Gender, Race and Philosophy: The Blog

Feminist Philosophy and Essentialism Conference

HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITÄT ZU BERLIN, GERMANY INSTITUT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE SYMPOSIUM SERIES:

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY AND… ESSENTIALISM

Dates: 19 – 20th of July 2012

Location: Senatssaal, Humboldt-Universität Main Building (Unter den Linden 6), Berlin

Description: Would you be the same individual if you were gendered differently? The workshop asks this and related questions with a special emphasis on Charlotte Witt’s recent book The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011). According to Witt, most ordinary social agents find the answer to the above question to be an obvious ‘No!’ and they have no difficulties providing an intuitive answer. By contrast, most academic feminists working on gender find the answer neither obvious nor easy. What generates such divergent views and why are ordinary agents so secure in their gender ascriptions? In her book, Witt provides an articulation of this and offers an account of gender essentialism that is based on Aristotelian unification essentialism: gender (being a woman/ man) functions to unify social individuals so that an individual – rather than an aggregate of diverse parts – exists. The workshop interrogates Witt’s view, considers alternatives to it and discusses the role of gender essentialism in feminist philosophy.

Speakers:

Dan López de Sa (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)

Eva von Redecker (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)

Natalie Stoljar (McGill University, Canada)

Alison Stone (Lancaster University, UK)

Charlotte Witt (University of New Hampshire, USA)

Attendance is free but places are limited. To register, please email feminismhu@gmail.com by 30th of June 2012. We hope to be able to provide travel bursaries for students/ unwaged participants. If you would like to be considered for one, or have any queries regarding the Symposium Series/ this event, please contact the organiser Mari Mikkola (mari.mikkola@hu-berlin.de). ---

Prof. Dr. Mari Mikkola Juniorprofessorin für Praktische Philosophie/ Junior Professor in Practical Philosophy Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Institut für Philosophie Under den Linden 6 D-10099 Berlin Germany Website: http://www.philosophie.hu-berlin.de/institut/lehrbereiche/politik/mikkola/mitarbeiter/mikkola_mari

Spring 2012 Symposium: Witt on the Metaphysics of Gender

Find the Spring 2012 Symposium here.

Table of Contents: Hypatia February 2012

Hypatia © Hypatia Volume 27, Issue 1 Pages 1 - 240, February 2012

Introduction FEAST Cluster on Feminist Critiques of Evolutionary Psychology—Editor's Introduction (pages 1–2) Diana Tietjens Meyers Article first published online: 28 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01239.x Articles Evolutionary Psychology, Ethology, and Essentialism (Because What They Don't Know Can Hurt Us) (pages 3–27) Letitia Meynell Article first published online: 3 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01240.x “Not Much to Praise in Such Seeking and Finding”: Evolutionary Psychology, the Biological Turn in the Humanities, and the Epistemology of Ignorance (pages 28–49) Kim Q. Hall Article first published online: 23 SEP 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01229.x Feminist Engagement with Evolutionary Psychology (pages 50–72) Carla Fehr Article first published online: 15 SEP 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01221.x Introduction Cluster: The Myths of Maternity – Editor's Introduction (pages 73–75) Linda Martín Alcoff Article first published online: 3 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01245.x Articles For Shame: Feminism, Breastfeeding Advocacy, and Maternal Guilt (pages 76–98) Erin N. Taylor and Lora Ebert Wallace Article first published online: 28 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01238.x Idealized and Industrialized Labor: Anatomy of a Feminist Controversy (pages 99–117) Jane Clare Jones Article first published online: 15 SEP 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01217.x Against Matricide: Rethinking Subjectivity and the Maternal Body (pages 118–138) ALISON STONE Article first published online: 9 FEB 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01169.x Irigaray and Lyotard: Birth, Infancy, and Metaphysics (pages 139–162) Rachel Jones Article first published online: 28 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01236.x Hospitality and the Maternal (pages 163–181) IRINA ARISTARKHOVA Article first published online: 29 SEP 2010 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01147.x Open Issue Content Articles Donna Haraway's Cyborg Touching (Up/On) Luce Irigaray's Ethics and the Interval Between: Poethics as Embodied Writing (pages 182–200) MARGARET E. TOYE Article first published online: 7 MAY 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01198.x Foucault and Familial Power (pages 201–218) CHLOË TAYLOR Article first published online: 4 MAR 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01171.x Book Reviews How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence. By VIRGINIA HELD (pages 219–222) Susan Hawthorne Article first published online: 15 NOV 2010 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01150.x Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances. By AIMEE CARRILLO ROWE (pages 223–227) Dawn Rae Davis Article first published online: 22 DEC 2010 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01162.x The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves. By JOHN CHRISTMAN (pages 227–230) Diana Tietjens Meyers Article first published online: 4 MAR 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01173.x Musings The Politics of Feminism and the Feminism of Politics: Reflections on a Roundtable Hosted by the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (pages 231–236) Anya R. Topolski Article first published online: 28 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01249.x Notes on Contributors (pages 237–240) Article first published online: 13 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01252.x

Call for Nominations: Hypatia Editor(s)

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS FOR EDITOR(S)

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy is seeking an editor, co-editors, or an editorial team to serve a five year term, beginning July 1, 2013. The journal issues a call for nominations for editor(s) every five years in order to consider new directions for the journal and to encourage others to get involved.

We encourage self-nominations as well as nominations of others. Self-nominations will be accepted until May 1, 2012;  those wishing to nominate others should submit your nominations no later than March 1, 2012.

Hypatia is the preeminent journal for feminist philosophy; it has a wide international readership and a robust institutional subscription base. It serves as an important resource not only for philosophers, but for all those interested in philosophical issues raised by feminism, including interdisciplinary women's and gender studies scholars.  The journal publishes work covering a wide range of philosophical traditions and topics, and therefore we encourage nominations of editors who have diverse interests and expertise in sub-areas and methodologies of Philosophy and Feminist Studies.  Candidates should have a record of publication in feminist philosophy; some previous editorial experience is desirable. Hypatia is committed to the inclusion of the scholarship of feminists of color, trans-feminists, transnational feminists, queer and differently-abled feminist philosophers.  We encourage nominations of editors who write from these standpoints. Individuals constituting an editorial team need not be members of the same institution. Candidates (or at least one member of an editorial team) should be at an institution with graduate students in Philosophy or Gender/Women’s Studies who can serve as managing editors and editorial assistants.  Candidates who prefer to co-edit and/or construct an editorial team should indicate how they would share the work of the journal. Candidates should also indicate what kinds of institutional support they expect to receive. 

If you are nominating yourself (or co-editors, or a team), please send a CV (or CVs for each member of the editorial team), a brief statement of the directions in which you would like to take Hypatia, and a brief account of your relevant experience. If you are nominating a team please also include a statement that indicates how the work of editing the journal will be shared and where the journal will be housed. If you are nominating others, please send a letter briefly stating your reasons for nominating them, as well as their institutional/postal addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses. We will contact them and request that they provide the same materials as self-nominators should they wish to be considered. 

Initial applications received by May 1, 2012 will be reviewed and a subset of applicants invited to submit a full proposal. The full proposals must be sent by October 1, 2012.  All proposals will be judged on their merits.

Instructions for preparation of full proposals will be posted on the Hypatia website.

Please feel free to contact Lori Gruen lgruen@wesleyan.edu or Alison Wylie aw26@u.washington.edu with any questions

Nominations should be sent to: Lori Gruen lgruen@wesleyan.edu

Editorial Search Committee: Elizabeth Anderson, Lori Gruen (chair), Falguni Sheth

CFP: Gender, Sex, Race and the Family

CFP: Making Sense of Gender, Sex, Race and the Family

Humana.Mente – Journal of Philosophical Studies

Call for Papers Issue 22, July 2012

Making Sense of Gender, Sex, Race and the Family

Editors: Elena Casetta & Vera Tripodi

One of the main topics in analytic feminist philosophy is the notion of gender and it is widely held that it is a social constructed concept or category. Traditionally, the inquiry into the nature of gender has been focused on the relation between gender and sex, but recently an increasing number of analytic feminists is coming to consider the status of gender also in its correlation with the categories of race and family. Briefly, according to this approach, it would be a mistake to isolate conditions such as gender, race, class, age, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, economic position, family status: insofar as they are social constructions, all these notions differ from one society to another and women or men do not experience their membership in a gender, sex or race in the same way. But are really all these notions socially constructed? And, in case, are they constructed in the same way and to the same extent? And how can race and sex affect the way we perceive and shape our gender experience and gender expression? Are there different types of human bodies and different ways of sexually classifying them? What does make a woman (or man) a mother (or father)?; Is parenthood a biological or natural relationship? What defines a family?

This issue of Humana.Mente welcomes contributions addressing these and related questions, including the following topics:

The ontology of race and gender
Reproduction and sexuality
Non-human animals sexuality, reproduction, and “families”
Family and adoption
Reproduction, procreation and family
The science of race and sex
Gender, race, ethnicity and class
Man and masculinity
Sexuality and marriage
Identity, race and gender
Sex reassignment and personal identity
Motherhood and fatherhood
Transgender, transsexual, and queer sexualities
Gender and science
Marriage, same-sex unions and civil marriage

Furthermore, we invite to submit reviews of recent books (published after 2010), and commentaries of articles and books that could be of particular interest for the topics analyzed in this Issue.

Please send a document in an editable format suitable for blind review to:

Elena Casetta: elena.casetta AT unito.it
Vera Tripodi: vera.tripodi AT ub.edu

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: 2012 January 1st
PEER-REVIEWING PROCESS: 2012 January 7th to March 31st
NOTIFICATION OF ACCEPTANCE: 2012 April 2nd
FINAL VERSION DUE: 2012 April 30th

Instruction for Authors:
Max. length:
- PAPERS: 20 pp. (2400 characters with spaces per page – 50.000 types, blankets, notes and references included).
Papers must include an abstract (between 600 and 700 types) and a reference list (please use the author-date reference style).
- COMMENTARIES: 7 pp.
- BOOK REVIEWS: 4 pp.
Font: Bodoni 11 – Page Dimension: 15×23 cm
Margins: Sup 3,25 Inf 2,25 Left and Right 1,8

Language: English

New Book - Feminist Epistemology and Phil Science: Power in Knowledge

A new volume just out (cross-posted from SWIP-L):

FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: POWER IN KNOWLEDGE, edited by Heidi Grasswick and published by Springer (as part of the Feminist Philosophy series edited by Elizabeth Potter).

The table of contents can be found here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-1-4020-6835-5#section=895294&page=1

Though this book is expensive (as are all Springer books), consider Springer's "MyCopy" option. If your library subscribes to one or more of Springer's e-book collections, you will be eligible to purchase a "MyCopy" version of this volume, either hard copy or electronic, for only $25. This means that if you are fortunate enough to be at an institution with a library that has the requisite subscriptions, you and your students could purchase the book reasonably, making class use a possibility.

Conference on Bias

HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITÄT ZU BERLIN, GERMANY INSTITUT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE
SYMPOSIUM SERIES:  FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY AND…

THE INAUGURAL EVENT ON BIAS

25 – 26th August 2011

Location: Kleiner Senatssaal (Humboldt-Universität Main Building, Unter den Linden 6, Berlin)

The concept of bias has played a key role in shaping feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. It is not, however, an uncontested concept. Feminist philosophers disagree amongst themselves on how the concept should be understood, and whether bias is inevitable. They further disagree on how feminists should respond to and deal with bias. For instance, are biases always detrimental to our knowledge seeking activities? Or, can certain explicit biases (like feminist and anti-racist ones) make our epistemic practices more robustly truth-seeking?

More recently, political and ethical discussions have started making use of the concept of bias. Both philosophers and psychologists alike have begun examining certain sorts of widespread implicit biases about members of stigmatised social groups. The holders of these biases are generally unaware of them, and often have sincere and explicit egalitarian beliefs. On one understanding, implicit biases are unconscious prejudices that unduly affect our ways of both positively and negatively perceiving, evaluating, and interacting with others. The recognition and analysis of such biases has wide-ranging consequences for feminist philosophy and politics, as well as for every other movement seeking social justice. Implicit biases may explain why members of particular groups still find it hard to ‘make it’, despite the lack of overt obstacles to positions of power and authority.  Given its centrality to a number of feminist debates, this conference examines the notion of bias (broadly conceived).

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

Louise Antony (University of Massachusetts, Amherts, USA): "Different Voices or Perfect Storm? Explaining the Dearth of Women In Philosophy"

Jennifer Saul (University of Sheffield, UK): "Formal Equality of Opportunity and Affirmative Action"

Matthew Drabek (University of Iowa, US): “A Model of Feedback Bias in the Social Sciences”

Catherine Hundleby (University of Windsor, Canada): “Bias and Fallacies of Argumentation: The Case of Androcentrism”

Kristen Intemann (Montana State University, US) & Inmaculada de Melo‐Martín (Weill Cornell Medical College, US): “Bias and the Commercialization of Scientific Research: Can a Feminist Conception of
Impartiality Help?”

Peter Kirwan (University of California, Irvine, US): “Implicit Bias: Mapping the Dark Matter of Social Psychology”

Heidi Lockwood (Southern Connecticut State University, US): “Why does Diversity Matter in the Academy”

Susanne Pohlmann (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany): “Accountability and Underpinning Attitudes of Biased Beliefs”

This conference also serves as the inaugural event for the new Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Symposium Series Feminist Philosophy and…. It will be followed by further regular events on topics relevant and of interest to feminist philosophers and all philosophers working on issues to do with social justice. Planned future topics include Feminist Philosophy and: Gender, Pornography, Race, Sex work.

Attendance is free but places are limited. To register, email feminism-hu@gmx.de by 11th August 2011. For further information about the Symposium Series and the event on Bias, please contact Prof. Dr. Mari Mikkola (mari.mikkola@hu-berlin.de).

Signs Spring 2011 on Peace

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is proud to announce the publication of our Spring 2011 issue (volume 36, number 3). Signs is published by the University of Chicago Press, which has recently moved its journals publication to the new JSTOR Current Scholarship platform. Read the latest issue here: http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/signs/about.html.

The issue features "Feminists Reconceptualize Peace," a probing Comparative Perspectives Symposium with contributors from China, the former Yugoslav countries, South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, and the Fiji Islands.

Other articles in this issue address naked protest in India, women's political subjectivity in postconflict South Sudan, gender in anarchoindigenist solidarity activism, gendered citizenship and the Minutemen, necro- and narcopolitics and femicide at the Mexico-U.S. border, and gender and genre in Emma Goldman.

The call for papers for the Signs special issue on Women, Gender, and Prisons: National and Global Perspectives (deadline for submissions June 30, 2011) is available here: http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/signs/forAuthor.html.

TIWAFLL flickr stream

MIT Women's and Gender Studies has undertaken a campaign to make feminism more visible.  Many people accept the basic principles of feminism (anti-sexism!?) but resist the f-word.  Our thought is that by showing that feminism is a broad-based movement that includes people of all kinds, we can defuse some of the anxiety about the word and build connections and coalitions more easily. 

We began by using International Women's Day as an occasion to wear a sticker saying "This is what a feminist looks like" and then moved on to photograph members of the MIT community wearing their stickers.  You can find it on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mit.wgs?ref=ts#!/media/set/fbx/?set=a.1436127642686.52869.1817835690
Our most recent effort was at the MIT Open House celebrating MIT's 150th anniversary (4/30).  We set up a photo booth and offered a tote bag printed with "This is what a feminist looks like at MIT"  to anyone who would have their photo taken with a sign saying the same thing.  We were busy all day and over 175 people participated.  It is an AMAZING display and includes the president of MIT, Susan Hockfield, the Dean of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Deborah Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Cambridge, Denise Simmons, and many many more from around the area and around the world.  Find it here:

http://flic.kr/s/aHsjuDf3n3

It is an important reminder that feminism is a broad-based and much loved movement.  Show your feminist pride!

Moya on Race and Culture

The On The Human Forum has just completed an excellent discussion of race and culture, prompted by Paula Moya's essay "A Story in Two Parts, With an Ending Yet To Be Written."  Find it here:

http://onthehuman.org/2011/05/story-in-two-parts/

Enjoy!