In 2011, when Judith Butler delivered the lecture series that would become Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, the speech act theorist joined other critical scholars attempting to work through the dark cloud of neoliberal fatigue settling over the humanities. “Identitarian ontologies” had become only more entrenched in the age of terror, any potential alternatives seeming destined for “discursive appropriation” by the insidious vocabulary of late biopolitical capitalism. Fatigued, but not yet resigned, Notes sets out “to rethink the (...) speech act”, not to discover something else to say or some other way to say it but instead to take seriously what Butler described more than a... (shrink)

Octavia E. Butler was notoriously skeptical of utopian science fiction, and though she desired very much to write it, she found herself unable to do so "because I don't believe imperfect humans can form a perfect society."1 In interviews and in practice through her fiction Butler rejected the possibility of an ideal society and instead found her way to what Jim Miller has called "a post-apocalyptic hoping informed by the lessons of the past."2 This is to say that, (...) as a black woman science-fiction writer who had witnessed the pains of systemic racism, patriarchy, and oppressive violence against the communities to which she belonged, and who was particularly affected by the Religious Right–backed racist and classist... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 25-27 [Access article in PDF] Gender, Body, Meaning:Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Injury and Borderline Personality Disorder Carolyn Sargent THE CENTRAL THEMES OF "Commodity Body/Sign: Borderline Personality Disorder and the Signification of Self-Injurious Behavior" reflect issues that cut across the disciplines represented by this journal and have received increasing attention from anthropologists. Medical anthropologists, as well as psychological anthropologists and others interested in symbolic analysis (...) of the body, have addressed such topics as the culture of biomedicine and the cultural shaping of psychiatric classification, the multiple meanings of body modifications, power relations in therapeutic interactions between doctor and patient, and cultural variation in understandings of normality and abnormality.Curiously, there is little anthropological literature that directly focuses on either borderline personality disorder (BPD) or self-injurious acts per se. Indeed anthropological research on psychiatric diagnosis, classification, and treatment, as well as ethnopsychiatry, include scant reference to personality disorders. One exception is Nuckolls' 1992 article, "Toward a Cultural History of the Personality Disorders," which raises pertinent questions for one of Potter's introductory statements—that the majority of those diagnosed with BPD are women. Nuckolls directly addresses gender ideology and gender roles in the United States in his comparison of antisocial personality and histrionic personality diagnoses. In his paper, he argues that these personality disorders have cultural histories and are strongly congruent with prevailing gender stereotypes, such that men are many times more likely to be diagnosed as antisocial than women and women much more likely to be diagnosed as histrionic (Nuckolls 1992, 37). He also historicizes the emergence of certain behavioral styles that have been seen as characteristic of women and men, and the evolution of psychiatric diagnoses that classify extreme manifestations of these behavioral styles.The issue of why women, rather than men, are more frequently diagnosed with BPD is not elaborated in Potter's article, although she notes the importance of considering the intersection of gender and "identifying behaviors" associated with BPD. Cultural analyses of gender ideology in the [End Page 25] United States might suggest that the connection involves gendered expectations concerning emotionality and relational context but these articulations remain intriguing and underexplored. One might speculate that BPD/self-injury occurs in the context of particular gender ideologies, perhaps in class-based, industrialized societies where the body is highly commodified. It appears that the history of this constellation of symptoms and behaviors remains to be written.Cultural analysis of self-injury, a theme that runs through Potter's article, tends to be embedded in the anthropological literature on body ornamentation, initiation rituals, and "culture-bound" syndromes. Mascia-Lees and Sharpe (1992, 1) describe the body as "a site of adornment, manipulation, and mutilation," practices with roots reaching back as far as 30,000 years, and include as examples head deformation, scarification, foot binding, tooth filing, lip plates, nose rings, tattoos, subincision, and genital cutting.However, the concept of self-injury, as Potter notes, is problematic in the discipline of anthropology given the significance historically accorded to cultural relativism. Correspondingly, body "modification" is not "self-injury" as long as it is socially normative, for example, a facet of an initiation ordeal or body ornamentation (e.g., circumcision, scarification, piercing). Among the rare examples of acts that seem readily identifiable as "self-injury" are New Guinea practices of cutting off a finger to demonstrate mourning and Baatombu (West African) male finger amputation to show grief and anger over a wife's infidelity. Both are, however, considered culturally legitimate and not indicative of pathology.Potter's argument draws heavily on the notion of "body as text," derived largely from literary theory and feminist philosophy (Butler 1990; Jaggar and Bordo 1989). The perspective of "body as text" has influenced anthropological theory over the past two decades, particularly in the interpretive and postmodernist schools of thought. The body as a text of femininity is aptly characterized by Bordo, who argues that the continuum between female disorder and normal femininity is revealed by means of an analysis of symbolic meaning of gender in... (shrink)

Behavioural experiments are one of the central and most powerful methods of intervention in cognitive therapy. Yet until now, there has been no volume specifically dedicated to guiding physicians who wish to design and implement behavioural experiments across a wide range of clinical problems.The Oxford Guide to Behavioural Experiments in Cognitive Therapy fills this gap. It is written by clinicians for clinicians. It is a practical, easy to read handbook, which is relevant for practising clinicians at every level, from trainees (...) to cognitive therapy supervisors.Following a foreword by David Clark, the first two chapters provide a theoretical and practical background for the understanding and development of behavioural experiments. Thereafter, the remaining chapters of the book focus on particular problem areas. These include problems which have been the traditional focus of cognitive therapy, as well as those which have only more recently become a subject of study, and some which are still in their relative infancy. The book also includes several chapters on transdiagnostic problems, such as avoidance of affect, low self-esteem, interpersonal issues, and self-injurious behaviour. A final chapter by Christine Padesky provides some signposts for future development.Containing examples of over 200 behavioural experiments, this book will be of enormous practical value for all those involved in cognitive behavioural therapy, as well as stimulating exploration and creativity in both its readers and their patients. (shrink)

Women’s health activists laid the groundwork for passage of the law that created the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1906. The pharmaceutical and food industries fought regulatory reforms then and continue to do so now. We examine public health activism in the Progressive Era, the postwar era and the present day. The women’s health movement began in the 1960s, and criticized both the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment. In the 1990s, patient advocacy groups began accepting industry funds; thousands (...) of commercially-funded groups now dominate the advocacy landscape. As pharma funding became normalized, concerns arose regarding a) the lack of transparency and public accountability regarding funding, b) the distortion of groups’ agendas, and c) the ability of pharma-funded groups to dominate the discourse and override less well-resourced patient and health advocacy groups. Although industry-funded groups argue that funding allows them to provide useful services, the trade-off in health risks, exorbitant prices and distorted information is far too high. Sincerity is beside the point; patients and the industry have differing interests when it comes to drug safety and efficacy, drug information and drug prices. A growing resistance movement is asserting the values of its activist predecessors and opposing the prevailing culture of pharma-funded advocacy. (shrink)

Foucault proposes at the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality to shift the focus of sexual studies from sex-desire to bodies and pleasures. This article seeks to establish what he means by this shift, how he proposes it be made, and what the consequences are for thinking about sexuality together with `sex'. Foucault's shift involves a historiographical claim about the superability of the recent past, and can be read as an effort to relegate the concerns about (...) sexual difference and kinship to the past, and to establish a contemporary field for sexuality that involves bodies without history, pleasures without sex. The article suggests a way around this questionable historiographical assumption and marks a different departure for a Foucauldian study of sexuality. It also seeks to highlight some of the contemporary tensions between feminist and lesbian and gay studies, especially queer studies, in light of this reading of Foucault. (shrink)

The reality of resource limitation during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic has deeply challenged established approaches to healthcare system emergency response. Early preparation du...

The problem of how to make the transition to a more environmentally and socially sustainable society poses questions about how such far-reaching social change can be brought about. In recent years, lifecourse transitions have been identified by a range of researchers as opportunities for policy and other actors to intervene to change how individuals use energy, taking advantage of such disruptive transitions to encourage individuals to be reflexive toward their lifestyles and how they use the technological infrastructures on which they (...) rely. Such identifications, however, employ narratives of voluntary change that take an overly optimistic view of how individuals experience lifecourse transitions and ignore effects of experiences of unresolved or unsuccessful transitions. Drawing on interview data from the Energy Biographies project at Cardiff University, we explore three case studies where the effects of such unresolved transitions are significant. Using the concept of liminal transition as developed by Victor Turner, we examine instances where “progressive” narratives of energy use reduction clash with other “narrative genres” used to make sense of change. Such clashes show how narratives that view lifecourse transitions as opportunities ignore the challenges that such transitions may pose to efforts to construct or sustain identities. (shrink)

‘On the “Subject” of Žižek’ is a three-part review essay looking at two recent texts on Žižek’s political interventions: Sean Homer’s Slavoj Žižek and Radical Politics, which takes up Žižek’s writings on the Balkan Wars, and Adam’s Kotsko’s series of web posts on Žižek on the refugee “crisis” in Europe. As well, it examines Zizek’s 2016 book on Islamic terrorism and the same “crisis”, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours. Through a close reading of (...) Žižek’s text, the review asks what is the proper philosophical response to these contemporary events. It proposes that critics of Žižek’s intellectual interventions fail properly to grasp his Hegelian method, which at once is to propose solutions and to think the limits and conditions of possibility of such solutions. It ultimately suggests that such solutions are their own failure, which are intended to lead to a better thinking of our situation – a thinking, consistent with Žižek’s Hegelian method, that could not have been arrived directly, but only through and as the failure of previous solutions. (shrink)

A new biography of one of the founding fathers of the Scientific Revolution, Robert Boyle, is no easy undertaking, but no scholar is better poised to give us a revisionist view of this iconic figure than Michael Hunter. For fourteen years Hunter, together with Edward Davis, supervised the definitive fourteen‐volume edition of Boyle's complete works, published and unpublished. This was the first such undertaking since the 1744 edition compiled by the cleric and antiquary Thomas Birch. Almost no Boyle scholar has (...) been as privileged—or as dogged—in probing every bit of Boyle's legendary scribblings as Hunter. With his new biography, which gestated for decades and reflects the accumulating wisdom gained only with disciplined, persistent, and wide‐ranging reading, Hunter has shed new light on Boyle's life and character. Specialists will delight in having Hunter's path‐breaking articles gathered together in one volume from journals as far ranging as the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Medical History to the more standard venues of the profession.Which Boyle have historians of early modern science more recently encountered, and how does Hunter's book enhance or change our understanding? Richard S. Westfall and Marie Boas Hall produced portraits of Boyle as a bona fide, uncomplicated mechanist devoted to testing his view of the universe by frequent experimentation. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their Leviathan and the Air‐Pump set the stage for a more complex version of Boyle. They portrayed him as a consummate strategist who craftily used his experimental philosophy to serve his own conservative political and social agendas. Shapin's more recent A Social History of Truth claimed that Boyle relied heavily on his social status to carefully craft his public image as a gentleman in order to gain credibility and trust from his audiences. Lawrence Principe in his Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest has shown us a Boyle who was passionately committed to alchemy and fascinated by, if fearful of, magic. Barbara Kaplan in her Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick emphasized Boyle's long‐standing interests in medical issues and medical practices.What sort of Boyle does Hunter offer his audience, and how has his high place in Boyle scholarship enabled him to present such a novel interpretation? Hunter shows us a Boyle whose fully complex personality directly contributed to, and thwarted, his scientific production as an experimenter. Hunter's analysis is not deeply seated in psychoanalytical theory but, rather, emerges from a fine‐grained analysis of Boyle's intense religious preoccupations. In the case of Boyle, Hunter argues, earlier eighteenth‐century biographers—including Gilbert Burnet, Roger North, Henry Miles, and William Wooton—produced adulation for a figure whose deep religiosity enhanced his scientific endeavors. Rather than casting his lot with contemporaries who sought a conservative solution to church and state relations after 1660, Boyle had troubling religious preoccupations so that things for him were not so simple, as Hunter shows. Indeed, Boyle befriended and associated with men who were openly acknowledged as mystics and enthusiasts and never allied himself exclusively—or even primarily—with Church of England spokesmen or ecclesiastics. Moreover, Hunter argues, Boyle felt more acutely aware of the dangers of excessive rationalism than he did of the claims of direct divine inspiration. Boyle's religious anxieties, far from mere youthful preoccupations, plagued him throughout his lifetime. Hunter reproduces Boyle's notes on two full confessional interviews he had with two prominent churchmen toward the end of his life. The two churchmen, Gilbert Burnet and Edward Stillingfleet, appeared unsympathetic with the great man's scruples over the legitimacy of his ownership of considerable lands once belonging to the Church. But for Boyle this was no trivial matter; throughout his life he was similarly plagued about the moral rectitude of inheritances from his wealthy father, about constant incursions of blasphemous thoughts, and about the moral propriety of taking oaths. Indeed, for Hunter Boyle's obsessive concern in salving his conscience induced his refusal to accept the presidency of the Royal Society in 1680 because of the oath‐taking necessitated by the position. His tortuous, obsessive religious preoccupations, Hunter argues, find their parallels in Boyle's equally exacting procedures related to his punctilious scientific experiments. Thus, while some historians might see the scrupulous religiosity of Boyle as “dysfunctional,” the same instincts and personality features made him a highly “functional” scientist.Hunter's careful probing of Boyle's defensive apologies, frequently found as prefatory material in his published treatises, reveals another side of Boyle, hitherto largely ignored by his biographers. Excessively concerned about his reputation for establishing new empirical findings, Boyle reveals himself to Hunter in several instances as a masterful dissembler or plagiarist, careful in the extreme to conceal his debts to empirics, compilers, and less learned or less socially prominent men, including George Starkey, William Salmon, Johann Glauber, J. J. Becher, and Jean‐Baptiste DuHamel. What emerges from Hunter's depiction is the antithesis of the decisive, manipulative, socially prepossessing Boyle that Shapin has depicted. What Hunter furnishes is a Boyle who is perhaps far more insecure than the one historians have allowed themselves to envision and who struggled to hide his own vulnerability and inadequacy.In a satisfying exploration of Boyle's connections with medical circles, Hunter searches to explain why Boyle, well known among his contemporaries for enjoying a constant state of ill health and for his dissatisfaction with learned Galenic medicine passed down by the esteemed physicians of his day, was, nevertheless, so loath to publish his stinging criticisms of the medical profession. Historians have long recognized that Boyle evinced strong interest in medical matters from the time of his early researches with physicians in the 1650s in Oxford and that he continued to write about medical issues for the next several decades of his life. But Boyle was acutely aware—as his prefaces attest—that he was not a member of the profession and that his access to sick bodies was severely constricted by his status as a gentleman. Hunter suggests that Boyle's reticence in publishing his attacks on the Galenists owed something to his social position—he was, after all, on good social terms with many eminent physicians. His deference, Hunter argues, owed not just to his hesitation to attack a well‐respected profession, but also to his diffidence about proclaiming universal truths on matters as changeable—and ultimately untestable—as sick human bodies. Hunter further probes another paradox of Boyle's life. We know that Boyle freely gave out his medical advice and medicines that were produced in his private laboratory to friends and acquaintances and that, furthermore, he saw this as a moral duty and Christian charity. Yet Boyle, the champion of open communication in matters of natural philosophy, steadfastly refused to publish his medicine recipes . His unpublished drafts reveal a Boyle who was sharply committed to widening the access of his poor countrymen to chemically prepared and effective medicines. But Boyle stopped well short of making these recipes available for wider dissemination through the medium of print. Why? Again Hunter presents no simple answers but suggests a medley of motives. Exquisitely sensitive to his own reputation, Boyle, in part, may have censored himself lest he be seen as the equal of empirics, apothecaries, and quacksalvers, all abundant and thriving in London in the 1670s. Despite his high‐minded sense of philanthropy, Boyle was particularly concerned about his public persona, so much so that his private passions at times took second seat. Hunter suggests a similar explanation for Boyle's refusal to forthrightly publish his investigations of supernatural phenomena, including witchcraft, visions, angelic apparitions, and second sight. In addition to his strong religious scruples that such investigations might be tainted by demonic participation, Boyle censored himself out of his fear of the charge of easy credulity. As popular satires of experimenters were beginning to pour forth from the pens of Thomas Shadwell and Samuel Butler, Boyle must have smarted at the thought of being classified among those indulging in magical pursuits unbecoming to a genteel experimenter. Hunter concludes by revealing a Boyle far from being a confident showman and expositor of the new science. Instead he shows us a conflicted, ambivalent man who suffered from his high social status, even as he manipulated it for his own aggrandizement or for that of the Royal Society and its experimental program.Hunter's depiction of a tortured man—hitherto most often conceived as an iconic devotee of experimental science or as a consummate, self‐fashioning, smooth‐talking gentleman—will not sit well with some historians. Nor will his characterization of Boyle's lifelong religious scruples sit well. Just as Lawrence Principe presented readers with a disturbing vision of a Boyle duped by alchemical operators or conversing with angelic voices, Hunter offers up a tentative, hesitant, and uncertain man who does not seem to fit with earlier portraits. With extremely convincing and documented evidence, Hunter draws a complex, strong personality that left its stamp on his scientific agenda. Hunter's most piercing insight is to see Boyle's deep‐seated diffidence not as an obstacle to his science but as a driving force behind his commitment to experimentalism. In the end Hunter's view will outlast earlier, less complex versions. (shrink)

Contains responses from social critic Judith Butler to essays on her work from across the social sciences, humanities, and behavioral sciences.

Pierce challenges the argument that economic sanctions are always morally preferable to the use of military force. He argues that such sanctions inflict suffering and physical harm on noncombatants and that small-scale military operations are sometimes preferable.

This article revisits the Frankfurt School’s reflections on race, anti-Semitism and fascism, focusing especially on the theory of race implicit in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It argues that this theory has the potential to be developed into a critical functionalist theory of race that avoids both class and race reductionism, offering a thoroughly intersectional competitor to currently dominant philosophies of race. The key to such a theory is the view that racialization plays a functional role in sustaining capitalist exploitation. While Horkheimer (...) and Adorno focus on the scapegoat function of racialization, I argue that this function, while important, does not exhaust the possible functionalities of racialization and neglects an especially crucial function: the maintenance of a specifically racial form of exploitation. (shrink)

Socioeconomic inequality is perpetuated and exacerbated by an overlooked yet serious epidemic of time theft: the act of causing others to lose their time without adequate cause, compensation, or consent. We explain why time theft goes unnoticed, how it drives socioeconomic inequality, and what businesses and policymakers can do to address it.

Cet ouvrage est construit autour d'un chapitre (texte original) de Judith Butler sur l'éthique de la non-violence. En réponse se construisent quatre réflexions philosophiques. Mylène Botbol-Baum présente le collectif à partir de sa traduction du texte de Judith Butler, et aborde la question du sujet et de la norme à partir de la lecture butlerienne de Levinas et Arendt, sur la question des limites de la légitimité de la violence pour une éthique de la relationalité. Jean de Munck (...) traite une lecture croisée de Benjamin et Butler sur la violence. Romildo Pineiro et Jose Erraruz off rent une lecture historique et politique du concept de violence et y confrontent l'interprétation de la non violence dans le texte de Butler. Trois textes plus sociologiques suivent sur l'impact de la non-violence, dans une perspective qui vise à " défaire le genre " dans le cadre sociopolitique critique des vulnérabilités, dans le cadre du travail des femmes migrantes (Ghaliya Dejelloul) ou du travail domestique non rémunéré (Anna Safuta), à partir d'une enquête sur la mobilité spatiale des femmes dans les zones pré-urbaines d'Alger ou de Bruxelles, off rant une analyse sur l'hostilité masculine et le rôle du discours religieux dans la légitimation de cette violence. Matthieu de Nanteuil conclut le volume sur la question de la violence et de la sensibilité politique en mettant à jour la théorie de la démocratie radicale chez Judith Butler. Il sera donc question dans ce volume de penser la non-violence à partir d'une approche fondée sur la normalisation des corps, en réintroduisant le sujet de la vie comme interlocuteur critique du sujet de la norme en démocratie. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare comes with opportunities but also numerous challenges. A specific challenge that remains underexplored is the lack of clear and distinct definitions of the concepts used in and/or produced by these algorithms, and how their real world meaning is translated into machine language and vice versa, how their output is understood by the end user. This “semantic” black box adds to the “mathematical” black box present in many AI systems in which the underlying (...) “reasoning” process is often opaque. In this way, whereas it is often claimed that the use of AI in medical applications will deliver “objective” information, the true relevance or meaning to the end‐user is frequently obscured. This is highly problematic as AI devices are used not only for diagnostic and decision support by healthcare professionals, but also can be used to deliver information to patients, for example to create visual aids for use in shared decision‐making. This paper provides an examination of the range and extent of this problem and its implications, on the basis of cases from the field of intensive care nephrology. We explore how the problematic terminology used in human communication about the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of concepts of intensive care nephrology becomes a much more complicated affair when deployed in the form of algorithmic automation, with implications extending throughout clinical care, affecting norms and practices long considered fundamental to good clinical care. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

This article considers how race and gender shape latina and Latino paths to school success in college. A purposive sample of successful high school and college students was selected. Through interviews, fieldwork, and school records, the researchers find that Latinas navigate successfully through negative stereotypes by maintaining positive definitions of themselves and by emphasizing their group membership as Latina. Young Latino men also see themselves as part of a larger cultural group but tend to have less positive racial and ethnic (...) identities than women do. Typically, they are supported by mentors, such as white athletic coaches, and tend to draw from the meritocratic ethos of sports, regarding their success in individualistic terms. While successful Latinas do not assimilate in the ways predicted by the literature, the young men in this study accept the individualistic and meritocratic ethos of the dominant culture, but with a psychological price. (shrink)

The use of "theory" in feminist analysis has been said to threaten feminism as a political force. This collection of work by leading feminist scholars engages with the question of the political status of poststructuralism theory within feminism. Against the view that the use of post-structuralism necessarily weakens feminism, 'Feminists Theorize the Political' affirms the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential. In laying the theoretical groundwork for the volume, Butler and Scott posed a number of questions (...) to prominent legal scholars, literary critics, philosophers, political theorists, historians, and cultural theorists. The essays do not settle the questions but generate new and productive directions for them. The volume as a whole valorizes the unsettling power and politics of theory. The essays in 'Feminists Theorize the Political' speak to the questions that emerge from the convergence of feminism and poststructuralism: What happens to feminist critique when traditional foundations--experience, history, universal norms--are called into question? Can feminist theory problematize the notion of the subject without losing its political effectivity? Which version of the subject is to questioned, and how does that questioning open up possibilities for reformulating agency, power, and sites of political resistance? What are the consequences of a specifically feminist reformulation of difference? What are the uses and limits of a poststructuralist critique of binary logic for the theorization of racial and class differences, the position of the subaltern? This anthology represents a diverse array of theoretical work within feminist theory with strong political stakes. Although not all of the authors subscribe to poststructuralism, (and few would concede post-structuralism is a monolithic enterprise), each offers an innovative feminist analysis that is in some way motivated in and by the poststructuralist challenge. 'Feminists Theorize The Political' addresses a range of feminist concerns, including productive freedom, anti-discrimination law, rape, and formulating power in terms of exclusion, difference and hierarchy. (shrink)

This commentary requests some further details about the study and raises some concerns about factors that may have affected the findings or the interpretation thereof. These include the possibility….

Many legal scholars well recognize that, in some instances, support for a law or policy may be primarily because of its expressive function, i.e. the statements it makes about underlying values. In these cases, the expressive content of a law or policy may actually overshadow its central purpose. Examples of this phenomenon, according to Cass Sunstein, include, for example, regulations against hate speech in the USA. He suggests that achieving the consequence (prohibiting hateful speech against certain groups) may not be (...) the real focus (central purpose) of the law. Rather, the real focus is on the social meaning of these regulations—that bigotry is unacceptable in a liberal society. In this way, a particular law or policy can operate on many levels—while aiming to achieve a particular objective or behavior, it can also be a valuable tool for achieving other important social goals through its expressive function. This article applies this insight to the realm of public health policy, with particular attention to the case of pandemic planning, and suggests that public health policy and its overall goals may be well-served by deliberate regard for, and appropriate utilization of, the expressive function. (shrink)

Skinner has assigned the persistence of cognitive explanations to the literature of freedom and dignity. This view is challenged especially as it applies to behavioral scientists. It is argued that cognitive explanations persist because current behaviorism does not challenge cognitive epistomology; because behavior analysts have failed to provide research evidence at the level of human behavior, and finally because a science of behavior based solely on operant principles is necessarily incomplete. The implications of these problems for behavior analysis are addressed.

Mental health courts, premised on the notion of therapeutic justice, have become an increasingly appealing way of dealing with what is widely, although not uniformly, seen as the inappropriate incarceration of people who engage in criminal behavior caused by mental illness. Nevertheless, mental health courts are not without their critics and a number of objections have been raised against the implementation of these courts. Among these criticisms is that mental health courts may inappropriately privilege criminal behavior by the provision of (...) expedited comprehensive services to persons with mental illness who commit criminal of enses and, in doing so, reduce or delay the provision of services to persons with mental illness who do not engage in criminal behavior. This article explores the mechanisms that may result in “queue-jumping” and analyzes whether a priority to of enders, when it does occur, is justii able. (shrink)

This book shows how environmental decline relates to human health and to health care practices in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It outlines the environmental trends that will strongly affect health, and challenges us to see the connections between ways of practicing medicine and the very environmental problems that damage ecosystems and make people sick. In addition to philosophical analysis of the converging values of bioethics and envrionmental ethics, the book offers case studies as well as a number of (...) practical suggestions for moving health care toward sustainability. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler (...) engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy. (shrink)

This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his metaphysics and view of the subject, all while revealing ambiguities within his position. The result is a sophisticated reconsideration of the post-Hegelian tradition (...) that has predominated in modern French thought, and her study remains a provocative and timely intervention in contemporary debates over the unconscious, the powers of subjection, and the subject. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender (...) as a reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender (...) as a reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

Ethical decisions related to computer technology and computer use are subject to three primary influences: (1) the individual's own personal code (2) any informal code of ethical behavior that exists in the work place, and (3) exposure to formal codes of ethics. The relative importance of these codes, as well as factors influencing these codes, was explored in a nationwide survey of information system (IS) professionals. The implications of the findings are important to educators and employers in the development of (...) acceptable ethical standards. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 8, August 2024, Page 109-111.