Putting the ethical tools of philosophy to work, Ellen K. Feder seeks to clarify how we should understand "the problem" of intersex. Adults often report that medical interventions they underwent as children to "correct" atypical sex anatomies caused them physical and psychological harm. Proposing a philosophical framework for the treatment of children with intersex conditions—one that acknowledges the intertwined identities of parents, children, and their doctors—Feder presents a persuasive moral argument for collective responsibility to these children and their families.

Ellen Feder's monograph is an attempt to think about the categories of race and gender together. She explains and then employs some critical tools derived from Foucault, in order to advance her main argument: that the institution of the family is the locus of the production of gender and race, and that gender is best understood as a function of a "disciplinary" power that operates within the family, while race is the function of a "regulatory" power acting upon the family (...) from outside. Her interdisciplinary work will be of interest to feminist philosophers and theorists because it plays into a recent expansion of interest in the family, as well as to literary scholars of Foucault, to scholars of race and race theory, and to other feminist scholars in political science, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Johann Georg Heinrich Feders Schriften bieten einen repräsentativen Einblick in die Entwicklung des philosophischen Denkens, die der deutschsprachige Empirismus zwischen den späten 1760er und den frühen 1790er Jahren nahm. Mit dieser ersten, kommentierten Edition der Schriften des berühmtesten zeitgenössischen Kant-Kritikers entsteht ein plastisches Bild der,Neuen Göttinger Wissenschaften‘ während der Spätaufklärung. Neben zahlreichen Zeitschriftenbeiträgen und Rezensionen werden paradigmatische Auszüge aus schwer zugängigen Monographien Feders präsentiert. So wird erstmals wird Feders einflussreiche Dissertation „De sensu interno“ im Original und in einer Übersetzung vorgestellt. (...) Auch viele der bislang unberücksichtigen Kritiken an Kants Transzendentalphilosophie werden in kommentierter Form präsentiert. Darüber hinaus dokumentiert der Band die Bandbreite des federschen Schaffens in Schul- und Popularphilosophie. Insgesamt entsteht ein facettenreichen Bild der philosophischen und publizistischen Schriften eines der produktivsten Philosophen der Spätaufklärung. (shrink)

The first-ever compilation of articles that highlights the intersection of Derridean and feminist theories--a work that represents the extensive and diverse response feminist theorists have had to Derrida, particularly to the issues of gender, identity, and the construction of the subject.

Katrina Karkazis, Fixing sex: Intersex, medical authority, and lived experience, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008, reviewed by Ellen K. Feder Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in doubt: An American history of intersex, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, reviewed by Ellen K. Feder.

Ethical questions in medicine tend to emphasize the intentions of researchers and physicians. Questions concerning harm have more often been addressed in terms of legal culpability. This commentary proposes that normalizing interventions for atypical sex anatomies, both historical and ongoing, be recognized as a kind of medical error, and that attention be focused not simply on prevention, but on repair.

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Even as feminist analyses have contributed in important ways to discussions of how gender is raced and race is gendered, there has been little in the way of comparative analysis of the specific mechanisms that are at work in the production of each. Feder argues that in Michel Foucault's analytics of power we find tools to understand the reproduction of whiteness as a complex interaction of distinctive expressions of power associated with these categories of difference.

The recent publication of Michel Foucault’s 1974-75 and 1975-76 lectures at the Collège de France provides an opportunity to reconsider the potential contribution of Foucault’s “analytics” of power for understanding the contemporary operation of race. Unlike the deployment of gender, which, I argue here, is best understood as a function of “disciplinary” power, the deployment of race is primarily a function of “biopower,” an expression of power that is bound up with the state apparatus. The announcement of the federal Violence (...) Initiative in the 1990s provides an illuminating example of the operation of this power, and the chiasmic function of discourse that Foucault famously termed “power/knowledge.”. (shrink)

Does life have meaning? What is flourishing? How do we attain the good life? Philosophers, and many others of us, have explored these questions for centuries. As Eva Feder Kittay points out, however, there is a flaw in the essential premise of these questions: they seem oblivious to the very nature of the ways in which humans live, omitting a world of co-dependency, and of the fact that we live in and through our bodies, whether they are fully abled or (...) disabled. Our dependent, vulnerable, messy, changeable, and embodied experience colors everything about our lives both on the surface and when it comes to deeper concepts, but we tend to leave aside the body for the mind when it comes to philosophical matters. Disability offers a powerful challenge to long-held philosophical views about the nature of the good life, what provides meaning in our lives, and the centrality of reason, as well as questions of justice, dignity, and personhood. These concepts need not be distant and idealized; the answers are right before us, in the way humans interact with one another, care for one another, and need one another--whether they possess full mental capacities or have cognitive limitations. We need to revise our concepts of things like dignity and personhood in light of this important correction, Kittay argues. This is the first of two books in which Kittay will grapple with just how we need to revisit core philosophical ideas in light of disabled people's experience and way of being in the world. Kittay, an award-winning philosopher who is also the mother to a multiply-disabled daughter, interweaves the personal voice with the philosophical as a critical method of philosophical investigation. Here, she addresses why cognitive disability can reorient us to what truly matters, and questions the centrality of normalcy as part of a good life. With profound sensitivity and insight, Kittay examines other difficult topics: How can we look at the ethical questions regarding prenatal testing in light of a new appreciation of the personhood of disabled people? What do new possibilities in genetic testing imply for understanding disability, the family, and bioethics? How can we reconsider the importance of care, and how does it work best? In the process of pursuing these questions, Kittay articulates an ethic of care, which is the ethical theory most useful for claiming full rights for disabled people and providing the opportunities for everyone to live joyful and fulfilling lives. She applies the lessons of care to the controversial alteration of severely cognitively disabled children known as the Ashley Treatment, whereby a child's growth is halted with extensive estrogen treatment and related bodily interventions are justified. This book both imparts lessons that advocate on behalf of those with significant disabilities, and constructs a moral theory grounded on our ability to give, receive, and share care and love. Above all, it aims to adjust social attitudes and misconceptions about life with disability. (shrink)

This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of women’s antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of “Women Breaking the Silence”. WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of women’s antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy for women’s antiwar discourse from the gendered marginalized position of “outsiders within” the military. From this contradictory standpoint, the women soldiers (...) offer a critical gendered voice, which focuses on criticism of the combat masculinity and gendered identification with the Palestinian “other.” While they reaffirm the republican ethos that grants political dominance to male soldiers, they also deconstruct the image of hegemonic masculinity as the emblem of the nation and undermine gendered militarized norms. (shrink)

Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the work of caring for dependents, "love's labors", figure neither in political ...

Some useful statistical tools and concepts; Plot or pen technique; The completely randomized design; Randomized complete block design; The latin square design; The choice of treatments and the factorial experiment; Other factorial experiments; Confounding in factorial experiments; Factorial experiments with main effects confounded- split plot and aplit block designs with vatiations; Incomplete block designs: general considerations and the one-restrictional lattices with treatments in complete replicates; Lattice designs with more one restriction on the allocation of treatments in the complete block; Other (...) incomplete block designs; Balanced designs; Some additional designs; Covariance. (shrink)

Cheryl Chase has argued that “the problem” of intersex is one of “stigma and trauma, not gender,” as those focused on medical management would have it. Despite frequent references to shame in the critical literature, there has been surprisingly little analysis of shame, or of the disgust that provokes it. This paper investigates the function of disgust in the medical management of intersex and seeks to understand the consequences—material and moral—with respect to the shame it provokes.Conventional ethical approaches may not (...) provide quite the right tools to consider this affective dimension of the medical management of intersex, but we find in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality a framework that allows us a profound appreciation of its moral significance (Nietzsche 1887/1998). Understanding doctors' disgust—and the disgust that they promote in parents of those born with atypical anatomies—as a contemporary expression of ressentiment directs us to not focus on the bodies of those born with intersex conditions, which have been the privileged objects of attention both in medical practice and in criticisms of it, but moves us to consider instead the bodies of those whose responses constitute the motivating force for normalizing practices in the first place. (shrink)

Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures provides an unusual and important reading of Michel Foucault's later work. This response is an effort to introduce McWhorter's project and to describe the challenge it presents to engage in askesis, the transformative exercise of thinking, which McWhorter's work itself exemplifies.

Despite the upsurge of research on disgust, the implications of this research for the investigation of cultural pollution beliefs has yet to be adequately explored. In particular, the sensitivity of both disgust and pollution to a common set of elicitors suggests a common psychological basis, though several obstacles have prevented an integrative account, including methodological differences between the relevant disciplines. Employing a conciliatory framework that embraces both naturalistic and humanistic levels of explanation, this article examines the dynamic reciprocal process by (...) which contamination/contagion appraisals in individuals serve to shape—and are in turn shaped by—culture-specific pollution beliefs. This complex interrelationship is illustrated by examining ancient Near Eastern and modern ethnographic documentation of pollution beliefs, highlighting the underappreciated function of these pollution beliefs as folk theories for the spread of infectious disease. By evaluating how pollution beliefs shape contamination appraisals in individuals, it will be argued that cultural inheritance has played a much larger role in guiding disease avoidance behavior than has been previously recognized. (shrink)

Critics of the gaps in our nation’s health insurance decry the absence of a health insurance “system” and the resulting “patchwork” of private and public insurance that leaves so many Americans unprotected. There is no question that these gaps are unconscionable; but they are also no accident. They are the result of policy and political choices with substantial consequences for those who remain uncovered. In my view, the fundamental political barrier to universal coverage is that our success in insuring most (...) of the nation’s population has “crowded out” our political capacity to insure the rest. This paper will explain how we arrived at the mix of private and public insurance we now have, how that mix impedes efforts to achieve universal coverage, and how “crowd-out” affects strategy for improving coverage in the future. (shrink)

One of two commentaries on “Normalizing Atypical Genitalia: How a Heated Debate Went Astray,” by Josephine Johnston, from the November‐December 2012 issue.

The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy is a definitive introduction to the field, consisting of 15 newly-contributed essays that apply philosophical methods and approaches to feminist concerns. Offers a key view of the project of centering women’s experience. Includes topics such as feminism and pragmatism, lesbian philosophy, feminist epistemology, and women in the history of philosophy.

Intersex—the fact of bodies neither typically male nor female, together with the grim history of its medical management—was a topic for feminist theory before there was such a thing as intersex activism. Indeed, critical academic scholarship about intersex supported the consciousness raising that made an intersex activist movement possible. Activist engagement, in turn, has expanded the understanding of the theorists whose work is responsive to that activism. Central to the thinking about intersex are the questions of identity and its limits (...) that are an important focus of the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, whose narrative suggests she had a condition associated with intersex. While her work largely predates intersex activism, it powerfully encapsulates the tensions displayed in contests over identity that have become central over the last 15 years, and furthermore offers insight into the challenges that lie ahead. (shrink)

Among the various human forms alluded to in the Hebrew prayer, mental retardation appears to be one of the most difficult to celebrate. It is the disability that other disabled persons do not want attributed to them. It is the disability for which prospective parents are most likely to use selective abortion (Wertz 2000). And it is the disability that prompted one of the most illustrious United States Supreme Court Justices to endorse forced sterilization, because "three generations of imbeciles are (...) enough." The mentally retarded have at times been objects of pity, compassion, or abuse by their caretakers and society at large. But they have rarely been seen as subjects, as citizens, as persons with equal entitlement to fulfillment. (shrink)