This article explores the relationship between gender, technology, language, and how infants and children born with disorders of sexual development are shaped into intelligible members of the community. The contemporary medical model maintains that children ought to be both socially and surgically assigned and reared as one particular gender. Gender scholar Suzanne Kessler rejects this position and argues for the acceptance of greater genital variability through the use of language. Using a Heideggerian lens, the main question I seek to answer (...) in this article is: does Kessler’s approach succeed in its aim to better treat individuals born with disorders of sexual development? I argue that Kessler is successful in offering practical solutions for persons with intersexed conditions to exist and flourish as intelligible members of the community, but that her project ultimately relies on power to “challenge forth” greater acceptance of genital variance. Building on the work of Kessler and Heidegger, I argue that a better approach to making intelligible the existence of an infant born with a disorder of sexual development is not to rely on the manipulation of language, but to instead reinvigorate a sense of the sacred in response to having an intersex condition. (shrink)

In this article, I advance a novel hypothesis on the evolution of hominin bipedalism. I begin by arguing extensively for how the transition to bipedalism must have been problematic for hominins during the Neogene. Due to this and the fact that no other primate has made the unusual switch to bipedalism, it seems likely that the selection pressure towards bipedalism was unusually strong. With this in mind, I briefly lay out some of the most promising hypotheses on the evolutionary origin (...) of hominin bipedalism and show how most, if not all, fail in the face of the need for an unusually strong selection pressure. For example, some hypotheses maintain that hominins became bipedal so they could use their hands for carrying infants, food, or other valuable objects. But extant apes are able to carry objects in one of their front limbs (while walking with the other three), and thus it does not seem plausible that our hominin ancestors went through the troublesome transition to bipedalism just so they could carry objects a little more efficiently. After I show that past hypotheses are wanting in the face of this challenge, I argue that there is only one selection pressure powerful enough to instigate a strange and problematic evolutionary adaptation like bipedalism, and that is sexual selection. Specifically, from the fact that bipedal locomotion is an important strategy for intimidating others and ascending the dominance hierarchy in extant apes, I argue that for no particular selective reason bipedal locomotion became a signal for high fitness (much as a large and intricate tail became a signal for high fitness for peahens), and this led to the trait being continuously reinforced in spite of all its deleterious fitness consequences. (shrink)

In his contribution to the Journal of Medical Ethics, Joseph Mazor1 makes a logical case, based on the premises underlying his reasoning, for his article's primary thesis: he concludes that parents have the prerogative to determine the ‘best interests’ of their infant son in a circumcision decision. If the facts of the matter were ultimately no different from what he adduces, one could admit the soundness of his argument. But the paper is flawed by some questionable assumptions and grievous (...) incompleteness.First, the author insufficiently explores the profound implications of a serious equivocation in the term ‘circumcision’ that is common throughout the literature. He does superficially reference the article on ‘Circumcision’ in The Jewish Encyclopedia, which describes in detail the actual steps involved in brit milah versus brit periah.2 Despite this general allusion, though, he hardly discusses the matter further, as though the distinction were practically irrelevant. It does have fundamental import, however. Milah is merely a token clip of the very tip of the prepuce, which leaves most of the organ system intact. This was evidently the version practiced in biblical times under the old Abrahamic–Mosaic covenant, before the Talmudic guardians of Judaic ethnic and religious identity proposed a means to prevent Hellinising Jewish men from attempting foreskin restoration by stretching their remaining preputial tissue forward. The rabbis mandated the replacement of milah with the more drastic procedure of periah, a radical surgery that cuts and tears from the penis its entire covering, leaving the glans irreversibly denuded. Unlike traditional milah, the innovation of periah necessarily has significant adverse consequences .Second, Mazor concedes that circumcision might cause a ‘moderate’ reduction of sexual pleasure in the lad's …. (shrink)

Circumcision of a male child was recently ruled illegal by a court in Germany on the grounds that it violates the child's rights to bodily integrity and self-determination. This paper begins by challenging the applicability of these rights to the circumcision debate. It argues that, rather than a sweeping appeal to rights, a moral analysis of the practice of circumcision will require a careful examination of the interests of the child. I consider three of these interests in some detail. The (...) first is the interest in avoiding a moderate decrease in expected future sexual pleasure. I argue that even if such a decrease were to occur, it is not wholly unreasonable to think that this might actually be a good thing for the child. Second, I consider the interest in self-determination. I argue that this interest is not as strong as it might appear because the adult's circumcision decision is subject to a variety of biases and a significant lack of information. Finally, I consider the child's interest in avoiding the future costs of adult circumcision. I argue that this interest becomes much stronger in the religious case because the child is quite likely to choose to become circumcised as an adult. The likelihood of the child choosing circumcision in the religious case also reduces the extent to which infant circumcision violates his interest in self-determination. I conclude that male infant circumcision falls within the prerogative of parental decision-making in the secular case and even more clearly so in the religious case. Finally, I distinguish male circumcision from female genital cutting in several important respects and argue that we can coherently hold that male circumcision is permissible without also endorsing all forms of female genital cutting. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that a serious right to life is grounded only in actual, relatively advanced psychological capacities a being has acquired. The moral permissibility of abortion is frequently argued for on these grounds. Increasingly it is being argued that such accounts also entail the permissibility of infanticide, with several proponents of these theories accepting this consequence. We show, however, that these accounts imply the permissibility of even more unpalatable acts than infanticide performed on infants: organ harvesting, live experimentation, (...) sexual interference, and discriminatory killing. The stronger intuitions against the permissibility of these ‘pre-personal acts’ allow us to re-establish a comprehensive and persuasive reductio against psychological accounts of persons. (shrink)

Les historiens qui se sont intéressés à la sexualité au xviie siècle ont souvent noté qu’il était rare d’accéder à une parole féminine. Quelques bribes en subsistent pourtant, que délivrent les biographies et autobiographies spirituelles de femmes dévotes et les archives des tribunaux d’Église (Officialités). À partir de cette parole enchâssée dans d’autres discours – ceux des hommes et femmes d’Église qui les recueillent, ceux des juges qui les enregistrent –, opacifiée par des visées particulières – hagiographique ou judiciaire –, (...) censurée parfois, on ne peut espérer atteindre la réalité des pratiques sexuelles. En revanche, les silences qui la ponctuent donnent à voir l’importance de l’ignorance, de l’innocence et de la feinte dans l’expérience féminine de la sexualité depuis les fantasmes et les découvertes de l’enfance jusqu’aux premiers temps du mariage. (shrink)

By conceptualizing Sexual Selection, Darwin showed a way to analyze intra-specific individual differences within an evolutionary perspective. Interestingly, Sexual Selection is often used to investigate the origins of sports, arts, humor, religion and other phenomena that, in several languages, are simply called “play.” Despite their manifested differences, these phenomena rely on shared psychological processes, including playfulness. Further, in such behaviors there is usually considerable individual variability, including sex differences, and positive relationship with mating success. However, Sexual Selection is rarely applied (...) in the study of play, with exception to what is concerned as infant training behavior for adult sex roles. We offer an integrated grounding of playful phenomena aligning evolutionary propositions based on sexual selection, which might stimulate further exploration of playfulness within evolutionary perspective. (shrink)

IntroductionElements mark the reality of reading the female body in symbolic constructions and social symbols in the exercise of their reproductive health. The study aims to identify elements that characterize the female condition while analyzing the reproductive health of Brazilian and French women.Materials and MethodsA qualitative, multicenter, international study was conducted in Brazil and in France between 2016 and 2019. Data were produced through the use of semi-structured scripts. Focus group discussions and individual interviews were conducted with women who gave (...) birth, hetero-female couples who lived the experience of gestation and birth of a baby, and professionals of maternal and childcare services or members of the associations concerned with the health of mothers and babies. It was guided by the theoretical-methodological framework of institutional analysis in line with the French Institutional Socioclinics.ResultsSexual and reproductive health in the realities researched in Brazil and France are sometimes close and sometimes far apart. In what involves the Brazilian health system, abortion is criminalized and often performed illegally. Furthermore, pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period are highly medicalized. In addition, childbirth is not assured as an experience for a woman and her family. This aspect is confirmed by high numbers of cesarean sections performed or by maternal and infant mortality indicators. The French health system prioritizes vaginal deliveries and seems to assure more autonomy to women, but at the same time, it is worn out by the logic of profit, the efficiency of actions, and the rationalization of practices. In association with these, there are other intrinsic elements in the functioning of the institution that delineates the format of each country: notion of women's rights, violence against women, and discussion regarding the oppression markers of race, gender, sexuality, and social class.ConclusionsBoth countries reveal aspects related to the social role of women's bodies. The established logic reflects in the decision to have children, motherhood, women's autonomy over their own bodies, and in the core values linked to the termination of pregnancy and the professional practices developed in prenatal care, childbirth, and postpartum. (shrink)

This article seeks to open up a discussion of issues relating to the significance of sexual difference, the thinking and politics emerging from it and how it might affect educational philosophy. It briefly examines the initial work of Luce Irigaray, which has become quite influential in parts of the English speaking world, particularly focussing on the idea that there are implications for our educational objectives if gender equality were to be put in question as one of the underlying paradigms with (...) which to measure children's performance. It then looks at the work of some groups of Italian philosophers and educationalists who have not been translated into English and are consequently less well known. Their work has been devoted to exploring Irigaray's challenge to re-think the world from the perspective of sexual difference. In particular, in tune with the theme of this special issue, this article shows how this work puts forward the practice and philosophy of relationship for consideration at different stages of the educational process, focussing particularly on Luisa Muraro's philosophical ‘invention’ of the symbolic order of the mother as a way to bring into the shared world the erased sexual difference that Irigaray had articulated. Muraro's work considers the meaning of the first relationship between mother and infant and suggests that the mother, or the one doing her work, is in fact the first and ongoing educator and transmitter of philosophy, a fact that is only partially recognised in our formal educational structures. The article introduces, finally, the idea that as the historical patterns of mainly women teaching younger children and men teaching older children are shifting, to understand the need for and argue for a more sexuate world, with both sexes participating in the educational process at all stages would allow for the possibility of a new discussion of concepts that are already central to educationalists such as equality, freedom, autonomy, authority, flourishing and the relationship with parents. (shrink)

Caretaker-infant attachment is a complex but well-recognized adaptation in humans. An early instance of (or precursor to) attachment behavior is the dyadic interaction between adults and infants of 6 to 24 weeks, commonly called "babytalk." Detailed analysis of 1 minute of spontaneous babytalk with an 8-week infant shows that the poetic texture of the mother’s speech—specifically its use of metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding—helps to shape and direct the baby’s attention, as it also coordinates the partners’ emotional communication. We (...) hypothesize that the ability to respond to poetic features of language is present as early as the first few weeks of life and that this ability attunes cognitive and affective capacities in ways that provide a foundation for the skills at work in later aesthetic production and response. By linking developmental social processes with formal cognitive aspects of art, we challenge predominant views in evolutionary psychology that literary art is a superfluous byproduct of adaptive evolutionary mechanisms or primarily an ornament created by sexual selection. (shrink)

Since the 1950''s effective control of conception has allowed modern men and women to differentiate procreational from recreational sexual exchange. What is considered highly erotic has differed widely through time and in various cultures. In the U.S. the female breast has come to mean far more than nurturing an infant. Sexuality symbolizes youth, attractiveness, desirability and as such is used for effective commercial marketing. The reality of cancer remains to be dealt with in health care at a physical (...) level but more is needed to assist the emotional adjustment of affected women and their partners. Brief sex therapy for sex symptoms is outlined. (shrink)

Although all natural languages are spoken, there is no accepted account of the evolution of a skill prerequisite to language—control of the movements of speech. If selection applied at sexual maturity, individuals achieving some command of articulate vocal behavior in previous stages would have enjoyed unusual advantages in adulthood. I offer a parental selection hypothesis, according to which hominin parents apportioned care, in part, on the basis of their infants’ vocal behavior. Specifically, it is suggested that persistent or noxious crying (...) reduced care to individuals who would have had difficulty learning complex behaviors, and that cooing and babbling increased social interaction and care as well as control over complex oralmotor activity of the sort required by spoken language. Several different tests of the hypothesis are suggested. (shrink)

The conceptual and investigative tools for the analysis of social behavior can be expanded by integrating biological theory, control systems theory, and Pavlovian conditioning. Biological theory has focused on the costs and benefits of social behavior from ecological and evolutionary perspectives. In contrast, control systems theory is concerned with how machines achieve a particular goal or purpose. The accurate operation of a system often requires feed-forward mechanisms that adjust system performance in anticipation of future inputs. Pavlovian conditioning is ideally suited (...) to subserve this function in behavioral systems. Pavlovian mechanisms have been demonstrated in various aspects of sexual behavior, maternal lactation, and infant suckling. Pavlovian conditioning of agonistic behavior has been also reported, and Pavlovian processes may likewise be involved in social play and social grooming. Several further lines of evidence indicate that Pavlovian conditioning can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of social interactions, thereby improving their cost/benefit ratio. We extend Pavlovian concepts beyond the traditional domain of discrete secretory and other physiological reflexes to complex real-world behavioral interactions and apply abstract laboratory analyses of the mechanisms of associative learning to the daily challenges animals face as they interact with one another in their natural environments. Key Words: aggression; biological theory; control theory; feed-forward mechanisms; learning theory; nursing and lactation; Pavlovian conditioning; sexual behavior; social behavior; social grooming; social play. (shrink)

In the developing world, the dramatic male bias in tobacco use is usually ascribed to pronounced gender disparities in social, political, or economic power. This bias might also reflect under-reporting by woman and/or over-reporting by men. To test the role of gender inequality on gender differences in tobacco use we investigated tobacco use among the Aka, a Congo Basin foraging population noted for its exceptionally high degree of gender equality. We also tested a sexual selection hypothesis—that Aka men’s tobacco use (...) is related to risk taking. Tobacco use, income, tobacco purchases, tobacco sharing, reasons for using tobacco, risk taking, and other variables were measured using structured surveys and peer reports. Tobacco use was verified by testing for salivary cotinine, a nicotine metabolite. Contrary to expectations, we found a very large male bias in tobacco use. Low levels of use among females appeared to be explained by aversions to tobacco, concerns over its negative effects on fetal health, and a desire to attract husbands, who prefer nonsmoking wives. High male use appeared to be related to a desire to enhance hunting abilities and attract and/or retain wives, who prefer husbands that smoke. We conclude that low levels of smoking by Aka women are better explained by the hypothesis that women evolved to avoid plant toxins to protect their fetuses and nursing infants. High male use might be better explained by sexual selection. We also highlight the important role that recreational drugs appear to play in hunter-gatherer sharing relationships. (shrink)

What are the effects of circumcision on sexual function and experience? And what does sex—in the sense related to gender—have to do with the ethics of circumcision? Jacobs and Arora (2015) give short shrift to the first of these questions; and they do not seem to have considered the second. In this commentary, I explore the relationship between sex (in both senses) and infant male circumcision, and draw some conclusions about the ongoing debate regarding this controversial practice.

Our computational studies of infant language learning estimate the inherent difficulty of Arbib's proposal. We show that body language provides a strikingly helpful scaffold for learning language that may be necessary but not sufficient, given the absence of sophisticated language in other species. The extraordinary language abilities of Homo sapiens must have evolved from other pressures, such as sexual selection.

Fifty-one mother-infant pairs were followed prospectively by home visits and telephone contacts during the first 6 months post-partum. Comparisons between mothers who experienced lactation crises because of perceived breast-milk insufficiency and those who did not revealed differences in attitudes to breast-feeding, breast-feeding behaviour and sexual life. The crisis group tended to initiate breast-feeding for infant-related reasons more frequently than the non-crisis group, which more frequently gave mother-related reasons. During the course of breastfeeding attitude changes in a negative direction (...) were significantly more common in the crisis group. No difference was found between the groups in the resumption of sexual life, but 59% of all the women claimed that they experienced less or no desire compared to before pregnancy and, of these, a significantly higher proportion belonged to the crisis group. (shrink)

Male circumcision—partial or total removal of the penile prepuce—has been proposed as a public health measure in Sub-Saharan Africa, based on the results of three randomized control trials showing a relative risk reduction of approximately 60 per cent for voluntary, adult male circumcision against female-to-male human immunodeficiency virus transmission in that context. More recently, long-time advocates of infant male circumcision have argued that these findings justify involuntary circumcision of babies and children in dissimilar public health environments, such as the (...) USA, Australasia and Europe. In this article, we take a close look at the necessary ethical and empirical steps that would be needed to bridge the gap between the African RCTs and responsible public health policy in developed countries. In the course of doing so, we discuss some of the main disagreements about the moral permissibility of performing a nontherapeutic surgery on a child to benefit potential future sexual partners of his. In this context, we raise concerns not only about weaknesses in the available evidence concerning such claims of benefit, but also about a child’s moral interest in future autonomy and the preservation of his bodily integrity. We conclude that circumcision of minors in developed countries on public health grounds is much harder to justify than proponents of the surgery suggest. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to settle the controversy around Kant’s notorious discussion of maternal infanticide in the ‘Doctrine of Right’ of 1797. How should a state punish an unmarried mother who has killed her newborn infant? The text (at DoR VI 335–37) is obscure. Three readings have been defended in the literature: 1. Lenience. Maternal infanticide does not count as murder; so, capital punishment is inappropriate. On this view, the child does not enjoy the full recognition of (...) the law (this is the standard view). 2. Temporary privilege. Lenience should prevail as long as social attitudes are barbaric and treating maternal infanticide like regular cases of murder is perceived to be unjust. The regular punishment for murder will be appropriate once sexual mores have changed. The child will then enjoy the full protection of the law (Hruschka, Varden). 3. No lenience. Capital punishment, though it appears to be unjust, is actually just and ought to be applied. Any child, whether born to married parents or not, enjoys the full protection of the law (Brandt, Uleman). Based on a close examination of the passage and the context of contemporary laws and attitudes, Kant is not, it will be argued, advocating lenience but certain legislative reforms, which are needed to dispel the perception that capital punishment is unjust. Progressive legislation will change social attitudes, not vice versa. Moreover, it will be shown that Kant does not, appearances notwithstanding, endorse the thesis that a child born out of wedlock has been smuggled into the state like ‘prohibited goods’ or ‘contraband merchandise’, which would deprive the child of the protection of the state; that is the view with which Kant saddles Cesare Beccaria. (shrink)

_Psychoanalysis and Women_, Volume 32 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_, is a stunning reprise on theoretical, developmental, and clinical issues that have engaged analysts from Freud on. It begins with clinical contributions by Joyce McDougall and Lynne Layton, two theorists at the forefront of clinical work with women; Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, and Ethel Spector Person, from their respective vantage points, all engage the issue of passivity, which Freud tended to equate with femininity. Employing a self-psychological framework, Christine Kieffer returns (...) to the Oedipus complex and sheds new light on the typically Pyrrhic oedipal victory of little girls. Section III broadens the historical context of contemporary theorizing about women by offering the personal reminiscences of Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Brenda Solomon, and Malkah Notman. A final section, dedicated to "women who shared psychoanalysis," features historical essays on Ida Bauer, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Edith Jacobson, and Therese Benedek, along with Linda Hopkins's revealing interview of Marion Milner. Of special note is Marian Tolpin's examination of three women - Bauer, Helene Deutch, and Anna Freud - who helped shape Freud's notion of the "femail castration complex," and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's exploration of how two women - Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham - developed parent-infant observation. _Psychoanalysis and Women_ is an extraordinary chronicle of the distance traveled since Freud characterized women's sexual life as "the dark continent." The contributors vitalize a half century of theory with the lessons of biography, and they broaden clinical sensibilities by drawing on recent developmental, gender-related, and socio-psychological research. In doing so, they attest to the ongoing reconfiguration of Freud's dark continent and show the psychoanalytic psychology of women to be very much a revolution in progress. (shrink)

Reflecting upon some problems of the moral life, Gilbert Meilaender considers their difficulties within a vision that accentuates not only the limits, but also the promise, of the Christian story. Created by God as finite beings, we make particular attachments. Redeemed by God for a community transcending nature and history, our love always carries us beyond the special bonds of time and place. We live, therefore, with a sense of permanent tension. If this tension heightens our sense of the perplexities (...) of life, it should not free us from the obligation to probe, clarify, and resolve some of those difficulties. The author holds that theological ethics must clarify the direction for growth and development within the Christian life. He undertakes such analysis, emphasizing throughout the limits of the human condition, the importance of our nature as embodied persons, and the danger and pretension in some of our attempts to take control of and master human life. This Christian vision is developed in chapters that explore a range of moral problems, such as abortion, artificial reproduction, euthanasia, care for defective infants, provision of artificial nutrition and hydration, and marital and political community. These are throughout, however, _theological_ explorations. Taken together they illumine not only particular problems of the moral life but a vision of life—classically Christian in its conception, humane in its care for particular bonds of attachment, and modest in its recognition of moral limits on our ability to seek the good. Meilaender has developed a broad recognition both among scholars and students of ethics and among interested general readers. He has the capacity to throw fresh angles of vision on complex problems so as to help both the sophisticated and the uninitiated reader to think more penetratingly about moral questions. (shrink)

The Threshold of the Visible World advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic--Kaja Silverman explores the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies. Accounting for these phenomena on both a conscious and an unconcious level, Silverman analyzes the psychic and textual conditions under (...) which our "field of vision" can be expanded. The title of this book is taken from Lacan's essay on the mirror stage. In that text, Lacan writes that "the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world." He thereby suggests that the visible world has no existence as such until the infant subject has access to an image of self. Lacan intimates that the mirror provides the frame through which one relates to others within the domain of vision, stressing the priority of narcissism and the ego over all other libidinal transactions. The Threshold of the Visible World provides a psychic, social and political specification of Lacan's claim, and most particularly of its implications for the subject's relations to the social other. This is accomplished through examination of the ego, as well as two other categories at the center of Lacan's account of the mirror stage: ideality and identification. This book is an ethical-political project which leads to the re-elaboration of a number of crucial theoretical categories--Silverman offers an account of the bodily ego, of identification, of idealization, of the gaze, of the look, and of the "photographic." The Threshold of the Visible World leads as well to the formulation of a fresh model for conceptualizing sexual, racial and class "difference," and the terms under which it might be dismantled. This book thus seeks to apprehend the field of vision through the frame of a different kind of bodily ego, and discover the pleasures to be derived from corporeal transport. (shrink)

For four decades Ifeanyi Menkiti has addressed the question of which sort of community constitutes personhood from a characteristically African perspective. In this chapter, I critically discuss the conceptions of how one acquires personhood through community that Menkiti has advanced, in search of the one that would most enable him to avoid prominent moral objections made to his views over the years. In particular, his account of personhood has been criticized for insufficiently accommodating individual difference, most recently in respect of (...) gender and sexuality. I draw on the resources in Menkiti’s work for rebutting this line of criticism, but contend that, even if he can avoid that one, another, new objection looms large: because of Menkiti’s claim that reciprocity is central to community, he is committed to the view that human infants and mentally incapacitated adults lack moral standing, in the way he explicitly believes animals lack it. After showing that, according to Menkiti’s strongest conception of personhood, one counterintuitively cannot acquire it in the course of interacting with any non-persons, I articulate an alternative conception of how to understand the role of community in acquiring personhood that avoids this problem as well as the other ones discussed. (shrink)

In 1995 the People's Republic of China passed a controversial Eugenics Law, which, after a torrent of international criticism, was euphemistically renamed the Maternal and Infant Health Law. Aimed at "the implementation of premarital medical checkups" to ensure that neither partner has any hereditary, venereal, reproductive, or mental disorders, the ordinance implies that those deemed "unsuitable for reproduction" should undergo sterilization or abortion or remain celibate in order to prevent "inferior births." Using this recent statute as a springboard, Frank (...) Dikötter explores the contexts and history of eugenics in both Communist China and Taiwan. Dikötter shows how beginning in Late Imperial China, Western eugenics was imported and combined with existing fears of cultural, racial, or biological degeneration in Chinese society, leading to government regulation of sexual reproduction. _Imperfect Conceptions_ is a revealing look at the cultural history of medical explanations of birth defects that demonstrates how Chinese assumptions about the relationship of the individual to society form the very core of their attitudes toward procreation. Dikötter explains the patrilineal model of descent, where a person is viewed as the culmination of his or her ancestors and is held responsible for the health of all future generations. By this logic, a pregnant woman's behavior and attitude directly influence the well-being of her baby, and a deformed or retarded child reflects a moral failing on the part of the parents. Dikötter also shows how the holistic medicine practiced in China blurs any distinction between individual and environment so that people are held responsible for illness. Drawing on cultural, social, economic, and political approaches, Dikötter goes beyond a simple authoritarian model to provide a more complex view of eugenic policy, showing how a variety of voices including those of popular journalists, social reformers, medical writers, sex educators, university professors, and politicians all disseminate information that supports rather than questions the state's program. _Imperfect Conceptions_ reveals how Chinese cultural currents--fear and fascination with the deviant and the urge to draw clear boundaries between the normal and the abnormal--have combined with medical discourse to form a program of eugenics that is viewed with alarm by the rest of the world. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology aims to discover what makes us human, but it has produced accounts that exclude some members of our species. It relies often on a non-naturalistic “philosophy of consciousness” and locates humanity in the cognitive capacity to objectively represent things, to reason teleologically and use tools, to use symbols and language, or to be self-conscious and question existence. This work pursues an alternative, thoroughly naturalistic philosophical anthropology in the tradition of Arnold Gehlen. Combining Gehlen’s theory of our behaviorally-detached and (...) culturally-determined impulses with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views on intersubjectivity, affect, sexuality, and social institutions, the present work locates the human within the unique structure of human feeling. This produces a truly inclusive account of “the human as the other” or Homo alter. The human is deeply and thoroughly dependent on affective, bodily, communicative bonds, in which others appear as sources of meaning, norms, pleasure, and approbation and disapprobation. This socio-biological account of the human makes institutionality central to our form of life but rejects any political anthropology that attempts to use human nature to prescribe a necessary form to institutions such as the home. Such a social and affective account of the human produces a novel approach to the affect of shame as the feeling of institutional rejection. Ultimately, this work uses philosophical anthropology to combat dehumanization. Our unique form of dependency on others and institutions is present, for example, in infants and the severely disabled who may not possess the forms of consciousness and cognition that traditionally are identified with being human. (shrink)

Newborn male circumcision is a minor surgical procedure that has generated significant controversy. Accumulating evidence supports significant health benefits, most notably reductions in urinary tract infections, acquisition of HIV and a number of other sexually transmitted infections, penile cancer, phimosis, paraphimosis, balanitis and lichen sclerosis. While circumcision, like any surgical procedure, has risks for complications, they occur in less than 1 in 500 infants circumcised and most are minor and require minimal intervention. The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (...) believe that health benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks. For this reason, the AAP believes that parents should be allowed to make the decision concerning circumcision of their male infants after receiving non-biased information on health risks and health benefits. (shrink)

This commentary draws upon the author's experience in bioethics and as a physician, ordained Rabbi, and certified Mohel (a Jewish professional qualified to perform infant male circumcisions (MC)). People's identity and adherence to a religious belief are frequently cited reasons for deciding whether to circumcise their male children. For Jewish and Muslim males, circumcision is considered essential. In this commentary, the author uses his medical, religious, and bioethical knowledge, expertise, and experience to address common arguments used in opposing nontherapeutic (...) male circumcision of minors. In these narratives, half of the parents agreed with circumcision, and half did not. The parents against circumcision cite human rights violations, security, privacy, and bodily integrity issues and refer to circumcision as genital mutilation, while those who agree argue that circumcision should be done for religious reasons to prevent health issues, promote hygiene and cleanness, avoid cancer, or for later sexual enjoyment. After evaluating the evidence, the author states that parents should be free to either consent or decline MC for a son. Though a reoccurring theme in these narratives was for mothers to leave the circumcision decision up to their male partners, the author concludes that women have considerable power regarding the decision. (shrink)

One common mistake in discussions about the ethics of infant male circumcisioni is to attempt to answer the question of the practice's permissibility by appealing to general principles and bypassing the empirical evidence about purported benefits and harms of the practice.Joseph Mazor1 avoids the mistake of appealing only to general principles. He correctly argues that it is not sufficient to invoke a child's right to bodily integrity or to self-determinationii. Moreover, he does not appeal to parents’ rights to religious (...) or cultural freedom in order to make his case for the permissibility of parents having their sons circumcised for religious or cultural reasons.However, in invoking empirical considerations, he is insufficiently careful. For example, he includes, on the negative side of the circumcision ledger, a reduction in sexual pleasure, yet it is not clear that even his own reasoning warrants this. The problem is that he seems to want both, to acknowledge the absence of clear evidence for this claim, and to accept it as one of the costs of circumcision.He says that Michael Benatar and I2 ‘carefully reviewed the medical evidence’1 about circumcision. In the paper that he cites, we noted that competing claims were made about the effect of circumcision on sexual pleasureiii and we established that no conclusion could be drawn from the limited and conflicting evidence available on this question. Dr Mazor notes that critics could point to those studies that lend support to the conclusion that circumcision reduces sexual pleasure, but he concedes that this would be controversial,1 …. (shrink)

Secularization has accelerated. From 1981 to 2007, most countries became more religious, but from 2007 to 2020, the overwhelming majority became less religious. For centuries, all major religions encouraged norms that limit women to producing as many children as possible and discourage any sexual behavior not linked with reproduction. These norms were needed when facing high infant mortality and low life expectancy but require suppressing strong drives, and are rapidly eroding. These norms are so strongly linked with religion that (...) abandoning them undermines religiosity. Religion became pervasive because it was conducive to survival, encouraged sharing when there was no social security system, and it is conducive to mental health and coping with insecure conditions. People need coherent belief systems, but religion is declining. What comes next? The Nordic countries have consistently been at the cutting edge of cultural change. Protestantism left an enduring imprint, but the 20th Century welfare added universal health coverage, high levels of state support for education, welfare spending, child care, pensions and an ethos of social solidarity. These countries are also characterized by rapidly declining religiosity. Does this portend corruption and nihilism? Apparently not. These countries lead the world on numerous indicators of a well-functioning society, including economic equality, gender equality, low homicide rates, subjective well-being, environmental protection and democracy. They have become less religious, but their people have high levels of interpersonal trust, tolerance, honesty, social solidarity and commitment to democratic norms. The decline of religiosity has far-reaching implications. This book explores what comes next. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Promoting Health and Social Progress by Accepting and Depathologizing Benign Intersex TraitsHida ViloriaI was born with ambiguous genitalia and it was a doctor who, by honoring my bodily integrity and not “fixing” me, gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received. Because my body and its sexual traits are a positive, fundamental part of my experience and identity as a human being, I know that having my genitals removed (...) or altered according to someone else’s vision would have deeply damaged me, both physically and psychologically.The doctor who protected my autonomy was, unsurprisingly, my father. I say “unsurprisingly” because in my experience parents are typically more protective of their children than doctors are of their patients. Also, doctors do not discuss cases with other doctors in the same way they do with laypeople, as doctors know more about medical issues such as the risks involved in infant genital surgery.Other than having clitoromegaly (a large clitoris), my reproductive anatomy is typically female, and so I was assigned female and raised as such without incident. My parents didn’t discuss my intersex traits with me, and I grew up thinking of myself and being accepted as, a girl.When I began menstruating, my father told me I’d need to take pills to “grow taller.” I thought this unusual, as I wasn’t short, and later overheard my mother arguing with him, saying that the pills were “experimental”. I was reminded of this discussion years later, when she told me that the pills had actually been hormones to make my breasts grow. I never took them though as she convinced my father not to make me.Article 7 of The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that, “No one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation,” and I’m grateful to both my parents for protecting my civil rights as they protected my health.Due to my Catholic upbringing and schooling, I had no opportunity to compare my genitals to other girls’, and it wasn’t until the age of twelve that I realized, while perusing magazines with friends, that I have atypical sex anatomy. Contrary to common speculation however, this awareness didn’t make me question being female. I simply assumed there must be some genital variation in humans.I feel my parents made the wisest decision possible by registering me as one of the two accepted, available genders but allowing me to live, physically and behaviorally, as who I am. Despite not having developed a stereotypically curvaceous female figure, I was popular and excelled in typically feminine social activities, as well as sports and academics. For example, I was one of four girls selected out of one hundred twenty–five that competed for a spot on my high school cheerleading [End Page 114] squad when I tried out to help a friend who needed a tryout partner.Other than escaping IGM (Intersex Genital Mutilation) and estrogen therapy, I’ve had only a few experiences pertaining to my medical care around being intersex. These experiences fall into two categories: seeing medical doctors who treated me the same after discovering that I have ambiguous genitalia, and seeing ones who didn’t. I feel incredibly blessed that my experiences in the former category vastly outweigh the latter.My first experience came at the age of twenty, when a gynecologist asked me if my clitoris had always been as large as it is. I responded that it had, and she said, while looking at me disapprovingly, that she’d like to do some tests. When I asked her what they were for though, she wouldn’t respond directly. She said I’d reported having some upper lip hair, and acne, on my intake forms. I replied that neither were above average, and asked if there were health issues I should be concerned about. She reluctantly said no. I asked what reason there was then for undergoing tests because of the size of my clitoris.She finally responded, “It’s just not normal.”Fortunately, I’d had positive reactions to my sex traits from the people I’d dated. For example, the first... (shrink)

Perinatal experience is posited as generative of psychogenesis: the psychological birth of the infant. The process involves a sentient human being rather than a nonconscious tabula rasa fetus. That birth experience is only traumatic is reductionist. The origins of positively colored affects as well as sexual feelings and even ecstasy may be intrauterine. The importance and complexity of the birth experience can better be described in terms of phases of being that parallel the physical stages of labor. These phases (...) are immanence, obstruence, descendence, experience, ascendence, emergence, and transcendence. Each of these phases encompasses a unique state and dynamic process. Birth as such is shown to be a rich multidimensional experience that is also transformative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Misnomer of Freud's "Seduction Theory"Hall TriplettSigmund Freud's theory of 1896 was buried without a name in 1897, less than two years after it appeared. The process by which it acquired a name, "seduction theory," and the role this name played in the history of psychoanalysis are essential parts of the legend-making in Freud's biography. The label, bestowed half a century after publication, reflected two major rhetorical transformations. First, (...) from a theory presented with highly general claims of infant sex abuse, assault, and trauma, the theory was repackaged as a theory of seduction. Second, from a theory reportedly based in actual, traumatic experience, followed by repressed memory, it was transformed into one of fantasy. The name "seduction theory" has therefore operated as a misleading, strategic misnomer for the theory that Freud published in 1896.Freud announced his theory in three publications, referred to here in order of publication as the Paris paper,1 the Berlin paper,2 and "The Aetiology of Hysteria," published in Vienna.3 In his final publication the emphasis on trauma was greatest. In the space of five pages in the Standard Edition of Freud's works he used the word "traumatic" or "traumatically" fifteen times.4 Although he was extending the traumatic memory theory that he had shared with Josef Breuer in 1895,5 he touted his new modification as "the discovery of a caput [End Page 647] Nili [source of the Nile] in neuropathology."6 Sixteen months later he would privately renounce it. The theory was resurrected in the 1980s as support for the recovered memory movement.7It is essential to recall that the issuance of scientific claims is quite different from scientific validation. Getting the name of a theory right more than a century after publication is one matter only; assessing the basis of its underlying claims raises yet another challenge, particularly when the theory has been transformed with such extensive variation as Freud's theory of 1896.Therefore, the early death of the theory, described only in private letters to Wilhelm Fliess, is critical to an understanding of the entire historical episode. It is essential also to note that when Freud published his retrospective revisions of the theory, he did not know that his contemporary letters to his intimate friend would become competing evidence of the actual events of the mid-1890s.8When Freud secretly abandoned his theory on 21 September 1897 he wrote to Fliess, "I no longer believe in my neurotica."9 Implied already is the fact that Freud's belief in his theory was all that had supported it. One of his retrospective comments unwittingly substantiates this fact. In 1914, in his "History of the Psycho-analytic Movement," he conceded that his theory "broke down under the weight of its own improbability."10Furthermore, abandoning a theory in secrecy with no public defense is itself tantamount to a confession that supporting evidence is missing. Freud had acknowledged the absence of supporting data in his Berlin paper when he stated, "In this kind of communication it is not possible to bring forward the evidence needful to support my assertions, but I hope to fulfill this obligation later in a detailed presentation."11 His claim that it was "not possible to bring forward the evidence" must be challenged. Presenting scientific evidence is always possible when one has it. Moreover, in his "later" paper, by far the longest of 1896, he evaded the presentation of "actual material," opting instead to discuss potential objections.12 He did not present a single case history of hysteria, arguing that this would have taken too much time; yet he had closed his Berlin paper with a case history of paranoia that was purportedly based in the female patient's "sexual relationship" with her brother during childhood.13 [End Page 648] This case is not persuasive, but it demonstrates Freud's eagerness in 1896 to share a case when he believed that he had one to share.The style of a live lecture in "The Aetiology of Hysteria," as though Freud were speaking to an audience of potential objectors, is highly misleading, even fictional. As he explained in his letters... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer C. Nash Black Lactation Aesthetics: Remaking the Natural in Lakisha Cohill’s Photographs In her 1992 essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” bell hooks recounts entering a “late night dessert place” with a group of colleagues who all began to laugh at a shelf of “gigantic chocolate breasts complete with nipples— huge edible tits.”1 For hooks, the chocolate Black (...) breasts are mammy imagery, a “displaced longing for a racist past when the bodies of black women were a commodity, available to anyone white who could pay the price.”2 For her white colleagues, the chocolate breasts are simply comical. Her colleagues’ response—their willingness to consume, laugh, and ignore racial, gendered, sexual violence—constitutes the racialized visual marketplace that hooks’s essay seeks to both describe and dismantle. The chocolate breasts become a rhetorical point of entry into hooks’s critical engagement with a visual marketplace where Black female bodies are delectable and disposable objects. hooks’s analysis has become part of a canon of Black feminist work exploring how Black breasts get taken up as signs of pathology, “excess flesh,” sexual deviance, hypersexuality, and alterity.3 From histories of the so-called Hottentot Venus and the preoccupation with her breasts, buttocks, and genitalia—including 1. bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 61. 2. hooks, 61–62. 3. See Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Jennifer C. Nash 95 signature works by Zine Magubane, Janell Hobson, Samantha Pinto, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting4 —to scholarship on the construction of black women’s imagined corporeality as “social dead weight” by Sabrina Strings, Black feminists have given critical attention to the construction of Black breasts as the location of Black women’s imagined racial and sexual difference.5 If Black breasts have been culturally and scientifically constructed as deviant, excessive, pornographic, and desirous, they have largely been uncoupled from an identification with nutrition—from the capacity to sustain and feed babies—except their connection with wet nursing and their conscription into maternal labor for white children. In this imaginary, Black breasts provide nutrition only when recruited as white property, with their nurturance capacity oriented toward white health and futurity. We might understand the cultural inability to interpret Black breasts as nurturing Black life as part of what Andrea Freeman describes as the “unmothering” of Black women, the unseeing of Black maternity except to elevate it as a symbol of brokenness or pathology.6 But in recent years, as I argue in my forthcoming book Birthing Black Mothers, Black breasts have entered the US cultural imagination anew. Black breasts are increasingly viewed as in need of support through seemingly benign state interventions to encourage Black breastfeeding. Indeed, Black breasts are recruited by an array of actors who often find themselves strangely aligned to champion Black breastfeeding —including NGOs, public health campaigns, and reproductive justice efforts spearheaded by Black feminists—precisely because Black breastfeeding is thought to perform urgent political, emotional, and 4. See Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender & Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 816–834; Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005); Samantha Pinto, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 5. See Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: NYU Press, 2019). 6. Andrea Freeman, “Unmothering Black Women: Formula Feeding as an Incident of Slavery,” Hastings Law Journal 69, no 1545 (2018): 1545–1606. 96 Jennifer C. Nash public health work. Black breastmilk is increasingly described as a crucial technology of Black life, one that supports Black infant life and inoculates it physically, psychically, and even spiritually against the array of anti-Black forces that wound and violate. The work that Black breast milk is thought to perform includes its posited... (shrink)

The potential benefits of an alternative to physical gestation are numerous. These include providing reproductive options for prospective parents who are unable to establish or maintain a physiological pregnancy, and saving the lives of some infants born prematurely. Ectogenesis could also promote sexual equality in reproduction, and represents a necessary option for women experiencing an unwanted pregnancy who are morally opposed to abortion. Despite these broad, and in some cases unique benefits, one major ethical concern is the potential impact of (...) this emerging technology on abortion rights. This article will argue that ectogenesis poses a challenge to many common arguments in favour of a pregnant woman’s right to choose, but only insomuch as it highlights that their underlying justifications for abortion are based on flawed conceptions of what the foetus and pregnancy actually are. By interrogating the various interests and relationships involved in a pregnancy, this article will demonstrate that the emergence of artificial gestation need not impact existing abortion rights or legislation, nor definitions of independent viability or moral status. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Not by Nature but by Grace: Forming Families through Adoption by Gilbert C. MeilaenderThomas O'BrienNot by Nature but by Grace: Forming Families through Adoption Gilbert C. Meilaender notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2016. 136 pp. $25.00I was adopted as an infant through a Catholic Charities office in 1961, and just three years ago, thanks to an online DNA analysis service, I met both of (...) my biological parents, with whom I have an ongoing, loving relationship. So my keen interest in this book and its topic is more than just theological [End Page 209] curiosity. It includes personal and emotional dimensions, as I'm sure it will for many readers.This book is an attempt to understand modern adoptive practices from a primarily Christian/Catholic perspective, with helpful allusions to the beliefs and practices of the other Abrahamic faiths. Overall, I believe the book succeeds in presenting a solid theological foundation for adoption in general and, more specifically, for its current mainstream manifestation in the developed world. The author doesn't shy away from the various controversies related to adoption—like assisted reproduction, LGBTQ adoption, embryo adoption—and he takes on other authors who make claims about adoption that he believes distract or obscure the central purpose of adoption, which is to provide a child a "needed place of belonging" within the network of loving relationships that is the ideal of the family (38).My reservations about the book are two. The first has to do with the inconsistent tone of the book, which tends to swing, abruptly at times, from a theological and analytical tone to one that feels more popular and homiletic—even to the point of being maudlin. As stated earlier, I have high regard for most of the analytical sections and find the overarching thesis convincing. Generally, in these sections, the method begins with the lived experience of adoptees and their parents and works through scripture, tradition, and critical reflection to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. However, occasionally the book drifts into uncritical and merely emotive territory, and this is especially the case in the sections called "interludes," where the author presents letters to adoptees from their parents reprinted from the Christian Century magazine. These seem out of place and even distracting. Of even greater concern is the concluding chapter, where the author should be summarizing and highlighting the strengths of his thesis. Instead he chose to draw homiletic lessons from Anne of Green Gables (110).My second reservation is not so much a critique of this book but of the state of contemporary Catholic sexual ethics, which forms a backdrop for the entire book. The book accurately reflects a mainstream position in Catholic sexual ethics, which abandoned a narrow focus on procreation decades ago in favor of one highlighting the unitive and relational aspects of human intimacy. This move away from a strictly deontological framework stressing the duty to procreate and toward a teleological ethic stressing the need to model human relationships after divine ones has been celebrated for good reasons, but it has not come without costs. Like all teleological ideals, this sexual ethic is attractive to purveyors of high philosophy but tends to be thoroughly abstract and almost entirely incapable of offering concrete, practical guidance. Because it is so abstract, its application to specific moral issues can seem arbitrary and at the whim of the author. Such is the case in this book, for instance, when this teleological ideal is wielded to shed doubt on LGBTQ adoption. It is particularly telling [End Page 210] that the author neglects to consult lived experience in this section, ignoring the mountains of evidence readily available that LGBTQ families can be just as loving and nurturing as those of traditional families. Ultimately, a second Renaissance would benefit Catholic sexual ethics—one that balances deontological and teleological elements by introducing practical, consequential, and proportional methods.Thomas O'BrienDePaul UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This essay is an examination of how love may be theorized in relation to the meeting of two skins in the caress. Starting and ending with the theories of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, it presents his theory of the moi-peau and its development in the infant through experiences of primary care, the fantasy of a ‘common skin with the mother’ and the taboo on touching, and looks in detail at how this relates to the psycho-sexual experience of love. The writings (...) of Sartre on love and the caress are compared with Anzieu's, and the essay ends by proposing a theory of ‘consensuality’ derived from their common ideas. (shrink)

Although many people find fault with Freud, the horse that they flog is not yet dead. I should in fact maintain that we are all still under Freud's long shadow. Last autumn the American press reported a dreadful crime: a young man, egged on by his mother, murdered his father. The newspapers helpfully explained that the young man had a very prominent Oedipus complex. If we dismiss this as just a journalistic excess, we would do well to remember how hard (...) it is to open our own mouths without registering the effect of Freud upon the language. We converse casually about the sexual proclivities of infants, about sibling rivalries, about dependency upon the mother, about sadomasochistic impulses. When we forget things, we suspect ourselves of having wanted to forget them. We may shun the technical vocabulary of Freud, words such as ego, superego, id, the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the anal, oral, and genital stages, yet we are hardly likely to do without such words as aggression, anxiety, compulsion, the unconscious, defense mechanism, narcissism, death wish, erogenous zones, fixation, guilt feeling, sublimation, wish fulfillment. Freud may not have invented most of these words, yet he connected them together and he gave them a special color and shape. And quite apart from terminology, Freud has given us the conviction that a secret life is going on within us that is only partly under our control. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals by Cristina L. H. TrainaSandra Sullivan-DunbarErotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals CRISTINA L. H. TRAINA Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 363 pp. $55.00In this ambitious and broadly interdisciplinary work, Cristina Traina begins from an experience that evades contemporary discussion: maternal sensual pleasure in the care of infants and young children. As Traina notes, (...) this experience puts two contemporary dogmas on a “collision course”: the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure is intrinsically good and the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure between unequals is intrinsically exploitative. As with other feminist turns toward neglected experience, this one calls for a recalibration of ethical models—in this case, a more complex and nuanced sexual ethic.Traina challenges readers to broaden notions of sexuality beyond androcentric models focused primarily on particular acts and on genital release. Such models are deeply graven in the Christian tradition and reinforced through reductive cultural appropriations of Freudian thought. But all human relations are embodied and involve desire, argues Traina, and are thus in some sense erotic, though most do not involve genital sexuality. Likewise, her readers are challenged to recognize the pervasiveness of relations of inequality in human life, when most Christian sexual ethics limit themselves to relations between equals, or at least understand a sexual ethic to aim at equality and mutuality.The book engages psychological resources demonstrating the human need for appropriate touch as well as the profound damage done by abusive touch. The need is so universal and foundational that Traina casts it as a human right; yet offering such touch appropriately is a subtle and challenging moral task beset with danger and the potential for self-deception.Traina diagnoses the sexual abuser as a fragmented self, one unable to perceive the concrete reality, needs, and experiences of her victim and bent on the doomed project of creating a whole self by appropriating and objectifying the other. Thus, at the heart of her ethic of sensuality between unequals is the notion of “attunement.” The attuned caregiver can acknowledge and fully experience inclinations, joys, and pains with a contemplative and compassionate awareness that allows considered and appropriate responses. The attuned care-giver lives with “unending, acknowledged desire” (177), a desire that glories in the goodness of the child in her care and, in so doing, creatively elicits subjectivity from her rather than manipulating her to meet the needs of the caregiver. [End Page 240]This ethical vision is developed in dialogue with a number of resources from Christian and secular sources. Traina helpfully nuances a Thomistic account of the virtue of temperance as a guideline for appropriate touch. She also develops revisionist accounts of Augustinian desire offered by Wendy Farley and Linda Holler. I found myself wondering whether some more traditional interpretations of Augustine might serve Traina’s project as well as or better than these revisionist understandings, which emphasize desire as a permanent state rather than directed toward final rest in God.Likewise, Traina works her way through the plethora of recent eros theologies, drawing in particular on recent interpretations of Plato’s Symposium that stress the creativity of eros in bringing to birth goodness and beauty as well as its potential for enabling a degree of other-regard. It seems to this reader that a contemporary ethic of sexuality between unequals calls for greater other-regard than the most generous interpretation of Plato’s ladder of love can suggest. However, Plato’s caution about the profound difficulty of directing eros toward the true good resonates with the difficulty of achieving the “erotic attunement” described by Traina.In any case, quibbles about the resources and interpretations that Traina mines to support her ethic do not lessen the originality, power, and importance of this book, which extends beyond sexual ethics to reframe questions about embodiment, (in)equality, and moral agency in profound and necessary ways.Sandra Sullivan-DunbarLoyola University, ChicagoCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.4 (2005) 613-622 [Access article in PDF] The Triumph of Cupid: Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage Mary-Kay Gamel University of California, Santa Cruz e-mail: [email protected] is a lot for classicists to like in Marlowe's The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage. There was a lot for theatergoers to like in Neil Bartlett's production of this play at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (...) (March 5–26, 2005).The script of Dido is based primarily on the Aeneid (Books I, II, and IV). Vergil's text contains many formal and thematic allusions to tragedy, especially in IV: the agonistic speeches; Anna's role as nutrix/confidante; comparisons of Dido to a raging Bacchant (301–3), Pentheus (469–70) and scaenis agitatus Orestes 471; and her thoughts of imitating the savage violence of Medea and Atreus 600–602. Aeneid IV raises the possibility that the poem will metamorphose from epic to tragedy, with Dido taking center stage from Aeneas.That is what happens in Ovid's Heroides 7, and it happens again in Dido Queen of Carthage. Marlowe probably wrote this play—his first—in 1585, when he was a twenty-one year old student at Cambridge University. An excellent Latinist, Marlowe did a superb translation of Ovid's Amores, probably before writing Dido. In writing Dido, Marlowe focused on Aeneid I, II, and IV, the books of the poem best known to ancient, Elizabethan, and modern audiences, and in a few places his characters speak Latin lines from the Aeneid. In dramatizing this material, Marlowe did not simply translate but made many changes in structure, characters, and language. Aeneas' account of the fall of Troy, for example, condenses all of Aeneid II (more than 800 lines) into 163 lines (still a very long speech, which includes horrific details not in Vergil: "young infants swimming in their parents' blood, / headless carcasses piled up in heaps" [II.i.193–94]).1 [End Page 613]Most significantly, Marlowe makes his gods Ovidian rather than Vergilian—selfish and petty, concerned only with status and pleasure, using human beings only to satisfy their desires. Jupiter is a middle-aged man making a fool of himself over a teenager: in the first scene he is not, as in the Aeneid, looking down from Olympus and already thinking about Aeneas, but rather trying to seduce Ganymede, a "female wanton boy," when Venus indignantly interrupts with "Ay, this is it!" (I.i.50).Venus' encounter with Aeneas in Carthage (Aeneid I.314–417) ends with Aeneas' unanswerable question, "Why talk we not together hand in hand / And tell our griefs in more familiar terms?" (I.i.245–46). Venus and Juno's plot to unite Dido and Aeneas is complete with sexual double-entendre: in the cave, Juno says, they will "interchangeably discourse their thoughts / Whose short conclusion will seal up their hearts" (III.ii.93–94). Costumes in the ART production reflected the gods' iconic status, though more in terms of Hollywood than ancient representations: Juno was a drag queen, Hermes an unearthly figure in gold paint with huge wings, while Venus was played by an African-American actress in white satin and spike heels (including her hunting outfit) with exaggeratedly "black" gestures and intonations—waving her long fingernails, arching her neck, posing her head, and calling Juno "sistah!" Bartlett was clearly not worried about using sexual and racial stereotypes to make an impact.Marlowe's mortals are dignified, yet wounded and vulnerable. His Dido is proud, independent, initially uninterested in Aeneas; his Iarbas genuinely loves Dido, warmly welcomes Ilioneus and the others; Anna is in love with Iarbas. All try to behave reasonably and honorably but are invariably thwarted by the gods' games. The ART Aeneas was deeply damaged by his experiences in Troy. A craggy man, wearing a scoured breastplate over worn fatigues, he staggered on, stooped, beaten. The text supports this interpretation: before beginning his speech about the fall of Troy, he says "memory... beats forth my senses from this... (shrink)

All primates except human beings have thick coats of body hair. This suggests the primate ancestors of human beings likewise had such body hair and that, for some evolutionary reason, lost their body hair. Various theories have been put forward but none is fully adequate. This article presents the “naked love theory.” This theory locates the origin of human hairlessness in the ancestral mother—infant relationship. In this view, hairlessness is ultimately the adaptive consequence of bipedalism. Because of bipedalism, ancestral (...) infants lost their prehensile feet and thus lost the ability to grasp the mother's fur with their feet, as do other primate infants. Early bipedal mothers were thus under pressure to carry the infant. Therefore infants survived only if mothers had a strong desire to hold them. Because of the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact, the desire to hold the infant would have been stronger in mothers possessing a hairless mutation that enabled them to give birth to hairless infants. Survival of these infants would have then been greater than that of hair-covered infants. The hairlessness that began to appear in this context of maternal selection was then reinforced by sexual selection in the male—female sexual relationship. This is because a hairless sexual partner would have enabled the hairless individual to recreate the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact in the mother—infant relationship. This theory then helps to explain the evolutionary origins of romantic love. (shrink)

La sinopsis del filme El cebo, dirigida en el año 1958 por el húngaro-español Ladislao Vajda (1906-1965), sintetiza la trama como sigue: “Un detective de policía decide investigar por su cuenta el caso del asesinato de una niña de ocho años, pues tiene dudas de que el principal sospechoso sea culpable.” Esta coproducción hispano-germano-suiza (Chamartín, Praesens-Film y CCC-Filmproduktion) es unánimemente calificada como “excepcional”, a caballo entre el género policíaco y el de terror. Como se defenderá, se está ante una fábula (...) fílmica cuyo propósito central, alrededor del cual se derivan múltiples cuestiones filosóficas de calado, consistía en ofrecer una narración con la intención didáctica de advertir a los espectadores –adultos y menores– de los crímenes sexuales contra los infantes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 296-311 [Access article in PDF] Byron As Cad Ian Jobling I AS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT and intriguing poets of the romantic period, Byron has been the subject of much recent critical commentary. However, no matter how excellent some of this scholarship is, the reader who is familiar with evolutionary psychology, the science that has tried to explain the biological underpinnings of human (...) nature, inevitably comes away from it with a feeling of dissatisfaction. In spite of the obvious relevance of biological theories of human behavior to the most basic issues of literary interpretation, only a handful of literary critics, and no Byron critics, have attempted to use these theories to understand the creation and reception of literary texts. All literary criticism relies on assumptions about human nature; because most critics are unfamiliar with evolutionary psychology, these assumptions are almost never clarified and justified. By familiarizing themselves with evolutionary psychology, literary critics can replace their vague, commonsensical, and often empirically unsupported assumptions about human nature with more precise and empirically valid theories.Much recent research on the evolution of sexuality has focused on "cad" and "dad" mating strategies in men. Cads seek to maximize their reproductive success by maximizing the number of their sexual partners and by avoiding parental investment; dads are committed to long-term, monogamous relationships with women and make substantial parental investment in their children. The personality traits of cads—aggressiveness, rebelliousness, criminality, and sexual promiscuity—bear a close resemblance both to Byron's own personality traits and to those of the Byronic hero. Understanding the cad mating strategy [End Page 296] enables us to better understand Byron's personality as well as the conflicts between his personality and the culture of his time that shaped his literary production and reception. II Evolutionary psychology uses the principles of evolutionary biology as a guide to the study of human cognition and behavior. The types of psychological traits that will succeed evolutionarily are those that maximize an organism's ability to transmit its genes to the next generation, or what evolutionary psychologists call its "fitness," by successfully reproducing and by helping kin who share its genes to reproduce. Our psychological design did not evolve in the environment that we now inhabit but on the African savannah of the Pleistocene era; therefore, evolved human psychology is best understood not in relation to the lifestyle of the citizens of modern nation-states, but to that of hunter-gatherers. 1Recent research on human sexuality has suggested that humans have evolved to pursue two different types of mating strategies: short-term and long-term. On the one hand, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, unlike most mammals, humans are designed for long-term sexual relationships with substantial male parental investment in children. Human infants require a great deal of parental care, and children reared in father-absent households suffer much higher mortality rates than those who are reared in father-present households, especially in preindustrial societies. 2 The sexual psychology of women also indicates that human sexuality has been shaped by long-term sexual relationships. A number of studies both in the United States and across cultures have shown that women regularly report being attracted to men who are socially respected, financially well-off, ambitious, industrious, dependable, emotionally stable, and romantic, 3 all qualities that indicate the ability and willingness to sustain long-term, parentally investing relationships with women.However, there are also aspects of both men's and women's sexuality that show that we did not evolve exclusively to pursue long-term mating. The evidence for the importance of short-term mating in human evolution is most obvious in men, who consistently show a marked desire for sexual variety. For example, in a survey, male college students said that they would, on average, like to have six partners in the coming year, and men fantasize about having sex with multiple partners (Buss, [End Page 297] ED, pp. 76-83). The fitness advantage of short-term sexual relationships to men is obvious: men can have more offspring the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowAlison StoneGod the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Christ (...) and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties.Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body.However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all.Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche.The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also... (shrink)

Hysteria has disappeared from contemporary culture only insofar as it has been subjected to a repression through the popular diagnosis of 'borderline personality disorder'. In _Hysteria_ the distinguished psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas offers an original and illuminating theory of hysteria that weaves its well-known features - repressed sexual ideas; indifference to conversion; over-identification with the other - into the hysteric form. Through a rereading of Freud, Bollas argues that sexuality in itself is traumatic to all children, as it 'destroys' the (...) relation to the mother, transfiguring her from 'mamma', the infant's caregiver, to 'mother', the child's and father's sex object. For the hysteric this recognition is endlessly traumatic and the hysterical personality forms itself into an organised opposition to this knowledge. True to his earlier writings, Bollas' vision is thought provoking and mind expanding. _Hysteria_ brings new perspectives to long-standing ideas, making enlightening reading for students and professionals involved in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy alike, as well as the lay reader who takes an interest in the formation of personality in western culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:74 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer L. Holland “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust”: Children and Young Adults in the Anti-Abortion Movement During the last three decades of the twentieth century, children across the United States regularly encountered adults who both hailed them as survivors of a holocaust and pleaded with them not to perpetrate one. These adults were not talking about war, (...) at least not in a traditional sense. They were talking about legal abortion. Children and young adults often heard this pitch in school presentations like one made in the mid-1970s by a California anti-abortion group, United Parents Under God, in which pictures of aborted fetuses (whose “feet will never kick a football... run on a playground... or play hopscotch”) and their imagined lost life stories were the centerpiece. Next to pictures of aborted fetuses were pictures of two prematurely born infants of color (the only people of color in the presentation) who were supposedly in danger under Roe v. Wade. With murder hovering in the air, activists asked their teen audience, “Is someone you love next?” According to these California anti-abortion activists, young people were physically and intellectually vulnerable to pro-choice views because they inhabited “atheistic” classrooms “where evil can no longer be called ‘evil.’” “You are quite literally ‘trapped’ in a completely ‘pagan’ situation in our secular society and schools and we must reach you anyway we can,” they continued. In the so-called “pro-life” worldview, liberals were brainwashing children and young people through the media, public schools, and many other institutions. Jennifer L. Holland 75 “Women’s liberal abortion speakers,” political scientists, “who typically work for the STATE” and for whom the “ends justify the means,” and new “secular-science textbooks”—all were trying to frighten teenagers to “into killing [their] OWN OFFSPRING,” activists said. Anti-abortion women, “ordinary women... who LOVE you” according to the California presentation, sought to protect children while feminist “witches... distort [ed] God’s purposes of sexuality.”1 In order to counteract what they viewed as corruption, anti-abortion activists had to wage a counter -battle, politicizing children in order to make them innocent again. In practice, that meant bringing the abortion wars—with their attendant graphic imagery and discussions of immorality, murder, and “holocausts ”—into the haven of childhood. From the movement’s early days, anti-abortion activists waged their fight in the name of innocent young people; abortion, they said, was a genocide of children. While these activists were certainly not the only US movement to use the supposed vulnerability of children to elicit public support for their cause, they also did something different. For the anti-abortion movement, children and young adults were more than just endangered innocents; they were also potential perpetrators. Young people, it seemed, were more liberal than their elders, having allegedly been reared in and indoctrinated by liberal culture. They seemed, in short, to be a potentially pro-choice generation. Thus, adult activists spoke more to and about young people at the end of the century. Adults needed young people to speak for fetuses as “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust,” but they also needed to convert and save America through them. The anti-abortion narrative of childhood vulnerability offered the restoration of social hierarchies as a solution to the problem of abortion. It was “women’s liberal abortion speakers” and feminist “witches” who were the sources of societal indoctrination. Pro-choice women separated sex and reproduction, thus undermining women’s role in society and changing their relationships with men. More subtly, anti-abortion 1. United Parents Under God, “That They May Live: A Presentation on Abortion,” n.d., folder 1, United Parents Under God Ephemeral Materials, Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. This publication was probably created in the early to mid-1970s because the few citations contained within are from between 1970 and 1973. 76 Jennifer L. Holland activists—who were almost always white—mourned the loss of past racial hierarchies while also envisioning theirs as a civil rights movement. In the California presentation mentioned above, activists explicitly compared abortion to mandated... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hamlet’s PerfectionJohn D. CoxHamlet’s Perfection, by William Kerrigan; xviii & 179pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $29.95.While acknowledging that his reading of Hamlet is “idiosyncratic and unfashionable” (p. x), Kerrigan offers no apologies for it, asserting, instead, that tradition is worth vindicating, because “those who have been trained in a tradition may discard it, but those who come after, students of the discarders, will be simply oblivious” (...) (pp. 2–3). Putting all his cards on the table, Kerrigan acknowledges four influences in the tradition he defends: literary formalism, historical scholarship, intellectual history, and psychoanalysis (pp. xii–xiii).Hamlet criticism thus “begins with the Romantic Germans” (p. 1), and they eventually give rise to Freud, who “influences most of the criticism of our century” (p. 14), even when critics (like Eliot) disagree with him. Kerrigan’s reading of the tradition is illuminating, subtle, informed, and informative, and he uses it to establish his reading of the play, working within the tradition but extending it in hitherto unseen and insightful ways. Of course Hamlet delays for Kerrigan, but no one has ever explained his delay so carefully or with so many other factors taken into account. “This seems to me much the best reading yet of the delay,” Kerrigan asserts (p. 76), and one is inclined to assent, given the assumptions.But why make these assumptions? Kerrigan dismisses postmodern criticism: it is a symptom of “our current decadence” (p. 31) and has contributed “little to the elucidation of Hamlet” (p. xi). Since the elucidation of texts and characters is not the aim of postmodern critics, they unsurprisingly fail at what they do not attempt. Yet they follow a tradition established, for the most part, by Marx and Nietzsche, and Kerrigan does not explain why he venerates one of Paul Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion,” namely Freud, and not the other two.In fact, many readers may feel that Kerrigan fails to avoid decadence himself. He relates his Oedipal explanation of Hamlet’s delay to the observation that Shakespeare never has anything good to say about cosmetics, even though he was a man of the theater. Kerrigan relates this “split,” in turn, to early traumas in Shakespeare’s life. The fact that Mary Shakespeare had lost two daughters before William’s birth means that she must have been overattentive to him as an infant, yet she must have weaned him nine months before birth of younger brother Gilbert, thus splitting William’s attitude toward her between resentment of her overattention and resentment of being displaced at the breast. Kerrigan finds evidence of the latter in Timon 4.3.114–20, where Timon inveighs against “milk-paps” as “horrible traitors” (p. 78). Never mind that these are virgin’s paps and that Timon’s emphasis is sexual, not maternal: breasts are traitors to Timon as sex objects, not as sources of nutrition. The critic’s confusion between virgin and maternal breasts perhaps explains why Kerrigan places Thaisa in a brothel in Pericles, rather than Marina (p. 80), but I am not sure what psychological explanation to offer for this particular split. [End Page 381]Kerrigan would do well to heed the postmodern insight that we all speak out of a specific tradition, with the attendant lesson that tolerance and mutual respect across traditions is imperative, since “ridiculous” and “mockable” are relative to context, as Corin points out to Touchstone.In privileging Freud, Kerrigan not only dismisses the heritage of Marx and Nietzsche but underestimates the importance of what lies behind all three. For the Romantic/Freudian tradition cannot claim to have originated either character analysis or individuality, which Kerrigan purports to value. “A man’s character is his fate,” Heraclitus says, perhaps generalizing from Homer, but the insight would eventually inform Aristotle’s notion of an ethics based on virtuous character, which in turn was Christianized by Thomas (where it complements the moral sense of individual worth that Hamlet acknowledges in the providential oversight of sparrows), and came to influence the Reformers in various ways. Kerrigan has good things to say about Stoicism in Hamlet, but to assert that “It all begins with the Romantic Germans... (shrink)

Este trabajo se enmarca dentro del análisis de las acciones alternativas a la privación de libertad en adolescentes infractores a la ley penal. Intenta buscar soluciones que eviten la cárcel para quienes cometan pequeños delitos, opción que puede disminuir el índice de reincidencias. El objetivo es promover, desde el Trabajo Social, una doble reflexión: primero, analizando críticamente el concepto de delito, su definición en las diversas corrientes ideológicas y su aplicación en la legislación argentina; y segundo, la importancia de que (...) los jóvenes se responsabilicen de sus actos y experimenten caminos alternativos al delito.This work places inside the analysis of the alternative actions to the privation of freedom in inobservant teenagers to the penal law. It tries to look for solutions that avoid the jail for those who commit small crimes, option that can diminish the index of repetitions. The aim is to promote, from the Social Work, a double reflection: first, analyzing critically the concept of crime, his definition in the diverse ideological currents and his application in the argentine legislation; and second, the importance of which the young men take responsibility of his acts and experience alternative ways to the crime. (shrink)

El presente trabajo aborda el concepto de Transmodernidad bajo dos puntos de vista diferentes. Por un lado, la mirada de Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, la cual nos plantea la Transmodernidad como una tríada dialéctica entre Modernidad-Postmodernidad-Transmodernidad, siendo esta última tanto una continuación como una superación de la Postmodernidad. El otro punto de vista corresponde a Enrique Dussel, el cual nos plantea la Transmodernidad como un proyecto utópico que es transversal a la Modernidad/Postmodernidad; está antes de la Modernidad y a la (...) vez la trasciende, siendo una categoría de exterioridad que pretende sacar la voz propia de las culturas no europeo-norteamericanas, para así poder establecer diálogos interculturales simétricos que llevan consigo características de la propia cultura inconmensurables al proyecto moderno europeo. Así enfrentamos ambas concepciones de la Transmodernidad para destacar sus diferencias y contraposiciones. (shrink)