Female genital alteration is any cutting, removal or destruction of any part of the external female genitalia. Various FGA practices are common throughout the world. While most frequent in Africa and Asia, transglobal migration has brought ritual FGA to Western nations. All forms of FGA are generally considered undesirable for medical and ethical reasons when performed on minors. One ritual FGA procedure is the vulvar nick. This is a small laceration to the vulva that does not cause (...) morphological changes. Besides being performed as a primary ritual procedure it has been proposed as a substitute for more extensive forms of FGA. Measures advocated or taken to reduce the burden of FGA can be punitive or non-punitive. Even if it is unethical to perform VN, we argue that it also is unethical to attempt to suppress it through punishment. First, punishment of VN is likely to cause more harm than good overall, even to those ostensibly being protected. Second, punishment is likely to exceed legitimate retributive ends. We do not argue in favor of performing VN. Rather, we argue that non-punitive strategies such as education and harm reduction should be employed. (shrink)

This paper examines texts written by, or in collaboration with, female ex-members of the Italian left-wing armed organization, the Red Brigades. The corpus differs from male-authored or male-centred texts in that issues relating to identity and selfhood lie at the very heart of the project of narrating the terrorist past; the primary concern of Italian women's post-terrorist narration is not to narrate the experience of belonging to an armed organization, but to construct a new identity distinct from a pre-existing (...) self identified exclusively with the transgressive experience of political violence. I consider the corpus in the light of a number of critical problems posed both by the specificity of female perpetration and by the dearth of theoretical writings on perpetrator trauma more generally. I identify in each text an acute anxiety about the very act of speech or narration and find that, in order to circumvent the perceived prohibition on speech, the women of the Red Brigades subtly insinuate into their life writing a discourse of alterity bordering on subalternity that obscures the boundary between victim and perpetrator. The unacknowledged slippage between discourses of perpetration and victimization is explored in relation to Ruth Leys’ critique of Cathy Caruth's formulation of trauma as the wound that cries out through the voice of the victim. The paper concludes by questioning whether perpetrator trauma can ever be articulated as such and by considering the implications of that question for traumatized perpetrator and victimized society alike. (shrink)

The present study examines the physiological alterations in prolactin (PRL) messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) and serum PRL levels during the rat estrous cycle and the effed of naloxone, an endogenous opioid peptide receptor antagonist, on PRL gene expression during the rat estrous cycle. Adult female rats exhibiting at least two consecutive 4-day estrous cycles were used in this study. A single injection of naloxone (2mg/kg b.w.) or saline was given sc 30 mm prior to decapitation. Animals were sacrificed at (...) 10:00 h of each stage of the estrous cycle, and at 2-h intervals from 10:00 h to 20:00 h during the proestrus. PRL mRNA and serum PRL levels were determined by an RNA-blot hybridization with the rat PRL cDNA probe and by a PRL radioimmunoassay, respectively. PRL mRNA and serum PRL levels were not dramatically altered in the morning of each stage of diestrus I, II, and proestrus, and naloxone failed to modify the two parameters. During estrus naloxone clearly suppressed serum PRL levels, but it was unable to modify PRL mRNA levels. A more detailed examination of the proestrus stage revealed that PRL mRNA and serum PRL levels fluctuated as a function of time: PRL mRNA levels reached a maximum level at 12:00 h and gradually decreased until 18:00 h. PRL mRNA levels then rose at 20:00 h. No difference in PRL mRNA levels between the control and naloxone-treated groups was observed. Changes in serum PRL level during proestrus were conversely related to changes in PRL mRNA: serum PRL levels were low from 10:00 h to 14:00 h, then increased and reached a maximum level at 16:00-18:00 h. Following then, serum PRL levels were decreased. Naloxone was effective in suppressing the characteristic afternoon surge of PRL from 16:00 h to 20:00 h. These data clearly showed that alterations in PRL mRNA levels were conversely correlated with changes in serum PRL levels on proestrus, indicating differential regulation of PRL gene expression and secretion. (shrink)

Introducción: La ablación o mutilación genital femenina incluye una amplia variedad de prácticas que suponen la extirpación total o parcial de los genitales externos o su alteración por razones que no son de índole médica. Causa daños irreversibles y pone en peligro la salud, e incluso la vida de la mujer o niña afectada. Objetivo: Caracterizar la mutilación genital femenina y sus complicaciones a largo plazo en la comunidad de Fajikunda, Gambia, entre marzo y septiembre de 2012. Método: Se realizó (...) un estudio descriptivo prospectivo a 117 mujeres que asistieron al centro de salud por cualquier motivo que requiriera examen ginecológico y se estudiaron las variables grupo de edades, tipo de mutilación, grupo étnico y complicaciones. Resultados: Del total, 98 mujeres eran de 45 años de edad o menos; la clitoridectomía fue la práctica más frecuente; la inflamación pélvica crónica y el dolor en los genitales fueron las complicaciones a largo plazo que mayor asociación estadística demostraron con relación a la mutilación. La anorgasmia presentó una alta incidencia en la población estudiada. Conclusiones: La prevalencia de la mutilación genital femenina en Fajikunda es aproximadamente la misma que en Gambia, la tipo I es la más practicada y generalmente en jóvenes de la etnia Mandinga. Introduction: The ablation or female genital mutilation includes a wide variety of practices dealing with total or partial extirpation of the external genitalia or its alterations for reasons other than of medical nature. It causes irreversible damages and puts in danger the health or even the life of the woman or child involved. Objective: The aim of the present study is to characterize female genital mutilation and its long-term complications in Fajikunda community, Gambia, between March and September 2012. Method: A descriptive prospective study was performed to 117 women that attended the health unit for reasons requiring gynecological examination and the variables age group, mutilation type, ethnic group and complications were studied. Results: Of the total, 98 women were 45 years old or less; the clitoridectomy was the most frequent practice; cronical pelvic and genital pains were the long-term complications that showed a major statistical association with relation to mutilation. Conclusions: The prevalence of female genital mutilation in Fajikunda is approximately the same as in Gambia, the type I is the most performed and generally within young women belonging to Mandinga ethnic group. (shrink)

This essay begins to develop a philosophical interpretation of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale, a work of fiction that is known in English as The Neapolitan Novels. My ultimate aim is to explore the work's ambitious moral psychology, and particularly its subtle conceptualization of women's path to freedom. I begin by reconstructing some of the main ideas of Italian difference feminism as they are expressed in the texts of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective—texts that are controversial milestones of Italian social theory, (...) yet are relatively unknown outside of Italy. I then show how these ideas provide a useful frame of reference for interpreters of Ferrante's novel. This discussion sets up a more extended analysis of the special status of Lila Cerullo, her strange condition of smarginatura, and the import of her puzzling earthquake speech. (shrink)

Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of the evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that “explains” a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory specialists call Sexual Selection, a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sexes. Darwin thought the (...) conspicuous sexual differences among animals are adaptations to female choice. Down to our day the biology of sexual selection confirms his melodramatic cliches: Males are passionate, armed, and ornamented, females coy and drab, conflict inevitable and ubiquitous. Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, dismisses sexual selection as “pure ideology.” “A huge body of scientific theory is incorrect.” All the parts that overlook the evolution of real cooperation, meaning not the coincidence of selfish interests, but coordinated collaboration. The evidence of such cooperation between the sexes is diverse, cumulative, and much underappreciated. Roughgarden also takes friendship and pleasure seriously. Intimate contact keeps animals coordinated, and mutual pleasure makes cooperation self-policing, without the punishing algorithms postulated by Evolutionary Psychology. Her book is a serious work of science. She argues that “sexual selection can never be demonstrated once studies are sufficiently thorough,” and shows that this whole area of evolutionary biology “is not settled science, is in considerable flux, and is not ready for export.” If you research any field affected by the claims of Sexual Selection, Evolutionary Psychology, or the Selfish Gene, you may want to study this book. (shrink)

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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Radical Female Imaginary: Temporality and Embodiment in Irigaray’s EthicsEwa Plonowska Ziarek* (bio)An important intervention of Irigaray’s work on sexual difference into the postmodern debates on ethics is the mediation between two different lines of ethical inquiry: one represented by the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault, and, to a certain degree, Castoriadis, and the other by the work of Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard. Although the two trajectories (...) both depart from the notion of morality as a universal system of law and judgment, they represent different approaches to freedom and obligation. For Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard, the ethical significance of alterity disrupts social systems of signification and, in this sense, marks transcendence as a break in discourse, whereas for Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, otherness is expressed within the endless variations of becoming. To elucidate this difference, it might be useful to recall John Caputo’s distinction between two kinds of postmodern ethics—the Nietzschean heteromorphism and the Levinasian heteronomy. In its emphasis on becoming and change, heteromorphism, Caputo claims, puts forward the claim of liberation but cannot accommodate an obligation to the other: “In heteromorphism, the aim is freedom from inhibition and blockage, freedom from... the weight of values... from everything that weighs the will down....” By contrast, the Levinasian ethics of alterity gives priority to the obligation to the other, which calls the freedom of the subject into question: “freedom is suspect, suspended, held in question, because it is aggressive, self-accumulative, and eventually, finally murderous. Heteronomism wants the other to be free while one is oneself held hostage” [Caputo 60].In my discussion of the radical female imaginary I would like to show that Irigaray’s work refuses to align itself with either side of this divide. Originating in the very gap between liberation and responsibility, self and other, immanence and transcendence, freedom and obligation, the feminist ethics of sexual difference cannot disregard any of these claims. For Irigaray, the ethics of sexual difference has to enable different trajectories of gendered becomings without forgetting the obligation to the other. In fact, Irigaray argues that the responsibility to the other who differs sexually is the very source of such becomings. Irigaray’s ethics maintains neither the rigid separation between freedom and obligation, as is the case in Levinas’s work, nor their symmetrical reversibility, as is the case in Kant’s ethics. By contesting the oppositions between carnal passions and ethical obligations, between the respect for the other and the becoming of the self, Irigaray allows us to think through the disjunction between the two main ethical trajectories of postmodernism and to find the means to negotiate between them. In this essay I would like [End Page 60] to focus on two moments of such negotiation: the becoming of sexed bodies and the temporality of the female imaginary.One of Irigaray’s famous claims is the charge of the forgetting of sexed bodies in the discourses of philosophy, science, linguistics, and politics. Although this claim is certainly not new in feminist theory, what is original in Irigaray’s work is the diagnosis of the numerous symptoms of such forgetting, for instance, the relation she makes between the erasure of the sexed body and the nihilism of Western culture. For Irigaray, the forgetting of sexual difference manifests itself not only in the disregard for the specificity of feminine embodiment, desires, and genealogies but also in the disembodied character of linguistic analyses, in the erasure of the drama of enunciation evident in the privilege given to predication, in the separation of the subject of knowledge from carnality and desire, in the infatuation with formalism and with its obverse side, the crippling nostalgia for the maternal body, and, finally, in the rigid separation between the immanence of flesh and the transcendence of the spirit. 1 Even more striking is the originality of Irigaray’s intervention, which links the question of sexual difference with the temporality of the body.An important element of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference is the recovery of “that repressed entity, the female imaginary” [TS 28]. Despite numerous excellent discussions of the imaginary in Irigaray’s work, the complexity of her negotiations around this... (shrink)

Confucian scholars often reference the Yijing 《易經》 (the Classic of Changes), the Liji 《禮記》 (Records of Rituals), and other classics in their advocacy for female chastity. Perplexingly, vocabulary that suggests extremism, which often results in self-imposed – or public sanctioned – suicide, starvation, or physical disfigurement of women during the pre-modern China and the early republic, either does not appear or rarely appears in the Yijing or other early Confucian canons. In these early texts, both zhen 貞 and jie (...) 節 have multiple meanings. Neither term is confined to a specific gender. This fact suggests that the original meanings of zhen and jie in the Yijing, composed around 1046 BCE–771 BCE, had likely been altered and radicalized in later times. I use word frequency analysis, examination of hexagrams, and the method of intertextuality to expose and deconstruct interpretive contradictions and attempt to restore these concepts to their original meaning without distortion. (shrink)

Altered attachment characteristics may disturb the HPA and can even cause changes in the hippocampus. However, it is unknown if that will influence spatial navigation performance, learning and recalling. In this study we pretend to verify if there are differences in spatial navigation learning and was associated with attachment style dimensions of anxiety and close-depend. Sixty-five female participants were recruited and were evaluated using the Adult Attachment Scale-R and tested on a virtual maze navigation task (VMT) at one moment (...) (exploratory trial + 3 trials) and 24h later (3 trials). There was a significant Moment x Trial x Close-Depend interaction for the outcome time, F (2, 126) = 3.807, p = 0.025, with post-hoc analysis indicating that the High Close-Depend group displayed significant improvements between Trial 1 and Trial 3 in the post-test assessment. Conversely, the Low Close-Depend group displayed significant improvements between Trial 1and Trial 3 but on the pre-test assessment. Furthermore, the Low Close-Depend group presented significant better performance in pre-test Trial 3 in comparison to the High Close-Depend group. Thereby, it seems that low comfort with proximity and trust in others is associated with reduced spatial navigation recall, although spatial learning performance was actually superior in these participants. It is possible that reduced exposure to social interaction and meaning relationship may be reduced in the Low Close-Depend group, leading to modifications in hippocampal function and, ultimately, reduced spatial recall. Conversely, participants with high comfort with proximity and trust in others may not display typical spatial learning in the proposed task as they are more willing to freely explore the presented environment. (shrink)

The WHO, American Academy of Pediatrics and other Western medical bodies currently maintain that all medically unnecessary female genital cutting of minors is categorically a human rights violation, while either tolerating or actively endorsing medically unnecessary male genital cutting of minors, especially in the form of penile circumcision. Given that some forms of female genital cutting, such as ritual pricking or nicking of the clitoral hood, are less severe than penile circumcision, yet are often performed within the same (...) families for similar reasons, it may seem that there is an unjust double standard. Against this view, it is sometimes claimed that while female genital cutting has ‘no health benefits’, male genital cutting has at least some. Is that really the case? And if it is the case, can it justify the disparate treatment of children with different sex characteristics when it comes to protecting their genital integrity? I argue that, even if one accepts the health claims that are sometimes raised in this context, they cannot justify such disparate treatment. Rather, children of all sexes and genders have an equal right to bodily autonomy. This includes the right to decide whether their own ‘private’ anatomy should be exposed to surgical risk, much less permanently altered, for reasons they themselves endorse when they are sufficiently mature. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the "female condition" of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a "politics of alterity" with applications for feminist practice.

Drosophila males sing a courtship song to achieve copulations with females. Females were recently found to sing a distinct song during copulation, which depends on male seminal fluid transfer and delays female remating. Here, it is hypothesized that female copulation song is a signal directed at the copulating male and changes ejaculate allocation. This may alter female remating and sperm usage, and thereby affect postcopulatory mate choice. Mechanisms of how female copulation song is elicited, how males (...) respond to copulation song, and how remating is modulated, are considered. The potential adaptive value of female signaling during copulation is discussed with reference to vertebrate copulation calls and their proposed function in eliciting mate guarding. Female copulation song may be widespread within the Drosophila genus. This newly discovered behavior opens many interesting avenues for future research, including investigation of how sexually dimorphic neuronal circuits mediate communication between nervous system and reproductive organs. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the connection between religious belief, despair and gender in Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death and Fear and Trembling. I argue that despite Kierkegaard's abhorrent gender stereotyping, his concept of 'masculine despair' and its more extreme manifestation - the demonic - can be read ironically as a reductio ad absurdum of traditional 'male' virtues: pride, autonomy and dignity. That is to say, although the demonic is, according to Kierkegaard, the exact mirror-image of faith, it lacks precisely those (...) 'feminine' qualities - submissiveness and givingness - that would make faith a genuine possibility. Hence it would seem that Kierkegaard's bigotry notwithstanding, women are in fact constitutionally better equipped for the possibility of religious belief than are men, but given that this conclusion rests on very questionable premises, it presents at best a poisoned victory for the female sex. (shrink)

Making links between different embodied cultural practices has become increasingly common within the feminist literature on multiculturalism and cultural difference as a means to counter racism and cultural essentialism. The cross-cultural comparison most commonly made in this context is that between ‘African’ practices of female genital cutting (FGC) and ‘western’ body modifications. In this article, I analyse some of the ways in which FGC and other body-altering procedures (such as cosmetic surgery, intersex operations and 19th century American clitoridectomies) are (...) compared within this feminist literature. I identify two main strategies of linking such practices, which I have termed the ‘continuum’ and ‘analogue’ approaches. The continuum approach is employed to imagine FGC alongside other body-altering procedures within a single ‘continuum’, ‘spectrum’ or ‘range’ of cross-cultural body modifications. The analogue approach is used to set up FGC and other body-altering practices as analogous through highlighting cross-cultural similarities, but does not explicitly conceive of them as forming a single continuum. Two key critiques of the continuum and analogue approaches are presented. First, because these models privilege gender and sexuality, they tend to efface the operation of other axes of embodied differentiation, namely race, cultural difference and nation. As such, the continuum and analogue approaches often reproduce problematic relationships between race and gender while failing to address the implicit and problematic role which race, cultural difference and nation continue to play in such models. This erasure of these axes, I contend, is linked to the construction of a ‘western’ empathetic gaze, which is my second key critique. The desire on the part of theorists working in the West to establish cross-cultural ‘empathy’ through models that stress similarity and solidarity conceals the continuing operation of geo-political relations of power and privilege. (shrink)

This article analyzes selected short stories in Cecelia Ahern’s thirty-narrative collection Roar to see how the perspectives of posthuman and postfeminist critique can be incorporated via the common dystopic umbrella into the mainstream female readership of romance literature. The dystopic worlds created by Ahern in Roar portray inequality and power imbalances with regard to gender and sex. The protagonists are mostly middle-aged women whose family and personal lives are either regulated by dystopic realities or acquire a “dystopic” dimension, the (...) solutions to which are provided by, among other tropes, “posthuman” transformations. Roar introduces other-than-human elements, mostly corporeal alterations, in which the female bodies of Ahern’s characters become de-formed and re-formed beyond androcentric systems of value. The article raises the question of whether feminist and, to some extent, “posthuman” approaches, need to be popularized in such an abridged way as Ahern does in her volume. The answer depends upon the identification of the target audience and their expectations. Ahern’s Roar represents popular literature intended to be sold to as many readers as possible, regardless of their education, state of knowledge, etc. Viewed from that perspective, what some critics could perceive as the collection’s structural weaknesses constitutes its utmost marketing asset. The essay argues that despite not being a structurally innovative work of art, Ahern’s book fulfils the basic requirements of the popular fiction genre, intermittently providing some extra, literary gratification and popularizing rudimentary elements of the posthuman and postfeminist thought. (shrink)

The male gametes of most organisms lack cytoplasm. Consequently, most cytoplasmic genetic elements are maternally inherited: they cannot be transmitted patrilinnearly. The evolutionary interests of cytoplasmic elements therefore lie in transmission through the female. These elements may thus be in evolutionary conflict with nuclear genes which are transmitted by both sexes. This conflict is manifested in observations of cytoplasmically induced biased sex‐ratios. Some cytoplasmic genes avoid this fate by biasing the primary sex ratio towards females, or by inducing parthenogenesis. (...) Others kill male hosts, and either achieve transmission via dispersal, or benefit their clonal relatives in the dead male's female siblings. Still others cause the failure of zygotes resulting from pairings between males carrying specific microbes and females lacking them, causing an increase in the microbes through the sterilisation of non‐bearing females. Many, but not all, of these ‘ultra‐selfish’ microbes are closely related. Investigations of the significance of their phylogenetic affinities, or lack of them, their adaptability in terms of the methods by which they avoid, or ameliorate, the adverse effects of being in male hosts, and their importance as selective agents in the evolution of invertebrate sex determination systems, provide fertile spheres for future research. (shrink)

This article deals with questions concerning the nature of representation of the female body within the so-called `oriental' discourse in Serbian art: Who is the painter? For whom is the work painted? With whom is the work identified? With what other possibilities of identification does the work leave us? In the context of the historical codes, a stance towards a body is seen as a projection of the social, cultural and power impulses. In the first case studied, the artist (...) was a male commissioned by the Serbian court to paint a series of paintings for the indigenous population and foreigners. In the second case, the artist was also male, a Serb working in Vienna, who painted for the audience of the `real Europe' from the position of an identity alteration. The third case focuses on a female artist, Babett Bachmayer Vukanovic, who was born in Germany but after marrying a Serb moved to her husband's homeland. Visual constructions of female bodies are used as the starting point for the deconstruction of ignored gender-related questions in analysing époque. (shrink)

Twenty “uncontacted” Taromenani were slaughtered and two female children kidnapped in retaliation for the spearing of a couple of “civilized” Huaorani in March 2013. After months of indecision, the government of Ecuador decided to abduct the two little captives and send six warriors to jail for genocide. Each of these actions caused a moral outrage locally, nationally, and internationally. This article explores the complex constructions through which these violent events have come to be understood, both by the Huaorani and (...) by Ecuadorian nationals, and it shows how two broad concerns—“territoriality” and “compensation”—have structured both the violent conflicts discussed and subsequent attempts at peace restoration. The essay concludes with a brief anthropological discussion of the relationship between ontology and politics. Whereas recent theorizations of Amazonian cosmic economies of alterity sharpen our understanding of “the assimilation of the Other as a mode of reproduction,” they tend to obscure the whys and the hows of intra- and intercultural disagreements, as well as the nature of the resort to violence as a way of asserting one's will. (shrink)

Avec la Phénoménologie de la perception, la description de l’expérience du corps vécu devient un point central et caractéristique de la phénoménologie. Approfondissant la distinction entre Leib et Körper établie par Husserl, Merleau-Ponty revalorise le corps-sujet, vécu en première personne, par opposition au corps-objet, par exemple le corps étudié par la science. La « lecture corporelle » de la phénoménologie par les féministes, qui place au cœur de ses réflexions l’expérience du corps des...

This chapter explores Simone de Beauvoir's relation to Hegel's philosophy beyond her adaptation of the master and slave dialectic to the question of woman's historical relation to man. It focuses on her reading of the Hegelian Absolute, which underlies her rejection of the patriarchal representation of the female alterity as absolute, as manifested in the eternal myth of the feminine. Through a survey of Simone de Beauvoir's early intellectual history, it shows that the idea of the Absolute is more (...) important for Simone de Beauvoir than it is generally acknowledged in the philosophical literature on her. She interprets the Absolute as the idea of freedom, which unfolds itself in historical reality, and from which women cannot be excluded as persons. On personalist grounds, she argues that women's acquisition of political and moral status as persons is a necessary implication of the Absolute, if the Absolute has to overcome the unhappy consciousness the consciousness falls into in patriarchal myths. (shrink)

Male and female participants were instructed to produce an altered response pattern on an Implicit Association Test measure of gender identity by slowing performance in trials requiring the same response to stimuli designating own gender and self. Participants’ faking success was found to be predictable by a measure of slowing relative to unfaked performances. This combined task slowing (CTS) indicator was then applied in reanalyses of three experiments from other laboratories, two involving instructed faking and one involving possibly motivated (...) faking. Across all studies involving instructed faking, CTS correctly classified 75% of intentionally faking participants. Using the CTS index to adjust faked Implicit Association Test scores increased the correlation of CTS-adjusted measures with known group membership, relative to unadjusted (i.e., faked) measures. (shrink)

Early life stress precedes alterations to neuro-immune activation, which may mediate an increased risk for stress-related psychiatric disorders, potentially through alterations of central kynurenine pathway metabolites, the latter being relatively unexplored. We hypothesized that ELS in a non-human primate model would lead to a reduction of neuroprotective and increases of neurotoxic KP metabolites. Twelve adult female bonnet macaques reared under conditions of maternal variable foraging demand were compared to 27 age- and weight-matched non-VFD-exposed female controls. Baseline behavioral observations (...) of social affiliation were taken over a 12-week period followed by the first cerebrospinal fluid sample. Subjects were then either exposed to a 12-week repeated separation paradigm or assigned to a “no-RSP” condition followed by a second CSF. We used high-performance liquid chromatography for kynurenine, tryptophan, 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, kynurenic acid, and anthranilic acid as a proxy for quinolinic acid determination. At baseline, social affiliation scores were reduced in VFD-reared versus control subjects. CSF log KYNA and log KYNA/KYN ratio were lower in VFD-reared versus control subjects. CSF log KYNA/KYN was positively correlated with CSF log ANTH in VFD only. Controlling for log KYNA/KYN, log ANTH was elevated in VFD-reared subjects versus controls. CSF log KYNA/KYN obtained post-RSP was positively correlated with mean social affiliation scores during RSP, specifically in VFD. ELS is associated with a reduced neuroprotective and increased neurotoxic pathway products. That the two contrasting processes are paradoxically correlated following ELS suggests a cross-talk between two opposing KP enzymatic systems. (shrink)

Concealed fecundity and extended female sexual receptivity have evolved in some primates, including humans, conferring advantages both within primarily monogamous relationships and from extrapair liaisons. As humans evolved the intellectual capacity for decision-making, women became capable of altering their own fertility. In some circumstances, they may choose to ameliorate risks and responsibilities associated with pregnancy by reducing sexual motivation near the perceived most fecund time of their menstrual cycle. But three findings—a general inability of women to accurately recognize their (...) own intervals of fecundity, high variability in ovulation timing, and unconscious transmission and reception of cues associated with fecundity—constitute a physiological and behavioral syndrome that can be considered self-deception. In this study, I develop a descriptive model to determine implications of the hypothesis that these features of female and male physiology and behavior have been shaped by natural selection in response to female decision-making. My analysis shows that consensus motivation for coitus between partners influences both the importance of variable ovulation date and the probability of conception, under the influence of self-deception. It also identifies priorities for future empirical work. (shrink)

Benefits to females of short-term mating have recently been identified, and it has been suggested that women have evolved adaptations for this strategy. One piece of evidence supporting such a female adaptation would be that women find the experience of a one-night stand as affectively positive as men. Individuals (N = 1,743) who had experienced a one-night stand were asked to rate aspects of their “morning after” feelings (six positive and six negative). Women were significantly more negative and less (...) positive than men. Although women did not especially view these relationships as a prelude to long-term relationships, they felt greater regret than men about having been “used.” Extra-pair copulations were rated more negatively, but not less positively, than singles’ experiences. There was no interaction between gender and mated status on positivity or negativity. Although, in terms of subsequent affective response, women do not seem well adapted to casual sexual encounters, it may be important to distinguish impelling sexual motivation preceding intercourse from later evaluations of the event. Menstrual cycle changes may also be important in altering the strength and target of sexual motivation. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic has affected the entire globe, including the world of high-performance sports. Accordingly, it has been widely assumed that the thereby caused postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games could have negative psychological impacts for aspirants, since they were halted abruptly in the pursuit of their Olympic endeavors and their daily lives drastically altered. Considering the sudden nature of the pandemic, few researchers, if any, have yet scrutinized the individual experience of Olympic aspirants. This qualitative study examines (...) the subjective perceptions of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games postponement among Austrian Olympic athletes and coaches. To this end, 21 Austrian athletes (13 male, 8 female; mean age = 26.67 ± 4.93 years) and six male coaches were recruited through a criterion-based purposive sampling strategy. Five athletes had already qualified for the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020 and 15 athletes were still in an ongoing qualification process. Data was collected by means of short written statements, elicited via open-format questions on an anonymous online survey platform. In order to infer meaning from the text, a qualitative content analysis with an interpretative focus was conducted inductively, which allowed for deriving alternative explanations of findings. The results support the notion that the Olympic postponement was experienced in myriad ways by affected participants. Three general themes comprised of several meaning units of different levels of abstraction were created from the text data. Many respondents experienced an immediate emotional reaction to the postponement characterized by confusion, disappointment and/or relief. Participants associated multiple consequences with the postponement, such as the prolongation of physical and psychological pressure, a lack of motivation, concerns about future performance, living and their occupational career, but also the opportunity for performance improvement and recovery. Respondents displayed various coping strategies, such as distancing themselves from sports, cognitive reframing, appealing for acceptance, and planning behavior. This study gleans first insights into the idiosyncratic experience of the Olympic Games 2020 postponement among Austrian aspirants. The findings could serve to assist sport psychologists in their applied practice by informing them about athletes’ and coaches’ needs in their Olympic preparation during the ongoing pandemic. (shrink)

Many traditions have utilized silent environments to induce altered states of consciousness and spiritual experiences. Neurocognitive explorations of spiritual experience can aid in understanding the underlying mechanism, but these are surprisingly rare. We present the verbal report and the electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha profile of a female participant scoring a maximal 34 on the Absorption Scale, recorded before and while she was immersed in a whole-body perceptual deprivation (WBPD) tank. We analyze her trancelike experience in terms of the imagery reported: (...) a spaceship, corridors, doors, a man dressed in white, speaking to God, the sun, supernova, concentric images, and an out-of-body experience. Her report is indicative of a spiritual experience, given that she felt that she was “meeting God” in the laboratory. She exhibited both frontal and parietal left > right alpha power asymmetry at baseline, whereas in the WBPD condition, there was a global increase in alpha power and especially a sharp increase in right-frontal alpha power. Her verbal report and EEG alpha profile were compared to those of another female participant, also scoring high on absorption, whose verbal report was also indicative of a trancelike experience. For further comparison, we present the data for two participants scoring low on absorption. Spiritual experience that can be verbalized might be associated with a marked increase in right-frontal alpha power, as reported here. In contrast, a mystical experience characterized by ineffability would be indicated by a marked increase in left-frontal alpha power. (shrink)

How is feminism changing the way women and men think, feel, and act? Virginia Held explores how feminist theory is changing contemporary views of moral choice. She proposes a comprehensive philosophy of feminist ethics, arguing persuasively for reconceptualizations of the self of relations between the self and others and of images of birth and death, nurturing and violence. Held shows how social, political, and cultural institutions have traditionally been founded upon masculine ideals of morality. She then identifies a distinct feminist (...) morality that moves beyond culturally embedded notions about motherhood and female emotionality. Examining the effects of this alternative moral and ethical system on changing social values, Held discusses its far-reaching implications for altering standards of freedom, democracy, equality, and personal development. Ultimately, she concludes, the culture of feminism could provide a fresh perspective on--even solutions to--contemporary social problems. Feminist Morality makes a vital contribution to the ongoing debate in feminist theory on the importance of motherhood. For philosophers and other readers outside feminist theory, it offers a feminist moral and social critique in clear and accessible terms. (shrink)

Requests for support in professional changes are getting more and more numerous. Regarding jobs concerned with caring for others, therapeutic education needs to be spread into new approaches requiring social and human sciences (Tourette-Turgis, 2015 ; Chalmel, 2015). These requests lead to alterations in professional practices and changes in educational devices. This chapter deals with a direct observation of effective practices addressed to young patients and also implies the training of nurses through experiences. It also discusses ways of scientific collaboration (...) between female researchers in different scientific fields of the medical body leading the latter to alter their practices by creating pedagogic instruments or new tools for training. This inventive conception deriving from these exchanges leaning on experiences and skills previously built up and linked together to help devices development. Our contribution deals with and discusses the transformation of state nurses functions through these analyses and towards actions which do not only concern body care but a way of teaching healthy life style. The themes under study concerns the passing on and transferring experiences and responsibility when directing cessions from cardiology education to the therapeutic education nurse. (shrink)

This article examines the production of consecrated femininity in contemporary Polish convents. Drawing on qualitative data from 35 interviews in five religious communities the article explores the type of female agency which transforms the dominant model of Polish femininity instead of resisting it. Following Lois McNay’s concept of narrative identity, the article argues that female agency does not necessarily emerge out of subversion of the male-dominated Polish Catholic Church. Rather than simply being placed within discursive structures, Catholic nuns (...) reflexively alter them by using a mixture of gender ideology and spiritually driven gender work in order to produce coherent and socially meaningful narratives of consecrated femininity. (shrink)

This chapter explores the representation of the human body, with a particular focus on transgenesis and transgenderism, in Pedro Almodóvar’s La Ley del Deseo (Law of Desire) (1987) and La Piel que Habito (The Skin I Live In) (2011). Although released 24 years apart, both films represent the female body as a construct that mirrors the fluid reality of the postmodern era in which this body is found. Thus, as the physical space of our global habitat has become ever (...) more artificial, fragmented and unfixed so, too, the screened individual is a ‘floating and drifting self,’ a being that has become increasingly hard to define. Known for his unconventional themes and plots, Almodóvar here challenges traditional notions of what is male and female and the two concepts merge. The viewer explores a fluid corporeal and gendered territory as the once biologically male protagonists are subjected to either voluntary or forced sex change, leaving them physically transformed into a female although their thought patterns are still partly male. Gender and body are open to new interpretations as the filmmaker demonstrates how the human body (and skin), in a sexually permissive, socially and culturally less rigid era, can be surgically and bio-medically altered through a number of procedures, a process which by its end result at times reminds of a Deleuzian becoming. The screened individual is physically changeable, body and mind unfixed concepts, as one identity is left behind and another is adopted. Almodóvar’s man/woman/construct resembles what Zygmunt Bauman has called ‘denizens of’ a ‘postmodern habitat’ that ‘have a rootless and inconclusive existence.’ The argument is inserted into a Baumanian and Deleuzian framework and the fluidity of the human being is analysed from a partly postmodern perspective. (shrink)

Background: Losing one’s only child may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, of which re-experiencing is the core symptom. However, neuroimaging studies of sex differences in re-experiencing in the context of the trauma of losing one’s only child and PTSD are scarce; comparisons of the functional networks from the hippocampal subfields to the thalamus might clarify the neural basis.Methods: Thirty couples without any psychiatric disorder who lost their only child, 55 patients with PTSD, and 50 normal controls underwent resting-state functional magnetic (...) resonance imaging. The functional connectivity from the hippocampal subregions to the thalamus and the correlations of FC with re-experiencing symptoms were analyzed within and between the sexes.Results: Compared with husbands without PTSD, wives without PTSD had higher re-experiencing symptoms and weaker FC between the right hippocampal cornu ammonis 3 and the right thalamus. Moreover, only the correlation between the RCA3-RT FC and re-experiencing in wives without PTSD was significant. Among the three groups, only the RCA3-RT FC in female subjects was markedly different. Additionally, the RCA3-RT FC in wives without PTSD was remarkably lower relative to female patients with PTSD.Conclusion: Wives without PTSD who lost their only child had worse re-experiencing symptoms relative to their husbands, which was associated with the FC alteration between the hippocampal subregions and the thalamus. Importantly, the low level of the RCA3-RT FC may play a potentially protective role against the development of PTSD in wives who have lost their only child. (shrink)

While Merleau-Ponty does not theorize sexual difference at any great length, his concepts of the flesh and the institution of a sense suggest hitherto undeveloped possibilities for articulating sexual difference beyond the male–female binary. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is a “pregnancy of possibilities” which gives rise to masculine and feminine forms through a process of mutual divergence and encroachment. Both sexes bear “the possible of the other,” and neither represents the first or generic form of the human; each sex bears (...) the possibility of the other. By approaching sexual difference in terms of intersubjectively distributed possibilities rather than interlocking forms or types, we may grasp sexual difference in terms of both a developmental process in which bodies become sexed (and sometimes re-sexed) over time, and in terms of a social-historical process in which patterns of relation and exchange between sexed bodies shift over time, altering the very sense of sexual difference. (shrink)

This study investigates the Proteus effect from the first-person perspective and during avatar embodiment in actual exercise. In addition to the immediate measurements of the Proteus effect, prolonged effects such as next-day perception and exercise-related outcomes are also explored. We theorized the Proteus effect as altered perceived self-concept and explored the association between virtual reality avatar manipulation and self-concept in the exercise context. While existing studies have mainly investigated the Proteus effect in a non-VR environment or after VR embodiment, we (...) aim to contribute to the literature by addressing this concern to explore how the Proteus effect works in actual VR exercise. Through a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment, the results partially support the Proteus effect. Regarding actual physical activity, embodying an avatar with a six pack during exercise creates fewer body movements. No significant effect was found for perceived exertion. We also explored the role of sex as a potential moderator in the association of the Proteus effect on exercise outcomes. The Proteus effect was supported by immediate and next-day self-efficacy for core-muscle exercise only among female participants. The between-subject design allowed us to probe how avatar manipulation of muscular body shape with a six pack as opposed to normal body shape influences participants’ self-concept and exercise outcomes, as limited VR studies have employed within-subject comparisons. This also contributes to the literature by providing an upward comparison as opposed to the previous downward comparison regarding body fitness. The overall results supported the Proteus effect in the context of core-muscle exercise when comparing normal and ideal body shape avatars. However, the Proteus effect as an altered self-concept and its effects on self-efficacy for exercise were supported among females but not males. Whereas the female participants who embodied avatars with a six pack associated themselves more with the muscular concept than other people, the male participants who embodied avatars with a six pack perceived themselves as more normal than others. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Consider a case of a patient receiving life-supporting treatment. With appropriate care the patient could be kept alive for several years. Yet his latest prognosis also indicates that his mental abilities will deteriorate significantly and that ultimately he will become incapable of understanding what happens around and to him. Despite his illness, the patient has been eager to live. However, he finds the prospect that he is now faced with devastating. He undergoes an unconscious process that results in his finding (...) himself with a preference to die. Consequently, he requests his doctor to stop the treatment that she is providing. Other things being equal, standard medical ethics and the legislations of most Western countries allow the doctor to adhere to the patient’s request if it is autonomous. While its origins can be traced back to at least J.S. Mill’s work on women’s rights, unconscious alteration of one’s preferences in light of the options available for one has figured, for example, in recent discussion on female oppression and social choice theory. Yet the topic has not received attention in the debate on voluntary euthanasia. The inattention is unfortunate because the central problem with such adaptation has been taken to be that it undermines personal autonomy. This motivates the main question examined in this chapter, i.e. the problem of whether a request for euthanasia based on an adaptive preference is autonomous. (shrink)

Uchiyama et al. productively discuss how culture can influence genetic heritability and, by modifying environmental conditions, limit the generalizability of genome-wide association studies (GWASs). Here, we supplement their account by highlighting how recent changes in culture and institutions in industrialized, westernized societies – such as increased female workforce participation – may have increased assortative mating. This alters the distribution of genotypes themselves, increasing heritability and phenotypic variance, and may be detectable using the latest methods.

Why do physicians who've taken the Hippocratic Oath willingly cut into seemingly healthy patients? How do you measure the success of surgery aimed at making someone happier by altering his or her body? Sander L. Gilman explores such questions in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, a cultural history of the connections between beauty of body and happiness of mind. Following these themes through an impressive range of historical moments and players, Gilman traces how aesthetic alterations of the body have (...) been used to "cure" dissatisfied states of mind. In his exploration of the striking parallels between the development of cosmetic surgery and the field of psychiatry, Gilman entertains an array of philosophical and psychological questions that underlie the more practical decisions rountinely made by doctors and potential patients considering these types of surgery. While surveying and incorporating the relevant theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Menninger, Paul Schilder, contemporary feminist critics, and others, Gilman considers the highly unstable nature of cultural notions of health, happiness, and beauty. He reveals how ideas of race and gender structured early understandings of aesthetic surgery in discussions of both the "abnormality" of the Jewish nose and the historical requirement that healthy and virtuous females look "normal," thereby enabling them to achieve invisibility. Reflecting upon historically widespread prejudices, Gilman describes the persecutions, harrassment, attacks, and even murders that continue to result from bodily difference and he encourages readers to question the cultural assumptions that underlie the increasing acceptability of this surgical form of psychotherapy. Synthesizing a vast body of related literature and containing a comprehensive bibliography, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the histories of medicine and psychiatry, and in philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish cultural studies, and race and ethnicity. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that the desire for a thin female physique and its pathological expression in eating disorders result from a social pressure for thinness. However, such widespread behavior may be better understood not merely as the result of arbitrary social pressure, but as an exaggerated expression of behavior that may have once been adaptive. The reproductive suppression hypothesis suggests that natural selection shaped a mechanism for adjusting female reproduction to socioecological conditions by altering the amount of (...) body fat. In modern Western culture, social and ecological cues, which would have signaled the need for temporary postponement of reproduction in ancestral environments, may now be experienced to an unprecedented intensity and duration. (shrink)

White matter tracts are known to be susceptible to injury following concussion. The objective of this study was to determine whether contact play in sport could alter white matter metabolite levels in female varsity athletes independent of changes induced by long-term exercise. Metabolite levels were measured by single voxel proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the prefrontal white matter at the beginning and end of season in contact and non-contact varsity athletes. Sedentary women were scanned once, at a time equivalent (...) to the Off-Season time point. Metabolite levels in non-contact athletes did not change over a season of play, or differ from age matched sedentary women except that non-contact athletes had a slightly lower myo-inositol level. The contact athletes had lower levels of myo-inositol and glutamate, and higher levels of glutamine compared to both sedentary women and non-contact athletes. Lower levels of myo-inositol in non-contact athletes compared to sedentary women indicates long-term exercise may alter glial cell profiles in these athletes. The metabolite differences observed between contact and non-contact athletes suggest that non-contact athletes should not be used as controls in studies of concussion in high-impact sports because repetitive impacts from physical contact can alter white matter metabolite level profiles. It is imperative to use athletes engaged in the same contact sport as controls to ensure a matched metabolite profile at baseline. (shrink)

Childhood adversity is associated with altered or dysregulated stress reactivity; these altered patterns of physiological functioning persist into adulthood. Evidence from both preclinical animal models and human neuroimaging studies indicates that early life experience differentially influences stressor-evoked activity within central visceral neural circuits proximally involved in the control of stress responses, including the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN), bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and amygdala. However, the relationship between childhood adversity and the (...) resting-state connectivity of this central visceral network remains unclear. To this end, we examined relationships between childhood threat and childhood socioeconomic deprivation, the resting-state connectivity between our regions of interest (ROIs), and affective symptom severity and diagnoses. We recruited a transdiagnostic sample of young adult males and females (n= 100; mean age = 27.28,SD= 3.99; 59 females) with a full distribution of maltreatment history and symptom severity across multiple affective disorders. Resting-state data were acquired using a 7.2-min functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) sequence; noted ROIs were applied as masks to determine ROI-to-ROI connectivity. Threat was determined by measures of childhood traumatic events and abuse. Socioeconomic deprivation (SED) was determined by a measure of childhood socioeconomic status (parental education level). Covarying for age, race and sex, greater childhood threat was significantly associated with lower BNST-PVN, amygdala-sgACC and PVN-sgACC connectivity. No significant relationships were found between SED and resting-state connectivity. BNST-PVN connectivity was associated with the number of lifetime affective diagnoses. Exposure to threat during early development may entrain altered patterns of resting-state connectivity between these stress-related ROIs in ways that contribute to dysregulated neural and physiological responses to stress and subsequent affective psychopathology. (shrink)

The regional brain networks and the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms subserving the cognition of visual narrative in humans have largely been studied with non-invasive brain recording. In this study, we specifically investigated how regional and cross-regional cortical activities support visual narrative interpretation using intracranial stereotactic electroencephalograms recordings from thirteen human subjects (6 females, and 7 males). Widely distributed recording sites across the brain were sampled while subjects were explicitly instructed to observe images from fables presented in “sequential” order, and a set (...) of images drawn from multiple fables presented in “scrambled” order. Broadband activity mainly within the frontal and temporal lobes were found to encode if a presented image is part of a visual narrative (sequential) or random image set (scrambled). Moreover, the temporal lobe exhibits strong activation in response to visual narratives while the frontal lobe is more engaged when contextually novel stimuli are presented. We also investigated the dynamics of interregional interactions between visual narratives and contextually novel series of images. Interestingly, the interregional connectivity is also altered between sequential and scrambled sequences. Together, these results suggest that both changes in regional neuronal activity and cross-regional interactions subserve visual narrative and contextual novelty processing. (shrink)

Labioplasty is a surgical procedure performed to alter the size and shape of the labia minora. The reasons for women requesting this procedure remain largely unknown and recently girls and young women under the age of 18 years have been requesting this type of surgery. This paper examines the ethical acceptability of performing this procedure on under 18s. We will first discuss whether labioplasty can be considered to be a therapeutic technique. We will claim that, while it is difficult to (...) offer a definitive definition of what constitutes a therapeutic technique, in our view labioplasty cannot be considered as such. This conclusion has relevance for the ethical acceptability of the procedure, its legal status in regard to the Female Genital Mutilation Act and the debates over who can give consent for it. It will be concluded that in our current state of knowledge, the benefits of labioplasty are far from clear, whereas the harms are demonstrable and therefore this procedure should not be offered to those aged under 18 years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin J. B. LipscombAmy Gilbert RichardsLIPSCOMB, Benjamin J. B. The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xxx + 326 pp. Cloth, $27.95In The Women Are Up to Something, Lipscomb demonstrates in form (...) and content the inextricable link between philosophical theory and personal story and character. The book tells two stories: "first, a story [End Page 148] about four women, their overlapping friendships, and their struggle to establish themselves as philosophers in an often-hostile context; second, a story about two conflicting approaches to ethics." These two stories connect through the role these women played in the development of the second of the conflicting approaches—a challenge to the mid-twentieth-century Oxbridge orthodoxy in metaethics, what Lipscomb later calls a "minority report."Chapter 1 centers on the fact–value divide. The consequence of this divide for ethics lies in its banishment of all evaluative terms from the realm of possible facts, thereby demoting them to matters of "opinion." Lipscomb here offers a genealogy of the divide. He also introduces the insight that will become the seed of the minority report: The picture of the world offered by the fact-value divide is just that, a picture. Bringing to light the deep background pictures that undergird our understanding of the world is one of the most difficult intellectual tasks. But the picture rooted in the fact–value divide includes the claim that the divide itself is simply a "fact"—not a picture at all, and therefore not contestable. Lipscomb labels this view "the Dawkins' sublime."The next three chapters continue the work of stage-setting. Chapter 2 immerses us in the Oxford of the women's undergraduate years—an Oxford temporarily but dramatically altered by World War II, where female students made up a much larger percentage of the undergraduate population than was usual, and where professors were in a new way open to mentoring women. Chapter 3 briefly recounts all four childhoods, lived in the aftermath of the first World War. Chapter 4 returns to Oxford and narrates the graduate degrees of the four women. It also offers a perceptive primer on the history of analytic ethics, culminating in the state of the field at the point when the women were on the cusp of entering it—the precise shape of the approach to ethics the women would eventually abjure.Each of the next four chapters traces the development of the mature philosophy of one of the four women—in order: Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley. Despite deep differences among their philosophical and theological outlooks, they all four came to defend a version of the thesis, commonplace in ancient and medieval philosophy, that there are things that are good for human beings qua human being, that our moral lives are largely a matter of seeing and responding—well or poorly—to these elements of the human good that are given as part of our nature. In other words, there are facts about values. We in crucial ways discover rather than invent morality.The last chapter serves as an epilogue to both stories: It traces the ways in which the writing and lives of these four women produced a decisive change in the landscape of Anglo-American philosophy. Lipscomb notes which strains in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy owe their existence to the minority report. Figures like Korsgaard feature as contemporary representatives of an ethics grounded in the fact–value [End Page 149] divide. Figures like MacIntyre and Hursthouse feature as inheritors of the philosophical legacy of the book's heroines.In this final chapter Lipscomb also offers brief portraits of the later life and death of each of the women in turn. At the end of the final portrait, the book rounds to a poetic close—not offering a final philosophical statement but reflecting on the fruits of friendship and the power of its legacy for those who come after.It is difficult to pin down Lipscomb's precise philosophical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers ed. by Linda Lopez McAllisterSue M. WeinbergLinda Lopez McAllister, editor. Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv + 345. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $22.50.Hypatia: born in the fourth century A.D.: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, teacher; brutally murdered in Alexandria in 415 A.D—whether for holding religious views regarded as heretical or because she (...) was a woman who dared to be a scholar and teacher remains a matter of speculation. Today, she gives her name to the journal for feminist philosophy. She is a symbol for those women who, over the centuries, have struggled to be part of the philosophical life of their time.Until very recently, the centuries that separated Hypatia from the present were assumed to have been a philosophical desert for women. But times have changed. Hypatia’s Daughters is a sign of this change. It contains eighteen articles on seventeen philosophers: Hypatia; Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and Christine de Pisan from the Middle Ages; Elizabeth of Bohemia, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, Catharine Trotter, Belle van Zuylen and Mary Wollstonecraft from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Anne Doyle Wheeler and Harriet Taylor Mill from the nineteenth; Charlotte Perkins Oilman, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, and Angela Davis from the late nineteenth century into contemporary times. Few are known as well as they deserve, but many names are familiar even to non-specialists. Their ideas, however, are another matter.The collection in no way constitutes a definitive selection of women philosophers; those discussed are not presented as the most significant women philosophers in the history of philosophy. (A different kind of study would be necessary for evaluations of that kind.) The women here studied have little in common as a group; they wrote on many topics of philosophical concern; their views and their supporting reasoning differ. Further, as the subjects of the articles differ in their ideas, so do the contributors’ approaches and their methods of studying those ideas differ. These differences are the strengths of a collection that is stimulating, enlightening, provocative. The following examples indicate their range.Andrea Nye examines the correspondence of Heloise and Abelard and, in a second article, of Elizabeth of Bohemia and Descartes. Heloise and Elizabeth are usually regarded as passive followers or, at best, no more than serious questioners seeking answers of their correspondents. Nye’s fresh look at the Heloise-Abelard correspondence finds not only important differences between two ways of thinking, but also sees already underlying their disagreement what she calls the “macroquestion” of philosophy’s future: philosophy as “a professional discipline independent of political or social concerns or... an ongoing critical and cultural discourse.” (25) Elizabeth’s persistent questions to Descartes reveal ideas that challenge his views, especially on moral issues and physiological-psychological [End Page 164] phenomena; these are views that have a greater complexity than the basic issue of mind-body interaction that is usually identified as central to their exchange.Writing on Harriet Taylor Mill, Jo Ellen Jacobs examines changing attitudes towards her subject, beginning with views of Taylor Mill’s contemporaries and moving through the decades into our time. She finds parallels between criticisms of Taylor Mill and attitudes towards the so-called intellectual woman. In times encouraging of women, Taylor Mill is regarded as having made important contributions to the development of J. S. Mill’s thinking, in addition to writing and speaking about her own ideas and positions that did not always follow those of J. S. Mill. In less encouraging times, her significance tends to be minimized.Hannah Arendt is not usually thought of as a feminist. Joanne Cutting-Gray, through her discussion of Arendt’s early book on Rahel Varnhagen, develops implications of that study for Arendt as a “feminist thinker,” in particular through her focus on “the politics of alterity.” Cutting-Gray finds in the Varnhagen biography “an analogy between Jewish and female alterity [that] can stretch our understanding of women and politics.” (281)And there is more, much more: Martha Brandt Bolton’s scholarly examination of the philosophical works... (shrink)

This paper reviews the characteristics of anorexia nervosa described in the DSM-III-R , relates them to normative gender roles and adolescent development, and critiques those roles on feminist grounds. Two apparently contradictory explanations for the irrational pursuit of thinness are considered: a) the anorexic thus attempts to conform to a socially defined feminine ideal; b) the anorexic thus attempts to avoid the appearance and consequences of mature womanhood. I propose that both explanations are applicable, together emplifying the ambiguity that Simone (...) de Beauvoir considers characteristic of female experience. Because both explanations suggest a gender identity disorder, I question the fact that the DSM-III-R fails to indicate this linkage. I argue further that therapeutic considerations require efforts to alter the socialization factors that are implicative in anorexia nervosa. Keywords: anorexia nervosa, diagnoses, feminism, philosophy of biology, psychiatry CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Men and women “possessed by unclean spirits” throng the pages of the Acta sanctorum, just as they had for centuries thronged the shrines of miracle-working saints. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, however, the literature of edification shows a sudden upsurge of interest in demoniacs. They begin to proliferate not only in saints' lives but also in the new genre of the exemplum, associated with the friars and the rise of vernacular preaching. At the same time that these sources (...) are directing heightened attention toward the possessed, the symptoms of possession itself conspicuously alter. Unlike the violent and self-destructive persons who had always qualified for saintly exorcism, the energumens of the new exemplum literature are lucid and articulate, inspiring responses more of curiosity and respect than of pity or horror. Speaking in persona diaboli, they were viewed as sources of supernatural authority, treated with circumspect awe by priests, and sometimes even allowed to preach. In their diabolically inspired, charismatic role, such demoniacs bear a startling, if superficial, resemblance to prophetic female saints, who gained their religious authority by speaking in persona Dei. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse the recent rapid growth of ‘binge’ drinking in the UK. This means the rapid consumption of large amounts of alcohol, especially by young people, leading to serious anti-social and criminal behaviour in urban centres. British soccer fans have often exhibited this kind of behaviour abroad, but it has become widespread amongst young people within Britain itself. Vomiting, collapsing in the street, shouting and chanting loudly, intimidating passers-by and fighting are now regular night-time features of many (...) British towns and cities. A particularly disturbing aspect is the huge rise in drunken and anti-social behaviour amongst young females. Increasingly, policy makers in the West are concerned about how not just to regulate but to alter social behaviour. Smoking and obesity are obvious examples, and in the UK ‘binge’ drinking has become a focus of acute policy concern. We show how a simple agent based model approach, combined with a limited amount of easily acquired information, can provide useful insights for policy makers in the context of behavioural regulation. We show that the hypothesis that the rise in binge drinking is a fashion-related phenomenon, with imitative behaviour spreading across social networks, is sufficient to account for the empirically observed patterns of binge drinking behaviour. The results show that a small world network, rather than a scale-free or random one, offers the best description of the data. (shrink)