In many ways, globalization created the problem of representation for feminist solidarity across the borders of the nation state. This problem is one of presenting a cohesive identity for representation in the transnational public sphere. This paper proposes a solution to this problem of a cohesive identity for women’s representation by drawing on the work of Paul Ricœur. What these women seem to have in common are shared political aims, but they have no basis for those aims. This paper (...) provides a basis for these aims by turning to Ricœur’s work on collective memory from Memory, History, Forgetting. The paper concludes that it is the shared testimony through narrative hospitality, which can provide a foundation for a social bond for those with common political aims. More specifically, this common knowledge provides a justification for the representation of women and their allies in the transnational public sphere. (shrink)

Hume is usually taken to have an evidentialist account of testimonial belief: one is justified in believing what someone says if one has empincal evidence that they have been reliable in the past. This account is impartialist: such evidence is required no matter who the person is, or what refotions she may have to you. I, however, argue that Hume has another account of testimony, one grounded in sympathy. This account is partialist, in that empincal evidence is not required (...) in order for one to be justified in believing some of the assertions of one's friends. (shrink)

The contested testimony in the Hill-Thomas ease is an illuminating test case for universalistic theories about the reliability of testimony. There is no reasonable alternative to universalistic standards of epistemic appraisal. And yet the charge by feminists and others that such criteria can be applied selectively and used to discredit and silence people is shown to be accurate. The road to a solution is to offer guidelines for the interpretation and application of these norms.

Epistemic injustice is a widely discussed phenomenon in many sub-disciplines (including epistemology, ethics, feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy). Yet, there is very little literature on its connection to the philosophy of sports. Here I explore the intersection between epistemic injustice and sports, focusing on testimonial injustice. I argue that there exist clear-cut cases of testimonial injustice in sport that arise when athletes attempt to communicate information. After highlighting the theoretical connections between various cases, I explore the more ambitious (...) claim that sport performances themselves carry linguistic content. This claim allows us to see the biased negative judgment of sport performances in a new light, as constituting a further and distinctive form of testimonial injustice. I show how the case of figure-skater Surya Bonaly can be understood as a real-life instantiation of this form of testimonial injustice. I conclude by explaining why it is philosophically fruitful to understand these wrongs through the lens of testimonial injustice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, (...) but as a process of ‘articulating an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is a widely discussed phenomenon in many sub-disciplines (including epistemology, ethics, feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy). Yet, there is very little literature on its connection to the philosophy of sports. Here I explore the intersection between epistemic injustice and sports, focusing on testimonial injustice. I argue that there exist clear-cut cases of testimonial injustice in sport that arise when athletes attempt to communicate information. After highlighting the theoretical connections between various cases, I explore the more ambitious (...) claim that sport performances themselves carry linguistic content. This claim allows us to see the biased negative judgment of sport performances in a new light, as constituting a further and distinctive form of testimonial injustice. I show how the case of figure-skater Surya Bonaly can be understood as a real-life instantiation of this form of testimonial injustice. I conclude by explaining why it is philosophically fruitful to understand these wrongs through the lens of testimonial injustice. (shrink)

This article uses a feminist political economy framework to analyse economic violence against women in the context of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the introduction of neoliberal regimes in its successor states from the late 1980s until 2015. The authors’ focus is on the following processes before, during and after the breakup: the wider social, political and economic context of Yugoslavia before the war, already marked by the introduction of orthodox neoliberal standards and practices and combined with nationalism; (...) the period during the war, with escalation of conflict and growing nationalism; and the post-socialist transformation, marked by aggressive neoliberalism. The analysis is based on women’s testimonies given in preparation of and during the Women’s Court in Sarajevo in 2015. It points to the conclusion that orthodox neoliberal policy and privatization, intersecting with patriarchy, nationalism and conflict, induced economic violence against women in the region. (shrink)

This paper presents a feminist intervention into debates concerning the relation between human subjects and a divine ideal. I turn to what Irigarayan feminists challenge as a masculine conception of ‘the God’s eye view’ of reality. This ideal functions not only in philosophy of religion, but in ethics, politics, epistemology and philosophy of science: it is given various names from ‘the competent judge’ to the ‘the ideal observer’ (IO) whose view is either from nowhere or everywhere. The question is (...) whether, as Taliaferro contends, my own philosophical argument inevitably appeals to the impartiality and omni-attributes of the IO. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

Two decades ago, Tarana Burke started using the phrase ‘me too’ to release victims of sexual abuse and rape from their shame and to empower girls from minority communities. In 2017, actress Alyssa Milano made the hashtag #MeToo go viral. This article’s concern is with the role of testimonial practices in the context of sexual violence. While many feminists have claimed that the word of those who claim to being sexually violated by others have political and/or epistemic priority, others have (...) failed to recognize the harm and injury of instances of sexual violence that are not yet acknowledged as such and failed to listen to victims from marginalized social groups. In fact, some feminists have attacked #MeToo for mingling accounts of ‘proper’ sexual violence and accounts that are not ‘proper’ experiences of sexual violence. My aim in this article is to show why this critique is problematic and find a philosophically fruitful way to understand the #MeToo-movement as a movement that strives for moral and conceptual progress. (shrink)

In 1930 Husserl wrote that phenomenology is ‘a transcendental idealism that is nothing more than a consequentially executed self-explication in the form of an egological science, an explication of my ego as subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have a sense for me, the ego.’ In transcendental-phenomenological theory, according to Husserl, ‘every sort of existent itself, real or ideal, becomes understandable as a “product” of (...) transcendental subjectivity, a product constituted in just that performance.’ This appears so inimical to the fundamental bases of feminist theory that the question of the very possibility of a ‘feminist phenomenology’ inevitably arises, not least because so much associated with the contributions of feminist theory to philosophy concern precisely the critique of the transcendental, isolated, disembodied subject. This chapter explores the different kinds of feminist phenomenology of pregnancy and birth with this problem in mind. Although phenomenology has developed and transformed itself in ways more accommodating to feminist theory we are still entitled to ask what makes it phenomenology? What are the presuppositions of any feminist phenomenology if it is still to count as phenomenology, rather than descriptive social-psychology or feminist metaphysics or feminist ethics? Is phenomenology essentially tied to first-personal description, or can third-person accounts be a legitimate part of its analyses? If third-person descriptions are accepted as a legitimate, what considerations govern the inevitable interpretative aspect of their analysis? Can there be any phenomenology, feminist or otherwise, without some conception of transcendental subjectivity? And what is at stake in the continued use of the transcendental problematic, granted its immanent phenomenological criticism and its various theoretical transformations? This chapter addresses the question of the philosophical specificity of feminist phenomenology by pursuing its distinction from the use of phenomenological research methods in practice disciplines and qualitative psychology, via two of the pivotal questions raised above: can there be any phenomenology, feminist or otherwise, without some conception of transcendental subjectivity? And what is the role of third person testimony in phenomenology? I will argue that the first of these questions remains a problem for feminist phenomenology, in a way that is not easily solved with recourse to third person testimony, the use of which remains under-theorized in the feminist phenomenological literature. Finally, I will show how the problem of transcendental subjectivity is particularly acute for the feminist phenomenology of pregnancy and birth when we consider the generative metaphorics of its philosophical origin in Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

Although history has been one of the main disciplines through which we can understand gender, the paucity of data written or recorded by women makes it more difficult for the historian to research women's lives in the past. In the Caribbean, this task has been made easier by the discovery of a few key sources which allow an insight into the private sphere of Caribbean women's lives. These records of women who have lived in the Caribbean since the 1800s consist (...) of memoirs, diaries and letters. The autobiographical writings include the extraordinary record of Mary Prince, a Bermuda-born enslaved African woman. Other sources which have been examined are the diaries of women who were members of the élite in the society, and educated women who worked either in professions or through the church to assist others in their societies. Through her examination of the testimonies of these women, the author reveals aspects of childhood, motherhood, marriage and sexual abuses which different women – free and unfree, white, black or coloured – experienced. The glimpses allow us to see Caribbean women who have lived with and challenged the definitions of femininity allowed them in the past. It demonstrates that the distinctions created between women's private and public lives were as artificial then as they are at present. (shrink)

Much feminist epistemology has liberatory political objectives; therefore it is activist. Its non‐ideal theorizing reveals how social differences and power affect knowers, knowing, knowledge, and epistemological theorizing to sustain conditions of oppression, and articulates how norms and practices of knowing, in daily life and in the sciences, ought to change to enable social transformations. It articulates and promotes new, more inclusive, expansive, and nuanced epistemic norms and practices that produce knowledge and understanding needed to overcome structures of oppression and (...) to equitably promote well‐being. Such work in feminist epistemology may plausibly be considered applied philosophy. (shrink)

This volume deploys recent feminist epistemological frameworks to analyze how concepts like knowledge, authority, rationality, objectivity and testimony were constructed in Greece and Rome. The introduction serves as a field guide to feminist epistemological interpretations of classical sources, and the following sixteen chapters treat a variety of genres and time periods, from Greek poetry, tragedy, philosophy, oratory, historiography and material culture to Roman comedy, epic, oratory, letters, law and their reception. By using an intersectional approach to demonstrate (...) how epistemic systems exclude and pathologize the experiences of ancient women and other oppressed groups, these contributions aid in the recovery of non-dominant narratives and reveal issues of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, religion, age, class, familial status and citizenship in the ancient and modern world. The volume contributes to a more inclusive and equitable study of classical antiquity and builds transhistorical connections capable of exposing similar injustices in our own time. (shrink)

In this paper I develop and support a feminist virtue epistemology and bring it into conversation with feminist contextual empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. The virtue theory I develop is centered on the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness, which foregrounds the social/political character of knowledge practices and products, and the differences between epistemic agencies that perpetuate, on the one hand, and displace, on the other hand, normative patterns of unjust epistemic discrimination. I argue that my view answers important (...) questions regarding epistemic agency which both contextual empiricism and standpoint theory leave open, but need to have answered. Feminist virtue epistemology thus emerges as providing an integrative framework for pluralism in feminist epistemology that illuminated connections among theories through engagement with the lived experiences, aspirations, and epistemic work of feminist epistemic agents. (shrink)

The tradition of Western philosophy—in particular, the ideals of reason and objectivity—has come down to us from white males, nearly all of whom are demonstrably sexist, even misogynist. What are the implications of this fact for contemporary feminists working within this tradition? Is this tradition so imbued with patriarchy that it is impossible for feminists to work on the same problems or to use the same tools? Or can feminists remain feminists while helping themselves to the philosophical tradition?In this splendidly (...) provocative volume, thirteen feminist theorists of many different persuasions address these questions. The chapters touch on many historical figures as well as many contemporary modes of thought, but a common theme running through them all is the question of whether there is a place for the traditional ideals of objectivity and rationality in a committed feminist view of philosophy and of the world.A Mind of One's Own stands as testimony to the variety, vigor, and vitality of current feminist philosophy. It will be essential reading and an essential reference for philosophers as well as for all scholars and students concerned about the nature of knowledge and our pursuit of it. (shrink)

Efforts to introduce particular-focused and emotionally engaged storytelling into historiography have sparked intense debate. Stone-Mediatore argues that women and other under-represented groups have a particular interest in defending the epistemic value of storytelling, but that we can do so meaningfully -- not by endorsing all storytelling -- but only by articulating a metahistory that challenges the division between history and story as well as makes explicit the interrelated epistemic and ethical goals of historical inquiry. The author draws on Hannah Arendt (...) and Susan Griffin to begin to articulate such a feminist metahistory. She argues that such a metahistory throws light on the potential value of creative and engaged storytelling, not only for understanding historical events but also for building less violent worlds. (shrink)

In 1999, Susan Wolf diagnosed what was missing in bioethics: “an analysis that places race, ethnicity, and gender at the center.” Since then, not enough progress has been made in “decentering” whiteness in bioethics. The use of assisted reproductive technologies in the United States, and the bioethical discussion surrounding it, provides a window into the problem. Recent surveys of ART usage show racial disparities in access to ART and treatment outcomes. A personal testimony about egg freezing suggests a perceptual (...) blindness when white experience is taken to be the norm. Nevertheless, bioethics, including feminist bioethics, has largely framed ART within the parameters of “normative whiteness.” This paper will argue that feminist bioethics needs to put race at the center of analysis and will suggest pathways for doing so. Decentering whiteness requires a consideration of epistemic limits and privilege, a reevaluation of the goals of feminism, and an embrace of empathy in service of a more responsive and flexible worldview. (shrink)

This article focuses on the epistemic transition to testimonial justice. It argues that the recognition of testimonial injustice in the context of reproductive rights may play a central role in this transition. First, I show how testimonial injustice undermines women’s legal protection against sexual violence and rights triggered by it such as the right to abortion. Second, I argue that the epistemic transition initiated by the #MeToo and #YoSiTeCreo movements call for transitional justice. In support, I review the circumstances of (...) transitional justice for cases like the transition to testimonial justice. Finally, I focus on the area of reproductive rights. I argue that policies of recognition contribute to epistemic transitional justice and complement other strategies aimed to overcome testimonial injustice such as the virtue of the responsible hearer and institutional compensatory virtues. (shrink)

In 2006, and again in 2007, I suffered the miscarriages of two wanted and painstakingly planned pregnancies. In the aftermath of each, I found myself unprepared, as do many women who miscarry, for the devastation I would feel. In my attempts to cope, I sought solace in the written testimony of other women who had miscarried, in the medical statistics that reassured me I still had a strong chance of carrying another pregnancy to term, in the experiences of friends (...) and colleagues who had dealt with miscarriage and other reproductive difficulties, and in the expertise of counselors who helped me process my thoughts and feelings. While each of these avenues was helpful in its own right, I still found myself struggling.. (shrink)

Anonymity is accepted as necessary for the generation of empirical knowledge concerning human research participants, especially for members of “vulnerable” groups. In particular, anonymity has been given a role in easing the challenges of giving voice to experiences that disrupt familiar and convenient paradigms of knowledge. This paper troubles such a notion, on the grounds that anonymity may undermine the acceptance of such experiences as evidence and reinforce the kind of epistemic politics that treats some assertions as incontrovertible, while silencing (...) others. An uncritical acceptance of anonymity generates concerns about representation, voice, and authorship in research, particularly amongst disadvantaged communities. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine some issues debated in mainstream epistemology for which the social features of knowledge are relevant, such as the epistemic relevance of social contexts, the nature of practical knowledge, and the epistemic role of testimony. In the first part of the paper, we show how feminist epistemologies have usefully stressed the social character of knowledge in many central areas of debate within mainstream epistemology. We call these the virtues of feminist epistemology: the denial (...) of the neutrality and autonomy of the epistemic subject, the focus on practical knowledge, and the ensuing attention to the social dimensions of the epistemic process. Our conclusion on the social dimensions of knowledge is the thesis that the epistemic subject can know only in connection with others. In the second part of the paper, we address the issue of the plausibility of feminist epistemologies by discussing three main criticisms which have been raised against them. We conclude that, even if these criticisms are valid, the legacy of feminist epistemologies remains because the social features of knowledge are plausibly significant not only within but also without the perspectives of feminist epistemologies. (shrink)

Radical feminist Carla Lonzi is regarded as a founding mother of Italian feminism in the early 1970s. Italian feminists look at her diaries and pamphlets as historical testimony, or as tools of self-identification. Very little work engages Lonzi’s feminist thought in its critique of psychoanalytic constructs of female sexuality, such as the forced sexual coincidence between vaginal sexuality and masculine pleasure. While reappropriating the clitoris as the site of female autonomy, Lonzi invents the ‘donna clitoridea,’ whose authenticity (...) opposes heteronormativity. This article examines Lonzi’s theory of the clitoris and the donna clitoridea, arguing that Lonzi’s clitoris is not so much a site of pleasurable authenticity, but a phallic instrument of domination among women. (shrink)

Using testimonies from immigrants and examples of immigrant policies, this book proposes an interdisciplinary, feminist approach to immigration justice.

This article is based in a critical recognition of the determinate influence of Mary Daly's feminist ethical and theological reflection, particularly as found in her earlier work, on the development of Christian feminist theologies. It argues that the content and form of Daly's rejection of traditional religion constitute a clear alignment of feminist commitment with rejection of traditional religion that is fundamentally problematic for those advocating the possibilities of creative and liberative feminist Christian encounters. The rejection (...) of traditional religion is posited as an imperative of feminist consciousness, and as a testimony to feminist realisation. Such is the impact of Daly's critical articulation of the incompatibility of feminism and Christianity; she has influenced a dominant discourse about whether it is possible to be a Christian and a feminist. (shrink)

The notion of moral expertise poses a variety of challenges concerning both the question of existence of such experts and their identification by laypeople. I argue for a view of ethics expertise, based on moral understanding instead of on moral knowledge, that is less robust than genuine moral expertise and that does not rely on deference to testimony. I propose identification criteria that focus mainly on the awareness and communication of implicit biases and situated ignorance. According to the account (...) of ethics expertise presented in this paper, the expert's testimony is not an epistemic reason for the layperson's belief, but merely an epistemic influence. The epistemic reasons for the layperson's belief are largely independent from the expert. But there is still some epistemic risk involved in the proposed method of knowledge transfer, and therefore criteria for the identification of a trustworthy expert are necessary. The risk involved in knowledge transfer can be both due to willful manipulation and due to the expert's implicit biases and situated ignorance. While willful manipulation cannot really be avoided, the influence from biases and ignorance can be minimized. I argue that the best way to do this is if the expert is aware of their own biases and ignorance and communicates them. Combined with evidence of the expert's education in moral philosophy and experience with the topic in question, this gives the layperson the best chance to identify someone who can really help them consider all relevant aspects of a situation and come to a better justified decision. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 379 Hoedl) would warrant a less minimalistic interpretation of Thomas's prominence in the theological controversies of the 70s and 80s of the thirteenth century. This volume claims to examine Thomas's work and influence in light of the newest research. This is very true of Wielockx's article, but not every contribution equally justifies this claim. Still, this collection is a welcome addition to the ongoing investigation of Thomas's (...) thought. It is all the more regrettable, then, that the publishers have decided upon such an exhorbitant price, apparently resigning themselves to the belief that there is no market for the book outside libraries which have already ordered the series. The editors and contributors deserve a wider audience. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften Munich RICHARD SCHENK, O.P. Edith Stein: Scholar, Feminist, Saint. By FREDA MARY 0BEN. New York: Alba House, 1988. Pp. 80. $5.95 (paper). Essays on Woman. By EDITH STEIN. Edited by Dr. L. Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, O.C.D. Translated by Freda Mary Oben. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Discalced Carmelite, 1891-1942, vol. 2. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1987. Pp. ix + 290. $7.95 (paper). Whether as an ample introduction for one unfamiliar with Edith Stein or as a further education for one who already appreciates her legacy, these two books will serve the reader well. The saintly philosopher and educator became a Carmelite nun and eventually a victim of the Holocaust; she was beatified in 1987. Doctor Freda Mary Oben is well qualified to interpret Stein's writings as she, like Edith Stein, is a convert from Judaism to Catholicism and a scholar as well. She began to study Edith Stein after her conversion but }lad to learn German to do it. Essays on Woman is a testimonial to Oben's nearly 30year enterprise. This work is a translation of Die Frau, Ihre Aufgabe nach Natur und Gnade, which contains Edith Stein's lectures and writings on woman, compiled and edited by Dr. L. Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, O.C.D., of the Archivum Carmelitanum Edith Stein in Brussels. These two works can be read in either order, as each supports and elucidates the other, but for an introduction, Edith Stein: Scholar, Feminist, Saint should be read first. Since Oben refers to Stein as Edith in this work, this reviewer will do the same. 380 BOOK REVIEWS The Edith Stein work consists of three chapters. Chapter One is a 37-page, well-documented biography supported by quotations from Edith's writings. Oben's straightforward, lucid style enhances this compact account of the variety of interesting, inspiring, and gripping details of Edith's life. Oben recounts her own tour of the significant places in Edith's life: Breslau, Gottingen, Bergzabern, Speyer, Miinster, Cologne, Echt, Auschwitz. The narrative is supplemented with eight pages of Stein family photographs in the middle of the book. Throughout her life, Edith Stein maintained a strong love for her family and her own Jewish people. Integrated with this is the develop· ment and growth of her intellectual life: from an ambivalence toward school to her being among the first women to enter a university to her becoming a university professor, all the while struggling from being at first unable to pray to later working among scholars who were deep· ly spiritual. Several of these scholars were converts from Judaism to Christianity and even to Catholicism. Oben shows how Edith followed this same route, relating her scholarly insights in psychology and philosophy to her spiritual ones and finally turning to Catholicism after a casual encounter with a biography of St. Teresa of Avila. Oben shows how, once a Catholic, Edith used her intellectual ability to study the link between woman's nature and religious education. By 1932 Edith was recognized as the intellectual leader of Catholic feminism in Europe. Oben tells of Edith's entrance into the Carmelite Convent in Cologne in 1933, her life there as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and her decision, foreseeing the Holocaust, to hear the Cross for the Jewish people. In a brief but captivating account, Oben tells of Edith's hasty transfer from Cologne to... (shrink)

In this paper, I examine alternative feminist activism and social movements in Egypt by analyzing BuSSy. BuSSy is a performance art group that hosts storytelling workshops and monologues of taboo and “shameful” personal stories that challenge societal and state-sanctioned normative discourses on femininity/womanhood and masculinity/manhood. Drawing on transnational feminist scholarship and queer theory and using collective memory as a lens, I argue that BuSSy’s storytelling is an act of airing Egypt’s dirty laundry, queering normative discourses to enable (...) class='Hi'>feminist counter-memorializing. Based on content analysis of secondary data including BuSSy’s published interviews, YouTube videos, website and Facebook images, and testimonies from 2006 to 2020, my analysis reveals BuSSy as curating an “archive of feelings” centralizing gendered narratives of shame. I examine how BuSSy’s affectively contagious storytelling leads to feminist social change by empowering storytellers and listeners. BuSSy’s works create cathartic experiences to shed stigma and shame. Finally, I reconceptualize feminist activism and collective memories outside of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and contribute to the literature on shame by analyzing how BuSSy identifies and counters shame’s silencing power. (shrink)

There is a growing recognition that victims of injustice may have privileged access to knowledge about the injustices they experience, and that injustices are perpetuated through silencing victims by taking them to be less credible, and through denying them the platform and capacity to speak. However, these are not ideas that political philosophers tend to engage with in a sustained manner, to the extent that they alter methodological approaches to be systematically attentive to victim testimony. In this article, I (...) provide two arguments in favour of political philosophers attending to victim testimony, one moral, one epistemic, and demonstrate that the moral case has little purchase, but that the epistemic case is more successful. Then, I present the strongest case against including victim testimony in political philosophy, and I argue that it does not hold up to scrutiny. In so doing, I demonstrate how methodological practices in political philosophy could be improved through drawing on feminist social epistemology; attending to victim testimony can enrich political philosophy in epistemically acceptable ways, and it also corrects for a range of potential biases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Susan Laird, “Musical Hunger: A Philosophical Testimonial of Miseducation”Estelle R. JorgensenSusan Laird’s lament of her “musical under-education,” her youthful lack of opportunity for the sorts of experiences for which she hungered and its life-long after-effects, and her invocation of hunger as a metaphor for music education raise compelling questions. In a feminized field such as music, particularly piano playing, her hunger is particularly poignant. Also, the (...) notion of “musical taste” takes on new meaning, and the musical, educational, and ethical questions this metaphor evokes reveal its richness as a means of thinking about music education. This metaphor joins others such as Barbara Thayer Bacon’s metaphor of the quilt, Jane Roland Martin’s metaphor of the home, Iris Yob’s metaphor of pilgrimage, Elizabeth Gould’s metaphor of the nomad, Virginia Richardson’s metaphor of the steward, and Randall Allsup’s metaphor of the garage band, each of which illumines music education differently.1 Without one, we miss important insights into the thought and practice of music education; when taken together, they offer a richer view than were we to see music education in terms of one alone. [End Page 75]Although metaphor evokes imaginative thought and practice in music education, it is also limited. As Nelson Goodman aptly puts it, metaphor is a “matter of teaching an old word new tricks” and an “expedition abroad in which associations with one realm are applied in another.”2 Its power lies in its evocative and imaginative quality as it startles and surprises, challenges familiar ways of thinking and doing, and opens new possibilities for how we might think, act, and be differently. Although Laird would not want to literalize musical hunger or equate it with physical hunger—physical and spiritual realms intersect but they are not equivalent—it is possible to freeze a metaphor or literalize the vitality out of it. Testing it systematically, we enter the ground between metaphor and model, or what Iris Yob thinks of as the metaphorical model.3 While metaphor may prompt an intellectual journey, it cannot take us the entire way. In its particularistic and imaginative appeal, it opens reflection though it cannot suffice. A metaphor may also have a dark side. For example, envisaging the teacher’s role as salvific in providing bread for the hungry or preventing gluttony or food addictions may foster a paternalistic view that substitutes the teacher’s view of a student’s long term interests for the student’s directly-known and immediately perceived needs and interests, thereby subverting Laird’s expressed interest in the student’s desires. The educational “sin” of addiction may also be “redeemed” in Schefflerian fashion by pointing to important contributions of musicians who were doubtless excessive in their musical engagements.4 These possibilities suggest that we shall need to examine critically the metaphor and what it means for music education and move beyond the metaphor to its related models of music education.One of the interesting questions that Laird’s metaphor of hunger raises is the possibility of spiritual hunger, especially in a pervasively materialistic world. Matters related to spirituality have been addressed variously by writers in music education, whether it be the “healing” and ecologically-oriented approach of June Boyce-Tillman, the evolutionary and anthropologically grounded holistic approach of Anthony Palmer, the ethically-based approach of David Carr, the introspective and politically-charged writing of Cathy Benedict and Randall Allsup, the feminist perspectives of Elizabeth Gould, Charlene Morton, Roberta Lamb, and Deanne Bogdan, or the religiously grounded work of Iris Yob.5 Notions of spiritual hunger might be seen differently within the various lenses that these writers bring to music education but they all underscore the importance of knowing that goes beyond the literal, utilitarian, generalizable, and vocational to address the life of mind and body that Susanne Langer terms “feeling” and with which the arts, myths, rituals, and religions have to do.6 As such, they rebuke general education that is limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic, and driven by tests, standards, and mandates that often give short shrift to matters of human spirituality. Still, as the recent unanimous resolution in favor of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christian Ethics at the Boundary: Feminism and Theologies of Public Life by Karen V. GuthJulie Hanlon RubioChristian Ethics at the Boundary: Feminism and Theologies of Public Life Karen V. Guth MINNEAPOLIS: FORTRESS PRESS, 2015. 231 pp. $39.00In her promising first book, Karen Guth does "ethics at the boundary," reading the central figures of Martin Luther King Jr., John Howard Yoder, and Reinhold Niebuhr with an uncommon generosity that (...) allows for synthesis and opens up new potential for collective action. She challenges the Christian realists, witness theologians, and liberationists in contemporary Christian ethics to see overlap in their theologies, hear the questions that others bring to their work, and join together in bringing theology to the public square.This moment in politics and political theology seems to call for the kind of argument that Guth wants to make. Polarization in the academy mirrors that of the church and society, and potential for moving beyond it seems more elusive than ever.The key contribution of the book is shedding light on what is often overlooked in three key figures who continue to influence Christian ethics. At the "boundaries" or edges of their work, Guth retrieves Niebuhr's attention to ecclesiology as an essential part of his realist ethic; Yoder's willingness to learn from liberalism and translate theology for a diverse audience; and King's liberation theology of the streets, which enacted transcendence of the witness/realist divide.Equally significant is attention to overlooked feminist themes in all three thinkers. Guth argues that Yoder has the most developed feminist theology (especially evident in unpublished memos, 138–40), whereas King and Niebuhr, though often rightly criticized by feminist thinkers, have in their writings and sermons significant overlap with central feminist themes. By reading King and Niebuhr alongside feminist thinkers, we can begin to see King's "'feminist' and 'womanist' politics of love," which inspires a view of "churches as potential sites of divine creation" (183), and Niebuhr's call for the church to "confess its complicity with the world" for its failures, which coheres with feminist insistence that the church must "confess its complicity in women's [End Page 196] oppression" (111). In retrieving feminist themes, Guth offers a corrective to political theology's frequent lack of attention to sexism.Guth is careful to note that, in their personal lives, all three theologians failed to live up to their professed concern for gender justice. Despite this qualification, it is particularly difficult to read of Yoder's professed feminism in light of the overwhelming allegations of sexual abuse against him by over one hundred women. His perverse theological justification of the abuse and the ongoing tension among Christian ethicists about how to respond compound the problem. In 2017, SCE members held a prayer service to honor the testimony of Yoder's victims and to address the SCE's complicity in the harm done by him. Guth's response is that it is now even more important to correct misperceptions and uphold feminist themes in Yoder's work. However, it seems all but impossible to redeem his thought in this area. Yoder justified his abuse by melding together themes from scripture and liberalism. In light of what we know now, his justification of "revolutionary subordination" (even in the 1994 version of Politics of Jesus) is even more troubling. In these times, silence about Yoder may be the more appropriate way to honor his victims.Still, Guth's emphasis on intellectual charity, her articulation of the desire for beloved community as essential to the ethicist's task, and her willingness to risk standing at the boundary in order to illuminate the common concerns of those who see themselves as opponents are great gifts to Christian ethics. By complicating the reader's location of Yoder, Niebhur, and King, Guth makes a strong case that ethicists can form a better "community of argument" (190). In a course on social ethics, or in public or political theology, reading Guth would provide a way for students to synthesize the contributions of key thinkers, grapple with both personal and theoretical limitations, and think creatively about how to do their work with generosity and humility.Julie... (shrink)

"The Personal is Political": This was an often-heard slogan of feminist groups in the late sixties and early seventies. The slogan is no doubt open to many interpretations. There is one interpretation which touches on the epistemology of social facts, viz. the slogan claims that in assessing the features of a political system, personal experiences have privileged evidentiary value. For instancte, in the face of third person reports about political corruption, I may remain unmoved in my belief that the (...) political powers are morally upstanding, and it is only when I myself am adversely affected, that I come to change my views. There are two standard patterns of explanation of this type of belief formation: (i) We know that third-person reports may be lessreliable than first-person experiences; (ii) If the third-person reports are no less reliable than first-person experiences, we may just be dealing with a standard pattern of epistemic irrationality. However, we argue that there is also a much more surprising pattern of explanation: under certain conditions, a Bayesian argument can be proffered to the effect that it is rational to change one's beliefs in the face of personal experiences and not in the face of third-person reports, even if these experiences and reports are equally reliable. Hence, the feminist slogan (at least on one particular interpretation of it) receives unexpected support from Bayesian comers. We also show that this pattern of explanation has surprising repercussions on the question of the evidentiary value of miracles in philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This article discusses the issue of abortion in the context of the dispute between progressive and neoconservative political forces in Brazil. The article analyses ADPF 442, a legal instrument known as a Motion of Noncompliance with a Fundamental Precept, which was lodged with the Supreme Court as part of a feminist litigation strategy in the country. The motion calls for the Supreme Court to decide on the constitutionality of the decriminalisation of abortion within the first 12 weeks of gestation. (...) Methodologically, the analysis combines a literature review with participant observation and corpus linguistics analysis. ADPF 442 is considered a key event in the use of judicialisation to voice demands for women’s rights in current-day Brazil, and this work examines the testimonies as representative of the discourse and strategies at play in the broader field of abortion and its major actors, both for and against its decriminalisation. (shrink)

The group Féminin Masculin Avenir was founded in autumn 1967. It took part in the events of May 68, and subsequently became Féminisme Marxisme Action. It then dissolved into the women¹s liberation movement (MLF) when the latter started in 1970. Le groupe Féminin Masculin Avenir s’est constitué dès l’automne 1967. Il a participé aux événements de mai 68, devenant alors Féminisme Marxisme Action. Il s’est ensuite dissous dans le Mouvement de libération des femmes lorsque celui-ci a éclaté en 1970.

The sacrifices of nurses in hard-hit cities during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and of family caregivers for people with late-stage Alzheimer’s disease present two puzzles. First, traditional accounts of supererogation cannot allow for the possibility of making enormous sacrifices that make one’s actions supererogatory simply to do what morality requires. These caregivers, however, are doing their moral duty, yet their actions also seem to be paradigmatic cases of supererogation. I argue that Dale Dorsey’s new account of supererogation (...) can solve this puzzle. Second, these caregivers often deny that they are heroic, but standard explanations of these assertions either diminish their sacrifice, say they are confused, or attribute to them a vice. If we want to understand them without diminishing them, we should instead see their denials as a response to what Beth DeVolder calls compulsory heroism. Compulsory heroism occurs when someone is foisted into the role of hero for doing their moral duty as a distraction from the social realities that make doing their duty involve inordinate sacrifice. (shrink)

It is no accident that white privilege designed to be both be invisible and weightless to white people. Alison Bailey’s “On White Privilege and Anesthesia: Why Does Peggy McIntosh’s Knapsack Feel Weightless?” extends a weighty invitation white readers to complete the unpacking task McIntosh (1988) began when she compared white privilege to an “invisible and weightless knapsack.” McIntosh focuses primarily making white privilege visible to white people. Bailey’s project continues the conversation by extending a ‘weighty invitation’ to white readers to (...) explore why the metaphorical knapsack, despite the weight of its contents, feels weightless. Here’s the short answer. The knapsack only feels weightless because white people have become anesthetized us to our own brokenness. We are more comfortable considering what white privilege does for us than what it does to us. People of color feel the weight of whiteness every day. The weighty invitation invites white readers to become sensitive to our own insensitivity. To do this Bailey (1) explores white resistance to unpacking the weight; (2) people of color’s testimonies to the daily impact of the weight on their bodies; and (3) how the anesthesia of white privilege distorts our humanity. The article concludes with a McIntosh style list of that the anesthesia of privilege distorts white people’s humanity. (shrink)

The reform of rape law remains a vexed enterprise. The wager of this article is that the plural traditions and technologies of criminal law can provide the resources for a radical rethinking of rape law. Parts 1 and 2 return to the historical and structural forms of rape law reform in Australia. These forms of reform illustrate a variety of criminal jurisdictions, and a transformation in the way in which rape law reform is conducted now. Against this transformation, Part 3 (...) takes up the technology of classification in rape law in order to generate a radical legal definition of rape—one which responds to the pain and suffering of the survivor of rape, at the same time as it holds the legal institution before the law. This has important implications, it is suggested, not only for domestic legal systems but also the jurisprudence of rape in international criminal law. (shrink)

Prologue -- Paris, August 1, 1990 -- What happened next -- Live in it -- Africa, 2008 -- Paris, revisited.

Socially extended knowledge has recently received much attention in mainstream epistemology. Knowledge here is not to be understood as wholly realised within a single individual who manipulates artefacts or tools but as collaboratively realised across plural agents. Because of its focus on the interpersonal dimension, socially extended epistemology appears to be a promising approach for investigating the deeply social nature of epistemic practices. I believe, however, that this line of inquiry could be made more fruitful if it is connected with (...) the critical notion of epistemic responsibility, as developed in feminist responsibilism. According to feminist responsibilists, at the core of epistemic responsibility is a critical disposition toward correcting epistemic injustice. This epistemic idea is highly relevant to the epistemological context of illness, where patient testimony is often disregarded. Hence, though restricted to the epistemological context of the experience of illness, this chapter delves into epistemic injustice and its robust mechanisms. I thus explore what responsible epistemic practices should involve in order to redress that injustice and how epistemic responsibility should be socially extended. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, by relying on Arthur Frank’s innovative work on illness narratives, I focus on chaotic bodily messages from patients overwhelmed by suffering and then explain why these messages should count as genuine narratives or testimonies despite their inarticulateness. Second, I elaborate on how epistemic injustice concerning such narratives (i.e., chaos narratives) is produced and reproduced, in particular how both a dominant sociocultural norm and our inherent vulnerability can contribute to its production and reproduction. Finally, I propose an extended form of epistemic responsibility that ameliorates this aspect. Laying particular emphasis on the epistemic role of mature empathy, I characterise the extended epistemic responsibility in terms of extended empathic knowledge. (shrink)

Filosofia delle donne (Philosophy of Women) is a book written in Italian in which authors Pieranna Garavaso (University of Minnesota, Morris, USA) and Nicla Vassallo (University of Genoa, Italy) claim that a greater interaction between analytic philosophy and feminist philosophies can generate philosophical theories that are more accessible and relevant to a broader range of people. This interaction can also produce richer solutions to traditional philosophical problems. The authors' main interests are in metaphysics and epistemology; thus the two main (...) issues discussed in the book are women's identity and women's knowledge. (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage (...) in interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

This chapter has two aims. First, I distinguish between two forms of testimonial injustice: identity-based testimonial injustice and content-based testimonial injustice. Second, I utilize this distinction to develop a partial explanation for the persistent lack of diverse practitioners in academic philosophy. Specifically, I argue that both identity-based and content-based testimonial injustice are prevalent in philosophical discourse and that this prevalence introduces barriers to participation for those targeted. As I show, the dual and compounding effects of identity-based and content-based testimonial injustice (...) in philosophy plausibly contribute to a lack of diversity in the social identities of practitioners and the discourses in which practitioners are engaged. (shrink)

It seems reasonable enough to assume that superheroes are heroes. First, heroes act to safeguard others. Second, heroes safeguard those around them, near or far, in a manner that's moral. Third, heroes safeguard those around them in an altruistic manner; they selflessly help others. Fourth, heroes safeguard those around them in a manner that is atypical, in ways that the unheroic are unwilling to act. Wonder Woman performs her daring feats, that is, with the agility of Mercury and the steel (...) sinews of a Hercules. Wonder Woman was always intended to be inspirational, to be an ideal toward which we could aspire. Her roots in feminism are testimony to this. This chapter considers the feminism that Marston reflects in Wonder Woman, freed and strengthened by supporting one another, women develop enormous physical and mental power, for using it to save the world from the hatreds and wars of men, and help humanity to find maturity. (shrink)

Real Language Series General Editors:Jennifer Coates, Jenny Cheshire, Euan Reid This is a sociolinguistics series about the relationships between language, society and social change. Books in the series draw on natural language data from a wide range of social contexts. The series takes a critical approach to the subject, challenging current orthodoxies, and dealing with familiar topics in new ways. Gender and Discourse offers a critical new approach to the study of language and gender studies. Women moving into the public (...) domains of power traditionally monopolised by men are creating new identities for themselves, and the language that is used by them and about them offers an insight into gender roles. Clare Walsh reviews the current dominance/difference debates, and proposes a new analytical framework which combines the insights of critical discourse and feminist perspectives on discourse to provide a new perspective on the role of women in public life. A superbly accessible book designed for students and researchers in the field, the book features: - topical case studies from the arenas of politics, religion and activism- a new analytical framework, also summarised in chart form so the reader can apply their own critical analyses of texts. - written and visual text types for the reader's own linguistic and semiotic analysis. 'This important book takes up a neglected question in the study of language and gender - what difference women make to the discourse of historically male-dominated institutions - and brings to bear on it both the insights of feminist scholarship and evidence from women's own testimony. Clare Walsh's analysis of the dilemmas women face is both subtle and incisive, taking us beyond popular 'Mars and Venus' stereotypes and posing some hard questions for fashionable theories of language, identity and performance. (shrink)

While experience often affords important knowledge and insight that is difficult to garner through observation or testimony alone, it also has the potential to generate conflicts of interest and unrepresentative perspectives. We call this tension the paradox of experience. In this paper, we first outline appeals to experience made in debates about access to unproven medical products and disability bioethics, as examples of how experience claims arise in bioethics and some of the challenges raised by these claims. We then (...) motivate the idea that experience can be an asset by appealing to themes in feminist and moral epistemology, distinguishing between epistemic and justice-based appeals. Next, we explain the concern that experience may be a liability by appealing to empirical work on cognitive biases and theoretical work about the problem of partial representation. We conclude with preliminary recommendations for addressing the paradox and offer several questions for future discussion. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of gothic violence in order to better theorize how domination operates in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. The fictive companion to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Maria is an account of the titular character’s struggle for self-determination in all aspects of her life, including her desire for a companionate partnership. I argue that Maria’s ultimate lack of freedom is directly attributable to coverture, the patriarchal legal fiction whereby wives (...) are subsumed under the legal persona of their fathers or husbands. Building on scholarship that positions Wollstonecraft as a republican feminist, I show how Maria articulates what I call gothic violence, a form of psychic domination that places the other in a condition of unfreedom by denying their status as an autonomous being and holding them in subordination through a variety of techniques, such as denial of legal and social status and testimonial quieting. I show how gothic violence results in the unfreedom of women through its reliance on domestic settings and intimate relationships, and with the support of law and custom, of which coverture is a central example. I conclude by suggesting that attending to gothic violence in Wollstonecraft’s thought allows us to further see the continuity between her political and fictional writings. (shrink)

This essay explores the epistemological significance of the kinds of beliefs that grow out of traumatic experiences, such as the rape survivor's belief that she is never safe. On current theories of justification, beliefs like this one are generally dismissed due to either insufficient evidence or insufficient propositional content. Here, Freedman distinguishes two discrete sides of the aftermath of psychic trauma, the shattered self and the shattered worldview. This move enables us to see these beliefs as beliefs; in other words, (...) as having cognitive content. Freedman argues that what we then need is a theory of justification that allows us to handpick reliable sources of information on sexual violence, and give credibility where deemed appropriate. She advances a mix of reliabilism and coherentism that privileges feminism. On this account, the evidence for the class of beliefs in question will depend on an act of sexual violence (or testimony, or statistics) to the extent that the act is a reliable indication of the prevalence of sexual violence against women. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that moral deference is prima facie obligatory in cases in which the testifier is a member of a marginalized social group that the receiver is not and testifies about their marginalized experience. We distinguish between two types of deference: epistemic deference, which refers to believing p in virtue of trusting the testifier, and actional deference, which involves acting appropriately in response to the testimony given. The prima facie duty we propose applies to both epistemic (...) and actional deference, though defeaters may quash either or both obligations. Even if one fails to epistemically defer to the marginalized testifier, we argue that they may still be ethically obligated to act in accordance with their testimony. (shrink)