOCACY

Lorraine Code

in Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location

This chapter addresses the covert capacity of autonomy — the goal of moral-political life in liberal-democratic societies — to oppress women and others who fail to fulfill its requirements. Taking ... More

This chapter addresses the covert capacity of autonomy — the goal of moral-political life in liberal-democratic societies — to oppress women and others who fail to fulfill its requirements. Taking the collapse of the welfare state as a locus of analysis, it shows how ecological citizenship and collective responsibility work toward reconfiguring the inequalities and injustices enacted under the aegis of a too-rigorous veneration of autonomy. One of the projects of the chapter is to reevaluate practices of advocacy in knowledge: a point that arises in chapter three with reference to medicine and is further developed here, both in connection with medicine and across a wider range of examples. Contrary to entrenched conceptions of epistemic self-reliance, the contention is that advocacy often makes knowledge possible: indeed, more radically, that without advocacy certain knowings are not possible. Trust is important to good advocacy, and testimony again plays a central part.Less

 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints

Ann E. Cudd

in Analyzing Oppression

This chapter characterizes social groups and institutions in a way that meets the plausible objections of individualists, yet allows a social explanation of oppression. Topics discussed include ... More

This chapter characterizes social groups and institutions in a way that meets the plausible objections of individualists, yet allows a social explanation of oppression. Topics discussed include explaining human behavior, social groups, institutionally structured constraints, oppression and social groups, social groups and group harm. It is argued that any account of oppression that distinguishes it from other types of harm that can come to individuals and locates it as a social injustice requires an account of social groups. Further, harms that accrue to members of voluntary and nonvoluntary groups must be treated separately in moral arguments.Less

 Economic Forces of Oppression

Ann E. Cudd

in Analyzing Oppression

This chapter discusses three main forces of economic oppression: oppressive economic systems (capitalism and socialism), direct forces of economic oppression, and indirect forces of economic ... More

This chapter discusses three main forces of economic oppression: oppressive economic systems (capitalism and socialism), direct forces of economic oppression, and indirect forces of economic oppression. It is argued that while capitalism and socialism are not intrinsically oppressive, both systems lend themselves to oppression in characteristic ways, and therefore each sort of system must take certain steps to guard against their respective characteristic oppressions. Direct forces of economic oppression are restrictions on opportunities that are applied from the outside on the oppressed, including enslavement, segregation, employment discrimination, group-based harassment, opportunity inequality, neocolonialism, and governmental corruption. Direct forces may not always be clearly visible, either because they happen far from the reach of legal authorities or from the view of consumers, or because they are diffused in a large society, and only apparent from a statistical analysis and comparison among social groups. In indirect forces, or oppression by choice, the oppressed are co-opted into making individual choices that add to their own oppression. When this force is at work the oppressed are faced with options that rationally induce them to choose against the collective good of their social group, and in the long run, against their own good as well. But choosing otherwise requires choosing against their own immediate interests, and changing their beliefs or preferences in ways that they may resent.Less

 Resistance and Responsibility

Ann E. Cudd

in Analyzing Oppression

This chapter discusses strategies to resist oppression. It argues that resistance to oppression is possible and morally required, and demonstrates that for virtually all different forms of oppression ... More

This chapter discusses strategies to resist oppression. It argues that resistance to oppression is possible and morally required, and demonstrates that for virtually all different forms of oppression there exist potentially successful means of resistance. All resistance begins with the recognition that there are serious injustices that can be addressed, and then must proceed to mitigate or at least protest the material and psychological harms. How legal theory might take a greater account of oppression within a liberal legal system is also discussed.Less

 Fashioning Freedom

Ann E. Cudd

in Analyzing Oppression

This chapter focuses on overcoming oppression, focusing on how women can liberate themselves. Topics discussed include the two senses of freedom, breaking the vicious cycle of oppression, two serious ... More

This chapter focuses on overcoming oppression, focusing on how women can liberate themselves. Topics discussed include the two senses of freedom, breaking the vicious cycle of oppression, two serious problems of social engineering, and enhancing the freedom of others.Less

Order and Disorder in World Politics

Roland Bleiker

in International Society and its Critics

In this final chapter of Part Two, the author addresses arguably the central stumbling block for those who would enlarge international society to incorporate elements of world society, alternative ... More

In this final chapter of Part Two, the author addresses arguably the central stumbling block for those who would enlarge international society to incorporate elements of world society, alternative levels of analysis, and subject matters: namely, the problem of order. He argues that a concern with order, in its methodological, theoretical, and empirical guises, is the principal feature of the understanding of international society by the English School of International Relations. While order may endorse methodological pluralism, the author argues that the approach does not embrace it and has powerful canons that structure its work, one being the requirement that to count as valid knowledge about international society, a piece of work must begin by referring to the established fathers of the tradition. This preoccupation with order carries over into the empirical and theoretical work conducted by those associated with the School, and the author attempts to critique this by challenging the assumption, central to English School theorizing since Henry Bull, that a degree of order is necessary for the achievement of social goods. Instead, he argues that an over‐preoccupation with order can serve the cause of oppression, and therefore insists that progressive change tends to come about through periods of disorder.Less

Philosophy, Theology, and the Claims of Justice

Karen Lebacqz

David E. Guinn (ed.)

in Handbook of Bioethics and Religion

Thirty years ago, both the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and the collaborative team of Tom L. Beauchamp and James Childress placed ... More

Thirty years ago, both the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and the collaborative team of Tom L. Beauchamp and James Childress placed justice on a short list of principles that should undergird medical treatment and research. It is difficult to sort out contributions of religious or theological ethics to justice theory in bioethics. Nonetheless, some claims can be made both for the influence of religious ethics on the public discussion of bioethics and for the distinctive voice of religious or theological ethics in matters of justice. Taking a biblically based view of justice, it is argued at that a religious view (1) extends the scope of justice; (2) makes oppression and liberation primary categories for understanding justice; and (3) makes justice the first principle rather than the second or third.Less

Conclusion: Making History

Jeffrey G. Snodgrass

in Casting Kings: Bards and Indian Modernity

This concluding chapter returns to theories of caste and to the manner in which Bhat culture and society may speak to such theories, by reflecting on the manner Bhats can be said to make their own ... More

This concluding chapter returns to theories of caste and to the manner in which Bhat culture and society may speak to such theories, by reflecting on the manner Bhats can be said to make their own history as opposed to simply inheriting a so-called traditional identity and profession. It points to continuities and differences between Bhats and other Indian Dalit (formerly Untouchable) communities. It engages the scholarship on Indian marginal and oppressed communities — loosely termed “Subaltern studies” — in order to ultimately argue for the Bhat-performers’ unique form of “poetic” consciousness and resistance.Less

Introduction: Centering Sexual Orientation Politics

Cheshire Calhoun

in Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for future chapters by suggesting that feminist theorizing must make a methodological shift from thinking that heterosexism is just a by‐product of ... More

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for future chapters by suggesting that feminist theorizing must make a methodological shift from thinking that heterosexism is just a by‐product of sexism, to thinking of lesbian and gay subordination as a separate axis of oppression that intersects with gender, race, and class axes of oppression. It also introduces the two central features of lesbian and gay subordination. The first of these is that the principal damaging effect of a heterosexist system is that it displaces lesbians and gays from both the public and private spheres of civil society so that they have no legitimated social location. The second is that the principal ideologies rationalizing lesbian and gay displacement are that there are only two natural and normal sexes/genders; that lesbian and gay sexuality is excessive, compulsive, and disconnected from romantic love; and that, for a variety of reasons, lesbians and gays are unfitted for marital and family life. The last part of the chapter makes general remarks on how the book fits into the essentialist–constructionist controversy.Less

Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory

Cheshire Calhoun

in Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement

This chapter focuses largely on lesbian feminist theorizing in the 1980s. It is argued that feminist theorizing on gender oppression has worked to conceal, rather then reveal, lesbian specificity. An ... More

This chapter focuses largely on lesbian feminist theorizing in the 1980s. It is argued that feminist theorizing on gender oppression has worked to conceal, rather then reveal, lesbian specificity. An attempt is made to determine what it is in feminist thinking that makes it difficult to see the lesbian in the feminist subject of woman, so that she is regarded as a ‘not‐woman’, and also as the quintessential form of feminist revolt against patriarchy because she refuses to be heterosexual. It is argued that this placement of resistance to patriarchy at the heart of what it means to be a lesbian is wrong.Less

Throwing Like a Girl: *: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality

Iris Marion Young

in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays

This essay describes experience and oppressions of feminine styles of comportment, tracing in a provisional way some of the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving, and ... More

This essay describes experience and oppressions of feminine styles of comportment, tracing in a provisional way some of the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving, and relation in space. It highlights the certain observable and rather ordinary ways in which women in society typically comport themselves and move differently from the ways that men do. The account developed here combines the insights of the theory of the lived body as expressed by Merleau-Ponty and the theory of the situation of women as developed by Beauvoir. It limits itself to the experience of women in contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society, offering specific observations, phenomenlogical interpretation, and implications for an understanding of the oppression of women.Less

Women Recovering Our Clothes

Iris Marion Young

in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays

This essay contends that one of the privileges of femininity in rationalized instrumental culture is an aesthetic freedom — the freedom to play with shape and color on the body, don various styles ... More

This essay contends that one of the privileges of femininity in rationalized instrumental culture is an aesthetic freedom — the freedom to play with shape and color on the body, don various styles and looks — and through them exhibit and imagine unreal possibilities. Such female imagination has liberating possibilities because it subverts and unsettles the order of respectable, functional rationality in a world where that rationality supports domination. In the context of patriarchal consumer capitalism, however, such liberating aspects of clothing fantasy are intertwined with oppressing moments. This essay asks how women’s pleasure in clothes can be described. It adopts a method derived from Luce Irigaray in an attempt to extricate the liberating and valuable in women’s experience of clothes from the exploitative and oppressive.Less

Menstrual Meditations *

Iris Marion Young

in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays

This essay examines the social oppression of women as menstruators in two major forms: the shame associated with menstruation that compels girls and women to conceal their menstrual events, and the ... More

This essay examines the social oppression of women as menstruators in two major forms: the shame associated with menstruation that compels girls and women to conceal their menstrual events, and the misfit between women and public places such as schools and workplaces, which often refuse to accommodate women’s social and physical needs. Imagining away these injustices reveals not a glorious experience but a personal bodily process that causes many women some discomfort or annoyance some of the time. The process nevertheless carries emotional meaning for many women. The unfairness associated with the social response to menstruation is analyzed based on the accounts of women’s experience of menstruation derived from Simone de Beauvoir and contemporary feminist research. Mood and memory as menstrual events that mark a woman’s self-narrative are explored.Less

Picking Up Pieces: Lives, Stories, and Integrity

Margaret Urban Walker

in Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics

This chapter offers an account of integrity as a kind of reliability accountability under the demands of multiple commitments. Integrity involves keeping reliably coherent the fit between our ... More

This chapter offers an account of integrity as a kind of reliability accountability under the demands of multiple commitments. Integrity involves keeping reliably coherent the fit between our actions, justifications, and presentation of ourselves to others as we sustain three kinds of intelligible narratives of identity, relationship, and value. While some contemporary philosophers stress an overarching unity in a life through the idea of a life plan, a quest, or a constitutive project, integrity on the account given can be more or less local, and individual lives may sustain more than one narrative of identity, relationship or value concurrently, or over time. Oppression need not compromise integrity, but oppressive conditions may impose distorting narratives on the lives of the oppressed and disqualify their authority to describe their lives in their own terms.Less