Feminist Philosophy

Etika péče je nový a dynamicky se rozvíjející směr morální filosofie. Zatímco tradiční etické systémy zaměřují svou pozornost především na činy a vlastnosti jednotlivců, etika péče vyzdvihuje morální význam vzájemných vztahů osob a skupin. Tato kniha představuje etiku péče jako svébytnou normativní teorii. Virginia Held, jedna z hlavních představitelek tohoto etického směru, v ní objasňuje charakteristické znaky péče a vysvětluje, v čem se etika péče liší od tradičních etických koncepcí, jako jsou kantovská etika, utilitarismus a etika ctností. Held péči vymezuje jako základní morální hodnotu a praxi a uvádí důvody, proč a za jakých okolností by péče měla mít přednost před morálními požadavky spravedlnosti a nestrannosti. Hodnoty péče, důvěry a solidarity zároveň pokládá za vhodný doplněk spravedlnosti či úcty k právům jednotlivce. Kniha se dále věnuje problematice využití etiky péče při řešení sociálních, politických a globálních otázek současnosti – ať už jde o otázky omezení trhu, koncepce školství a zdravotnictví, reformy sociálního státu či globální ekonomické a mocenské nerovnováhy, zde všude má perspektiva péče své přednosti.

In this essay, I attempt to outline a feminist philosophical approach to the debate concerning (allegedly) false memories of childhood sexual abuse. Bringing the voices of feminist philosophers to bear on this issue highlights the implicit and sometimes questionable epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical-political commitments of some therapists and scientists involved in these debates. It also illuminates some current debates in and about feminist philosophy.

Educational research shows a growing interest in "affect as pedagogy", a concept grounded in feminist studies, which focuses on the relationality and materiality of affect. This article addresses the becoming of affect as pedagogy, positioning its inquiry at the crossroads of feminist scholarship and the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of affect. It presents a postqualitative inquiry that "experiments with" an agentic assemblage of 76 public schools in Brazil, 78 responses to a qualitative survey, 12 teachers interviewed, and the researchers' fieldwork observations. The result of this experiment is a collective narrative organized as a Voice without Organ (VwO), which shows interlocking elements of challenging, disadvantaged educational scenarios and a teaching practice traversed by affect. The VwO answers the question of how affect becomes pedagogy, describing events that can be characterized as embodied history, affective labor, and the capacity to be affected. In these events, an intense connection between bodies occurs. This pedagogy also shows the capacity to affect, by creating affirmative desires that materialize in alternative narratives for the students' futures. In the face of limited and precarious resources, lack of public support, and an environment of violence, affect as futuremaking pedagogy becomes a means of working against exclusion and social injustice.

In this paper I examine how the Daodejing resonates with feminist epistemology. Recognizing the utter undifferentiation from which the world is born and the ineffability of the Dao threatens epistemic relativism. This threat of relativism is similar to that generated by feminist analyses of social-locatedness. Harding's solution of " hard objectivity, " in particular, allows for some interesting parallels.

This article discusses the acquisition of a physical impairment/disability through voluntary body modification, or transability. From the perspectives of critical genealogy and feminist intersectional analysis, the article considers the ability and cis*/trans* axes in order to question the boundaries between trans and transabled experience and examines two assumptions impeding the conceptualization of their placement on the same continuum: 1) trans studies assume an able-bodied trans identity and able-bodied trans subject of analysis; and 2) disability studies assume a cis* disabled identity. The perception of transsexuality and transability as mutually exclusive phenomena results from a non-intersectional analysis of transsexuality as an issue of sex/gender, but not ability, and of transability as an issue of ability, but not sex/gender. Difficulty recognizing continuities between these phenomena thus stems from an ableist interpretation of sex/gender and a cis(gender)normative* interpretation of ability. This article aims to: 1) enrich intersectional analysis in trans and disability studies and transability scholarship; 2) complicate disability studies, in which disabilities are often presumed “involuntary”, and encourage the decentering of a cis* subject; 3) encourage trans studies to decenter an able-bodied subject; and 4) advocate for increased dialogue and the creation of alliances between trans and disability studies and movements.

Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12113/abstract

This was a research paper for a course entitled Feminist and Multicultural Theologies. I unpack what gender complementarianism is, examine its history, and compare it to how Scripture and earlier Christian Tradition understood gender. This allows me to establish that gender complementarianism is a recent innovation in secular and Christian thinking about gender, and that it can be described as a "trajectory" from Scripture and Tradition on gender, influenced by social, ideological, and intellectual developments in secular societies. I then pursue a critique of gender complementarianism, arguing that it is an "unsatisfactory trajectory" because it has troubling implications for orthodox theology, is not borne out by empirical experience and observation, and has harmful effects on human beings and societies and on ethical development.

A new era of the feminist movement has already been established. We are
living in it. The organization of the international strikes of women, lesbians,
trans persons, and travestis since 2017 has marked a turning point in the
scale of the movement and in the conceptualization and constellation of
struggles that consider themselves feminist. It is this triple dimension of the movement (multiplicity of struggles, geographic scale, and common grammar) that has produced, with great political efficacy, concrete analyses and practices that oppose the predatory modes of the current phase of patriarchal and colonial capitalism.

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

In the article, I argue that the sexual assault of women because of their gender is a hate crime and that the failure of prosecutors to pursue hate crime charges against perpetrators of sexual assault is the result of an epistemic injustice that renders hate and sex as incompatible. Catharine A. MacKinnon's work on feminist jurisprudence and Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice ground the analysis.

First published in 1988, this volume redefined the anthropological study of menstrual customs. Examining cultures as diverse as long-house dwellers in North Borneo, African farmers, Welsh housewives, and postindustrial American workers, it challenged the previously widespread image of a universal "menstrual taboo" as well as the common assumption of universal female subordination that underlay it. Offering feminist perspectives on comparative gender politics and symbolism, the book has interested students and scholars in anthropology, women's studies, religion, and comparative health systems. Originally listed as a “Notable” book in Choice, it later won the first Most Enduring Edited Collection Prize, awarded by the Council for the Anthropology of Reproduction (a unit of the American Anthropological Association.). The book continues to be taught regularly around the world.

Kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. Although this paper provides an interpretation of Kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything Kant says about sexuality. Rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered Kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile insights and that by making Kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments, the result is a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation.

Open access link here:
https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/3116

This dissertation analyzes the postfeminist tendencies and biopolitics in contemporary media practices by considering the pop culture exemplar, the Kardashian-Jenner family.

This dissertation received First Class Honors from Trinity College Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

Print version of PhD Thesis.

This practice-based project investigates modalities of performing eco-aesthetic assemblages across the modern nature―culture divide. Assemblages are here understood as non-hierarchical associations between bodies that are different amongst themselves. I argue that eco-aesthetic practices that work towards naturalcultural assemblages contribute to the wider field of ecological thought and cultural understanding of the nonhuman environment or nature.

The research uses a transversal practico-theoretical approach that, following posthumanist and neomaterialist elaborations of ontology and epistemology, creates a ‘material-discursive entanglement’ (Barad, 2007) of bodies and concepts. In this posthuman continuum of practice, I argue that eco-aesthetics is an ethico-political disposition of fostering relations of accountability and responsibility with the bodies implicated in performance, especially the nonhumans understood to be minorities in the current politico-economic organisation.

The research is situated within the landscape of modern biopolitics, which is understood as a set of conceptual and material strategies of appropriation of life through the ‘logic of colonisation’ (Plumwood, 1993). Situated naturalcultural performances enact a different modality of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) with the world, by creating and maintaining fields in which life is seen as a force of generative difference.

The dissertation is divided in three parts which correspond to three entangled modes of performing research. The first part is a critical ontology which individuates operative modalities of modern boundary-making techniques. This part also outlines an alternative landscape of art and philosophy which go beyond binary thinking. The second part, through a posthumanist reconfiguration of the concept of assemblage from Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, and apparatus, in the work of Michel Foucault and Karen Barad, shapes an analytics for locating possibilities of material-discursive reconfiguration of the existing power relations. The third part follows the narrative of my artistic projects that sought to create naturalcultural performances with plants, trees, molecules of carbon-dioxide, sheep, and earth. This material-discursive entanglement of critique, analytics and performance as artistic practice together shapes a posthuman ecological praxis that is oriented towards naturalcultural justice.

AVAILABLE ONLINE:
http://minoritarianecologi.es/

Critical theorist Theodor Adorno is rarely considered as a philosopher of the body. The body which leaks, desires, rages, and lusts is seemingly disjointed from the dry and dense writings that often characterize Adorno's work. As bleak as this description of Adorno's writings may be, however, the body is both central to his critique of modernity and the site of hope and desire against the total domination and suffering that capitalism imposes. This paper highlights some of the ways in which feminist philosophy of disability and disability studies, more generally, would benefit by thinking in constellation with Adorno's negative dialectic to interrogate the ways in which meanings get made about bodies and, furthermore, use the margins of difference, in relation with others, to challenge what Adorno calls the "wrong state of things." I argue that the transfigured crip to come is central to this fight against the "wrong state of things."

It is sometimes argued that the non-therapeutic, non-consensual alteration of children’s genitals should be discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls (in which such alterations should be termed ‘female genital mutilation’ or FGM), and one for boys (in which such alterations should be termed ‘male circumcision’). In this article, I call into question the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and argue that all children—whether female, male, or intersex—should be free from having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication.

Hello, I'm Shelley Tremain and I'd like to welcome you to the thirty-ninth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I'm conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy. I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

Öz Bu makalede cinsiyet eşitsizliğini sınıflı toplumun bir ürünü olarak gören ve kadın özgürleşmesini sınıflı toplumun ortadan kalkışına bağlayan, bu nedenle esas mücadelenin ataerkiye karşı değil kapitalizme karşı verilmesi gerektiğini iddia eden görüş sorgulanmıştır. Kate Millett, Catherine MacKinnon ve Bell Hooks'un iddiaları bu sorgulamanın temelini oluşturuyor. Sosyalist, faşist ve kapitalist toplumlarda kadının durumu karşılaştırılmıştır. Buna dayanarak, farklı sınıflardaki kadınların her zaman yalnızca kadın olmalarından dolayı nasıl ayrımcılığa uğradıkları ve farklı biçimlerde ezildikleri gösterilmeye çalışılmış ve bu bulguların feminist kuram açısından sonuçları tartışılmıştır.

Abstract What is interrogated in this article is the idea that gender inequality is a product of class society and women liberation is totally bound to the annihilation of class society; so basic struggle must be given against not patriarchy but capitalism. The arguments of Kate Millet, Catherine MacKinnon and Bell Hooks are the basis of this interrogation. Situation of women in socialist, fascist and capitalist societies are compared. Depending on this comparison it is tried to show how women from different classes are discriminated and oppressed in different forms always because of the only fact that they are women and the results of these facts with regard to feminist theory are discussed.

Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves?


In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter.


Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disturbs the gendered dynamics of household work.


A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.


Endorsements:


Petra Bueskens has been in the forefront of the new, and very welcome field of motherhood studies.  In Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contact [she analyses] the psychic, social, cultural and political challenges posed by the dual identities of mother and citizen, elegantly and capaciously ranges across 400 years of theory, up to the present, that address them, as well as providing psychologically-attuned interview documentation of how women feel and think, daily and throughout their maternal lives.
Nancy J Chodorow
Author, The Reproduction of Mothering, The Power of Feelings, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, and other works Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley


This creative and theoretically rich book re-examines the social contradictions and penalties faced by women who want to be both caring mothers and autonomous public individuals.  Taking us beyond the logic of the "sexual contract," Bueskens introduces us to the "revolving mothers" who offer a glimpse of the social revolution required to undo the gendered separation of spheres.  A fascinating and compelling study.
Dr. Sharon Hays, author of the The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood



In this lucid, timely and important new book, Petra Bueskens takes up the formidable task of investigating the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity that leaves women strung out between the promise of autonomy in the public sphere, and the demands of motherhood that isolate and intensify mothering work in the home, both freeing and constraining women at once. Bueskens brings into view this impossible contradictory duality by producing both a new social theory of dualism, and the empirical evidence to show that it is possible to force changes in the sexual contract at the level of individual family organization. Through tracking a small group of women who both choose to mother and also spend protracted periods of time away from the family, she shows how these women produce radical shifts in the gendered dynamics of the household. Her bold and vital claim is that we can rewrite the sexual contract only if we understand the historical and contemporary double-bind that produces women's liberty as it undermines it, making motherhood still the unfinished business of feminism.
Dr. Lisa Baraitser, Reader in Psychosocial Studies, Birckbeck University, author of Maternal Encounters


Modern Mothers' Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract cogently and compellingly elucidates a central debate in motherhood studies and a persistent dilemma in most mothers' lives; namely the contradiction between women's maternal and individualized selves.  Through her lucid theoretical ruminations on the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity and by way of an innovative empirical study on 'revolving mothers', Bueskens delivers the needed blueprints to actualize the potential of what she incisively terms 'the individualized mother'.
Dr. Andrea O'Reilly, Professor of Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Founder and Director of the Motherhood Initiative and author of Matricentric Feminism.



In this engaging and timely book, Petra Bueskens tackles a central challenge of modern life - how to reconcile the contradictory roles of women as citizens, individual workers and mothers. She traces the history through the theoretical views of motherhood, integrating the multiple strands in a sophisticated and fascinating synthesis. She highlights periodic maternal absence as a bridge between individualism and constraint, revealing both the ambiguities and a potential way to progress women's liberation. The book is an absorbing read that makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of contemporary motherhood.
Dr. Lyn Craig, Professor of Sociology/ARC Future Fellow, The University of Melbourne, author of Contemporary Motherhood.

This paper explores Hawaiian racial identity formation using María Lugones’s metaphor of curdling as a guiding theme. I aim to show that the accepted definition of “native Hawaiian” is based on a purity model of race that serves to undermine the unity of the Hawaiian Nation. I begin by outlining the pre-contact understanding of Hawaiian identity. This conception of identity was subsequently altered through various political agendas to fit within a Western/European notion of “pure” racial identity. I argue that continuing to use the imposed definition of “native Hawaiian” makes the fragmentation of Hawaiian identity and society difficult to overcome. Additionally, I offer a discussion of the gendered rhetoric of some Hawaiian activists that complicates the effort to regain a precolonial cultural identity that was largely egalitarian. Finally, I suggest that a rejection of racial purity and a rearticulation of Hawaiian identity that recaptures pre-contact, strategic notions of belonging by way of Lugones’s “impure resistance” can set the stage for a more inclusive Hawaiian Nation.

Captured and branded in the highly recognizable image of the pink ribbon, the politics of breast cancer at the start of the 21st century is markedly hopeful (given the grim statistics) and surprisingly compliant with the medical establishment’s defined health goals and approaches to addressing the breast cancer epidemic.  In keeping with this volume’s theme of “Working to be Healthy”, this chapter examines and evaluates how the pink ribbon message has shaped and organized social response to breast cancer. The work in question is “healthwork”, a term found in the critical health literature denoting the active and purposeful work that people do to look after their health (Mykhalovskiy and McCoy, 2002). Healthwork analysis tends to focus on personal care practices—taking medicines, dealing with healthcare practitioners, informal care-giving, health information seeking, etc.—that are then subject to examination of how those individual actions invite extended relations of governance and ruling (Mykhalovskiy, McCoy and Bresalier, 2004).  In this examination of breast cancer campaigns, the same analytic concern with governance is taken, but the health-related work is extended beyond personal care and self-surveillance to also include the volunteer work done by many concerned citizens in their contributions of time, energy, and money to support campaigns for the cure.

In this chapter, I argue that while the appropriation of the language and themes of the early women’s health movement frames pink ribbon activism as a highly personal, emancipatory, and socially-responsible individual effort, this brand of breast cancer activism instead serves to fund a limited biomedical research agenda that is largely shielded from public scrutiny.  This agenda has been universalized through endearing “hero” narratives of personal struggle that inspire civic engagement by complicit consumers rather than critical activists. Pink ribbon activism problematically diverges from the women’s health movement’s demand for participation in setting the research agenda and determining treatment strategies. This neglect is troubling, given that breast cancer discourse is so fraught with contested knowledge claims regarding disease aetiology, prevention, and treatment. While the pink ribbon message offers hope and optimism, it does so by suppressing many counterclaims, disputes, and ambiguities surrounding the problem of breast cancer. Instead of soft “pink”, a more critical social response to breast cancer is needed in order to ensure women’s informed participation in addressing this serious challenge to women’s health.

Do you take vitamin D? Health, neoliberalism and responsibilisation

Most people experience a flu or other illnesses in their everyday lives but for some these illnesses become prolonged and chronic. People living with chronic illness- es often live with either unexplained illnesses or misrecognised such as ME/CFS, resulting in lower standards of living and even a great sense of desperation. When it is difficult to locate the cause of an illness according to the established frame of science, the social results can consist in people living with chronic illnesses con- sciously or unconsciously getting the message that the illness is, in some sense, their own fault. In this article the question „Do you take vitamin D?“, that chronically ill people get time and again, is put forward as a representation of responsibilisation in neoliberal societies. The question of responsibility is at the heart of ethics and if it is individualised in the manner of responsibilisation it is solely the individual that is held responsible for how she fares in life rather than social and medically (unexplained) issues being taken into account. In this article a redefinition of responsibility is suggested in line with Judith Butler’s definition of responsibility as responsiveness.

In recent decades, feminists have pointed out how prominent ethical theories are primarily concerned with establishing rules of conduct between strangers who share (or are theorized as if they share) the same social status. As Claudia Card points out, such theories outline explicit expectations and rewards of formal relationships; these relationships characterize formal institutions, such as law and business, and the considerations of upper-class men who predominate in such institutions. An ethics which focuses on the impersonal application of rules risks overlooking attentiveness to personal needs, a crucial quality in caring relationships which women and poorer classes have had primary responsibility for sustaining. For example, women have had greater pressure than men to be attentive to the particular needs of their children and households, while poorer workers have had to attend to the idiosyncrasies of their customers and employers. Moreover, contractarian theories of ethics idealize an equality of status which is not always possible or desirable: Ethical theories should be able to inform us in how we ought to treat our children, or how people should take care of others with disabilities.

I will argue that virtue theories can be particularly responsive to these feminist criticisms. Since a feminist ethical theory must be able to evaluate and critique both feminine and masculine practical considerations, I will examine how virtue theories emphasize caring qualities (e.g. personality and emotional sensitivity) alongside some endorsed by contractarian theories (e.g.distributive justice and impersonal respect). I will then discuss how understanding gendered notions of care can highlight unjust social practices, by reference to Card’s distinction of formal institutions and Annette Baier’s notion of caring professions. (Specifically, Baier holds that women are pressured to take up “caring” professions thought to require emotional sensitivity and attentiveness to particular needs, e.g. nursing or customer service.) Furthermore, I will point out how emphasizing moral agents’ personal qualities and circumstances can inform conditions for just laws, as exemplified by Rosalind Hursthouse’s ethical examination of abortion. In these ways, virtue theory can provide a moral context within which values of justice and care are jointly cultivated.

This article examines some arguments in favor of taking peace as a political obligation that can be found in one of the most important founders of the pacifist movement, Jane Addams. The main focus is on her 1907 book Newer Ideals of Peace, which has often been read as idealistic and outdated, and above all, as more of an activit's manifesto than a serious contribution to either political philosophy or political theory. I point out that this owes much to an ambiguity of Addams' criticisms of the traditional and Kantian cosmopolitan defense of peace as a political ideal, the ambiguity between practical-political and conceptual problems. However, Addam's succeeds in identifying one profound problem for traditional, even enlightended institution-centered ideals of peace, the collapse of the very ideal in cases of breaches of explicit peace-agreements among nations, because breaches of agreements are tantamount to the loss of all commitment to the other nation's rights. It reveals that the conditions imposed by such ideals are at most necessary, but not sufficient for peace, and hence that the concept based on them not a complete concept of lasting peaceful conditions among humans. Once it is seen as dedicated to resolving the problems entailed by this fundamental problem, Addams' work, and in particular her focus on resources of solidarity and right-granting practices beyond and outside explicit agreements between governments can be understood as the development of a more adequate, coherent and comprehensive, while also a more actionable conception of peace. In the course of this development, Addams can also be observed to make use of crucial epistemological and more technical philosophical tools that are most closely associated with classical pragmatism, but which partly appear (albeit largely obliquely in the course of their application to a particular case) for the first time Addams' treatise. Addams' work is therefore of more than merely political activist interest for philosophers. Nonetheless, the article also explains her status as an important contributor to proper conceptions of world peace and the understanding of certain phenomena in the organization of public will formation precisely by pointing out that without some of her future-oriented proposals, like the inseparability of peace-policies and development, or the need to institutionally protect and foster spontaneous solidary action, the best contemporary work on peace would not have been possible.

This is the first in a series of blog posts on realism and social movements. The purpose of it is to refine the explanatory purchase of realist thought within social movement studies and consider what it means ‘to be realist’ about social movements. This first post is dedicated to fleshing out realist thought and making my own argument(s) a little more accessible to social movement theorists.

In contemporary histories of psychology, William Moulton Marston is remembered for helping develop the lie detector test. He is better remembered in the history of popular culture for creating the comic book superhero Wonder Woman. In his time, however, he contributed to psychological research in deception, basic emotions, abnormal psychology, sexuality, and consciousness. He was also a radical feminist with connections to women's rights movements. Marston's work is an instructive case for philosophers of science on the relation between science and values. Although Marston's case provides further evidence of the role that feminist values can play in scientific work, it also poses challenges to philosophical accounts of value-laden science. Marston's work exemplifies standard views about feminist value-laden research in that his feminist values help him both to criticize the research of others and create novel psychological concepts and research techniques. His scientific work includes an account of the nature of psycho-emotional health that leads to normative conclusions for individual values and conduct and for society and culture, a direction of influence that is relatively under-theorized in the literature. To understand and evaluate Marston's work requires an approach that treats science and values as mutually influencing; it also requires that we understand the relationship between science advising and political advocacy in value-laden science.

The aim of this article is to critically analyze the feminist discourse that led to the recent enactment of Brazilian laws that increased the penalties for violence against women, in order to demonstrate that they cannot escape the cognitive traps established by male domination naturalized in Western societies and how they have served the development of neoliberal biopolitics.

This text reconstructs the Kohlberg/Gilligan controversy between a male ethics of justice and a female ethics of care. Using Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental pragmatics, the author argues for a mediation between both models in terms of a reciprocal co-responsibility. Against this backdrop, she defends the circular procedure of an exclusively argumentative-reflexive justification of a normative ethics. From this it follows for feminist ethics that it cannot do without either of the two types of ethics. The goal is to assure the evaluative variety of different types of an ethics of the good without endangering the normative boundaries of a deontological discourse ethics.

This paper considers perspectives on marriage in the Queer and feminist community reviewing key contemporary thinkers on the subject and using direct interviews and material from radical Queer activists and academics in the field.  It examines problems inherent in the fight for gay marriage and examines the ways gay marriage intersects with issues of race and class. I conducted dozens of interviews over the course of the research involved in this project.  Many of them  were broadcast in a documentary entitled, “Beyond Gay Marriage, broadcast on KPFA in 2010 and podcast by Race, Poverty & the Environment http://reimaginerpe.org/rpe/radio/dettmer. Quotations from these interviews are interwoven in the text without specific footnote. Unattributed direct quotations are excerpted from the transcript of Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio documentary, KPFA/ RP&E (2010).