The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism 9781474297783, 9781474297806, 9781474297776

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Lost of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Editio's Preface
Notes
Part 1 Introduction
Chapter 1 What Is Analytic1 Feminism?
1 Analytic feminism: A first attempt at a definition
1.1 Analytic philosophy: Controversies about its origins and main features
1.2 A working definition of feminism
2 Analytic feminism as a philosophical tradition: A proposal for a definition
3 For further reading
Notes
References
Chapter 2 Why Analytic Feminism?
1 Why do philosophers do analytic feminism?
1.1 Degrees of open-mindedness and enthusiasm
1.2 Kinds of analytic philosophy most amenable to feminist use
1.3 The types of feminist projects most amenable toanalytic methods
2 Should there be analytic feminism: Is it a good idea to categorize or divide feminist philosophers by philosophical method?
2.1 Reasons for feminist philosophers to usemethodological labels
2.2 Reasons for feminist philosophers not to usemethodological labels
3 Recent examples of cross-methodological work and suggestions for the future
Notes
References
Chapter 3 The Society for Analytical Feminism: Our Founding Twenty-Five Years Ago
Appendix: Presidents of the Society for Analytical Feminism
Notes
References
Part 2 Metaphysics
Chapter 4 Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics
1 What is feminist metaphysics?
2 Gender as the analytical lens for feminist metaphysics
3 An overview of the chapters
4 For further reading
Notes
References
Chapter 5 Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage be Saved?
1 Introduction
2 Metaphysicians against feminist metaphysics
2.1 Characteristics of “mainstream” metaphysics
2.2 The narrowness of the “mainstream” conception
2.3 Terminological or substantive?
3 Feminists against feminist metaphysics
3.1 What is not socially constructed?
3.2 The role of counter-narratives
3.3 Feminist objections to theorizing about what is priorto social construction
3.4 Defending metaphysics against feminist objections
4 A different conception of metaphysics
5 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 6 Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics
1 Introduction
2 Aims of (different) metaphysical theories
3 Non-ideal theory in political philosophy
4 Meta-theory of abstraction
5 Metaphysical lessons
6 Final words
Acknowledgment
Notes
References
Chpater 7 Kinds of Social Construction
1 Introduction
2 Social construction and inevitability
3 Social construction and universality
3.1 Two notions of universality
3.2 Social construction and culture-dependence
3.3 Social construction, concept dependence, and empty categories
3.4 Social construction and natural kinds
4 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 8 Gender and the Unthinkable
1 Three theses about gender—and why they should be rejected
1.1 Arguments for an ontology of social individuals
1.2 Thesis 1: Gender is not essential to persons
1.3 Thesis 2: Gender is ascribed from a third-person perspective
1.4 Thesis 3: Gender is a social universal
2 The unthinkable and the inescapable
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Chapter 9 Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin? Feminism and the Analytic Philosophy of Sex
1 Introduction
2 Dworkin’s account of intercourse as dominance
3 Intercourse, sex, and varieties of social construction
4 Analytic attempts to define sex
5 Dworkin, Morgan, and “Sex in the Head”
6 Concluding remarks
Notes
References
Part 3 Epistemology
Chapter 10 Introduction to Feminist Epistemology
1 What is feminist epistemology?
2 Feminist epistemologies and philosophy of science
3 The varieties of feminist epistemologies: Postmodernism, standpoint theory, empiricism and feminist naturalized epistemology, virtue epistemology
4 Main topics in feminist epistemologies: Reason and rationality; objectivity and the bias paradox; epistemic authority and ignorance
5 An overview of the chapters
6 For further reading
Notes
References
Chapter 11 Contemporary Standpoint Theory: Tensions, Integrations, and Extensions
1 Introduction
2 Background: A brief history
3 Contemporary standpoint theory—merging feminist empiricism and standpoint
4 Standpoint methodology and epistemology
5 The achievement thesis and the knowing community
6 Identity
7 Conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 12 Objectivity in Science: The Impact of Feminist Accounts
1 Feminist concerns with bias
2 Strong objectivity and feminist standpoint theory
3 Contextual empiricism and a social account of scientific objectivity
4 Feminist analytic philosophy and philosophy of impact
5 Directing feminist theories of objectivity to increased impact
6 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 13 Feminist Philosophies of Science: The Social and Contextual Nature of Science
1 Introduction
2 Contextualism in feminist philosophies of science
3 The social nature of scientific theorizing and knowledge
4 Case studies
4.1 Sex determination
4.2 Primatology
5 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 14 Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue
1 Modernism’s moral failings
2 Rawls and the overturning of modernism
3 Non-modern grounds
Notes
References
Chapter 15 Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy: Potentially the Closest of Allies
1 Alternative conceptions of ignorance
1.1 The traditional philosophic conception
1.2 The new agnotological conceptions
2 Ignorance of women
2.1 Actively constructed ignorance of women
2.2 Passively constructed ignorance of women
2.3 Virtuous ignorance of women
3 Knowledge of women
References
Chapter 16 Say Her Name: Maladjusted Epistemic Salience in the Fight against Anti-Black Police Brutality
1 Introduction
2 Resentment as tracking wrongs
3 Resentment of an oppressive state
4 Say Her Name: Islan Nettles and Rekia Boyd
5 Affectability imbalance and tracking violations
6 Maladjusted epistemic salience
7 Maladjusted epistemic salience as structural
8 Maladjusted epistemic salience for black women and girls
9 Objections
10 Concluding remarks
Notes
References
Chapter 17 The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality
1 Mills: “Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women?”
1.1 The questionable motivations argument
1.2 The Racial Solidarity argument
2 Mills as feminist separatist: The questionable motivations argument, reinterpreted
2.1 The solidarity argument reinterpreted
2.2 Some complications
3 Conclusion and outlook
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Part 4 Value Theory
Chapter 18 Introduction to Feminist Value Theory
1 What is value theory?
2 The origins of feminist ethics
3 The theoretical foundations of feminist ethics
4 Feminist ethics and political philosophy
5 Applied ethics
6 An overview of the essays
7 For further readings
Notes
References
Chapter 19 Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority
1 Autonomy as sovereign practical authority
2 Normative powers: Some examples
3 Violations, abuses, and failures of uptake
4 Toward a unified view of autonomy?
Notes
References
Chapter 20 (Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status
1 What is feminist about feminist approaches to abortion?
1.1 The liberal “pro-choice” view
1.2 What feminist philosophical accounts do
2 Which feminist view of fetal status?
3 Gradualism or relationality3?
4 Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Chapter 21 Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives
1 The patient appoints a proxy
2 What’s a treatment decision?
3 What’s wrong with proxy accuracy studies?
4 Shared agency
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 22 What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?
1 Introduction
2 What is a sex stereotype?—some possibilities
2.1 Explicit versus implicit associations
2.2 Normative versus neutral approaches
3 Individualist versus cultural approaches
4 What is a sex stereotype?—methodology
5 When and why is sex stereotyping wrongful/bad/unjust?
5.1 Failures of respect and recognition
5.2 Carrying a demeaning message
5.3 Supporting oppression/subordination
5.4 Blocking social change
5.5 Restricting freedom of gender expression
6 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 23 Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics: Women, Embodiment, Care Relations, and Systemic Injustice
1 Introduction
2 Kant’s comments about women
3 A brief history of pioneering women Kant scholars
4 The growth of Kantian feminist scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s5
5 Feminist themes in contemporary Kant scholarship
5.1 Kant and women
5.2 Kant and embodiment: Sexual activity, sexual objectification, abortion, sexual violence
5.3 Kant and care relations (marriage, dependents, servants)
5.4 Kant and systemic injustice: Poverty, prostitution, and oppression
6 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 24 Resisting Oppression Revisited
1 A recap of the argument
2 Self-respect under oppression
3 Responses to objections
4 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 25 Women and Global Injustice: Institutionalism, Capabilities, or Care?
1 Introduction
2 The gendered dimensions of global injustice
3 Global institutionalism
4 A global ethics of care
5 The capabilities approach
6 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 26 Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism: Reconceptualizing the Contested Relationship
1 Introduction
2 Feminism
3 Nationalism
4 Transnationalism
5 Feminist rejection of nationalism in favor of transnationalism
6 Are nation-states and nationalism relevant for feminism?
7 Conclusion
Notes
References
Part 5 Tools
Basic Logical Notions
Notes
References
A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts
Adversarial method
(Conceptual) analysis
Analytic(al) feminism
Analytic philosophy
Androcentrism versus sexism
Argument
Bias paradox
Continental feminism
Continental philosophy
“Different Voices” model
Empiricism
Epistemology
Essentialism and gender essentialism
Feminist empiricism
Feminist postmodernism
Gender versus sex
Gender schemas
Hermeneutics
Heteronormativity
Implicit bias
Intersectionality
Logic: Deductive and inductive
Logical positivism
Metaphysics
Naturalism
Nominalism
Object-relations theory
Ontology
Phenomenalism
Physicalism
Pragmatism
Queer studies or theory
Rationalism
Realism
Relativism
Sexism
Social constructionism
Standpoint theory
Stereotype threat
Strong and weak objectivity
Transgender and transsexual
“Waves” of feminism
Index

Citation preview

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Bloomsbury Companions The Bloomsbury Companions series is a major series of single volume companions to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the series is that each companion provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources.

Titles currently available in the series: Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro Aristotle, edited by Claudia Baracchi Continental Philosophy, edited by John Mullarkey and Beth Lord Epistemology, edited by Andrew Cullison Ethics, edited by Christian Miller Existentialism, edited by Jack Reynolds, Felicity Joseph, and Ashley Woodward Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards Heidegger, edited by Francois Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson Hobbes, edited by S.A. Lloyd Hume, edited by Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien Kant, edited by Gary Banham, Dennis Schulting, and Nigel Hems Leibniz, edited by Brendan Look Locke, edited by S.J. Savonius-Wroth, Paul Schuurman, and Jonathan Walmsley Metaphysics, edited by Robert W. Barnard and Neil A. Manson Philosophy of Language, edited by Manuel García-Carpintero and Max Kolbel Philosophy of Mind, edited by James Garvey Philosophy of Science, edited by Steven French and Juha Saatsi Plato, edited by Gerald A. Press Political Philosophy, edited by Andrew Fiala Socrates, edited by John Bussanich and Nicholas D. Smith Spinoza, edited by Wiep van Bunge

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism Edited by Pieranna Garavaso

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This edition published in 2022 Copyright © Pieranna Garavaso, 2018 Pieranna Garavaso has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p.xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Ernst Haas/Contributor/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Garavaso, Pieranna, editor. Title: The Bloomsbury companion to analytic feminism / edited by Pieranna Garavaso. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Bloomsbury companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017053926 (print) | LCCN 2018012659 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474297790 (ePub) | ISBN 9781474297776 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474297783 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Feminist theory. | Analysis (Philosophy) Classification: LCC HQ1190 (ebook) | LCC HQ1190.B59 2018 (print) | DDC 305.4201–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053926 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9778-3 PB: 978-1-3503-5649-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-9777-6 eBook: 978-1-4742-9779-0 Series: Bloomsbury Companions Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Book.indd 4

29-Jun-22 06:55:20

Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgments Editor’s Preface

vii xiii xiv

Part 1  Introduction   1 What Is Analytic Feminism?  Pieranna Garavaso 3   2 Why Analytic Feminism?  Ann Garry 17   3 The Society for Analytical Feminism: Our Founding Twenty-Five Years Ago  Ann E. Cudd and Kathryn J. Norlock 37 Part 2  Metaphysics   4 Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics  Katharine Jenkins and Pieranna Garavaso 45   5 Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage be Saved?  Jennifer McKitrick 58   6 Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics  Mari Mikkola 80   7 Kinds of Social Construction  Esa Diaz-Leon 103   8 Gender and the Unthinkable  Natalie Stoljar 123   9 Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin? Feminism and the Analytic Philosophy of Sex  Katharine Jenkins 144 Part 3  Epistemology 10 Introduction to Feminist Epistemology  Pieranna Garavaso 171 11 Contemporary Standpoint Theory: Tensions, Integrations, and Extensions  Sharon Crasnow 188 12 Objectivity in Science: The Impact of Feminist Accounts  Evelyn Brister 212 13 Feminist Philosophies of Science: The Social and Contextual Nature of Science  Lynn Hankinson Nelson 236 14 Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue  Deborah K. Heikes 260 15 Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy: Potentially the Closest of Allies  Janet A. Kourany 281

vi

Contents

16 Say Her Name: Maladjusted Epistemic Salience in the Fight against Anti-Black Police Brutality  Ayanna De’Vante Spencer 310 17 The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality  Rachel Elizabeth Fraser 329 Part 4  Value Theory 18 Introduction to Feminist Value Theory  Amanda Roth and Pieranna Garavaso 355 19 Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority  Andrea C. Westlund 375 20 (Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status  Amanda Roth 394 21 Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives  Hilde Lindemann 423 22 What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?  Adam Omar Hosein 438 23 Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics: Women, Embodiment, Care Relations, and Systemic Injustice  Helga Varden 459 24 Resisting Oppression Revisited  Carol Hay 483 25 Women and Global Injustice: Institutionalism, Capabilities, or Care?  Angie Pepper 507 26 Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism: Reconceptualizing the Contested Relationship  Ranjoo Seodu Herr 531 Part 5  Tools Basic Logical Notions  Pieranna Garavaso and Lory Lemke 561 A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts  Pieranna Garavaso 581 Index

599

List of Contributors Evelyn Brister Associate Professor of Philosophy at the RochesterInstitute Institute of of Bristeris is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Technology. She has written on feminist epistemology, epistemology, skepticism, skepticism, and andepistemic epistemic contextualism. Her research examines epistemological and and political political obstacles obstacles to using scientific scientific knowledge to change practice, with a focus focus on on how how public public decision-making makes use of environmental science research. Sharon Crasnow is a distinguished professor of Philosophy Emerita at Norco College, Norco, California, and an associate researcher at the Centre for Humanities Engaging Science and Society (CHESS) at Durham University, Durham, UK. Her research focuses on feminist philosophy of science and the relationship between methodology and epistemology in the social sciences. Recent publications in these areas include “Process Tracing in Political Science: What’s the Story?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science  Part A, 2017; “Bias in Social Science Experiments,” Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science, ed. by Lee McIntyre and Alex Rosenberg, 2017; “Natural Experiments and Pluralism in Political Science,”  Philosophy of Social Science, 2015; and “Feminist Perspectives” in Philosophy of Social Science: New Directions, ed. by Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montuschi, Oxford University Press. In addition, she is the coeditor (with Joanne Waugh) of the Lexington Press book series Feminist Strategies: Flexible Thought and Resilient Practices. E. Cudd Cudd isisDean Provost and and Senior Vice and Chancellor Professor of Ann E. of Arts Sciences Professorand of Philosophy at Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work employs analytical Boston University. Her work employs an analytical feminist lensanand focuses feminist lens focuses inequality, on themes and of oppression, inequality, and the moral on themes of and oppression, the moral value of capitalism. She is the author, coauthor, She or coeditor of six books, including Analyzing Oppression value of capitalism. is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of six books, (Oxford 2006)(Oxford and Capitalism and2006) Against: A Feminist includingUniversity Analyzing Press, Oppression UniversityFor Press, and Capitalism Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and a founding member andand past For and Against: A Feminist Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2011), a president the Society for Analytical founding of member and past president Feminism. of the Society for Analytical Feminism. Dr. Esa Diaz-Leon is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. Before this, she was an assistant and then associate professor at the University of Manitoba (Canada). She specializes in philosophy of mind and language, and philosophy of gender, race, and sexuality. She has written on a wide range

Book.indd 7

29-Jun-22 06:55:20

viii

List of Contributors

of topics such as the nature of consciousness and phenomenal concepts, the prospects of physicalism and conceptual analysis, the meaning of “woman,” historical constructivism about races, the nature of sexual orientations, and the normativity of mental content. Her research currently focuses on issues having to do with the nature and applications of conceptual ethics. Rachel Elizabeth Fraser is Associate Professor, Exeter College, University of Oxford. Her work is primarily in epistemology, philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy. She likes counterexamples. Pieranna Garavaso is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota Morris. Her research interests include the history of analytic philosophy, antirealism in the philosophy of mathematics, personal identity, and the mutual influences of analytic philosophy and feminism. She is the author of Filosofia della matematica. Numeri e Strutture (Philosophy of Mathematics. Numbers and Structures) (Guerini 1998) and the editor of Arithmetic and Ontology (Rodopi 2006). She has coauthored with Nicla Vassallo Filosofia delle Donne (Philosophy of Women) (Laterza 2007) and Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance (Lexington Books 2014). She has edited a special issue of Paradigmi devoted to Contemporary Perspectives on Frege (Franco Angeli 2013). Ann Garry  is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. In the past few years she has been Humphrey Chair of Feminist Philosophy at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and Fulbright Professor at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Her primary research interests in feminist philosophy include feminist approaches to epistemology and philosophical methods, particularly the intersection of feminist philosophy and analytic philosophy, as well as moral and social topics such as pornography, abortion, and feminist analyses of sexuality. Currently she focuses on intersectional frameworks. Her coedited volume with Serene Khader and Alison Stone, The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, appeared in spring 2017. She also is the coeditor of Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy and the special issue of Hypatia, “Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gender Realities.”  Carol Hay is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.  Her work focuses primarily on issues in analytic feminism, liberal social and political philosophy, oppression studies, and Kantian ethics.  Her work in public philosophy has appeared in venues such as  The New York Times, Aeon magazine, Times Higher Education,

Book.indd 8

29-Jun-22 06:55:20

List of Contributors

ix

NPR Public Radio, and  The Boston Globe.  She received the 2015 Gregory Kavka/ UC Irvine Prize in Political Philosophy from the American Philosophical Association for “The Obligation to Resist Oppression,” Chapter 4 of her 2013 monograph Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppression. Deborah K. Heikes is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her main area of interest is rationality. She has published three books on the topic: Rationality, Representation, and Race (Palgrave Macmillan 2016); The Virtue of Feminist Rationality (Continuum 2012), and Rationality and Feminist Philosophy (Continuum 2010). She has published articles in such journals as Synthese, the Journal of Mind and Behavior, and Southwest Philosophy Review. Adam Omar Hosein is an associate professor at the University of Colorado.  He works mainly in moral, political, and legal philosophy, with a special interest in areas of international concern and issues relating to gender or race.  He has held fellowships and visiting positions at Chicago Law, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, and the Université catholique de Louvain. He holds a BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from Merton College, Oxford, and a PhD from MIT. Katharine Jenkins is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. She works primarily on social ontology, and her work is informed by feminist philosophy and the critical philosophy of race. She is also interested in the philosophy of sex and sexuality, and in epistemic injustice. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sheffield in 2016 and holds a BA and MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.  Janet A. Kourany is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a Fellow of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. Her research areas include philosophy of science, science and social values, philosophy of feminism, and the new interdisciplinary area of ignorance studies. Her books include Philosophy of Science after Feminism (2010); The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice: Science and Values Revisited (coedited with Martin Carrier and Don Howard) (2008); The Gender of Science (2002); Feminist Philosophies (coedited with James Sterba and Rosemarie Tong) (1999, 1992); Philosophy in a Feminist Voice (1998); S cientific Knowledge (1998, 1987); and Science and the Construction of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge is Thwarted (2020).

Book.indd 9

29-Jun-22 06:55:20

x

List of Contributors

Lory Lemke has taught courses in Logic, The Theory of Knowledge, and Philosophy and Film at the University of Minnesota Morris. He earned his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Hilde Lindemann is Emerita Professor of Philosophy and Associate in the Center for Ethics Humanities in the Life Sciences at Michigan State University. A Fellow of the Hastings Center and a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, her ongoing research interests are in feminist bioethics, feminist ethics, the ethics of families, and the social construction of persons and their identities. Her most recent book is Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities. Earlier books include An Invitation to Feminist Ethics and Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. With James Lindemann Nelson, she also wrote The Patient in the Family: An Ethics of Medicine and Families. She is the former editor of the Hastings Center Report as well as of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She was the coeditor of Rowman & Littlefield’s Feminist Constructions series and the general coeditor (with James Lindemann Nelson) of the Reflective Bioethics series at Routledge. Jennifer McKitrick received her PhD from MIT in 1999, and is currently a Professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.  She works on metaphysics, mostly focusing on the metaphysics of dispositions, as well as the metaphysics of gender. Her publications include “Reid’s Foundation for the Primary Quality/ Secondary Quality Distinction,” Philosophical Quarterly, 2002; “A Case for Extrinsic Dispositions,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2003; “Gender Identity Disorder,” in Establishing Medical Reality: Essays in the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Biomedical Science, Harold Kincaid and Jennifer McKitrick, eds., Springer, 2007; “A Dispositional Account of Gender,” Philosophical Studies, 2015. Mari Mikkola is Professor and Chair of Metaphysics at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Before taking up her current position in 2017, she worked at the Universities of Humboldt, Berlin (Germany), Stirling and Lancaster (UK). In 2005, Mikkola completed her PhD thesis on feminist philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her work is mainly on feminist philosophy and, in particular, on feminist metaphysics and feminist engagements with pornography. Additionally, she has research interests in social ontology, broadly conceived. Mikkola has published papers on these topics in various journals and edited collections. Her recent monograph, The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and Its Role in Feminist Philosophy (NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), dealt with feminist philosophy and social injustice. She is currently

Book.indd 10

29-Jun-22 06:55:20

List of Contributors

xi

working on a book titled Pornography: A Philosophical Introduction (under contract with OUP). Lynn Hankinson Nelson is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Washington. She is the author of Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (1990), Biology and Feminism: A Philosophical Introduction (2017), and numerous articles devoted to feminist philosophy of science and feminist epistemology. She is coauthor of On Quine (1999), coeditor of Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science (1997), Feminist Interpretations of Quine (2003), and a special issue of Hypatia on “Feminist Science Studies” (2004). Kathryn J. Norlock is Professor of Philosophy and the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and a cofounder and coeditor of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. Her research and teaching focuses on ethical theory and applied ethics, especially responding to evils, as well as feminist philosophy and non-ideal theory. Her publications include “The Challenges of Extreme Moral Stress” (Metaphilosophy 2016), “Real (Imaginal) Relationships With the Dead” (Journal of Value Inquiry 2016), and Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective (Lexington Books 2009). She earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. Angie Pepper wrote her contribution while she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique, Université de Montréal. In her published work, Angie critiques statist and relational conceptions of global justice from a feminist perspective, and she argues that cosmopolitans cannot exclude sentient animals from their theoretical frameworks. Angie is currently developing a sentience-centered cosmopolitanism that can guide us in determining principles of cosmopolitan interspecies justice. Amanda Roth is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at SUNY Geneseo. Her main areas of interest include feminist philosophy, moral and political philosophy, bioethics, and gender and sexuality. She has published articles on women and sports, gender and respect, ethical progress, ethical objectivity, and queer family-making in journals including the Journal of Political Philosophy, KIEJ, Hypatia, IJFAB, and the Journal of Sports & Social Issues. Ranjoo Seodu Herr is Professor of Philosophy at Bentley University, MA, USA. She has published widely on topics of feminist, political, and comparative philosophy in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies such as

Book.indd 11

29-Jun-22 06:55:20

xii

List of Contributors

Hypatia, Meridians, Political Theory, Social Theory and Practice, Journal of International Political Theory, and Philosophy East & West. Herr’s current research interests are in theories of democracy, nationalism, self-determination, human rights, multiculturalism, and Third World/transnational feminisms. Ayanna De’Vante De’Vante Spencer assistant professor of philosophy and women’s, Ayanna Spencer isis an a PhD student in philosophy at Michigan State gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut. Professor Spencer is University. Her main fields of research are Epistemology and Black Feminist a Black feminist epistemologist and survivor-scholar who earned her doctorate in Thought. philosophy at Michigan State University. She is also a proud graduate of Spelman Natalie is an associate thesurvivors Department of Philosophy College.Stoljar Dr. Spencer examines professor how Blackingirl of sexual violence inand the the US are structurally denied power to meaningfully actUniversity.  as experts ofShe their own experiences Institute for Health and Social Policy, McGill received her PhD of violence. Shefrom worksPrinceton on epistemic oppression, in Philosophy University andsexual held violence, positionsand at criminalization the Australian to aid in efforts to dismantle the sexual abuse to prison pipeline. Additionally, National University, Monash University, and the University of Melbourne before Dr. Spencer is a consultant for the international ‘metoo’ movement, a recipient of going to McGill in 2006. Her research is in feminist philosophy, social and political a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. philosophy, and the philosophy of law. In feminist philosophy, she has written Natalie Stoljar is Professor of Philosophy in theofDepartment Philosophy on feminist metaphysics, including the notions essentialism,ofrealism, and and the Institute for Health and Social Policy, McGill University. She received her nominalism. In social and political philosophy, her work focuses on autonomy PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University and held positions at the Australian and other aspects of moral psychology. She is coeditor (with Catriona Mackenzie) National University, Monash University, and the University of Melbourne before of Relational Autonomy. Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social going to McGill in 2006. Her research is in feminist philosophy, social and political Self  (OUP 2000). philosophyofoflaw. law, In shefeminist has published on legalshe interpretation, philosophy, and  In thethe philosophy philosophy, has written constitutional interpretation and judicial review, and the methodology of law. and on feminist metaphysics, including the notions of essentialism, realism, nominalism. In social political philosophy, work focuses and Helga Varden is an and associate professor in her Philosophy and on in autonomy Women and other aspects of moral psychology. She is coeditor (with Catriona Mackenzie) of Gender Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Varden’s Relational Autonomy. Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self main research interests are Kant’s philosophy as well as legal-political philosophy (OUP 2000). In the philosophy of law, she has published on legal interpretation, and the philosophy of sex and She has published on a range of oflaw. classical constitutional interpretation and love. judicial review, and the methodology philosophical issues including Kant’s answer to the murderer at the door, private Helga Varden is Professor of Philosophy, of Women and Gender Studies, property, political obligations, and political legitimacy, as well as on applied and of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. issues such as terrorism, abortion, and same-sex marriage.  Varden’s main research interests are Kant’s philosophy as well as legal-political philosophy and the philosophy of sex and love. She has published on a range Andrea C. Westlund is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and of classical philosophical issues including Kant’s answer to the murderer at Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her areas the of door, private property, political obligations, and political legitimacy, as well as specialization include ethics, moral psychology, and feminist philosophy. Her on applied issues such as terrorism, abortion, and same-sex marriage. work has focused largely on the concepts of autonomy, authority, and shared Andrea C. Professor of Philosophy Florida State University. Heranger, areas agency, andWestlund she is is also very interested in atthe relationship between of specialization include ethics, psychology, and feminist philosophy. Her work blame, and forgiveness. She moral is currently working on a project on autonomy has focused largely on the concepts of autonomy, authority, and shared agency, and she and the exercise of normative powers, as well as another project on the role is also very interested in the relationship between anger, blame, and forgiveness. She is of autobiographical storytelling in our responsibility practices. She regularly currently working on a project on autonomy and the exercise of normative powers, as teaches coursesproject in ethics, social, and political philosophy, philosophy of law and well as another on the role of autobiographical storytelling in our responsibility public policy, philosophy sex andingender. practices. She and regularly teachesofcourses ethics, social, and political philosophy, philosophy of law and public policy, and philosophy of sex and gender.

Book.indd 12

29-Jun-22 06:55:20

Acknowledgments I would like to thank all the contributors for their patience, their cooperation, and their positive support of this project; I like to thank also the many feminist philosophers who have responded positively to my conception of this Companion even though they were not able to contribute to it. I thank Amanda Roth and Katharine Jenkins for their expertise and advice at different stages of the work to bring this volume together. I thank Colleen Coalter, the commissioning editor for Bloomsbury, for asking me to take on the editing of this Companion and Helen Saunders for taking care of the production. I would like to thank two anonymous referees whose comments have helped improve this volume. I am grateful to Sandy Kill and the staff at the University of Minnesota Morris Library for their care and their remarkable sleuthing skills in helping me find the texts I needed. A very special thanks goes to the four Morris Academic Partners who have assisted me in the last three years to bring this work to completion: Tessa Hagen helped in the research on and recruiting of the contributors and in the first conception of the volume; Liam Kiehne helped organizing my correspondence with potential and actual contributors; Jessica Gardner helped with the lastminute revisions and editing; and Jamon Beske has read each and every word of this book—several times—commented on several drafts of each chapter, provided insightful critical comments, and finally proofread and formatted each contribution. I thank him for his commitment, reliability, and always positive attitude. Finally, I would like to thank Lory Lemke for his helpful comments on every text I wrote for this Companion and for his support of me and my work throughout my whole career. I am grateful to him and to our two sons for their continuing support and encouragement.

Editor’s Preface The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism is the first volume of this kind1 devoted entirely to analytic feminism, that is, a tradition of feminist philosophies that has been influenced by views and methodological approaches developed and favored by philosophers trained in the analytic tradition. Accordingly, analytic feminism has historical links to and methodological similarities with both mainstream analytic and feminist philosophy. Yet, in most departments in the United States and in other countries where analytic philosophy is typically taught, feminist texts are not commonly read in introductory courses in philosophy or in introductory graduate and undergraduate courses in the specific areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. This volume stands out for its attempt at bridging the gap between traditional courses in analytic philosophy and courses in feminist philosophy. The purpose of this Companion is to collect insightful and groundbreaking work done by analytic feminist philosophers in core areas of mainstream analytic philosophy. The chapters included in this volume make significant contributions to widely debated topics within analytic philosophy such as realism, social constructivism, objectivity, rationality, and autonomy. This Companion is designed to be adopted as a textbook for a course on analytic feminism as well as a reference or companion text for introductory courses in analytic philosophy, or intermediate undergraduate and beginning graduate courses in the core areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory that are usually required courses for undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. These chapters are likely to engage students as they focus on topics easily relatable to their lives, such as the social construction of gender, sexual activity, biases in the sciences, heteronormativity, police brutality, or sex stereotyping. Unlike many other excellent handbooks and companions to feminist philosophies already in print,2 this work was not conceived as a resource that would provide an overall and exhaustive summary of analytic feminists’ work in the above fields. There are areas where analytic feminists have produced seminal work—for example, in the philosophy of language3—that we were not able to include in our discussions.4 This collection is intended to showcase the originality and depth of analytic feminists’ writings on several topics in the



Editor’s Preface

xv

general areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. The ultimate aim of this volume is to provide a tool for increased inclusion and dialectical integration of feminist texts into widely taught undergraduate and graduate courses in analytic philosophy. This volume is divided in five main parts. The introductory part proposes a characterization of Analytic Feminism, discusses its relations to other philosophical traditions and provides a brief history of its development in the profession. The following three parts are devoted to three main areas of philosophical reflection, that is, metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. The final part provides useful pedagogical tools, that is, a condensed introduction to the notions of validity and soundness and the techniques used to state, explain, and evaluate arguments and a glossary for crucial terms with which students may not be familiar and which are important for a full understanding of the readings. An index completes the volume. Each of Parts 2–4 starts with an introduction, which includes a concise (and broadly historical) outline of major debates in which feminists philosophers have been engaged, followed by chapters written exclusively for this volume that provide exemplary analytic discussions of topics related to various forms of social inequality in each core area. Finally, Parts 1–4 include an annotated bibliography for further readings in the relevant area, especially readings that provide broad and thorough surveys of feminist scholarship or discuss areas we were not able to include in the readings. The intellectual and scholarly quality of these chapters is the main reason for reading them and using them for teaching; yet there is another reason why these chapters can be extremely useful to instructors who aim at increasing the diversity of topics and perspectives discussed in courses in analytic philosophy. The lack of gender and racial diversity among the students and teachers of philosophy is a subject that has become of increasing concern for philosophy as a discipline and as a community.5 The percentages of women6 and students from other underrepresented groups who earn undergraduate or graduate degrees in philosophy are as low as the percentages of women or other underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) fields such as physics and computer science. The percentage of articles written by women and included in widely used introductory textbooks in philosophy is low; even lower is the percentage of articles that reflects a feminist perspective. In 2005, Margaret Walker wrote: “Most undergraduate textbooks, especially introductions to philosophy, remain astonishingly meager in their attention to issues of gender (not to mention, as they often don’t, race, sexuality, or disability). . . .

xvi

Editor’s Preface

Segregation, here as elsewhere, does not conduce to equal respect and to accurate understanding.”7 In the past twelve years since Walker’s comment, the situation has not significantly changed.8 There is of course no necessary connection between including in a course topics related to gender and other systems of social discrimination and increasing the diversity of the students taking the course. However, in the STEM fields, initiatives targeted directly to women and ethnic minorities have met with some degree of success, and the percentages of students and teachers from these underrepresented groups are increasing. It would seem to make sense for instructors of courses in analytic philosophy to include writings of philosophers who share their training and their approach to philosophical discussion and who can broaden the selection of topics and the diversity of perspectives included in their courses. This Companion collects chapters that can be so utilized.

Notes 1 Although this is accurate with regard to edited volumes such as handbooks and encyclopedias, two past issues of the journal of feminist philosophy Hypatia were devoted wholly to analytic feminism. The first issue was edited by Ann Cudd and published in the summer 1995; the second was edited by Anita Superson and Samantha Brennan and published in the fall 2005. 2 A very recent and impressive addition to the works that aim at providing thorough surveys of feminist philosophy is The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy edited by Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone (Routledge 2017). 3 The research produced by analytic feminists on the topic of pornography in connection with J. L. Austin’s speech act theory is an excellent example of how a feminist application of a theory that developed within mainstream analytic philosophy produces significant and innovative inquiries. For a very recent collection on this topic, see Mari Mikkola (ed.) Beyond Speech. Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy, Oxford University Press 2017. 4 Among others, some important areas that were not represented are moral psychology, virtue ethics, and social theory. 5 In the last ten years at least, the American Philosophical Association has been actively discussing these issues; see, in particular, the work of various committees such as the Committee on Inclusiveness in the Profession, the Committees on the Status of Black Philosophers and on the Status of Women, and various other committees devoted to the research of philosophers belonging to non-white ethnic groups; see also American Philosophical Association, “Data on Women in



Editor’s Preface

xvii

Philosophy,” available online: http://www.apaonlinecsw.org/data-on-women-inphilosophy (accessed July 26, 2017). Various APA newsletters are focused on areas of research related to the perspective of underrepresented groups. For recent and wideranging discussions of the low percentages of women in philosophy, see also Alcoff, Linda (2011), A Call for Climate Change for Women in Philosophy, available online at http://alcoff.com/articles/call-climate-change-women-philosophy (accessed June 10, 2017); Wylie, Alison (2011), “Women in Philosophy: The Costs of Exclusion— Editor’s Introduction,” Hypatia 26, 2 (SPRING 2011): 374–82. 6 By women I mean all those who identify as women; I thus intend to include also trans women. 7 Walker, Margaret Urban, “Diotima’s Ghost: The Uncertain Place of Feminist Philosophy in Professional Philosophy,” Hypatia 20 (3): 153–64, 160. 8 A quick survey of nine introductory textbooks advertised in the 2016 Oxford University Press catalog returned telling results: the percentage of women contributors varies from a high of 21.32 percent (Exploring Philosophy An Introductory Anthology) to a low of 1.35 percent (Classics of Philosophy) with an average at 13.3 percent of contributions by philosophers whose name suggests they may identify as women. I chose to focus on Oxford University Press because it is considered one of the most prestigious publishers in the field of philosophy. My guess is that looking at the data for other publishers we may obtain analogous results. I thank Jamon Beske, my Morris Academic Partner, for his careful counting and calculation of percentages.

xviii

Part One

Introduction

2

1

What Is Analytic1 Feminism? Pieranna Garavaso

1  Analytic feminism: A first attempt at a definition One common way of characterizing analytic feminists is as philosophers who apply the analytic approach, which is characterized by the extended use of conceptual analysis and argumentation, to issues of social inequality widely addressed in feminist literature. Although this characterization captures an important aspect of analytic feminism, the link between analytic and feminist philosophies can and needs to be better articulated. Ann Cudd points out a more complex two-way relationship between analytic and feminist philosophies as follows: “Analytical feminism applies analytic concepts and methods to feminist issues and applies feminist concepts and insights to issues that traditionally have been of interest to analytic philosophers” (2005: 157). Analytic feminism is the true offspring of feminist and analytic philosophies; it owes its methodological and substantive features to both. In this chapter, I provide a characterization of this philosophical tradition that brings to light the interaction of feminist and analytic perspectives in the work of analytic feminist philosophers. In the first section, I briefly outline the major problems involved in characterizing analytic philosophy, its methodology, and its origins; at the end, I adopt Tim Crane’s proposal for a general definition of a philosophical tradition. In the following section, I outline a minimalist account of the main features of a feminist theory or movement. This minimalist definition joined with a revised version of Crane’s proposal leaves us with a workable definition of analytic feminism. Suggestions for additional readings on the above topics conclude this brief introduction to analytic feminism.

4

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

1.1 Analytic philosophy: Controversies about its origins and main features In their Preface to The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy, Barry Danton and Howard Robinson cite the European Society for Analytic Philosophy homepage as a useful example of a definition of analytic philosophy that focuses on its methodology: “Analytic philosophy is characterized above all by the goal of clarity, the insistence on explicit argumentation in philosophy, and the demand that any view expressed be exposed to the rigours of critical evaluations and discussions by peers.”2 Along similar lines, Diane Jeske states, “I take analytic philosophy to be a very broad category of philosophical endeavor, united by a shared commitment to certain standards of philosophical evaluation rather than by any shared commitment to some set of substantive philosophical theses” (2002: 63). Ann Cudd also stresses that analytic philosophers “value clarity and precision in argument and use logical and linguistic analysis to help them achieve that clarity and precision” (2005: 157). While this methodological emphasis is the one most commonly mentioned in the attempt to characterize analytic philosophy, not all characterizations have been methodologically oriented. In his influential historical reconstruction of the origins of analytic philosophy, Michael Dummett traces it back to what he calls the “linguistic turn” inspired by the work of the logician and mathematician Gottlob Frege. For Dummett, the linguistic turn is characterized by “the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained” (1993: 4). Thus, Dummett’s portrayal emphasizes a change in the content of philosophy: the linguistic turn has caused a replacement of the Cartesian focus on epistemology with a focus on language, logic, and symbolism. This contentbased rather than methodological approach to a definition of analytic philosophy has been criticized as “one of the most popular creation myths.”3 The debate concerning the origins and definition of analytic philosophy and the associated task of distinguishing it from other philosophical traditions such as continental philosophy or phenomenology4 started as early as the 1930s (Nagel 1936) and still generates interesting discussions (Hacker 2011; Schwartz 2012).5 In his engaging and detailed introduction to The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, Michael Beaney discusses the main characterizations of analytic philosophy as either a tradition defined by a set of predecessors, among whom were Frege, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein,6 or a toolkit of methodological features such as the focus on language or the use of



What Is Analytic Feminism?

5

logical argumentation and analysis. He convincingly argues that no individual feature concerning method or subject matter can be considered either necessary or sufficient to define analytic philosophy since in each case the criterion turns out to be either too broad or too narrow and to either include philosophers who are not regarded as analytic or exclude philosophers who are regarded as analytic. Thus, Beaney concludes that we should consider analytic philosophy in two distinct ways, that is, as a scholarly tradition and as a methodological approach, which is comprised of an ever-expanding “toolkit” not to be identified with a rigidly defined set of methods7 (2013: 28). This two-part conclusion is paralleled and expanded upon in Tim Crane’s characterization of a philosophical tradition, which includes both a historical predecessors’ component and a methodological aspect: “(1) A philosophical tradition is constituted by a historically constituted collection of canonical texts, together with a certain way of reading these texts” and “(2) It is only by locating the questions philosophers ask in relation to a philosophical tradition that we can make real sense of these questions” (2015: 73; my emphasis). For Crane, a philosophical tradition requires a body of canonical texts joined with a certain reading of those texts; furthermore, a philosophical tradition places the questions arising from those texts within the context of that particular reading of those texts. The relevant reading of the canonical texts guides our philosophical inquiry by suggesting the questions to investigate and by providing clarity and meaning to those questions. The first condition that Crane proposes is the most controversial and most difficult to satisfy. A perusal of various histories of analytic philosophy—as well as of feminist thought—reveals no easy consensus on the choice of canonical texts: even the works of seminal thinkers such as De Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, and Quine have at times been excluded. However, I greatly value Crane’s second feature, that is, the emphasis on how a text is read and on the formulation of questions that arise and can be understood only in the context of a specific reading of texts. I will return to this notion of reading as a useful tool to characterize the interaction between analytic philosophy and feminism after the next section where we discuss a potential definition of a feminist theory or movement.

1.2  A working definition of feminism There is debate also with regard to the historical origins of feminism, for example, whether or not appeals for gender equality predated modern times: “Feminist

6

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

philosophies have histories that date back historically at least to the early modern period, and have different genealogies in different geographical regions” (Tuana 2011). Mary Ellen Whaite’s four-volume reconstruction of the history of women philosophers traces back the development of philosophical views produced by women to ancient times (Whaite 1987, 1989, 1991, 1995). Although these views may not be classified as feminist by the current standard meaning of this term, they prove that there have been many more women philosophers than we usually encounter in our introductory text books. Margaret Urban Walker’s notion of “recurrence” of feminist philosophies also outlines a nonstandard timeline for feminist philosophies: (1) early female Pythagoreans; (2) learned philosophers of the convents and monasteries such as Hildegard of Bingen and renaissance women such as Christine de Pisan; (3) more familiar fore-sisters such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, and Jane Addams; and (4) twentieth-century feminist philosophy (Walker 2005: 154). In contrast to these nuanced and detailed reconstructions of feminist philosophies, the “modern” history of Western feminism is often described as evolving through three phases or “waves.” The feminist activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) belongs to the first wave and the main goal of this mostly middle-class movement was the right to vote. Other earlier historical figures associated with the first wave are Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–96) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73). We need to remember, however, that Sojourner Truth (c. 1797– 1883) also belonged to this period and in her speeches the problems of gender and race equality were already tightly connected.8 The second wave is identified with the period between the 1960s and 1990s and feminist activism was at that time intertwined with the civil rights movement. Notable feminists associated with the second wave are Betty Friedan (1921–2006) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86); this phase had a lasting effect on academic feminism as many programs in gender, sexuality, masculinity, and ethnic studies were instituted in American universities. The third wave started after the 1990s and is usually presented as a reaction to the second wave; it was influenced by postcolonial and postmodern views and was critical of attempts to assert any universal notion of womanhood. Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray are well-known living feminist philosophers who present their work as critical of the white and middle-class feminists of the second wave. Scholars belonging to this phase paid greater attention to intersectionality and to the internal ties between different systems of social oppression. It is debatable whether the “tripartite” wave reconstruction is actually useful in describing the development of Western feminism. With support in current



What Is Analytic Feminism?

7

scholarship, Catherine Harnois lists three reasons to object to the wave metaphor: (1) by focusing on the large-scale political and social movement, it often ignores the struggles of poor women and women of color whose emancipatory goals were often different from those of middle-class and white women (Springer 2002; Morgan 2003); (2) as any generalization, the wave metaphor emphasizes the contrast between waves, for example, the second and the third, and neglects to point out the elements of continuity between the different phases of development of the feminist movement; and (3) the representation of the waves fails to account for the diversity and growth through change in the active interaction between these different periods of reflection (2008: 122).9 One additional shortcoming of the above historical-sociological recon­ struction of the phases of Western feminism is its lack of an account of the theoretical grounding of a feminist perspective. When students ask what does the term “feminism” mean in one of our classes, it becomes imperative to have some theoretical foundation to characterize both a theory and a political movement as feminist. Joan Callahan’s introductory comments to an American Philosophical Association symposium on feminist philosophy are useful exactly for this purpose: Although feminism (in and across domains) is far from unitary, there are at least four features that all feminist approaches share. First, feminism begins with the realization that women as a group have been and are still in a subordinate position in relation to men. Second, feminism offers accounts of the sources of that subordination. Third, feminism is activist in just the sense that it always involves a commitment to bringing that subordination to an end. Thus, fourth, feminism offers strategies for overcoming that subordination. . . . In the 1980s, feminist scholarship as a whole moved beyond a focus on women only as feminists began to see that systems of oppression (e.g., sexism, racism, classism, ageism, heterosexism, ableism) are interlocking, and current feminist scholarship (and political work) is increasingly acutely sensitive to all these forms of oppression and the relations between and among them. (1996: 186)

Callahan can be seen as providing four broadly accepted necessary conditions for a theory or movement to be “feminist,” that is to say: A theory or political movement T is feminist if and only if a. T begins with the realization that women and other underrepresented beings as a group have been and are still in a subordinate position in relation to men and other privileged groups. b. T offers accounts of the sources of that subordination.

8

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

c. T is activist in just the sense that it always involves a commitment to bringing that subordination to an end. d. T offers strategies for overcoming that subordination. These conditions are independent of each other: it is clearly possible to acknowledge that women and other underrepresented groups are oppressed (thus satisfying Condition 1) and to account for their subordination on the basis of some inferiority of theirs (satisfying Condition 2) and thus not to be committed to redressing this state of affairs (failing Conditions 3 and 4). This set of four requirements joined with the acknowledgment of the intersectional nature of social systems of oppression, which is stressed by Callahan in the second part of the quote, provides a workable account of a feminist philosophy.

2  Analytic feminism as a philosophical tradition: A proposal for a definition If we dismiss Crane’s requirement of a set of canonical texts as hard to satisfy for most if not all philosophical traditions, the other characteristics mentioned by Crane together with Callahan’s four necessary conditions provide a meaningful and informative definition of analytic feminism. Analytic feminists are philosophers who use methodological approaches often learned while training in analytic philosophy—that is, the ever-expanding toolkit that may include such instruments as conceptual and logical analysis, use of argumentation, thought experiments, counterexamples, and so forth—and who read classical and contemporary philosophical texts through a filter that highlights the existence and the effects of various systems of social inequality such as gender, race, class, physical and mental abilities, and sexual orientation. The stress that Crane’s definition places on the fact that texts are read by us in different ways aptly describes the function that gender, race, class, and other tools for the analysis of social inequalities play in a feminist reading of a text. Walker explicitly characterizes feminist philosophy as a methodological approach supported by the ability to see the intersectional working of different axes of social discrimination: When working as a feminist philosopher, whether one is thinking about philosophy of law or epistemic virtue or real essences, one has learned to keep an eye on the impact of various social differences that matter to how one thinks and what one sees. One has learned to look out for topics and questions that seem to



What Is Analytic Feminism?

9

have been neglected or marginal within disciplinary discourses. (Walker 2005: 157; my emphasis)

Interconnected systems of discrimination are often described as providing a specific lens through which to read a text; they have provided new and radically different readings of traditional philosophical texts.10 Callahan’s conditions for a feminist theory or political movement provide a useful characterization of the specific features of a feminist reading of philosophical texts. A feminist reading starts from the acknowledgment of social inequalities and is based on at least some preliminary hypotheses as to why these systems of discriminations exist. Furthermore, a feminist reading is guided by the motivation of finding ways to alter, defeat, and eliminate these injustices. Within this reading, “neglected” or “marginal” questions such as “Where are the women?” or “What are the perspectives of non-white people on this matter?” arise and make sense. The resulting definition of analytic feminism includes methodological and interpretive features and captures the two-way interaction between analytic and feminist thought mentioned by Ann Cudd in the above-quoted passage; it ultimately provides a descriptive clarification of what it means to work within the philosophical tradition of analytic feminism.

3  For further reading a. On the characterization of analytic feminism and the history of its development: Cudd, Ann (1995), “Analytic Feminism: A Brief Introduction,” Hypatia 10 (3): 1–6. This article is a short introduction to the summer 1995 special issue of Hypatia devoted to analytic feminism. It contains a description of the main features of analytic feminism and a short version of the history of the Society for Analytical Feminism (SAF). The history of SAF is also recounted in the chapter by Cudd and Norlock in this book. Garry, Ann (2014), “Analytic Feminism,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2014/entries/femapproach-analytic/ (accessed July 26, 2017). This entry is a thorough discussion of the origins and developments of analytic feminism that includes an examination of debates among feminist philosophers concerning different approaches to social discrimination. It also provides valuable mentions of work done in different areas such as the philosophy of language, moral and political philosophy, and history of philosophy.

10

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

b. On the characterization of analytic philosophy and the debate on its origins: Beaney, Michael (2013), The Oxford Handbook on the History of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. In the introductory part that precedes contributions written by experts in the field, Beaney provides a wealth of historical and theoretical resources. The introduction to the field and the discussion of the origin and meaning of analytic philosophy are informative and engaging. Dainton, Barry, and Howard Robinson, eds. (2014), The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy, London: Bloomsbury. This work includes both a component devoted to introducing major figures in analytic philosophy such as Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, all written by Dainton, and contributions from different scholars on specific topics of current debates. It concludes with some interesting reflections from Dainton and Robinson regarding the specificity of analytic philosophy and a contrast with continental philosophy. The volume includes useful mentioning of logical notions in the glossary. Dummett, Michael (1993), Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. This work collects lectures that Dummett delivered in English in Italy. They were first published as delivered in the Italian journal Lingua e Stile before being translated and published in German. This history is worth mentioning because the work reflects its European origin in its connection between analytic philosophy and the philosophy of Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. The book also includes an interview with Dummett that contains interesting reflections on both the features and developments of analytic philosophy and of Dummett’s own perspectives on these themes. c. On feminism and the philosophical canon: Walker, Margaret Urban (2005), “Diotima’s Ghost: The Uncertain Place of Feminist Philosophy in Professional Philosophy,” Hypatia 20 (3): 153–64. This often-cited article takes stock of the status of both women and feminist philosophers in the profession of philosophy in the United States. It also contains a brief mentioning and discussion of major obstacles hindering feminist philosophies from becoming part of mainstream philosophy. Witt, Charlotte, “How Feminism Is Rewriting the Philosophical Canon,” The Alfred P. Stiernotte Memorial Lecture in Philosophy at Quinnipiac College,



What Is Analytic Feminism?

11

October 2, 1996. Available online: http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/SWIP/Witt. html (accessed July 25, 2017) This short and accessible article provides a useful introduction to the main issues arising from the interaction between feminist criticism and the traditional mainstream history of philosophy. Witt identifies the two main problems that feminist readers find in the canonical philosophical text: (1) exclusion, that is, there are very few women philosophers, and (2) denigration, that is, the female and the feminine are often represented as antithetical to reason and rationality that are considered the foundation of philosophy. The author describes different feminist approaches to the canon and argues for the denial of one unique feminist perspective. Instructor’s guidance is needed for students who are not familiar with Plato’s Euthyphro as they may not grasp the joke. This article provides a great wealth of references to writings on specific topics. Witt, Charlotte, and Shapiro, Lisa (2017), “Feminist History of Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/ entries/feminism-femhist/ A book-length listing of resources on the work done by women philosophers and feminist philosophers in the following areas: (1) feminist criticisms of the canon; (2) feminist revisions of the history of philosophy; (3) feminist appropriation of canonical philosophers; and (4) feminist methodological reflections on the history of philosophy. d. On Analytic and Continental Feminist Philosophies: Hansen, Jennifer (2014), “Continental Feminism,” Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2014/entries/femapproach-continental/ (accessed July 26, 2017). It provides a useful characterization of two projects within Continental feminism. The deconstructive or critical project appeals to psychoanalysis and postmodernism; the reconstructive project appeals to phenomenology. Tuana, Nancy (2011), “Approaches to Feminism,” Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/spr2011/entries/feminism-approaches/ (accessed July 26, 2017). The aim of the essay is to provide an introduction to contemporary feminist philosophies in the United States. The article provides an impressionistic portrayal of the political context of the second-wave feminism—underlining the

12

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

connections with the 1960s civil rights movement and gay and lesbian struggles for social equality—and a brief discussion of the nature of philosophy in the United States. It provides a useful characterization of the contrast between analytic and Continental feminisms. Warnke, Georgia (2012), “Intersections between Analytic and Continental Feminism,” Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/ femapproach-analy-cont/ (accessed July 26, 2017). This essay proposes three main topics of comparison between analytic and Continental feminist philosophies: critique of essentialism, efforts toward social justice, and the appropriation of psychoanalytic theory. The discussion is informative, clear, and balanced. The author provides useful insights into each of the main traditions and literature. e. On Women in Philosophy: There is now a great abundance of resources on this topic. The selection below is merely reflective of my own interests and of what seems to have engaged students taking my courses. Agonito, R. (1977), History of Ideas on Women, New York: Berkley Publishing Group. An enlightening (and yet demoralizing) collection of mostly philosophical texts reflecting sexist, misogynist, and androcentric views concerning women. Buckwalter, W., and Stich, S. (forthcoming), “Gender and Philosophical Intuition,” in J. Knobe and S. Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at http://philpapers.org/rec/ BUCGAP (accessed July 26, 2017). This essay has generated a lot of discussion concerning whether there is evidence supporting the claim that gender affects philosophical intuitions. Although the jury is still out and there have been studies that suggest that the conclusions drawn in this essay were quite prematurely drawn, this article is often taken as an unavoidable starting point for this discussion. Calhoun, Cheshire (2009), “The Undergraduate Pipeline Problem,” Hypatia 24 (2): 216–23. This article discusses the question of why undergraduate students in American universities do not choose philosophy as a major. The author explores



What Is Analytic Feminism?

13

the idea that gender biases may be affecting students’ choices and much earlier than when they begin college. Dotson, Kristie (2012), “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3: 3–26. This article discusses the ways in which the philosophical profession is not a welcoming environment for philosophers coming from diverse backgrounds. Dotson appeals to Graham Priest’s definition of philosophy and Audre Lorde’s views of philosophical theory to suggest a perspective more deeply engaged with praxis. Jenkins, Katharine (2014), “‘That’s not Philosophy’: Feminism, Academia, and the Double Bind,” Journal of Gender Studies 23 (3): 2014. Jenkins points out a conflict between the demands of feminist research and the norms of academia, which puts feminist philosophers into a double bind. She suggests strategies to survive and thrive in these conflicted contexts; these strategies encourage active engagement and solidarity with other philosophers in the same situation. Paxton, M., Figdor C., and Tiberius, V. (2012), “Quantifying the Gender Gap: An Empirical Study of the Underrepresentation of Women in Philosophy,” Hypatia 27 (4): 949–57. This article contains a discussion of the above-quoted study by Buckwalter and Stich. The following are resources related to the issue of the underrepresentation of women in the profession: Beebee, H. and Saul, J. (2011), Women in Philosophy in the UK: A Report. Available online: http://www.swipuk.org/notices/2011-09-08/ (accessed October 6, 2017) Brister, Evelyn (2007), “Bringing Philosophy into the 21st Century.” Available online: http://knowledgeandexperience.blogspot.com/2007/12/bringingphilosophy-into-21st- century.html/ (accessed July 26, 2017). Cooklin, Katherine (2012), “The Lack of Women in Philosophy: Psychological and Structural Barriers and the Moral Dimension of Epistemic Responsibility.” Available online: https://icil.gr/download. php?fen=years/2012/downloads/speakers/020-cooklin-full_text-en-v002. pdf (accessed July 26, 2017).

14

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Goddard, Eliza (2008), “Improving the Participation of Women in the Philosophy Profession.” Available online: http://aap.org.au/women/reports/ IPWPP_ExecutiveSummary.pdf/ (accessed July 26, 2017). Haslanger, Sally (2011), “Are We Breaking the Ivory Ceiling? Women and Minorities in Philosophy.” Available online: http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/ papers/HaslangerCICP.pdf./ (accessed July 26, 2017). Norlock, Kathryn (2006), Women in the Profession: A Report to the CSW, with field-specific data in 2011 “Update.” Available online: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid= ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxhcGFjb21taXR0ZWVvbnRoZXN0YXR1c29 md29tZW58Z3g6NTlmYTExZDBiY2U1MDliYw (accessed July 26, 2017). Stewart, Abigail J. (2009), “What Might Be Learned from Recent Efforts in the Natural Sciences?” APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 8 (2): 16–19. Van Camp, J. (2010), “Tenured/tenure-track Faculty Women at 98 U.S. Doctoral Programs in Philosophy.” Available online: https://web.csulb. edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html (accessed July 26, 2017).

Notes 1 I take “analytic” and “analytical” to be synonymous. For a similar position, see Michael Beaney (2013: 3, footnote 1). As recalled in Cudd and Norlock’s contribution to this book, many early analytical feminists regarded the two terms as nonsynonymous. 2 European Society for Analytical Philosophy, homepage of website: http://www.dif. unige.it/esap (accessed February 10, 2017). 3 Michael Beaney also argues that the Fregean linguistic turn would exclude the early Russell and Moore as well as include such twentieth-century hermeneutic philosophers as Gadamer, Habermas, and Husserl (Beaney 2013: 23). 4 For a quick account of continental philosophy and phenomenology, see the relevant entries in “A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts” in this book. I cannot discuss adequately the controversies surrounding the historical reconstruction of these traditions and the nature of their contrast with analytic philosophy. Interested readers will find useful resources in the Further Readings section of this chapter. 5 For a wide-range listing of references, see Beaney (2013: 21–29). 6 Within the approach that traces back analytic philosophy to its predecessors, Beaney identifies two strands: the Cambridge School of Analysis developing the work of Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein, and logical empiricism influenced by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein (2013: 22).



What Is Analytic Feminism?

15

7 “All these different conceptions and techniques of analysis, and the variations and modifications introduced by many other analytic philosophers, have become part of the methodological toolbox of analytic philosophy. The analytic philosopher might then be characterized as someone who knows how to use these tools, through training in modern logic and study of the work of their predecessor. Each analytic philosopher may have different aims, ambitions, backgrounds, concerns, motivations, presuppositions, criticisms, evaluations, and syntheses; but there is a common repertoire of analytic techniques and a rich fund of instructive examples to draw upon; and it is these that form the methodological basis of analytic philosophy. As analytic philosophy has developed and ramified, so has its toolbox been enlarged and the examples of practice (both good and bad) expanded” (Beaney 2013: 26). 8 Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) was a civil right activist who gave an often-quoted speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. There is now controversy about the text commonly attributed to Truth as it may have been transcribed quite differently from how it was delivered. 9 Although I agree that the metaphor of the three waves hides the theoretical elaboration within feminist philosophies, I include a brief description of it as an aid to our students as it is not uncommon to find references to the wave metaphor in feminist scholarship. 10 The series Re-reading the Canon published by Penn State University Press is a clear example of feminist reading of canonical texts and raising new questions about these texts. See also Witt (2006).

References Callahan, Joan (1996), “Symposium: A Roundtable on Feminism and Philosophy in the Mid-1990s: Taking Stock: Introduction,” Metaphilosophy 27 (1&2): 184–88. Crane, Tim (2015), “Understanding the Question: Philosophy and its History,” in Eugen Fisher and John Collins (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism, 72–84, New York: Routledge. Cudd, Ann (2005), “Analytic Feminism,” in Edward Craig (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 157–59, New York: Routledge. European Society for Analytical Philosophy, homepage of website. Available online: http://www.dif.unige.it/esap (accessed July 26, 2017). Hacker, Peter M. S. (2011), “Analytic Philosophy: The Heritage” Teorema 30: 77–85. Harnois, Catherine (2008), “Re-presenting Feminisms: Past, Present, and Future,” NWSA Journal 20 (1): 120–45 Jeske, Diane (2002), “Feminism, Friendship, and Philosophy,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (Suppl.): 63–82.

16

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Morgan, Robin ed. (2003), Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women’s Anthology for a New Millennium, New York: Washington Square Press. Nagel, Ernest (1936), “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe,” Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 5–24; 33 (2): 29–53. Schwartz, Stephen P. (2012), A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Springer, Kimberly. (2002), “Third Wave Black Feminism?” Signs 27 (4): 1059–82. Whaite, Mary Ellen, ed. (1987), A History of Women Philosophers, vol. 1 Ancient Women Philosophers: 600 B.C.-500 A.D., Dordrecht and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. Whaite, Mary Ellen, ed. (1989), A History of Women Philosophers, vol. 2 Medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment Women Philosophers: 500-1600, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Whaite, Mary Ellen, ed. (1991), A History of Women Philosophers, vol. 3 Modern Women Philosophers, 1600–1900, Netherlands: Springer. Whaite, Mary Ellen, ed. (1995), A History of Women Philosophers, vol. 4 Contemporary Women Philosophers, 1900-Today, Dordrecht: Springer. Witt, Charlotte (2006), “Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (2): 537–52.

2

Why Analytic Feminism? Ann Garry

My questions in this chapter include both why there is such a thing as “analytic feminism” and whether there should be something that we designate in this way. Although it might seem strange to raise the latter question in a book that exhibits wonderful analytic feminist work, I think it’s important to continue to address the underlying issues. The first section of the chapter focuses on reasons why philosophers do analytic feminism and some of the permutations among them. Next I weigh reasons for and against labeling forms of feminist philosophy by method to help decide whether on balance it’s a good idea to categorize feminist philosophies in this way. Finally I discuss briefly two feminist topics whose development has benefited by crossing methodological divides and make a suggestion for the future of feminist philosophy.

1  Why do philosophers do analytic feminism? The short answer is that some philosophers with feminist values and politics have been educated in the literature and methods of analytic philosophy and want to use analytic tools in their theoretical feminist work. This was true not only of some early feminist philosophers in the 1970s, it continues to be true today. A few preliminary remarks will help us explore a longer answer to the question. First, let’s agree that, for all its divergent strands, there still is a tradition called analytic philosophy that is minimally characterizable not as a doctrine or a specific method, but by (a) the figures who are considered canonical such as Frege, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, and their mainstream descendants; (b) the desire for clarity and precision in the use of central concepts of the Enlightenment tradition—truth, objectivity, moral agency, and so on;

18

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

(c) the view of itself in contrast with other philosophical traditions—in different eras, for example, with absolute idealism, phenomenology, or poststructuralism.1 This is very rough and intentionally leaves the borders loose. Analytic feminists, as feminists, critique the figures, concepts, and styles of various forms of analytic philosophy all the while owing a debt to it and using it in their work. How feminist philosophers came to claim the label “analytic feminist” is explained by Ann Cudd and Kathryn Norlock as they recount the history of the Society for Analytical Feminism in Chapter 3 of this book.2 My quick take is this: it was important to the early analytic feminists to claim both feminism and analytic philosophy. They wanted to say publicly that analytic philosophy is not irredeemably sexist and androcentric, but can be useful for doing serious feminist work, in short, that analytic feminist philosophy is feminist; it was also important to show, especially to nonfeminist philosophers, that analytic feminist philosophy is philosophy. Additionally, analytic feminists wanted to have enough programs to discuss their work and venues for publication, and to encourage different kinds of philosophical feminists to cite and engage with each other’s work, regardless of the extent to which they disagree over substance or methods.3 Feminists who use the label “analytic” all see themselves to varying degrees as coming out of strands of an analytic tradition and frame their projects and questions to some extent in its terms. Nevertheless the notion of variation is important—and runs along several axes: (a) about the degree of openmindedness and enthusiasm with which they use the analytic tradition; (b) about the kinds of analytic philosophy most amenable to feminist use; and (c) about the kinds of feminist projects most amenable to analytic philosophy.

1.1  Degrees of open-mindedness and enthusiasm The range of philosophers who identify as analytic feminists runs from the few who barely read nonanalytic philosophy because they find it inferior all the way to those who seem to be analogous to “cultural Catholics,” that is, those who think in analytic terms because their early philosophical training and inclination (in whatever order they occurred) just happened to be analytic. It’s where we came from, how we were raised philosophically. I consider myself in the latter category; I would include Naomi Scheman’s “analytic semi-manqué” as a boundarydwelling species of a minimal cultural Catholic. Scheman’s own analogy is not the cultural Catholic, but being a New Yorker 1993: 245–49). Regardless of where analytic feminists fall on this spectrum, we critique the philosophers/questions/



Why Analytic Feminism?

19

methods/concepts that we see as misogynist, androcentric, or even mildly sexist; we reframe and reconstruct philosophy in ways that attempt to avoid all the facets of philosophy we critique, using a gendered lens to do so (though at its best, it’s a lens inflected by many other axes of oppression and privilege). We are feminists after all. Even setting aside the first type of person who finds nonanalytic philosophy inferior, there is still an enormous variety of types and levels of commitment to analytic philosophy among analytic feminists. For example, Carol Hay, during opening remarks at the 2016 Society for Analytical Feminism (SAF) Conference, said, “To me, analytic feminism is a way of doing feminist philosophy that is responsive to the analytical canon in a particular way: we’re critical (often very critical) of this canon, but we also take ourselves to be responsible to, and for, it” (Hay 2016). In contrast with Hay’s view, my own previous characterization commits analytic feminists only to a more instrumentalist view with no responsibility for and to the canon: Analytic feminists are philosophers who believe that both philosophy and feminism are well served by using some of the concepts, theories and methods of analytic philosophy modified by feminist values and insights. . . . [A]nalytic feminists share something that we might call a  core desire  rather than a core doctrine, namely, the desire to retain enough of the central normative concepts of the modern European tradition to support the kind of normativity required by both feminist politics and philosophy. This “core desire” finds its expression, for example, in the ways analytic feminists use some of what we might call the “core concepts” that Cudd mentions (1996): truth, logical consistency, objectivity, rationality and justice. (Garry 2014, emphasis in original)

Before leaving this topic, two last points bear mentioning. First, not all feminists trained in analytic philosophy take up the label “analytic feminist”: they do not actively reject it, but simply do not use it. In the United States, for example, many early feminist philosophers such as Marilyn Frye, Alison Jaggar, Claudia Card, not to mention all the early feminist philosophers of science, were educated in analytic graduate programs. Second, not even the most enthusiastic analytic feminists bother claiming the label in contexts outside professional philosophy. When we teach feminist classes to students in a wide range of majors, speak on public issues, or interact with colleagues in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, it’s sufficient to be identified as a feminist philosopher (though the need to explain one’s analytic background might well arise if asked a question about Cixous or Irigaray).

20

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

1.2  Kinds of analytic philosophy most amenable to feminist use When twentieth-century academic feminist philosophy began in the 1970s, we worried more about our specific critiques than about which traditional philosophers we appealed to. Given the explicit and implicit misogyny and androcentrism in philosophy, feminists were pleased to find support in anyone in any philosophical tradition, for example, in works of (or at least passages in) Plato, Mill, Marx, or Merleau-Ponty. However, as feminist philosophers grew in number as well as in the sophistication and complexity of our thought, some trends became apparent. Different kinds of philosophy were better for different feminist projects. Recall that by the 1970s naturalized epistemology (at least in a narrow Quinean form) already existed, Wittgenstein’s popularity was still high, John Rawls had great influence in moral and political philosophy, and classic logical positivism was already losing influence in many areas of philosophy. In continental philosophy, critical theory, phenomenology, and postmodernism competed for attention. Many methods were there for early feminist picking. We tended to pick the ones we knew best—and among those, ones that seemed most fruitful for our particular projects. Most analytic feminists leaned toward philosophy that can have a “natural” or “social” component because of the need to allow “space” for gender to enter the conversation. One cannot really pursue completely abstract, “ideal” epistemology or ethics if gendered experiences or empirical social differences need to be considered in our thinking. Figures come in and out of favor depending on the topic or field: for example, Quine has been long relevant to feminist empiricist philosophers of science (e.g., Nelson 1990); and in recent decades J. L. Austin’s work on performatives has been taken up by analytic feminist philosophers of language working on topics such as hate speech and pornography (e.g., Langton 2009; Maitra and McGowan’s collection 2012; Mikkola’s collection 2017) as well as nonanalytic philosophers such as Judith Butler (1997).

1.3 The types of feminist projects most amenable to analytic methods As we consider this topic we need to recognize differences among generations of feminist philosophers. In the 1970s feminist philosophers could rarely look to academic philosophy for feminist inspiration (or “political consciousness”). It went the other way: we brought our political consciousness from our life experiences and then used philosophy—where possible—to help make sense of



Why Analytic Feminism?

21

the confusion and contradictions. As we quickly realized, however, philosophy was part of the problem as well as of potential help in thinking things through. So we needed to be careful in our use of philosophical tools—heeding the warning of Audre Lorde that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1984: 112). As the body of feminist philosophy, including analytic feminism, has increased in size and complexity over the decades, we are now in a better situation (although we’d best still remember Lorde’s warning). Today we have a range of feminist readings and assessments of traditional philosophers at our disposal; we also have several iterations of discussions of key concepts in most fields of philosophy (objectivity, rationality, autonomy, care/justice, power, etc.). Thus, because the projects of later feminist philosophers have more analytic feminist work to build upon, we are able to undertake a wider range of projects using analytic methods. The same is true, of course, of other feminist philosophical methods. Even political inspiration can now be found in academic (feminist and other socially engaged) philosophy. Having set the context in this way, let’s look at some examples of core feminist philosophical projects that have been most amenable to analytic methods. The most obvious and most enduring are analyses or clarifications of concepts— oppression, equality, rape, sexual harassment, gender, woman/man—all need spelling out and analyzing (e.g., Superson 1993; Cudd 2006; Diaz-Leon 2016). Whether we’re inclined to look for necessary and sufficient conditions or family resemblances to illuminate concepts that help us make sense of our experience, we have sets of tools to use. Lest we think that feminists analyze only existing, everyday concepts, Sally Haslanger proposes that we think in terms of “ameliorative” projects, that is, proposing analyses of concepts that we should be using, taking into account the purposes and goals we have (2012, see especially Chapter 13). In this way we illuminate the point(s) of using a concept in particular intellectual and political work. A second obvious kind of project is to find what is useful within an analytic philosopher’s work for feminist purposes, remembering all the while to criticize its less useful (or worse) features. For example, in a 1993 essay that has become a feminist classic, Louise Antony appealed to Quine’s work. Antony notes that feminists offer critiques of traditional notions of objectivity (as impartiality and neutrality) at the same time they assume some notion of them as they criticize androcentric, sexist assumptions, that is, “male bias.” She appeals to Quine’s naturalized epistemology to alleviate this “bias paradox” by using it to look at

22

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

empirical situations to see which “biases” in fact lead toward truth or away from it (1993/2002). One can readily see what feminists find useful in analytic philosophers’ work in Sharyn Clough’s 2003 anthology that pairs six essays of traditional analytic philosophers with essays of feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science whom they influenced.4 There is also an abundance of feminist work influenced by Wittgenstein (e.g., Scheman 1993; Heyes 2000, 2003; O’Connor 2002, 2011; Tanesini 2004; Garry 2012). Of course, one’s general training in clearheaded analysis can be useful to any topic. There is barely an area of philosophy that feminists haven’t touched in the last four decades. The chapters in this book are a testament to some of this range. Nevertheless, clearheaded analysis is not unique to analytic feminists, but should be exhibited by anyone trained to think well and carefully.

2  Should there be analytic feminism: Is it a good idea to categorize or divide feminist philosophers by philosophical method? We have always had a diversity of views among feminist philosophers—with the attendant desire to sort them out, make sense of our differences, and see whether views might fit together or continue to clash. Although I confess never to have been enamored of any of the sets of distinctions, they grew from the perfectly understandable urge to sort or categorize in order to make sense of the assumptions that feminist theorists were making and the resulting disagreements among us. The two best-known earlier sets of distinctions were drawn by Alison Jaggar (1983) and Sandra Harding (1986). Jaggar initially distinguished among liberal, Marxist, socialist, and radical feminist theories (later feminist categories added, either by Jaggar or others, were multicultural, lesbian separatist, psychoanalytic, etc.). Of course, the feminist versions undermined the paternal discourses in many ways, but were still beholden to them for many of their basic assumptions and ways in which the issues were framed. For example, the conception of an autonomous agent was central to the liberal tradition; feminists used it and also greatly expanded and modified it in their discussions of relational autonomy. In spite of the fact that some of their paternal founders, for example, Marx, encompassed metaphysics and epistemology in their work, Jaggar’s categories



Why Analytic Feminism?

23

were most useful (and at home) in social and political philosophy. It’s important to note that critiques came quickly from women of color who believed that their viewpoints were obscured by these categories (Sandoval 1991, 2000). Harding used the feminist categories empiricist, standpoint theorist, and postmodernist, although she always maintained that they were unstable categories and that each undermined its paternal discourse (1986). These worked much better for epistemology and philosophy of science than for other fields, though the latter two categories are used in ethics and social/political philosophy as well. Neither of these two sets of categories lines up neatly and cleanly with different philosophical methods such as analytic, pragmatist, phenomenological, hermeneutical, poststructuralist, not to mention new materialist, decolonial, Daoist, or Confucian. This mismatch of categories led people to make mistakes such as improper generalization. For example, although it might not be wrong to assume that poststructuralists would tend to hold postmodern theories of justice, and that liberalism might have its roots in the “abstract individualism” with which many analytic philosophers feel comfortable, nothing implies that all and only analytic feminists are liberal feminists, or that all and only socialist feminists are standpoint theorists. In addition to the desire to avoid confusion and to block improper generalizations and inferences, the politics of feminist philosophy mentioned in the first section led to the founding of the Society for Analytical Feminism (SAF) in 1991. Today one might think, OK, I understand the reasons for the methodological labels two or three decades ago, but haven’t those problems been solved? Today feminist philosophers speak to each other and cite each other’s work. Different methods are respected within feminist philosophy. Do we still need to label by method? In what follows I try to look fairly at the strongest reasons for and against maintaining the label “analytic feminism.” Nevertheless, I want to alert readers that my own position is one of caution: I think it best that feminists use methodological distinctions very sparingly, that is, only when they are needed to avoid confusion or are otherwise extremely helpful. Even if we are trained in only one contemporary tradition and continue to work mostly within it, there is usually no need to use methodological labels. Their overuse encourages both political and philosophical behavior that is undesirable. Because many of the feminist facets of the issue cannot be easily separated from broader concerns about the value of categorizing by philosophical

24

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

methods, let’s start with the wider contemporary philosophical context. My examples are drawn from analytic philosophy in North America simply because I know this context best. It’s no news that in much of the academic world, philosophy included, specialization has become more and more narrow. Although I’m certainly not arguing against research specializations in Kant, Quine, Husserl, Beauvoir, or Foucault, I oppose making methodological narrowness a virtue. When we focus heavily on contemporary methodological labels it encourages people to be “virtuously narrow,” at least among those using the dominant (analytic) philosophical method. Narrowness and overuse of methodological labels starts when we are young philosophers and can easily lead us on a downward trajectory. Many philosophers, myself included, have not been educated in more than one twentieth-century philosophical method, that is, not in “pluralist” programs. We start at a disadvantage with respect to appreciating or even understanding other traditions and the ways work in them might interact with our own. I consider this a limitation, not a virtue. Of course, there are limitations of time, energy, personal interests, or even differences in our “wiring” that help dictate how we frame philosophical issues or how broadly we read. Despite these very real limitations, we can be more or less narrow minded, judgmental, or open to learning from others with different training. Once a philosopher becomes “virtuously narrow” it is quite easy to go from simply not reading widely or conversing with those in other traditions to the next step—believing that those works or those colleagues are not worth thinking about, and not at all relevant to what we do as philosophers. This philosopher feels entitled to ignore other traditions. A Rawlsian analytic political philosopher might feel entitled not to read Habermas, not to mention Adorno. A poststructuralist philosopher of language might feel entitled not to read analytic work. This limits our thinking as philosophers—admittedly at the same time it allows us to progress in a narrower area. We would probably be better philosophers if we were open to new figures and different approaches. Make no mistake about it: the “virtuously narrow” traditional philosopher also feels entitled to ignore feminist philosophy as well as other liberatory philosophical work, whether on race, disabilities, class, or queer/trans issues. At worst, this philosopher finds socially engaged and liberatory work simply “not philosophy.” This path needs to be discouraged. We philosophers are more likely to have our fundamental assumptions questioned if we talk to philosophers who don’t share our methods (or, for that



Why Analytic Feminism?

25

matter, our values). One hopes that this makes us less likely to be complacent about our “progress” or to overestimate the merit of our work. Of course, there is clearly a place for a range of approaches here. Sometimes we just want “to get on with it” by talking with others who do share our assumptions and can carry the conversation forward without much ado. Realistically, given that journals and book publishers tend to specialize by method, this sometimes makes sense. By now the reader might think I’m crazily unrealistic in thinking that avoiding the use of labels will make us less “virtuously narrow” so that we really do read and think about a broader range of philosophy. I realize that philosophers are unlikely to give up labels any time soon, if ever, but it’s important to think about the broader philosophical context when we think about the problems with feminist divisions by method. In addition, it’s important to see the pitfalls of being “virtuously narrow”—whether in traditional or feminist philosophy.

2.1 Reasons for feminist philosophers to use methodological labels Many of the reasons a feminist philosopher uses a methodological label echo reasons that philosophers in general want to use labels: she gives herself a more manageable body of literature with which to engage; the audience is more likely to understand a feminist philosopher’s views properly if we understand her mainstream tradition; it’s easier to know what to take for granted, who she’s read, what her moves mean, and so forth (this works best, of course, when the reader is versed in or at least acquainted with the author’s tradition). Other reasons are more specific to feminists or other socially engaged philosophers. I’ll mention four here. First, to avoid rancor: although feminists share many values and goals, for example, to end the oppression of women, increase freedom for all women, respect women’s dignity, and so forth, we disagree on many things, including philosophical assumptions and methods. Methodological labels can make it easier to sort and understand our differences and similarities, one hopes, without rancor. Second, to facilitate the goals of some feminist philosophers, it is particularly helpful to label by method. For example, if a feminist’s goal is to integrate feminist philosophy into traditional philosophy, it is more likely to be successful within the current methodological divisions, regardless of whether one likes them. Anita Superson offers suggestions to facilitate the goal of integration, for example, that it’s important for feminist articles to be accepted in “top-flight”

26

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

journals (2011). Many of these journals in North America explicitly accept only analytic philosophy. Third, even if one does not care explicitly about integrating feminist philosophy into traditional philosophy, methodological labels can make it easier for feminist philosophers to converse with and build bridges between themselves and the traditional philosophers whose work is relevant to theirs. One might think, “Why must we make it easier for them?” Although I can appreciate this sentiment, one answer is that it could lead to more widespread use of feminist work in nonfeminist philosophers’ own teaching and research. And, although it’s debatable whether philosophy today has wide cultural influence, if one believes that it does or hopes that it could (at least through our teaching), then it’s good to make it easy for potential allies to use feminist work. Finally, a point about the politics of philosophical power was once suggested to me by a German analytic feminist: if analytic philosophers are dominant in a country, there’s no point in analytic feminists’ not using the dominant label to promote their own views. The German feminist believed that there’d be no value to her claiming the label “analytic” in central Europe; instead she worried that it would compound her marginalized status. This led me to reflect on one way that North America differs from Europe: it’s not just analytic feminists who adopt labels here. Although continentally inclined feminists did not form a separate organization as early as analytic feminists did, the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) has long had an active group of feminists, and in 2007 continental feminists formed the organization philoSOPHIA, holding conferences and in 2011 inaugurating a journal by that name. Throughout this time pragmatist feminists have also created special issues of journals and anthologies (Seigfried 1993; Hamington and Bardwell-Jones 2012) as well as books calling attention to their pragmatist character (Seigfried 1996; Sullivan 2001).

2.2 Reasons for feminist philosophers not to use methodological labels Although the reasons below are all political in a broad sense, the first three are at the same time theoretical/scholarly. First, because contemporary academic feminist philosophy began only in the 1970s it’s important to appreciate our “young” age and continuing need for a



Why Analytic Feminism?

27

broad base of resources within (as well as outside of) philosophy. Given this need, there are reasons why we should not want to narrow ourselves by method. a. We can’t yet be positive about what is and isn’t relevant, useful, or promising. b. Feminist philosophy is, broadly speaking, naturalized, socialized philosophy. It is not about generic “man,” nor is it very abstract philosophy without interplay with the everyday world. So some parts of traditional philosophies (e.g., the god’s-eye view, work that centers male experience as if it were universal, etc.) will not be as relevant to us as other feminist approaches— regardless of their methodological label—within philosophy or, for that matter, outside of it. c. Feminists have a special obligation to scrutinize the scholarly methods and concepts we use. Cross-method communication makes this easier. As noted above, every feminist philosopher has to find a way to make her own peace with Lorde’s point about the master’s tools not dismantling the master’s house (1984). My own strategy is to point out that it is not the master’s house, that it was an “illegal taking.” The house/houses are the property of everyone. However, a person can’t be adequately vigilant alone about her tools and assumptions. To sustain our vigilance we need others with liberatory agendas to help us critique our tools and assumptions in fundamental ways. I mean to include help not only from feminists using other methods, but also from critical race theorists, queer and trans theorists, disabilities theorists, and a wide array of intersectional and decolonial theorists. Second, there is a cluster of overtly political points that argue against the use of methodological labels. The first two, offered by Marilyn Frye, are relevant specifically to analytic feminism. By identifying ourselves as analytic feminists we might mean to contrast ourselves as “sensible,” “rational” feminists rather than “extreme” feminist philosophers such as Mary Daly.5 We gain credibility, for example, by blaming Mary Daly’s forced retirement in the late 1990s on her “extremism,” in much the way people blame rape victims, so that it’s easier to think it won’t happen to us (Frye 2001: 86–87). Frye also believes that calling ourselves analytic feminists might encourage others to subsume feminism under a patrilineal identity rather than to prioritize our being feminists. She notes ironically how much “better placed in history” one seems when seen “in that august Oxbridge lineage [of Austin

28

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and Wittgenstein, rather] than in a lineage featuring dozens of mimeographed feminist pamphlets authored by collectives . . . Kate Millett, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin . . . [feminist philosophers such as] Claudia Card, Naomi Scheman, Maria Lugones, Sarah Hoagland, and troubadours like Alix Dobkin and Willie Tyson” (2001: 86–87). Finally, a broader political point: solidarity is important. Regardless of method, feminist philosophers want women to be treated better in philosophy and to have feminist philosophy respected as philosophy. Although there has been some progress on both fronts, we are still swimming upstream. We need solidarity among the still small number of feminist philosophers. I realize that solidarity doesn’t require agreement on all things, but continued emphasis on differences of method does not promote solidarity. Let’s draw this section to a close by returning to feminist philosophers’ concerns in 1991 when SAF was founded. We have made great progress at least along the following lines: analytic feminists no longer worry that their work isn’t seen as feminist by other feminist philosophers; feminist philosophers with different methodological orientations respect each other in spite of our labels, even if we don’t cite across methodological divisions as often as we might; we have also created multiple organizations that do not “compete” in a negative sense. On the last point: in their chapter in this book, Cudd and Norlock note that some of those surveyed in the founding of SAF had initial worries about competition and potential divisiveness among organizations for feminist philosophers, specifically between SAF and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP)—an organization that in principle has no specific method in its feminist focus. This has turned out not to be a problem: complementary organizations focused by subject fields as well as by method have flourished in the intervening years. Just looking at North America, in addition to SWIP, SAF, and philoSOPHIA, we have Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST), Feminist Epistemology, Methodology, Metaphysics and Science Studies (FEMMSS), the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers (SSWP, a historically oriented group), the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, and the Roundtable on Latina Feminism. In fairness, while there’s not “competition,” there is some ongoing concern about organizations being “exclusionary” by method (e.g., some people don’t submit their papers to SAF or philoSOPHIA because of a worry that it’s not “analytic enough” or “continental enough”—or don’t even attend for fear of feeling out of place).



Why Analytic Feminism?

29

However, the fact that we have successfully moved beyond most of our initial worries does not answer the question whether feminist philosophers should use methodological labels. Nor, candidly, do the reasons that I’ve given here for or against doing so. Although I personally give more weight to the reasons against methodological labeling, I know full well that other feminists will weigh the reasons differently. I hope that someone who likes to call herself an analytic feminist would do so sparingly, keeping in mind that labels can serve to exclude people and points of view. I would prefer to take the open-minded attitude expressed by Cudd in the passage below from a symposium, “Feminism as Meeting Place”: Although I was trained in graduate school by and mentored in my early career by philosophers firmly wedded to the analytic tradition, and jealous of any proposals by continentalists, since beginning to work on philosophical feminism I have begun to recognize the contributions that other traditions can make to my work. I thank feminists of all traditions for this continuing lesson in philosophy and community. (Cudd 2003: 132)

3  Recent examples of cross-methodological work and suggestions for the future Let’s close by looking briefly at two examples of cross-methodological feminist work—one that moved slowly across methods and another that flourished quickly. The first example is feminist standpoint theory, a topic whose development could have moved more quickly without methodological divisions. The fact that standpoint theory originally developed from a Marxist tradition and was so labeled very early on led many analytic epistemologists and philosophers of science to either reject it, not see its relevance, or not take it seriously for a long time (it’s also fair to say that some of the early versions had more difficulties than later ones). In the twenty-first century a number of analytic philosophers who would categorize themselves as “feminist empiricists” have come to appreciate the important insights of standpoint theory and find convergence among some of their views (see Chapter 11 in the Epistemology section of this book). Kristen Intemann summarizes the situation in her abstract of “Twenty-five Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?”: [Feminists] have clarified, revised, and defended increasingly more nuanced views of both feminist empiricism and standpoint feminism. Feminist empiricists

30

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism have argued that scientific knowledge is contextual and socially situated (Longino 1990; Nelson 1990; Anderson 1995), and standpoint feminists have begun to endorse virtues of theory choice that have been traditionally empiricist (Wylie 2003). In fact, it is unclear whether substantive differences remain. I demonstrate that current versions of feminist empiricism and standpoint feminism now have much in common but that key differences remain. Specifically, they make competing claims about what is required for increasing scientific objectivity. They disagree about 1) the kind of diversity within scientific communities that is epistemically beneficial and 2) the role that ethical and political values can play. In these two respects, feminist empiricists have much to gain from the resources provided by standpoint theory. As a result, the views would be best merged into “feminist standpoint empiricism.” (Intemann 2010: 778)

As the passage from Intemann indicates, feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science from different philosophical traditions came to recognize that a better position—one that is able to meet objections earlier “competing” positions could not—comes from combining the strongest features of each. My point is that labeling ourselves by method likely delayed this fruitful recognition. In contrast with standpoint theory’s slower development across divisions of method, interest in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic injustice grew rapidly from feminists and critical race philosophers across the board. They quickly recognized the value of analyzing unjust, oppressive knowledge practices that are both widespread and deeply ingrained. Within a decade Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997) and later essays (Mills 2007), Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (2007), a special issue of Hypatia on Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance (Tuana and Sullivan 2006), and a collection Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Sullivan and Tuana 2007) all appeared and set off a further explosion of diverse work.6 Although both Mills and Fricker can be identified as analytic, the authors in the two volumes on epistemologies of ignorance are more diverse in their methods: pragmatist, analytic, various continental strains, and, at least as important, authors drawing from sources whose work, due to racism, isn’t always seen as “philosophy.” These authors did not dwell on labels, but simply attended to the issues. Differences in philosophical methods seem to be transcended by the urgent need to make progress on epistemic injustice and ignorance, for example, the ways in which white ignorance is constructed and maintained; the ways that the word (“testimony”) of marginalized people is debased, smothered, and not even acknowledged; the injustice of not having concepts that enable marginalized people to speak about salient experiences; to name just a few.



Why Analytic Feminism?

31

Although continuing work on epistemic injustice—more so than epistemic ignorance or epistemic oppression and resistance—might run a risk of being framed in a narrowly analytic manner, I believe the group of issues encompassed by “epistemic injustice and ignorance” will flourish as topics not tied to one methodological tradition. Although space limitations prevent my going into detail about the diversity of individual authors,7 let me note some recent and forthcoming collections and special issues exhibiting a broad array of authors. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice alone compiles thirty-seven new essays on the topic written from across the methodological spectrum (Kidd et al. 2017). The issues are also being widely applied around the globe; for example, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies has a special issue Epistemic Injustice in Practice (2016) with applied essays in many fields and on many continents. An especially promising development is a special issue of Feminist Philosophical Quarterly in 2018 focusing on the connections between epistemic injustice and recognition theory that developed in continental contexts from the work of Beauvoir and Fanon (the call for papers appeared in Spring 2017).8 It seems that the amount and diversity of recent discussion on these topics is surpassed only by work on the concept of intersectionality and its applications. To my mind, work on intersectionality as well as on epistemic ignorance and injustice exhibit flourishing interaction among many kinds of feminists and critical race theorists. Discussions of epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic injustice illustrate the way I would like to see feminist philosophy develop.9 Although I framed this chapter to address the terms and time period in which the question whether to devise a label “analytic feminism” arose, it’s important to note that the context was white, Western/Northern (call it Eurocentric) feminist philosophy. Although within that context there’s been much good work coming from both analytic and continental traditions as well as from others, we need to get beyond (way beyond!) “analytic” and “continental.” The vision and parameters of feminist philosophy need to change, specifically, to decenter white and Eurocentric work in favor of more inclusive feminist practice. It is in this way that our politics and our theoretical work will be enriched. There are feminists all over the world using transnational and decolonial approaches as well as Western women of color doing work in all traditions, much of it intersectional. White feminists need to read, listen much more carefully to, and interact with women of all ethnicities and cultures. Similar things can be said for straight and cis feminists with respect to queer

32

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and trans people, and for other more/less powerful interpersonal interactions. It’s only with these kinds of interactions that feminist philosophy will cease making many women’s lives and perspectives invisible. Centering the lives and perspectives of non-Western and non-white women and feminists in our thinking will result in shifting the priorities of feminist philosophy. We don’t yet know what impact new priorities will have on feminist philosophical methods. However, whatever the impact is, priorities need to shift, both for the sake of justice and of truth.

Notes 1 This characterization of analytic philosophy comes primarily from Garry (2014). Let me note more generally that some other ideas in the chapter draw on Garry (1995) and (2014). 2 Cudd and Norlock distinguish “analytic” from the broader sweep of “analytical”; I do not make this distinction. 3 Some of the women who deserve credit for encouraging respectful disagreement among feminist philosophers during a crucial period are Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt. Their edited collection, A Mind of One’s Own (1993/2002), encompassed divergent feminist positions in central philosophical fields, especially on the role of gender in epistemology and on interpreting canonical figures as useful for feminism. Naomi Scheman (1993) and Antony (1995) also had a candid debate about psychological individualism and feminism. In addition, a number of feminists participated in roundtables/symposia on “Doing Philosophy as a Feminist” and “Intra-Feminist Critique and the Rules of Engagement” at meetings of the American Philosophical Association over the years (some are published in The APA Newsletter on Feminism in Philosophy (1991, 1993, 2001)). 4 Among those included are Lynn Hankinson Nelson with W. V. O. Quine, Sharyn Clough with Donald Davidson, Edrie Sobstyl with Wilfred Sellars, and Heather Douglas with Carl Hempel (Clough 2003). 5 Mary Daly refused to teach men in upper-division feminist courses at Boston College (though she said she would work with them independently). 6 I should avoid the impression that this work had no antecedents: Marilyn Frye (1983) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) deserve credit for raising issues of epistemic injustice and oppression even earlier. 7 As examples of recent work, see Kristie Dotson (2011, 2012), José Medina (2013), and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (2012, 2014). Some of this work is best characterized as on epistemic oppression and resistance.



Why Analytic Feminism?

33

8 See the Call for Papers for more detail about potential connections and issues http:// ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/call_for_papers.pdf. Note that the editors of the special issue—Paul Giladi, Nicola McMillan, and Alison Stone—conceive of current work on epistemic injustice as a development in “Anglo-American feminist epistemology.” This is a wonderful example of differing perceptions: the editors rightly note that work on epistemic injustice lacks a connection with continental work on recognition; I focus on the existence of some nonanalytic feminists and critical race theorists writing on the topics and think that this makes the work broader than analytic—in spite of the way the issues are sometimes framed. What is marvelous is that the editors’ perception leads to their editing this special issue that makes explicit cross-method connections! 9 Of course, I could have taken as examples other new work that crosses the boundaries of Western philosophical methods in fruitful (and intersectional as well as interdisciplinary) ways, for example, philosophy of disabilities and philosophy that attends to queer and trans issues. These areas are also characterized by a sense of urgency about the daily lives their work addresses.

References Anderson, Elizabeth (1995), “Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and Defense,” Hypatia 10 (3): 50–84. Antony, Louise M. (1993/2002), “Quine as Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology,” in L. M. Antony and C. E. Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own, 2nd ed. 110–53, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Antony, Louise M. (1995), “Is Psychological Individualism a Piece of Ideology?,” Hypatia 10 (3): 157–74. Antony, Louise M., and Charlotte Witt, eds. (1993/2002), A Mind of One’s Own, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Butler, Judith (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge. Clough, Sharyn, ed. (2003), Siblings under the Skin: Feminism, Social Justice, and Analytic Philosophy, Aurora, CO: The Davies Group. Cudd, Ann E. (1996), “Analytic Feminism,” in Donald M. Borchert (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, 20–21, New York: Macmillan Reference. Cudd, Ann E. (2003), “Revising Philosophy through the Wide-Angle Lens of Feminism,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 02 (2): 129–32. Cudd, Ann E. (2006), Analyzing Oppression, New York: Oxford University Press. Diaz‐Leon, Esa (2016), “Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle,” Hypatia 31 (2): 45–258.

34

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

“Doing Philosophy as a Feminist” (1991) (includes essays by Sally Haslanger, Naomi Scheman, and Virginia Held), The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 91 (1): 112–120. “Doing Philosophy as a Feminist” (1993) (includes essays by Margaret Atherton, H.E. Baber, and Patrice DiQuinzio), The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 92 (2): 44–53. Dotson, Kristie (2011), “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26 (2): 236–57. Dotson, Kristie (2012), “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression,” Frontiers 33 (1): 24–47. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly (forthcoming 2018), special issue on Epistemic Injustice and Recognition. Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, New York: Oxford University Press. Frye, Marilyn (1983), “On Being White: Thinking toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy,” in The Politics of Reality, 110–27, Berkeley and Los Angeles: The Crossing Press. Frye, Marilyn (2001), “Intra-Feminist Critique: Modes of Disengagement,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 00 (2): 85–87. Garry, Ann (1995), “A Minimally Decent Philosophical Method? Analytic Philosophy and Feminism,” Hypatia 10 (3): 7–30. Garry, Ann (2012), “Who is Included? Intersectionality, Metaphors and the Multiplicity of Gender,” in Anita Superson and Sharon Crasnow (eds.), Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, 493–530, New York: Oxford University Press. Abbreviated version in 2011 Hypatia 26 (4): 826–50. Garry, Ann (2014), “Analytic Feminism,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/ femapproach-analytic/ (accessed December 30, 2016). Hamington, Maurice, and Celia Bardwell-Jones, eds. (2012), Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, New York: Routledge. Harding, Sandra (1986), The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Haslanger, Sally (2012), Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, New York: Oxford University Press. Hay, Carol (2016), Opening remarks at the Society for Analytical Feminism, September 15, 2016, available from author. Heyes, Cressida J. (2000), Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Heyes, Cressida J. (2003), The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Intemann, Kristen (2010), “25 Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?,” Hypatia 25 (4): 778–96.



Why Analytic Feminism?

35

“Intra-Feminist Criticism and the Rules of Engagement” (2001) (includes essays by Naomi Zack, Marilyn Frye, Ann Garry, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Naomi Scheman), The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 00 (2): 82–96. Jaggar, Alison M. (1983), Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld. Kidd, Ian James, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., eds. (2017), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, New York: Routledge. Langton, Rae (2009), Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, New York: Oxford University Press. Longino, Helen (1990), Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lorde, Audre (1984), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Maitra, Ishani, and Mary Kate McGowan, eds. (2012), Speech and Harm: Controversies over Free Speech, New York: Oxford University Press. Medina, José (2013), The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press. Mikkola, Mari (2017), Beyond Speech: Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, Charles W. (1997), The Racial Contract, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, Charles W. (2007), “White Ignorance,” in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nelson, Lynn Hankinson(1990), Who Knows? From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. O’Connor, Peg (2002), Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. O’Connor, Peg (2011), Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life: Feminist Wittgensteinian Metaethics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile (2012), “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance,” Hypatia 27 (4): 715–35. Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile (2014), “Discerning the Primary Epistemic Harm in Cases of Testimonial Injustice,” Social Epistemology 28 (2): 99–114. Sandoval, Chela (1991), “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders 10: 1–24. Sandoval, Chela (2000), Methodology of the Oppressed, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Scheman, Naomi (1993), Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege, New York: Routledge.

36

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990), Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, ed. (1993), Hypatia, Special Issue: Feminism and Pragmatism 8 (2). Seigfried, Charlene Haddock (1996), Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sullivan, Shannon (2001), Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, eds. (2007), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Superson, Anita (1993), “A Feminist Definition of Sexual Harassment,” Journal of Social Philosophy 24 (1): 46–64. “Feminism as Meeting Place: Analytic and Continental Traditions,” (2003) (includes essays by Cynthia Willett, George Warnke, Louise Antony, Ann E. Cudd and Anita Superson), American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 02 (2): 120–35. Superson, Anita (2011), “Strategies for Making Feminist Philosophy Mainstream Philosophy,” Hypatia 26 (2): 410–18. Tanesini, Alessandra (2004), Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation, Malden, MA: Polity Press. Tuana, Nancy, and Shannon Sullivan, eds. (2006), Hypatia, Special Issue: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance 21 (3). Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies (2016), Special Issue: Epistemic Injustice in Practice 15 (Summer). Wylie, Alison (2003), “Why Standpoint Matters,” in Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding (eds.), Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, 26–48, New York: Routledge.

3

The Society for Analytical Feminism: Our Founding Twenty-Five Years Ago Ann E. Cudd and Kathryn J. Norlock

In her contributions to this book and to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), Ann Garry observes that analytical philosophers tend to consider themselves as the intellectual descendants of the American and European philosophers who were central to the linguistic turn in philosophy, who promulgated ordinary language analyses, or who advocated realism as opposed to idealism at the turn of the twentieth century. Aaron Preston, the author of the Analytic Philosophy entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, observes (as does Garry) that analytic philosophy admits variations that make it difficult to define, generally proceeds “more in the direction of philosophizing focused on language, logic, and science,” and “has always relied on contrasts with other approaches to help clarify its own nature” (Preston). In the mid-twentieth century, the often-drawn contrast in Anglophone philosophy departments was between analytic and Continental approaches. Analytic philosophy came to predominate, especially in American and British philosophy departments (Føllesdal 1996; DiLeo 2003); in the subfield of feminist philosophy, however, the heterodox reasons that move feminists to question and criticize dominant traditions led to more heterogeneity of approaches among feminist philosophers.1 This heterogeneity is evident in some of the responses to Virginia (“Ginger”) Klenk, who sent out letters to eighty women and thirteen men in early 1991, inviting them to join her in organizing an American Philosophical Association (APA)–sponsored group dedicated to feminist analytic philosophical work.2 Her letter began thus: In the past few years I have had numerous conversations with women in the profession, especially those in various areas of analytic philosophy, and have found a growing concern with the current tendency in feminist philosophy to

38

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism reject analytic methods as inappropriate to the discussion of gender issues. As an analytic philosopher who considers herself a feminist, I share this concern. I find the issues raised in current feminist literature to be extremely interesting and provocative and I believe they deserve serious discussion and analysis. I cannot believe, however, that analytic philosophers have nothing to contribute to the discussion.

Klenk raises two issues in this letter. First, she believed that there were feminists who, because they identified as analytic philosophers, felt out of place in feminist philosophy as done at the time. Second, she thought that there were contributions that analytic philosophers could make to feminism. Klenk believed that the new society could provide a forum where these issues could be discussed. She proceeded to propose a Society for Analytic Feminism under the auspices of the APA, to convene at the Central Division meeting of the APA later that year in Chicago. The archives of the Society contain twenty-seven responses to that initial letter. All express interest, including several from respondents who did not strongly identify with analytic philosophy, and instead saw themselves as continental in approach or as skeptical that analytic philosophy was all that methodologically distinct. Some who identified more closely with analytic philosophy referred to varieties of alienation from feminist work in philosophy at the time, and their letters comprise a third of the responses. Their alienation consisted in one of two complaints: some felt that their favored, analytical approach was not often represented in the feminist publications they tended to read, and others felt that their own ideas or approaches were not always well received or lacked company. “I myself have often felt very lonely as a feminist committed to the methods and concerns of analytic philosophy,” one wrote. Another third of responses were enthusiastic while reporting no alienation at all, and instead a strong sense of collaboration and harmony with feminist philosophers generally. “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” one wrote happily. “I am nothing if not an analytic philosopher,” wrote another, who said her feminist philosophical work “has been quite warmly received by feminist thinkers of various sorts.” Indeed, all of the letters, from the contented and the discontented, express varieties of interest or support, and no one refused to support the new group. Yet five respondents expressed their concern that starting a new society may, and mustn’t, be divisive among feminists. The Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) had been formed in 1972 in each of the three divisions of the APA to



The Society for Analytical Feminism

39

create a space where women philosophers could overcome their isolation from each other. If the new Society were to compete with SWIP for membership, then there would be fewer women in either group, and the sense of isolation might reappear. “I’m sure you will agree that it is important to define this new group as complementary to existing groupings in feminist philosophy rather than in opposition to them. [Let’s] begin by emphasizing what feminist philosophers share, rather than what divides us,” a representative letter said. One very different cautionary response came from one of the most influential women in the profession. She worried that starting a new feminist society for feminist philosophy would simply add to the ghettoization of feminist work. She wrote to say that “It’s the separatism I am concerned about. I would rather we . . . insisted on [feminist philosophy] as part of the regular divisional programs [of the APA]. I do not think our most important audiences are each other.” At the initial meeting of the Central Division of the APA in Chicago in April 1991, a room full of women and a few men showed up to discuss the founding of a new Society. One of the primary issues addressed was the new group’s existence apart from SWIP. Most participants wanted to be part of both groups, and the new group was to focus on research in analytical philosophy. The group soon agreed that to distinguish the Society from SWIP, we would not be for women as much as for feminist philosophy, no matter the gender of the philosopher. The name of the society was debated for much of the meeting. The debate surrounded the question of what sort of work we wanted to encourage through our sponsored sessions at the APA conferences. Would the work accepted be most narrowly confined to feminist issues in analytic metaphysics and epistemology, broader to include ethics and metaethics, or at its broadest to simply suggest that any philosophical work was welcomed as long as it was feminist-related and arguments would be analytically rigorous? The latter was the eventual choice. Instead of “analytic feminism,” the longer term “analytical feminism” was adopted, in order to attract the broadest group. The group finally agreed that the mission of the Society for Analytical Feminism (SAF) would be “to promote the study of issues in Feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to Feminist issues and to provide a means by which those interested in Analytical Feminism may meet and exchange ideas,” and this mission statement has remained the same to the current day (SAF). Virginia Klenk was the first president of SAF. A major goal of the new SAF was to increase the available publications of analytical feminist philosophy, especially in widely circulated journals. An

40

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

early contribution to this effort was a special issue of Hypatia in 1995, initially proposed by Ann Cudd (who would, in turn, be the second president of SAF), and coedited by Cudd and Virginia Klenk. In her introduction to the eight essays published there, just four years after the formation of the society, Cudd develops the following characterization of analytical and feminist issues in philosophy: Analytic feminists distinguish themselves from nonfeminists by an interest in a wider variety of works by feminists: works that draw on other traditions in philosophy as well as work by feminists working in other disciplines, especially the social and biological sciences. Most important, analytic feminist work is characterized by the conviction that there is value in the pursuit of notions of truth, logical consistency, objectivity, rationality, justice, and the good, despite the fact that the pursuit of these notions has often been dominated and perverted by androcentrism. But unlike nonfeminists, analytic feminists insist on seeing how sexism, androcentrism, and the domination of the profession of philosophy by men distorts philosophers’ pursuit of truth and objectivity. Analytic feminism often attempts to reclaim these notions from androcentric biases: to find what is epistemically compelling in these concepts and what is morally good in their application and to separate that from the sexist baggage that has traditionally accompanied them. Some analytic feminists (and this has been the focus of much of my own work) argue that, properly analyzed, these concepts can be used to undermine androcentrism or unjust gendered social institutions. (1995: 3)

The increase in concerted publication of analytical and feminist philosophy since then continues the work of undermining androcentrism and injustice. Searching the PhilPapers database for analytical and feminist work today will yield over one thousand results, and the vision expressed above by one of the first correspondents, that feminist philosophy should be part of main programs of the APA, is now a repeated reality, if not yet routine.3 The membership of SAF continues to grow, and continues to be heterogeneous in members’ approaches to philosophy. Has analytical and feminist philosophy become more distinct, as a result of the  productivity of its scholars in publications? It is not apparent from a review of the literature, and yet nor has it become the case that analytical feminist philosophy relies on contrasts with other sorts of work to clarify its nature. Instead, the vast productivity of feminist and analytical philosophers has established wider family resemblances between feminist and philosophical approaches, and a communicative network of philosophers who gather for regular conferences. It is difficult to feel isolated today, when one is as likely to



The Society for Analytical Feminism

41

find analytical feminism represented in the presidential address to the APA as one is to find it in feminist philosophical journals. Whether one seeks analytical approaches in feminist gatherings or feminist approaches in analytically dominated philosophical gatherings, one is likely to succeed.

Appendix: Presidents of the Society for Analytical Feminism ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

1991–95, Virginia Klenk 1995–99, Ann Cudd 1999–2003, Anita Superson 2003–05, Heidi Grasswick 2005–09, Sharon Crasnow 2009–15, Robin Dillon 2015–18, Kathryn J. Norlock

Notes 1 For evidence of their more varied methodological approaches, consider the variety of feminist philosophers’ articles that Ann Cudd identifies in an examination of 343 regular (non-review and non-commentary), non-fiction articles published in the feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, from its founding in 1986 through 1995. Cudd classifies ninety-eight as analytic (Cudd 2009). (For the purposes of classification, to count as analytic an article had to cite more than two canonical or contemporary analytic works, and have a preponderance of analytic over canonical or contemporary Continental works.) Eight of the ninety-eight were from a special issue she coedited on analytic feminism; therefore, setting aside the issue brought about by founding members of SAF, analytically oriented articles in Hypatia were just 90 of 343 articles, or 26 percent. (Another 107 (32 percent) of the articles can be better classified as Continental, 92 (27 percent) as neither, 36 (10 percent) as strictly history of philosophy but neither analytic nor Continental, and 10 (3 percent) as pragmatist). For those analytic philosophers who see metaphysics and epistemology as the core of philosophy, perhaps along with philosophy of mind, language, and science, only nineteen (5 percent) of the articles fit this category, and most of these were highly critical of the analytic tradition. 2 The original list of typed names and addresses of “Potential Members” includes four in Canada, one in Australia, and one in Egypt. It is not possible to know for certain that all were sent the letter, but the preserved responses suggest that at least

42

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

most were. The initial list of ninety-three philosophers was evidently not intended to be comprehensive, as Klenk’s letter notes, “I am sending this letter to a variety of people in the hope of reaching as many as possible who might have an interest in the project; some of you I know personally, some by reputation only. However, there are sure to be many that I have not identified.” 3 Conducting a search of PhilPapers (philpapers.org) on the terms “analytic AND feminist” yields “1000+” results, that is, more results than it is really possible to display.

References Cudd, Ann E. (1995), “Analytic Feminism: A Brief Introduction,” Hypatia 10 (3): 1–6. Cudd, Ann E. (2009), “Analytical Feminism: The Founding Issue(s),” Presentation to the Hypatia 25th Anniversary Conference (October 22–24), University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. (2003), Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1996), “Analytic Philosophy: What Is It and Why Should One Engage in It?,” Ratio 9 (3): 193–208. Garry, Anne (2014), “Analytic Feminism,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Available online: http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2014/entries/femapproach-analytic/ (accessed July 13, 2017). Preston, Aaron 2017, “Analytic Philosophy,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002. Available online: http://www.iep.utm.edu/analytic/#SH6f (accessed July 12, 2017). Society for Analytical Feminism (2016, April 8). Available online: https://sites.google. com/site/analyticalfeminism/ (accessed July 12, 2017).

Part Two

Metaphysics

44

4

Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics Katharine Jenkins and Pieranna Garavaso

Beauvoir posed the question, “What is a woman?” in the same way that Socrates asked about the virtues. (Witt 2011b: 1)

1  What is feminist metaphysics? Students new to philosophy are often introduced to the study of metaphysics by the historical fact that Aristotle’s writings concerning metaphysics were cataloged after the physics, that is, “meta”—in Greek “after”—Aristotle’s writings on physics. In some sense this ordering is still accurate, as metaphysics addresses questions that go beyond what is discussed in physics or in any of the natural sciences. Traditionally, philosophers acknowledge two main areas of metaphysical inquiry: the question of what exists—or ontology—and the question of what is the nature of what exists. Thus, we first ask what kinds of things make up reality and the most common answers are physical bodies, minds, and perhaps spiritual entities. Once we have decided on the scope of this list, we address questions about the fundamental features of these existing entities and their interrelationships: are bodies and minds fundamentally different, how do bodies and minds interact, how do these entities persist in time and space, and so forth. Whereas the first area of inquiry is the most general and abstract, the second leads to inquiries that are of a more restricted nature and that connect with subjects immediately significant for, and applicable to, real life, such as the freedom of the will or the persistence of persons. Many topics in “applied” metaphysics include issues that are regarded as fundamental to the development of other areas of philosophy. For example, the debate on free

46

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

will and determinism is fundamental for ethics and political philosophy, and the debate on the nature of reality is fundamental for the questions addressed in epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mind. Applied metaphysics includes topics such as personal identity, the mind/body problem, free will and determinism, and time and space. In the first chapter of this book, we explain what makes a philosophical approach analytic and feminist. We have given historical, interpretive, and methodological features of analytic philosophy and warned that these characterizations must be broadly understood since no philosophical process may be characterized with narrowly defined necessary and sufficient conditions. We have listed four potentially necessary conditions of any feminist theory or political movement that gives an account of, and addresses, the underrepresentation and subordination of women (section1.2 of Chapter 1). Keeping these features and conditions in mind will help us in reading the essays collected in Part 1 of the book as providing excellent examples of analytic feminist discussions of metaphysical issues. Put simply, we take feminist metaphysics to be any research within metaphysics that is also committed to meeting the conditions of being feminist. It should be clear from the above description of metaphysics that it includes both some highly abstract questions and some highly applied questions, and that it has many close connections to other areas of philosophy. Feminist metaphysics is no different in this respect. Moreover, the pursuit of metaphysical inquiry typically involves moving between these three types of questions, and it is often the case that philosophers turn to the most abstract levels of reflection after a good part of their philosophical journey has led them through the most readily applicable parts. For example, Gottlob Frege developed a new and extremely influential symbolic logic because he was striving to find a more intuitive way to teach mathematics to his students. Analogously, although feminist philosophers’ interest in addressing the subordination of women might lead them in the first instance to focus on applied questions within ethical and political philosophy, these inquiries often develop into metaphysical inquiries. For example, an investigation into abortion rights may lead us to questions about the beginning and ending of life and the nature of autonomy. Understanding the relationship between more applied and more abstract metaphysical questions is important because it helps us to address a common complaint leveled at feminist philosophy: that it is mostly or entirely focused on applied metaphysics and fails to engage abstract levels of reflections, thus failing to be “properly” metaphysical.1 Our first response to this charge is that there is no significant difference in this regard between feminist philosophy and



Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics

47

philosophy in general: all philosophical inquiries are prone to moving between levels of abstraction in the way just outlined. It is perhaps true that, because of their commitment to addressing the subordination of women, feminist philosophical inquiries more often start from the more applicable and more pressing areas of reflection, but they do not rest there. In the last twenty years, feminist philosophers have increasingly focused also on more abstract levels of reflection, as the chapters in Part 1 clearly show. Our second response is that we detect in this charge an implicit and hierarchical assumption to the effect that what is abstract is philosophically more valuable than what is applied, including applied metaphysics. We reject this assumption in the strongest terms. In our view, there is no good reason for regarding metaphysics or ontology as more important or more distinguished areas of research than applied ethics or philosophy of law. Especially when one uses a consistent methodological approach in the research and it is this approach and its historical roots that characterize one’s research, any topic can be as valuable as any other, regardless of how applied or abstract it is. Moreover, we think it is important to recognize that there are gendered connotations that attach to this contrast: the abstract (and rationality in general) is often equated with men (or, the masculine), and the applied (and the practical, emotional, and/ or physical) is often equated with women (or, the feminine). This constitutes an additional reason for feminists to reject this hierarchical understanding of the different areas of philosophy. Before turning to the specific examples of feminist metaphysics offered by the chapters in Part 1, we will give some background to two of the main areas of research within feminist metaphysics. The first is an applied question, which is the question of whether (and how) the category of “woman” exists. The second is an abstract question, which is the question of how feminist perspectives should inform broader debates about the nature of reality.2 A quick sketch of the main debates on these two questions will, we hope, provide some helpful context and some important conceptual frameworks for understanding other work in feminist metaphysics.

2  Gender as the analytical lens for feminist metaphysics One important strand of feminist metaphysics concerns the ontology of gender. This area of research centers on the question famously posed by Simone de Beauvoir: “what is a woman?” This question is often considered to be one of

48

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

some urgency for feminism, given that one way to conceive of feminism is as a movement for the emancipation of women. An important point of departure is the observation that the people who are currently considered to be women are extremely heterogeneous; women differ from one another in terms of their race, class, sexual orientation, disability status, and religion, to name but a few axes of diversity. As Elizabeth Spelman pointed out, it is impossible to separate out a person’s “womanness” from, say, her race, such that we could say that a black woman and a white woman both partake in a single property of “womanness” (an “essence”). The different aspects of our social identities simply cannot be neatly distinguished from one another in the way that this would require. There is a very urgent political implication to this observation, for overlooking it carries a real danger that the experiences of the most privileged women may be taken as the paradigm for the category as a whole, leading to the marginalization of less privileged women. One response to the recognition of the heterogeneity of women is what we might term “gender skepticism.” Following Mari Mikkola, we can understand gender skepticism as the claim that feminists should “reject the view that woman has some particular content and marks off the politically relevant class of individuals for feminism” (2007: 367). The thought here is that the differences among those considered “women” are so profound that any attempt to delineate the category of “woman” will inevitably fail. Furthermore, the skeptic may hold that the very act of attempting to articulate boundaries to the category of “woman” is problematic, because it sets up a normative standard for how women ought to be, which in turn leads to the exclusion and marginalization of those who do not meet this standard. Hence, the skeptic argues, the term “woman” cannot and should not play a central role in feminist theory and practice. Judith Butler’s work is often taken to be emblematic of this stance, although it is worth noting that she does not use the term “gender skepticism” and that her stance shifts across different works (1990, 1993). An alternative to gender skepticism is “gender nominalism.” The gender nominalist agrees with the skeptic that there is no single property that all women have in common. However, unlike gender skepticism, gender nominalism holds that gender is a useful category of analysis. Some gender nominalists proceed by identifying a cluster of several different properties that characterize the category of “woman.” The thought then is that a person can be a woman by instantiating some subset of these properties; she need not instantiate all of them, and different women are understood to instantiate different subsets of these properties. The



Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics

49

category of “woman” is considered to be unified by the network of similarities with regard to these properties. Thus, the nominalist seeks to show that a meaningful account can be given of the term “woman” that avoids problems of marginalization by (1) refraining from positing one single property that all women instantiate and (2) refraining from drawing sharp boundaries around the category of “woman.” Natalie Stoljar characterizes her nominalist position thus: “The type ‘woman’ is a type in virtue of the resemblance structure that obtains among individual members of that type. Women constitute a type on the basis of the (natural and social) similarities among the members of the type” (2011: 42) (see also Frye 2011; Hale 1996). By contrast to gender nominalism, “gender realism” is the view that the category of “woman” is unified in a more substantive way than the gender nominalist would allow. Gender realists typically seek to show that the category of “woman” is socially constructed (i.e., it is the product of social arrangements) but that it is nevertheless something that can be more or less precisely defined and can play an explanatory role in social theory—in other words, it is real (Mallon 2004). The challenge facing gender realists is how to define the category of “woman” without denying the heterogeneity that exists among those considered to be women. Haslanger (2012) has developed a prominent realist account according to which, roughly, to be a woman is to be a person who is in some way subordinated on the basis of being observed or imagined to have biological features that are taken to be evidence of a female role in biological reproduction. According to this view, if someone who we would intuitively consider to be a woman turns out not to be subordinated in this way, then that person is not a woman. This approach acknowledges the need to account for the heterogeneity of the category of “woman,” but contends that this is compatible with claiming that there is some property that all and only women instantiate. For instance, Haslanger does posit one single property that all women instantiate—the social property of being subordinated in a particular way—but her account can accommodate the fact that, for example, some women (upper- and middle-class women, especially white women) have historically been strongly discouraged from working outside the home, whereas other women (lower-class women, especially women of color) have been encouraged or required to do so. Since both being prevented from working and being required to work (particularly in specific low-paid and low-status jobs) are oppressive, and since women are targeted for this oppression on the basis of their (presumed) sexed embodiment, this difference provides no obstacle to either group satisfying Haslanger’s definition.

50

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Another approach is to rely on context to show that what it means to be gendered in a particular way is subject to variation at different social locations. This approach is taken by Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir, whose conferralist view states that gender properties (e.g., the property of being a woman) are conferred properties, where a conferred property is “a property that something has in virtue of some attitude, action, or state of subjects, or group of subjects” (2013: 719). According to Ásta,3 then, an individual acquires the property is a woman when those around her view or treat her in a particular way. The basis on which this property is conferred on someone, the party conferring it, and the implications of its being conferred, all vary in different social locations. Although the majority of feminist work on the ontology of gender is focused on the category of “women,” the field also includes approaches that engage with alternative questions. For example, Charlotte Witt has recently addressed the implications of gender for the ontology of individual women (2011b). Witt argues for “gender uniessentialism,” the view that an individual’s social self is unified by a form of social normativity centered on gender. Feminist work on the ontology of gender is feminist not only in virtue of its focus on the category of women, but in virtue of its aim of developing an account of the ontology of women that can be used to assist in eradicating gender oppression. Within this literature it is also possible to discern more specific approaches relating to more specific or complex emancipatory aims. For example, Talia Mae Bettcher has investigated the ontology of gender with particular attention to the situation of trans women; we can consider Bettcher’s work to be transfeminist in the sense that it is motivated by “a politics that focuses on the intersection of sexist and transphobic oppression” (2014: 387). Feminist work on the implications of gender (and of gender injustice) for metaphysical theorizing more generally—another important project in feminist metaphysics—is feminist in this very same sense. As Haslanger writes of this topic, “What makes the discussion feminist is . . . its concern with the ways in which our views about the mind and reality either sustain or challenge oppressive patterns of thought and behaviour” (2000: 124). One debate in metaphysics to which considerations of gender justice are relevant is the question of whether there are types or “kinds” in the world that exist independently of our classificatory efforts. To answer this question in the affirmative is to commit oneself to ontological realism. Feminists, however, have observed that regimes of gender oppression have sought to justify themselves



Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics

51

by claiming that their preferred gender categories and practices are “natural” and therefore normatively appropriate. Consider, for example, the entirely specious claim that women ought not to be educated beyond a certain level because excessive intellectual activity will have adverse effects on women’s reproductive organs. This insight suggests that we ought to be suspicious of categories that are claimed to be “natural,” especially when those categories are an integral part of an oppressive political regime. Does this mean, however, that feminists should adopt a metaphysical position that rejects the claim that there are objective natural categories or kinds? As Haslanger puts it, feminists must assess “whether ontological realism is compatible with the feminist insight that oppressive regimes mistakenly justify themselves by claiming that their political arrangements are grounded in ‘nature’ or are based in ‘the way the world really is’” (2000: 124). Haslanger argues that a modest form of realism is perfectly compatible with the feminist commitment to interrogating categories that are claimed to be natural. Haslanger’s assessment of realism is a good example of the fact that, as Mikkola puts it, “feminist metaphysics partakes in some perfectly ordinary metaphysical debates, but they do so from a particular perspective that is sensitive to gender justice” (2016: 668). However, the relationship between feminist metaphysics and metaphysics not undertaken from a feminist perspective is at times an uneasy one. One worry that has been raised by critics of feminist metaphysics is that the attention to normative considerations of oppression and injustice has no place in the value-neutral realm of metaphysics. As Mikkola argues, however, it is not true that metaphysical theorizing is or should be entirely free from values. Drawing on Elizabeth Anderson, Mikkola argues that it is not possible to compare and select scientific theories without drawing on contextual values that help us identify which considerations are significant. Since current trends treat metaphysics as a form of scientific investigation, it makes sense, Mikkola contends, to think that our choice of metaphysical theories will also need to draw on contextual values. On this view, when feminist metaphysicians draw on considerations of gender justice in theory choice they are simply making use of contextual values in the same way as other metaphysicians. Thus, the worry that “feminism’s political advocacy [is] inconsistent with the apparent objectivity that prominent contemporary versions of metaphysics are committed to” (Mikkola 2016: 662) turns out to be ill-founded, since metaphysics never was the value-free realm of inquiry that some have considered it to be.

52

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

3  An overview of the chapters Although each essay can be read independently of the others, their order suggests a process of reflection that goes from the most general and broad to the most applied topics. In “Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage be Saved?” Jennifer McKitrick addresses the question of whether there is an inescapable conflict between the feminist and the metaphysical perspectives. McKitrick denies the existence of a conflict after systematically addressing and rejecting the objections that are most often cited against a feminist metaphysics by either nonfeminist metaphysicians or feminist philosophers. The objections considered lead us directly into the heart of core metaphysical debates such as the discussion of realism and mind-independence. At the conclusion of her essay, McKitrick outlines an alternative model of feminist metaphysics which is not subject to any of the shortcomings that have emerged in the discussion of the most common objections to feminist metaphysics. In her essay “Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics,” Mikkola continues the discussion of the main features of a feminist metaphysics started in McKitrick’s chapter. Mikkola characterizes one of the two main tasks of feminist metaphysics as the critical role of identifying the potentially gendered ways in which core concepts of metaphysics, such as the entities that we countenance in our ontologies, are in any way value laden. The second and constructive role is to offer “transformative metaphysical models that are informed by feminist concerns.” For Mikkola, feminist metaphysics is a different kind of metaphysics; that is, it is a non-ideal theory. The notion of a non-ideal theory is drawn from political theory where it has been employed to critique John Rawls’s theory of justice. After providing a detailed examination of distinct types of non-ideal theories, Mikkola proposes a model that is derived in part from Charles Mill’s understanding of non-ideal theories and that is based on Mikkola’s own original and theoretically helpful notion of abstraction. Whereas the first two chapters address meta-metaphysical questions about the legitimacy, the form, and the nature of a feminist metaphysics, the two chapters that follow lead us to the discussion of topics frequently at the core of feminist metaphysicians’ debates, that is, social construction and gender. In “Kinds of Social Construction,” Esa Diaz-Leon addresses the question of what it means to say that a category is socially constructed. A satisfactory answer to this question is clearly needed before we can claim that gender and race are socially constructed. Diaz-Leon discusses two potentially necessary conditions for a useful notion of social construction, that is, that it may not be inevitable nor



Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics

53

universal. This discussion of the features of a social kind examines the different ways in which a social construction may display causal or cultural dependence and how it fundamentally differs from a natural kind. Among social constructions, gender is the construct that has been given greatest attention in feminist literature. After its originally stark separation from sex and the later acknowledgment of its performative nature, the notion of gender has undergone significant transformations, yet it remains at the center of feminist theories. Natalie Stoljar proposes her notion of gender by discussing uniessentialism, a form of gender essentialism recently defended by Charlotte Witt (2011). According to Witt, gender plays a functional role that unifies the many different social identities people hold as teachers, mothers, sons, or citizens. Stoljar isolates and rejects three theses that are implicit in Witt’s theory of gender uniessentialism, namely that (a) gender is not essential to persons but to what Witt calls social individuals, who are different from persons or human organisms; (b) gender ascriptivism is true; and (c) to be a woman a person needs to instantiate a gender universal. Stoljar’s conclusion is that Witt’s uniessentialism attempts but fails to solve the puzzle of reconciling both the subjective phenomenal experience that gender is an important component of one’s self and the conviction that gender is a social role that is externally bestowed on us. Stoljar’s proposal is to treat gender as a volitionally necessary aspect of the will as well as an inescapable component of our self-conception. In her discussion of the notion of sex and its treatment in feminist and analytic philosophy, Katharine Jenkins’s “Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin? Feminism and the Analytic Philosophy of Sex” offers a well-developed example of how fruitfully analytic feminists are able to connect the insights of analytic and feminist philosophers. By choosing to discuss Andrea Dworkin’s views on sex, intercourse, and gender, Jenkins focuses on a feminist author who has been widely criticized by philosophers of different trends and either ignored or discounted in much analytic literature. Since Dworkin’s views can be seen as a limit case of the prima facie inhospitable to an analytic approach to philosophical reflection, Jenkins submits that if an analytical approach can be usefully applied to Dworkin’s views and if these latter can enrich and deepen the analytic philosophy of sex, then Jenkins will have shown convincingly that more connections should be made between feminist and analytic philosophies to produce a deeper understanding and a more fine-grained definition of “the important, complex, and at times troubling phenomenon of sex.” Jenkins’s discussion of a topic in applied metaphysics, that is, the definition of sexual activity, naturally leads to the notion of social construction, which

54

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

we have seen debated in detail in Diaz-Leon’s contribution, and appeals to the distinction between causal and constitutional social construction. This approach is firmly grounded in analytic feminism as many feminist philosophers claim that the distinctions between various areas of traditional philosophy, such as metaphysics, ethics, or political philosophies, are at times rigidly maintained while their borders are and should be much more permeable. Exactly because feminist philosophers bring to light the interconnectedness between apparently neutral notions of reality and politically or socially meaningful frameworks, it is not possible nor advisable to separate the components of a discussion of sex that fall squarely in the range of metaphysics from those that fall in the range of political philosophy.

4  For further reading Haslanger, Sally and Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir “Feminist Metaphysics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ feminism-metaphysics/ This article provides a description of core topics in feminist metaphysics. Its focus on the definition of a “social construction” makes it a particularly good example of conceptual analysis applied to notions of great importance for feminist perspectives. Haslanger, Sally (2000), “Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural,” in Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, 107–126, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is a fairly accessible discussion of the main features that make mainstream metaphysics gendered, of the social conception of the body, and of the relevance of the realism/anti-realism debate for feminist philosophies. Koons, Robert C. and Timothy H. Pickavance, Metaphysics: The Fundamentals, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2015. For undergraduate students with no previous knowledge of metaphysics, the introductory chapter, entitled “What Is Metaphysics?,” is a clear and useful brief outline of the history of metaphysics within the history of philosophy. It also contains an analogously short outline of the origins and main features of analytic philosophy.



Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics

55

Mikkola, Mari (2006), “Elizabeth Spelman, Gender Realism, and Women,” Hypatia 21, No. 4: 77–96. Mikkola defends gender realism by questioning the prominent view that was eloquently argued for by Elizabeth Spelman in her book The Inessential Woman (1988); this is the view that women’s particularity counts against a realist view of gender. Mikkola proposes a notion of gender realism that is compatible with the type of epistemic difficulties Spelman points to and with the full acknowledgment of the differences between individual women. Stoljar, Natalie. (2011), “Different Women. Gender and the RealismNominalism Debate,” in Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, 27–46, Dordrecht: Springer. This article contains an accessible overview of five main arguments in support of gender nominalism, or the view that we ought to reject the existence of a universal “womanness” as the unifying feature of all members of the class of women. Stoljar also addresses the question whether or not metaphysical debates such as this are important for feminist philosophers. Witt, Charlotte (2011a), “What Is Gender Essentialism?” in Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, 11–25, Dordrecht: Springer. Witt provides a taxonomy of essentialist theories about gender; she distinguished between kind essentialism and individual essentialism. She discusses two arguments against gender essentialism and finally defends her view of gender essentialism, that is, uniessentialism or the view that gender is the unifying factor in an individual social dimensions. This essay is useful because it is quite accessible and connects the feminist debate on gender with canonical philosophers such as Aristotle and Saul Kripke.

Notes 1 For a recent manifestation of this preconception and a lively debate ensuing from it, see Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2016), Mari Mikkola (2016), Jonathan Shaffer (forthcoming), and Theodore Sider (forthcoming). Sider starts his article, which originated from an APA session on feminist metaphysics, with what he describes as a concession: At various points in my book [Writing the Book of the World], particularly at the very beginning, I suggested that the central goal of metaphysics is to inquire into the fundamental nature of reality. Not only does this have the vice of inaccuracy,

56

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism it also has a moral vice in contexts where metaphysics is esteemed: feminist metaphysics is not counted as central metaphysics and hence is portrayed as less important. Metaphysics certainly includes many questions other than those about fundamental reality, questions about the nature of race and gender among them, and I wish I hadn’t suggested otherwise. Even if, as I’ll argue, the content of my approach is compatible with substantive questions of social metaphysics, the practice of metaphysics—including partly my own—sometimes marginalizes such questions.



The debate on grounding as a core aim of metaphysical reflection is a recent development in the debate on the content of metaphysics. Feminist metaphysicians such as Barnes and Mikkola have actively taken part in this debate. However, the development of this area of research is too recent to be effectively included in our brief outline of the most significant debates in feminist metaphysics. Yet, the fact that right from the beginning feminist metaphysics has been engaged in this debate is an important sign of its ever-expanding influence in contemporary philosophical discussion. 2 We do not claim that these are the two most important strands within feminist metaphysics, still less the only two strands. For example, Haslanger and Ásta (2016) also identify debates about “the relational nature of the self ” as a key theme in feminist metaphysics, and we agree. We are limited by space to consideration of only these two questions. 3 We are following Icelandic naming conventions by referring to Ásta by her given name, as Icelandic patronyms are not family names and should not be treated as such. In this way, we are honoring Ásta’s preference. We follow this practice also in our listing of Ásta’s article in the “For Further Reading” section.

References Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir (2013), “The Social Construction of Human Kinds,” Hypatia 28 (4): 716–32. Barnes, Elizabeth (2014), “Going Beyond the Fundamental: Feminism in Contemporary Metaphysics,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114: 335–51. Barnes, Elizabeth (2016), “Realism and Social Structure,” Philosophical Studies, doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0743-y. Bettcher, Talia (2014), “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39 (2): 383–406. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies That Matter, New York and London: Routledge.



Introduction to Feminist Metaphysics

57

Frye, Marilyn (2011), “Metaphors of Being a Ф,” in Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, 85–95, Dordrecht: Springer. Hale, C. Jacob. (1996), “Are Lesbians Women?,” Hypatia 11(2): 94–121. Haslanger, Sally (2000), “Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural,” in Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, 107–26, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haslanger, Sally (2012), “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?” in Sally Halanger (ed.), Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, 221–47, New York: Oxford University Press. Mallon, Ron (2004), “Passing, Travelling and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race,” Nous 38 (4): 644–73. Mikkola, Mari (2006), “Elizabeth Spelman, Gender Realism, and Women,” Hypatia 21 (4): 77–96. Mikkola, Mari (2007), “Gender Sceptics and Feminist Politics,” Res Publica 13 (4): 361–80. Mikkola, Mari (2016), “On the Apparent Antagonism between Feminist and Mainstream Metaphysics,” Philosophical Studies. doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0732-1. Shaffer, Jonathan (2017), “Social Construction as Grounding; or: Fundamentality for Feminists, a Reply to Barnes and Mikkola,” Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2449–65. Sider, Theodore (forthcoming), “Substantivity in Feminist Metaphysics,” Philosophical Studies. doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0739-7. Spelman, Elizabeth (1988), The Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Boston: Beacon Press. Witt, Charlotte (2011a), The Metaphysics of Gender, Oxford: Oxford University Press Witt, Charlotte, ed. (2011b), Feminist Metaphysics. Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self, Dordrecht: Springer.

5

Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage be Saved? Jennifer McKitrick

1 Introduction Feminist metaphysics is simultaneously feminist theorizing and metaphysics. Part of feminist metaphysics concerns social ontology and considers such questions as, What is the nature of social kinds, such as genders? Feminist metaphysicians also consider whether gendered perspectives influence metaphysical theorizing; for example, have approaches to the nature of the self or free will been conducted from a masculinist perspective, and would a feminist perspective yield different theories? Some feminist metaphysicians develop metaphysical theories with the aim of furthering certain social goals, such as gender equality. Despite these and other intriguing research projects, feminist metaphysics faces challenges from two flanks: one might argue that “feminist metaphysics” is not metaphysics, or one might argue that it is not feminist. Recently, Elizabeth Barnes (2014) has made the case that, since contemporary accounts of the nature of metaphysics focus primarily on the fundamental, they have the problematic implication that feminist metaphysics is not, properly speaking, metaphysics. However, less emphasis has been paid, of late, to the idea that major strands of feminist thought also problematize feminist metaphysics. I will briefly assess the metaphysician’s case against feminist metaphysics in Section 2 of this chapter. Then, in Section 3, I will examine in more detail possible feminist concerns over metaphysics. In Section 4, I sketch a different conception of metaphysics that avoids both mainstream and feminist challenges to feminist metaphysics.



Feminist Metaphysics

59

2  Metaphysicians against feminist metaphysics Metaphysics that ignores feminist concerns is often called “traditional” or “mainstream” metaphysics—a label which already suggests that, even if feminist metaphysics is possible, it flouts philosophical traditions and is outside of the mainstream. I do not agree, but I’ll use these terms to mark the contrast. Let me start with the charge that whatever feminist philosophers are doing it cannot be metaphysics. I know of no mainstream metaphysician who explicitly makes this claim, but arguably it follows from what many take metaphysics to be.1 One could argue that mainstream metaphysics has a number of features which make it incompatible with feminist theory: mind-independence, a focus on fundamentality, realism, and value neutrality. In the next subsection, I elaborate these features and explore their implications for feminist metaphysics.

2.1  Characteristics of “mainstream” metaphysics a. Mind-independence First, the subject matter of metaphysics is said to be mind-independent reality. Agents with minds, and everything that depends, for its existence, on agents with minds, are not part of mind-independent reality. Social kinds are, by definition, constituted or constructed by communities of entities with minds. Consequently, any investigation into the nature of social kinds would not be a metaphysical project, nor would any attempt to give a social constructivist account of any phenomenon. b. Focus on fundamentality Second, as Barnes stresses in her 2014 article “Going Beyond the Fundamental: Feminism in Contemporary Metaphysics,” the subject matter of metaphysics is said to be fundamental reality—things like indivisible simple particulars and their perfectly natural properties. Complex entities such as people and social groups, and their features such as genders and social structures, again, are just outside of this domain. c. Realism Third, much of mainstream metaphysics, in the analytical tradition at any rate, is regarded as a realist endeavor by its practitioners, in that it aspires to provide a true description of reality. Furthermore, this commitment to realism is often coupled with a particular understanding of what realism entails, which connects with the first two features of mainstream

60

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

metaphysics. What is real is thought to be mind-independent, that is, not the result of any sort of fiction, pretense, or convention. Some go further and argue that only the fundamental is real, and consequently, realist metaphysics exclusively concerns the fundamental (Fine 2002; Heil 2012). By these lights, feminist metaphysics is anti-realist and not, properly speaking, metaphysics. d. Value neutrality Fourth, metaphysics is supposed to be a value-neutral, apolitical endeavor. Consequently, when considering legitimate reasons for or against any particular metaphysical theory, one’s social standing or political perspective is deemed to be irrelevant. For instance, whether one is a masculinist or a feminist has no bearing on whether objects are bundles of properties, or whether they have substrata. Value neutrality, together with mind-independence and realism, entails that metaphysics aspires to be objective, both in its methods and its results. Arguably, a feminist perspective compromises this objectivity, as would any political perspective. And insofar as feminist theorists aim to advance certain social goals, they abandon the objectivity that is the hallmark of realist metaphysics. Consequently, whatever feminist philosophers are doing, it is not metaphysics, it is not relevant to metaphysics, and so there can be no feminist metaphysics. Or so one might argue.

2.2  The narrowness of the “mainstream” conception The characterization of mainstream metaphysics given above can be rejected as too narrow, for reasons independent of feminist concerns. Clearly, it leaves more than feminist issues out of the domain of metaphysics. Consider the philosophy of color—red, green, blue, and so forth. Many theorists about color hold that color properties are not perfectly natural, fundamental mind-independent properties, but, rather that the identities of color properties depend on the natures of the visual systems of perceiving agents (Byrne and Hilbert 2003). Furthermore, some argue that color discrimination capacities, and consequently color itself, vary across populations and are culturally relative (Roberson et al. 2005). These ideas concern not just our knowledge about colors, but what colors essentially are—an apparently metaphysical issue. However, it follows from the characterization of metaphysics given above that an investigation into the nature of color properties is not a metaphysical project. In fact, John Heil argues that



Feminist Metaphysics

61

color predicates do not denote properties, and consequently color properties are absent from “serious ontology” (2012: 153). But arguably, he is the one who is out of step with traditional metaphysics, since the nature of color has been discussed under the rubric of metaphysics for centuries, and continues to be so (Jackson 1929; Guerlac 1986; Puryear 2013). Colors are a paradigm case of the so-called secondary qualities, whose ontological status and connection to primary qualities has been debated since at least the Early Modern era. Lawrence Nolan, author of Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate, writes: “nature of color is presently one of the most contentious topics in metaphysics” (2011: 2; my emphasis). And philosophy of color is just one example. Free will, personal identity, and the relation between mind and body have traditionally been considered metaphysical topics. Restricting the subject matter of metaphysics to fundamental ontology would rule out these topics as well, since discussion of these topics necessarily involves entities with minds, which are presumably non-fundamental. So, if such mainstream challenges purport to distinguish “traditional” metaphysics from feminist theory, they begin by redefining the tradition.

2.3  Terminological or substantive? Another response to the traditionalist challenge to feminist metaphysics is to claim that it is mere terminological quibbling. One may wonder, what’s in a name? What hangs on a subdiscipline being called “metaphysics”? Perhaps, if you want, you could draw a distinction between metaphysics about the fundamental stuff on the one hand and applied metaphysics on the other. So it seems that some of the traditionalist considerations against feminist metaphysics are more relevant to what it’s called, rather than its status as a worthwhile endeavor. However, other traditionalist considerations against feminist metaphysics go deeper. Recall that, from a traditionalist point of view, when metaphysics is done correctly, it is objective, and political and social values are deemed irrelevant. Consequently, evaluating traditional metaphysics from a feminist perspective would be considered off base, and developing metaphysical theories from a feminist perspective would be problematic. So, a traditionalist may argue, whether or not we call the endeavor metaphysics, the methodology is suspect, and so are its conclusions. (I will address this charge in Section 4.) Recently, Theodore Sider defended his conception of substantive metaphysics from the complaint that it renders feminist metaphysics non-substantive. He clarifies that being about the fundamental is sufficient for being a substantive

62

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

metaphysical issue, but it is not necessary. Furthermore, he notes an ambiguity in the claim that substantive metaphysics is mind-independent. It could mean that mind-dependent phenomena are not part of the subject matter of metaphysics, or it could mean that the correct account of any phenomena should not depend on the minds of those considering it. Sider only endorses the latter. He writes: “what is demanded is that the theorist’s point of view should not intrude into an objective description of reality, not that facts about the dependence of phenomena on human activity must be banned from the content of the description” (2016: 13, emphasis in original). As applied to feminist metaphysics, Sider argues that it could be independent of human thought in the following sense: Although the subject matter of statements about gender and sex concerns human beings, there is no intrusion of the point of view of the human theorist on the judgment that sex is distinct from gender: that judgment is not a projection of the theorist’s politics or values or outlook, but rather is the objectively correct description of social reality. (2016: 5–6, emphasis in original)

So, Sider’s metaphysics avoid two points of apparent conflict with feminist metaphysics—fundamentality and mind-independence. However, note that he steers headlong into a third—value neutrality. The idea that metaphysics can be done from a feminist point of view is apparently ruled out by Sider’s clarified characterization of what it means for metaphysics to be substantive. I will address this concern in Section 4, but first let’s consider some feminist reasons to be wary of feminist metaphysics.

3  Feminists against feminist metaphysics Why would anyone think that “feminist metaphysics” isn’t feminist? Using the label “feminist theory” for feminist scholarship broadly construed, the following question can be posed: does feminist theory include feminist metaphysics, or is the nature of metaphysics such that it has no place in feminist theory? Feminists may have various concerns about feminist metaphysics. One concern is that the subject matter of metaphysics is so different from that of feminist theory that, insofar as a philosopher is doing metaphysics, she is contributing little or nothing to feminist theory. Note that feminists with such concerns can remain neutral about the merits of metaphysical inquiry per se, and would probably be more open to being convinced of the relevance of metaphysics to



Feminist Metaphysics

63

feminism. A more serious feminist concern about feminist metaphysics stems from a general suspicion about any attempt to describe objective reality. Insofar as feminist metaphysicians are attempting to describe objective reality, some feminists will regard their projects with suspicion. A major source of tension between mainstream metaphysics and feminist theory is the feminists’ emphasis on social construction. As noted above, the mainstream metaphysician can argue that social constructivist accounts are not realist, or they have a different subject matter than metaphysics. However, some feminists also seem to think that the role that social construction plays in feminist theory makes it incompatible with metaphysics. On the assumption that social construction is a pervasive phenomenon, any endeavor that aims to discover the nature of mind-independent reality is suspect. I disagree. Not only can metaphysics concern social realities, but also theorizing about asocial reality is not as problematic as some social constructivists suggest.

3.1  What is not socially constructed? To investigate asocial reality is essentially to ask: What is not socially constructed? What is it like? To adequately address these questions, one must have some understanding of what it means for something to be socially constructed. There has been substantial work in feminist metaphysics developing various accounts of what it means to say that something is socially constructed, what ontological categories socially constructed things belong to, who or what does the constructing, and how the construction is accomplished (Haslanger 1995; Ásta 2013; Diaz-Leon 2015). I’m not going to assume or advocate a particular account of social construction, but merely make what I take to be a modest assumption: If something is socially constructed, then some social entity is necessary for that thing to be what it is. So, socially constructed things cannot predate societies. If the universe predates society, there was a time when nothing was socially constructed. The idea that some things, such as marriages, money, and universities are socially constructed is uncontroversial. It’s an interesting question how construction works even in these obvious cases (Searle 1995). But where social constructivist accounts have the most impact, I think, is where they show that something we thought was independent from social forces is, in fact, dependent upon and determined by them. The most interesting social constructivist claims are surprising—something that we thought was always and necessarily a certain way turns out to be a human invention of sorts. If there was a pre-social past,

64

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and social constructivist claims are correct, none of the socially constructed things were there, no marriages or money, of course, but perhaps no men, women, males, females, or even people. What could such a world be like? What were things like before social construction? In addition to this very general question, theorists can also ask a number of related questions when considering what is not socially constructed. We need not restrict the inquiry to what things were like before any social construction whatsoever, but rather, before construction of some particular kind. For example, one could ask “what were things like before the construction of gender?” without supposing that nothing had been socially constructed previous to the construction of gender. Furthermore, questions about the past before social construction have analogues that are not historical or diachronic, but concern currently existing things. These questions include “What is given?,” “What is natural?,” “What are socially constructed things constructed out of?,” and “What nonsocial facts ground the social facts?” For example, suppose that some nonsocial biological fact grounds a certain social fact. Grounding is a synchronic relation between facts that hold concurrently. So, while this biological fact would be “prior to” the social fact, in an ontological sense, it need not be temporally prior. For the most part, I am not distinguishing between the synchronic and diachronic senses in which something could be “prior to” social reality. More importantly, in this section, I am not trying to answer questions about what is not socially constructed. Rather, I want to assess the prospects for answering them.  In particular, I am interested in reasons for dismissing or resisting them.  Is there something wrong with trying to answer such questions? Is there something wrong with theorizing about the unconstructed or asocial world? In what follows, I identify four feminist objections to theorizing about unconstructed reality. Metaphysicians should be cognizant of these worries. However, I will try to show that, while theorizing about what is prior to social construction presents various challenges, these challenges do not constitute conclusive reasons to refrain from addressing such questions. But I begin with a brief exploration of the potentially positive role of theorizing about what is not socially constructed.

3.2  The role of counter-narratives The realization that something has been socially constructed should prompt us not only to question the idea that the status quo is unchangeable, but also



Feminist Metaphysics

65

to revise the ways we think about the distant past and the natural world. If surprising social constructivist claims are correct, then we’ve been believing false origin stories. Without a counter-narrative, there’s a vacuum where those beliefs used to be, and things that seemed to have a satisfying causal explanation no longer have any. Questions about the natural world and the distant past are often addressed empirically. Some of the research in biology, archaeology, and anthropology tries to determine what things were like, independent of social influences. Concerns about such research projects have been discussed by feminist philosophers of science, such as Sandra Harding (1986) and Alison Wylie (2002), as well as the biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (1992). However, feminist scholars also offer alternative views about nature or the past, which are at least as well supported as rival explanations. For example, Fausto-Sterling argues that the idea that there are only two distinct biological sexes is socially constructed (1993: 20–24). To make her case, she shows that the biological evidence does not substantiate the male/female binary. She goes on to suggest that the biological data could equally support an alternative taxonomy according to which there are at least five sexes. Metaphysics can also play a role in exploring the possibilities that conflict with our current socially constructed reality. If I come to believe that a certain kind of entity depends on a certain kind of society for its existence, I can try to conceptualize models of worlds that don’t include those kinds of entities. This would not only make possible a theory about the distant past, but could open up conceptual possibilities about the future. If theorizing about which is prior to, or independent of, social construction is possible, it could reveal untapped potentialities and strengthen the sense that things don’t have to be the way that they are. Traditionally, theorizing about how things might have been in the distant past, prior to the construction of our current social realities, has taken the form of hypotheses about the state of nature. According to some Early Modern Social Contractarians, in the state of nature, the independent and self-sufficient noble savage roamed the wilderness before deciding to better his life by cooperating with other people. As Thomas Hobbes famously wrote, “Let us consider men . . . as if . . . sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other” (Hobbes 1651: Chapter VIII, section 1). This arguably has the consequence of justifying the status quo as that which has been agreed to by equal and autonomous individuals. But many of the assumptions of social contractarians have been challenged by feminists, such

66

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

as the economist Julie Nelson, who writes, “Humans do not simply spring out of the earth. Humans are born of women, nurtured and cared for as dependent children and when aged or ill, socialized into family and community groups, and are perpetually dependent on nourishment and a home to sustain life. . . . the areas of life thought of as ‘women’s work’” (Nelson 1995: 135). Nelson rejects the Hobbesian origin story as empirically implausible, thus undermining its justificatory force. In its place, she envisions a more realistic state of nature that includes human beings at different stages of life with various dependencies and attachments. One can see a similar rejection and replacement strategy at work in Catherine MacKinnon’s paper “Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination.” MacKinnon writes that underlying what she calls “the difference approach” to sex discrimination law is a false story about the distant past, “Its underlying story is this: on the first day, difference was; on the second day, a division was created upon it; on the third day, irrational instances of dominance arose. Division may be rational or irrational. Dominance either seems or is justified. Difference is” (1987: 34). MacKinnon suggests that, according to this story, difference predated social construction. In the context, it is clear that the narrative MacKinnon is considering is one in which prehistoric males and females were naturally different in ways that provided a legitimate basis for distinguishing between them. This enabled one group, presumably the physically stronger males, to dominate over the relatively weaker females. MacKinnon goes on to argue that this narrative has problematic political implications, and so she offers a counter-narrative: Here, on the first day that matters, dominance was achieved, probably by force. By the second day, division along the same lines had to be relatively firmly in place. On the third day, if not sooner, differences were demarcated, together with social systems to exaggerate them in perception and in fact, because the systematically differential delivery of benefits and deprivations required making no mistake about who was who. (1987: 40, emphasis in original)

To be clear, I do not think that MacKinnon intended this story to be any less political or any more objective than the one it replaces. But it is a description of possible circumstances prior to the construction of gender. So, feminists occasionally offer counter-narratives or theorize about what things are like, or were like, independent of the construction of our current social reality. Nevertheless, feminists also raise a number of objections to doing so.



Feminist Metaphysics

67

3.3 Feminist objections to theorizing about what is prior to social construction In feminist literature, one can discern suspicion of metaphysical projects which aim to describe things as they are objectively or independently of social construction. I identify four lines of objection: that these projects lack relevance, that they are viciously circular, that they presuppose false dichotomies, and that they have a hidden agenda. a. Relevance Reconsider MacKinnon’s counter-narrative about difference and dominance. Someone who is interested in developing a coherent theory about the distant past might ask the following questions about MacKinnon’s story: What were things like before dominance? Doesn’t domination require a division between the dominators and the dominated? Was there anything different about those who achieved dominance? But MacKinnon isn’t interested in such questions. We’re told that the day that dominance was achieved was “the first day that matters.” It follows that whatever came before that day does not matter. So, while MacKinnon offers a hypothetical characterization of the distant past, she also suggests a limitation to this line of inquiry to “what matters.” Elsewhere, MacKinnon makes clear her impatience with philosophical debates that are deemed to be irrelevant. “Take the problem of ‘is there a reality and how do I know I’m right about it?’ The ‘is there a there there?’ business. How do we deal in the face of Cartesian—updated as existential—doubt? Women know the world is out there. Women know the world is out there because it hits us in the face. Literally” (1987: 59). A stalwart mainstream metaphysician might insist that sensory experiences, no matter how painful, are not conclusive evidence about the nature of fundamental reality. But if the asocial, mind-independent reality that metaphysicians are concerned about is necessarily outside of our conscious experience, then arguably it shouldn’t matter to feminists. If the goal of feminism is social change, arcane debates over the nature of fundamental reality seem irrelevant. What matters is our lived experiences, our social realities, and the levers of social change. Some feminist philosophers argue that, insofar as philosophy is feminist, it should advance feminist goals, and the futile quest for knowledge of objective truth about fundamental reality is irrelevant. Granted, metaphysics does little to advance some very important social goals. Furthermore, certain scholarly research projects have no reason to delve into

68

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

metaphysical questions. Take, for example, the ethnomethodological approach of Stoller, Garfinkle, and Rosen (1960). They ask us to bracket our “natural attitude”—the beliefs we unreflectively possess about a mind-independent external world. Instead of taking any position about the external world, they investigate what we do to make it real for ourselves. For example, they ask, how does an individual produce the reality of being a woman for others? Trying to describe mind-independent reality just isn’t part of this project.2 Similarly, in her essay “What Is a Woman?” Toril Moi does not reject the distinction between sex and gender according to which sex is biological while gender is social, but she argues that it is not relevant to the account of embodied subjectivity that she wants to develop (2001: 4). This charge of irrelevance suggests that the subject matter of metaphysics is too far removed from that of feminist theory for feminist metaphysics to be possible. b. Circularity A second reason against theorizing about what is outside of our socially constructed reality is that doing so involves inescapable circularity. Because we only have our socially constructed concepts to work with, it is impossible to grasp or describe anything other than that which is socially constructed. Any description we try to give of reality will be put in terms of our language, organized according to our current categories. You can find this idea in Foucault’s History of Sexuality. On the prospects of an objective investigation into the nature of sexuality, he writes: One must not suppose that there exists a certain sphere of sexuality that would be the legitimate concern of a free and disinterested scientific inquiry were it not the object of mechanisms of prohibition brought to bear by the economic or ideological requirements of power. If sexuality was constituted as an area of investigation, this was only because relations of power had established it as a possible object. (Foucault 1980: 98)

As I interpret Foucault here, he is criticizing the view that we can investigate sexuality as it occurs naturally, free of the influence of ideology. To suppose otherwise is to suppose that there is something—natural sexuality—that would exist and have a certain nature, in the absence of social forces. Foucault rejects this assumption. According to Foucault, if we think that we are investigating natural sexuality, we have, instead, imported our concept of sexuality into a context where it would not otherwise exist. Consequently, if we proceed as though there is something that answers to our concept to be investigated, what we learn about it tends to cohere with our preexisting notions.



Feminist Metaphysics

69

To put the circularity objection in more abstract terms, suppose that I was trying to understand the present Fs, and I endeavor to do so by researching the past Fs. I then marshal my evidence about the past Fs and offer an explanation of why the present Fs are the way that they are. According to the circularity objection, my interpretation of all evidence relevant to the existence and nature of the past Fs is shaped by my “F” concept, and the arguments I give in support of my claims about the nature of Fs are implicitly circular arguments. In short, when we try to think about what is not constructed, we think socially constructed thoughts. Insofar as metaphysics is about what is not socially constructed, it seems impossible. c. False dichotomies A third concern about trying to investigate what nonsocial things are like is that doing so presupposes a false distinction between what is social and what is natural. We find this view in Merleau-Ponty, who says “everything is both manufactured and natural in man” (1967: 198), and Donna Haraway (2013), who argues that there is no clear boundary between what is natural and what is constructed. Similarly, in Sexing the Body, Fausto-Sterling argues against natural/social dualism, particularly with respect to sex and gender. She writes, “The more we look for a simple physical basis for ‘sex,’ the more it becomes clear that ‘sex’ is not a pure physical category. What bodily signals and functions we define as male or female come already entangled in our ideas about gender” (2000: 4). Insofar as the subject matter of metaphysics is the natural, nonsocial world, the metaphysician assumes that we are capable of distinguishing the natural from the social. If this “false dichotomy” objection is correct, then we can make no such distinction, and metaphysics is impossible. d. Hidden agendas A fourth reason to resist addressing metaphysical questions about what is prior to social construction is that the answers are inevitably self-serving; they mask ideology and socially constructed reality as given. The combination of masking social construction and associating naturalness with inevitability, permanence, and normativity can be especially problematic. As Judith Butler writes, “Ontology is, thus, not a foundation, but a normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political discourse as its necessary ground” (2011: 203). (I will discuss Butler’s suspicions about ontology further in Section 4.) To illustrate the way political interests can shape inquiry, let’s suppose that a certain social group is regarded as naturally suited for a certain role. It then becomes easier to believe that they inevitably play that role, that they will always

70

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

play that role, and that this is a good thing. Those that benefit from this social arrangement have every incentive to believe and perpetuate those ideas. In this case, pointing out what’s socially constructed is an act of resistance. But suppose that, after we discover that the group members’ suitability for a certain role was socially constructed, we then ask “well, what social role are these people naturally suited for?” The question itself is rife with socially inculcated assumptions—that the expression “these people” refers to a homogeneous group, that the members of this group have similar capabilities, and that there is a reliable correspondence between social roles and natural talents. But in addition, the answer to this question is just as fraught with the potential for contributing to oppression as the view that it would replace. It might be better not to try to answer or even ask that question. Likewise, if metaphysics is a Trojan horse which sneaks a political agenda into our worldview, perhaps it is better not to do it at all.

3.4  Defending metaphysics against feminist objections These are four lines of argument that one can find in feminist and social construction literature which implicitly problematize metaphysics. Obviously, there is some overlap between them in practice, and there may be others. However, I will briefly respond to the objections as I laid them out above. a. Response to the relevance objection. I would not argue that every feminist philosopher should theorize about what is prior to social construction, nor would I argue that doing so would advance their particular goals. I’m more interested in whether those feminists who are curious about asocial reality, or alternative realities, have a reason to refrain from pursuing that curiosity. The fact that asocial metaphysics is not relevant to every research project does not provide such a reason. But note that there is a tension between the idea that metaphysics is incapable of having consequences of any significance and the “hidden agenda” objection, according to which traditional metaphysics advances a certain worldview that has problematic consequences. If traditional metaphysics has served the interests of the status quo, there’s no reason to think that feminist metaphysics is irrelevant or incapable of serving different interests. As I argued in Section 2.3, there might be positive reasons, from a feminist perspective, to be interested in theorizing about what exists independently of our current socially constructed reality. As we saw with Fausto-Sterling’s



Feminist Metaphysics

71

account of the sexes, Nelson’s reflections on the state of nature, and MacKinnon’s story about difference and dominance, there can be power in positing an alternative account, or a counter-narrative. If we merely negate our old beliefs about the distant past or the natural world, we are left with a vacuum where satisfying explanations had been. I think that it would strengthen the social constructivist account to posit a plausible characterization of the world without the socially constructed entities in question, as well as an alternative account of their origin. b. Response to the circularity objection According to the circularity objection, theorizing about asocial reality is pointless because the necessary use of socially constructed concepts makes it impossible to acquire any information about how reality is, or how the past was, in itself, mind-independently. But I disagree. It seems that the objection places the standards for legitimate inquiry impossibly high. It effectively rests on the following sort of assumptions: A. Unless a line of inquiry will result in answers that are definitive and certain, then it should not be pursued. Since we can never be sure that we are accurately describing objective reality, we should refrain from attempting to do so. B. To the extent that something is seen from a perspective, it is not seen for what it is, as it is in itself. And, if you are not seeing a thing as it is in itself, then you have no information about it. C. To the extent that you describe something according to the concepts that you possess, you are not describing it as it is itself. And if you cannot describe something as it is in itself, your description is illegitimate. I think that these assumptions can be challenged on a number of grounds. There can be benefits to having answers that are partial, plausible, or worthy contenders as compared to other available answers. It can be worthwhile to try to view something even if you can’t see all sides at once. Descriptions of things can be better or worse, even if they are all incomplete and not fully accurate. As Sally Haslanger puts it in “Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural”: There is a temptation to think that if we cannot “get outside” of ourselves to test our beliefs against reality, then there’s nothing further we can do epistemically to regulate belief; we’re left with only political negotiation. But there are other epistemic considerations that can be brought to bear on belief, and provide grounds for claims to truth, for example coherence, evidential support, fruitfulness, and so on. (2012: 155)

72

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

The Foucauldian account of the circularity of our reasoning is unduly pessimistic about the prospects of human inquiry. While people do have a problematic tendency toward confirmation bias, we are nevertheless capable of recognizing evidence that defies our conceptual schemes, as well as revising those schemes accordingly. c. Response to the false dichotomy objection According to the third objection, theorizing about asocial reality relies on an untenable natural/social distinction. To respond, I need to make an awkward distinction—between being able to make a distinction and being able to apply a distinction. We might not be able to apply the natural/social distinction in certain cases, for example, to determine which aspects of a man are natural and which are social. Maybe they are too intertwined, or maybe all of his features are both natural and social. But showing that something is both natural and social does not refute the idea that there is a difference between being natural and being social. We are able to understand the distinction and apply it in at least some cases. Analogously, consider the alcohol/water distinction. If you have a mixture of alcohol and water in a glass, you might not be able to distinguish the water from the alcohol. They might mix in a way it is practically impossible to say which part is alcohol and which part is water. But that does not go to show that there is no difference between being water and being alcohol. So, perhaps even if we cannot tell, which, if any, aspects of a man are natural, we can still make the natural/social distinction. One might ask: if we can’t apply the distinction, how can we investigate it? Here, I think it matters whether the investigation is about the present or the past. If I am asking which aspects of a currently living human being are natural and which are social, then the objection has some force. But if I am asking about the distant past that preceded society, no aspect of it is even partially social. One possible reply on behalf of those who deny the natural/social distinction is that the bounds of the social and the natural are still unclear in the distant past. Would small groups of prehistoric humans count as social? What about a parent and their offspring? What about similar groups of nonhuman ancestors? What about other nonhuman animals commonly described as “social animals”? Where do you draw the line? What this reply suggests, quite plausibly, is that humanity is on a continuum with the rest of the natural world. Perhaps humans evolved as social beings, and no pre-social humans ever existed. And perhaps we have been mistaken



Feminist Metaphysics

73

in thinking of natural and social as opposites. In this light, it is plausible that some ways of being social are in fact natural. If so, showing that something is social does not show that it is not natural. But fortunately, if “natural” does not mean “nonsocial,” investigating asocial reality does not, in fact, need to rely on the natural/social distinction after all. Granted, we are still left with the fact that there is no clear point at which the world went from being nonsocial to being social. But this does not necessarily preclude investigating the asocial. Again, one can ask more targeted questions such as “what were things like before the social construction of gender?” or any concept or entity of particular interest. Also, we could theorize about the time well before the fuzzy boundary that is the dawn of society. I think that one who opposes theorizing about asocial reality would make the following retort: even if I grant you that there was nothing social in the pre-social past, your conception of the past and your description of it will necessarily be shaped by your concepts and your language, which are shaped by social factors. Your conception and description of the past will be entirely infused with social influences, and so you won’t be able to apply the natural/social distinction to it. However, if this is the crux of the objection, it is in fact another articulation of the circularity objection discussed earlier. d. Response to the hidden agenda objection It was argued that doing metaphysics can conceal hidden agendas and be politically problematic. But typically, the fact that some philosophers have given politically problematic answers to certain metaphysical questions is not taken to be a reason to be disinterested in those questions. For example, suppose that you think that certain organized religions have been politically problematic and have used the threat of eternal damnation as a means of social control. Much ink has been spilled defending the metaphysical views in service of those institutions— the separability of the mind and the body, the existence of an uncaused cause or a being that exists necessarily, the possibility of ultimate moral responsibility. But secular philosophers do not take this to be a reason not to discuss the mindbody problem, modality, or free will. Likewise, if metaphysical views have served patriarchy, that is not a decisive reason to refrain from proposing alternatives. Furthermore, there is no necessary connection between what is natural or nonsocial and what is inevitable, permanent, or good. If staph infections were naturally occurring and plagued organisms since before social construction, it wouldn’t follow that antibiotics are not possible or should not be used. If the universe predates society, something came before social construction, even if

74

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

we know not what. If the past or the natural world somehow determines and constrains our possibilities, not knowing about the asocial won’t change that fact. If we want to resist the idea that the status quo is permanent and morally unproblematic, it’s hard to see how not thinking about asocial reality would help. If we reject the connection between natural, necessary, and good, we should not worry that an account of the past, the natural world, or fundamental reality will worsen our ability to challenge the status quo.

4  A different conception of metaphysics While I defended metaphysics against feminist objections in the previous section, there’s more that needs to be said in defense of specifically feminist metaphysics. Ironically, the feminist challenges and the metaphysical challenges to feminist metaphysics share some common assumptions about the aims of metaphysics. They both assume that the aim of metaphysics is to provide an aperspectival description of mind-independent, fundamental reality. As we saw in Section 2, the metaphysical critic thinks that feminist theorists do not share that aim, and consequently they fail to be proper metaphysicians. Meanwhile, Section 3 showed that the feminist critic thinks that all metaphysicians fail to achieve the aim of providing an aperspectival description of mind-independent fundamental reality, and their illusions or pretenses to the contrary are problematic. In sum, the metaphysical critic holds that metaphysics has certain goals that feminist theory lacks, and that these goals are worthwhile, while the feminist critic holds that metaphysics has certain goals that feminist theory lacks, and that these goals are not worthwhile. Despite their different value judgments, the metaphysical critic and the feminist critic are in broad agreement. If these critics are correct, feminists and metaphysicians should agree to disagree about the merits of metaphysical inquiry and go their separate ways, annulling the proffered coupling of feminism and metaphysics that would be feminist metaphysics. Given these challenges, a defender of feminist metaphysics must offer a different conception of metaphysics. This conception need not be antithetical to philosophical traditions, nor outside of the mainstream. A conception of metaphysics that has had adherents throughout the history of philosophy is the idea that metaphysics is about what kinds of things exist, their natures, and how they are related. If, as Barnes argues, metaphysics goes beyond the fundamental,



Feminist Metaphysics

75

then it extends to theories of ordinary objects, people, and complex social entities. Furthermore, if composite and complex entities are real, metaphysical theorizing about such entities can be realist. Feminist metaphysicians can aspire to provide accurate characterizations of things that exist. (Granted, some feminist philosophers do not describe themselves as realists, so I am not speaking for, defending, or criticizing their views here.) While I do not think realist aspirations are futile, I think that a heavy dose of epistemic modesty is called for. These considerations might be familiar from discussions in feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy of science (Longino 1990; Alcoff and Potter 2013), but they bear repeating as applied to feminist metaphysics. The way that you characterize things that exist is liable to be colored by your perspective. Furthermore, no one has a view from nowhere, and so absence of perspective is not possible. You can attempt to transcend your particular perspective, but doing so is difficult. Furthermore, there are various social factors that exacerbate this difficulty. If you do not hear other people’s ideas, you are liable to assume that your perspective is universal or not a perspective at all. If you surround yourself exclusively with like-minded people, your false confidence is reinforced and your awareness of your own perspective is diminished. Consequently, while absence of perspective is not possible, a plurality of perspectives is possible and advantageous. Traditional metaphysicians cannot be faulted for having approached metaphysical questions from the social perspective that they happened to have. However, to the extent that their philosophical conversations excluded women and people from different cultures, their investigations were impoverished. They did not take sufficient steps to test their assumption that their perspective was representative and universal. Feminist critiques of traditional metaphysics provide such a step. For truth-seekers, they should be welcomed as a test of the objectivity of their methods and theories. For mainstream metaphysicians, feminist theories of metaphysical subjects can facilitate an awareness of their own perspective, and that of others. Furthermore, metaphysicians need not disavow political commitments in order to fruitfully engage in metaphysical inquiry. In fact, proclamation of one’s ideology can be helpful. It’s not as if people with unspoken ideologies have no biases. Presumably, some metaphysicians argue for entelechies, haecceities, or nonphysical substances because of their personal faith. But metaphysicians aren’t typically craven opportunists either. Realists want to believe that their reasoning is bringing them closer to truth. But somehow, it’s easier to believe

76

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

things that favor your interests or fit with your preconceived notions. In this light, it is difficult to see why awareness of ideological or political commitments would be a hindrance to realist aspirations. One methodological tool that can be useful for feminist metaphysics is model-building (Paul 2012: 9). When you build a model, you might begin with fundamental building blocks, but you don’t end there. You also arrange them and identify relationships and composite structures. Rival metaphysical models can be compared relative to various criteria such as internal coherence, consistency with well-supported phenomena, and explanatory power. It can also be argued or disputed whether the model has any normative or political implications. Here’s a brief sketch of how comparing metaphysical models could be a fruitful project in feminist metaphysics. As noted above, Judith Butler criticizes traditional metaphysics for the way it insidiously installs itself into political discourse (2006: 23). More specifically, she focuses on a particular paradigm in metaphysics: hylomorphism—the view that substance and form are the two fundamental ontological categories. She claims that this view is an artifact of language, particularly the subject-predicate grammatical structure which dominates most languages (2011b: 28). She also argues that identification of discrete substances is arbitrary, and that the idea of discrete substances existing mind-independently is undermined by considerations of vagueness (2011a: xi; see also 2011b: 182). She goes on to suggest that the substance-attribute paradigm supports the idea that the universe is populated with subjects that have essential natures, and their defining activities flow from these natures. Selves with innate gender identities and sexual orientations are at home in this universe. In short, she claims that heteronormativity is supported by dubious metaphysical assumptions. While Butler professes to eschew metaphysics altogether, you can also interpret her as inviting us to contemplate a metaphysical model that is an alternative to hylomorphism. On this alternative model, activities are more fundamental than actors (2006: 34). Selves and identities are constructed from patterns of activity that are shaped by social forces. One could try to construct a metaphysical model consistent with these ideas—perhaps akin to process ontology (Whitehead 1929). This model could then be compared to hylomorphic models, and evaluated according to various criteria for theory choice, as well as the extent to which either model can be used to support or undermine social structures that may privilege or disadvantage certain social groups.



Feminist Metaphysics

77

5 Conclusion So, yes, the marriage of feminism and metaphysics can be saved. One can simultaneously be doing feminist theory and metaphysics. However, doing so means rejecting the restriction of metaphysics to the contemplation of fundamental, mind-independent reality. It also means rejecting the idea that having a perspective or an agenda is disqualifying. However, doing feminist metaphysics does not require abandoning objectivity, nor the aspiration to provide true descriptions of both asocial realities and socially constructed realities.

Notes 1 Barnes argues mainstream characterizations of metaphysics, such as those of Theodore Sider and Jonathan Schaffer, rule out feminist metaphysics. However, both Sider and Schaffer argue that their views are amenable to feminist metaphysics. See Sider (2016) and Schaffer (2016). 2 For discussion of Stoller and Garfinkel’s views, see Warnke (2010: 53).

References Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter (2013), Feminist Epistemologies, London: Routledge. Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir (2013), “The Social Construction of Human Kinds,” Hypatia 28 (4): 716–32. Barnes, Elizabeth (2014), “Going Beyond the Fundamental: Feminism in Contemporary Metaphysics,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society cxiv (3): 335–51. Butler, Judith (2006), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2011), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge. Byrne, Alex, and David R. Hilbert (2003), “Color Realism Redux,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (01): 52–59. Diaz‐Leon, Esa (2015), “What Is Social Construction?,” European Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 1137–52. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (1992), Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men, New York: Basic Books. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (1993), “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” The Sciences 33 (2): 20–24.

78

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000), Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, New York: Basic Books. Fine, Kit (2002), “The Question of Realism,” in Andrea Clemente Bottani, Massimiliano Carrara, and P. Giaretta (eds.), Individuals, Essence and Identity, 3–48, Dordrecht: Springer. Foucault, Michel (1980), History of Sexuality, Vols. 1–3, New York: Vintage. Guerlac, Henry (1986), “Can There Be Colors in the Dark? Physical Color Theory Before Newton,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1): 3–20. Haraway, Donna (2013), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Routledge. Harding, Sandra G. (1986), The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Haslanger, Sally (1995), “Ontology and Social Construction,” Philosophical Topics 23 (2): 95–125. Haslanger, Sally (2012), Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heil, John (2012), The Universe as We Find It, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, Thomas (1651), De Cive, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Jackson, Reginald (1929), “Locke’s Distinction Between Primary and Secondary Qualities,” Mind 38 (149): 56–76. Longino, Helen E. (1990), Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine A. (1987), Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1967), The Structure of Behavior, Boston: Beacon Press. Moi, Toril (2001), What Is a Woman? and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Julie A. (1995), “Feminism and Economics,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (2): 131–48. Nolan, Lawrence (2011), Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paul, Laurie (2012), “Metaphysics as Modeling: The Handmaiden’s Tale,” Philosophical Studies 160 (1): 1–29. Puryear, Stephen (2013), “Leibniz on the Metaphysics of Color,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2): 319–46. Roberson, Debi, Jules Davidoff, Ian R. L. Davies, Laura R. Shapiro (2005), “Color Categories: Evidence for the Cultural Relativity Hypothesis,” Cognitive Psychology 50 (4): 378–411. Schaffer, Jonathan (2017), “Social Construction as Grounding; or: Fundamentality for Feminists, a Reply to Barnes and Mikkola,” Philosophical Studies 174: 2449–65. Searle, John R. (1995), The Construction of Social Reality, New York: Simon and Schuster.



Feminist Metaphysics

Sider, Theodore (2017), “Substantivity in Feminist Metaphysics,” Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2467–78. Stoller, Robert J., Harold Garfinkel, and Alexander C. Rosen (1960), “Passing and the Maintenance of Sexual Identification in an Intersexed Patient,” AMA archives of General Psychiatry 2 (4): 379–84. Warnke, Georgia (2010), Debating Sex and Gender, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, Alfred N. (1929), Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: Macmillan. Wylie, Alison (2002), Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

79

6

Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics Mari Mikkola

1 Introduction Over the past few decades, feminist philosophers have advanced influential arguments in ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and political philosophy. However, until recent years feminist philosophical interactions with meta­ physics have been far less prominent (and at times outright antagonistic from both sides).1 Contemporary “mainstream” metaphysics can be highly abstracted and detached from ordinary experience. This sort of metaphysics typically investigates the basic structure of reality (what really or fundamentally exists) and its nature (what kinds of entities exist). It examines reality’s putative building blocks or basic structure carved in “nature’s joints,” where the task of metaphysics is to uncover and elucidate that structure (Sider 2009, 2011). Analytic feminist philosophers, by contrast, aim both to critique patriarchal social structures by utilizing mainstream philosophical tools and to shape mainstream philosophy with the help of feminist political insights. Feminist philosophy is typically distinctive in being framed around specific political concepts and background beliefs, which are sensitive to concerns about gender justice. This all appears irrelevant to metaphysics: what can politics tell us about the fundamental structure? Moreover, metaphysics seems to be a paradigm value-neutral endeavor, which is prima facie incompatible with feminism’s explicitly normative stance and its emphasis on how gender makes a difference to philosophical inquiry. The gap between feminism and metaphysics looks deep and irreconcilable. Despite this, interest in feminist metaphysics has exploded over the past few years.2 Feminist metaphysics places prime importance on examining “to what



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

81

extent the central concepts and categories of metaphysics, in terms of which we make sense of our reality, could be value laden in ways that are particularly gendered” (Haslanger and Ásta 2011: 1). Feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics in holding that metaphysical tools can help advance debates on topics outside of traditional metaphysical inquiry (e.g., on gender, sex, sexuality). Feminist philosophers have also discussed common metaphysical topics like properties, relations, the self, nature, essence, and identity from a feminist perspective (Alcoff 2006; Antony 1998; Ásta 2011, 2013; Heinämaa 2011; Meyers 1997; Warnke 2008; Witt 1993, 1995, 2011). Furthermore, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. Feminist metaphysicians too have recently begun interrogating the methods of metaphysics and they have raised questions about what metaphysics as a discipline is in the business of doing (Barnes 2014; Haslanger 2012; Mikkola 2015). The above raises (at least) two sets of queries. First, one might wonder whether the interest in metaphysical questions in feminist philosophy—roughly, questions of the form “what is the nature of x”—is ultimately part of feminist social philosophy, and not of metaphysics. Other areas of philosophy ask metaphysical questions too, but there is no need therefore to include them in metaphysics. For instance, metaethics examines (among other things) the nature of the good and the right, and in so doing deals with fairly straightforward metaphysical issues in moral philosophy. But metaethicists do not subsequently wish to be considered metaphysicians (nor do metaphysicians typically consider them to be so). Bluntly put, not all metaphysical questions belong to metaphysics— nor should they. It might then seem that although feminist philosophers have raised discipline-relevant metaphysical questions, this does not yet establish a distinct field of feminist metaphysics. Second, one might wonder about the role of feminist interventions in shaping metaphysics as a discipline. Feminist philosophy is traditionally taken to proceed by way of critique (Lloyd 1995). It provides ways to spot ●●

●●

●●

false assumptions about sex and gender that play a role in one’s philosophical argument (e.g., false generalizations, stereotypical mistaken beliefs, sexist assumptions in one’s theory building); problems of hyper-valuation and devaluation (e.g., taking maleness as the norm); how the application of apparently gender-neutral principles adversely affects women.

82

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

These more general tasks fit the earlier characterization of feminist metaphysics: that its role is to investigate and critique ways in which metaphysical theories and notions might be somehow questionable from a feminist perspective. However, one might wonder whether feminism has more to contribute to metaphysics than just a critical outlook that identifies deficiencies in current work. Self-proclaimed feminist metaphysicians seemingly hold that feminist metaphysics can and should have a constructive role: It should seek not only to identify and eliminate masculinist assumptions in metaphysical theories, but also to offer transformative metaphysical models that are informed by feminist concerns. My contention is that feminist metaphysics is part of metaphysics proper (I argue for this elsewhere [2016a, b]). However, I contend, we should understand feminist metaphysics to offer us a specific kind of metaphysics in order to satisfy the dual desiderata to be both critical and constructive. Here I will explore what kind of metaphysics a feminist perspective might afford. My investigation turns on methodological considerations and aims to contribute to broader discussions about the nature of metaphysics as a discipline. As I see it, metaphysics is what metaphysicians do. Earlier I noted that some mainstream metaphysicians do more detached, “fundamental” metaphysics. My proposal is that feminist metaphysicians (at least sometimes) undertake a different sort of metaphysical enquiry: they do non-ideal metaphysics. Feminist philosophers and critical race theorists doing value theory often take themselves to be doing nonideal theory. This chapter will, then, consider whether we can apply non-ideal theorizing found in social and political philosophy to metaphysical inquiry too. That said, it is not entirely clear what non-ideal theorizing amounts to and what a constructive non-ideal feminist enterprise in metaphysics subsequently would look like. Exploring these points is the main task of this chapter. Eventually I wish to suggest that the sort of non-ideal metaphysics offered by feminist perspectives is fruitful for metaphysics as a discipline. For now, I must settle for something more modest: to draw some preliminary and tentative conclusions about what a non-ideal perspective in metaphysics seemingly involves. Nevertheless, I hope that this will inspire novel ways to think about the methodology of metaphysics informed by feminist insights. I will first briefly note how different goals guide different metaphysical endeavors (Section 2). I will then consider what non-ideal theorizing in political theory amounts to—theorizing that should help us conceptualize a kind of nonideal metaphysics (Section 3). This demonstrates a need for a meta-account of



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

83

abstraction; in Section 4, I will explore such an account and propose four central features of abstraction that should guide (feminist and anti-racist) non-ideal metaphysical inquiries. The final section (Section 5) discusses my tentative view relative to more “mainstream” metaphysics.

2  Aims of (different) metaphysical theories Broadly put, metaphysics involves providing metaphysical explanations of some phenomena (e.g., of reality’s structure, essence, causation) and different metaphysical or ontological theories aim to systematically characterize the structure of those explanations. In this sense, all metaphysical theories are forged relative to some relevant and important question(s). Much of contemporary metaphysics aims to limn the (fundamental) structure of reality. Feminist metaphysics is typically not that different: it aims to limn the structure of social reality. With this in mind, one aim of feminist metaphysics is to make explicit how putatively natural classifications are actually social by unmasking politically and morally suspect interests and biases that ground various classificatory systems. Sally Haslanger calls this “critical social realism” (hereafter, CSR). It aims to reveal real “differences that are socially constituted but not recognized, or fully recognized, to be so . . . [where] calling attention to this will . . . provide critical leverage in challenging how we think and act” (2012: 197). The goal of CSR is “to locate the (often obscure) mechanisms of injustice and the levers for social change” (Haslanger 2012: 184–85), which involves unmasking (e.g., showing that gender and race are not “natural” but social categories). Much of this in turn involves (re-)classifying entities so that our classificatory schemes better facilitate projects that seek social justice. After all, we should ask “of a classification whether and how a distinction serves our purposes (and, more specifically, whose purposes it serves) because classification is a goal-oriented activity at which we can do better or worse, both in formulating the goal and figuring out how to achieve it” (Haslanger 2012: 190). In this sense, feminist metaphysics is aiming to do the same as some “mainstream” metaphysics: to uncover and limn the structure of reality by figuring out the right categories for describing it (cf. Sider 2011; Schaffer 2009; for more, see Mikkola 2016b). Still, feminist philosophical investigations are unapologetically guided by normative commitments pertaining to social justice. In order to achieve just states of affairs, we must know how things are—we must first identify and understand

84

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

those nodes in social reality that are in need of alteration. This requires social ontological explanations and accounts of extant states of affairs. With this in mind, some mainstream projects clearly diverge in their aims from feminist metaphysical ones. If we take the goal of metaphysical inquiry to be to elucidate the fundamental building blocks of reality “carved in nature’s joints,” feminist interventions look straightforwardly incompatible and irrelevant as they do not focus on “nature’s joints.” So given that the subject matter of our research guides theory choices, we might have good reasons to eschew feminist metaphysical theories when doing “fundamental” metaphysics; and if we are elucidating reality from a CSR perspective, we might have good reasons to doubt the helpfulness of some mainstream theories. Elsewhere (Mikkola 2016b) I have argued that what distinguishes feminist and “fundamental” metaphysical projects pertains to metaphysical primacy: which “level of reality” we find metaphysically speaking important. Those invested in examining reality’s fundamental structure typically hold that (ontologically speaking) socially constructed and derivative features of reality are secondary. These philosophers can (and do) accept the existence of ontologically non-self-sufficient derivative entities, but hold that it is the non-constructed, fundamental grounding layer that metaphysics proper investigates. By contrast, feminist metaphysicians deny this privileging of the “fundamental” level that derivative entities reduce to. The dispute turns on whether we should focus on the “big” macro-level phenomena such as socially constructed entities or on the “small” micro-level entities that ground the bigger picture and are found at reality’s “joints.” Focusing on the micro-level does not typically satisfy feminist metaphysicians because reducing our social ontological explanations to some “ultimate” grounds may well miss something explanatorily crucial and flatten out our explanations in problematic ways. To illustrate, consider the following. Bluntly put, social facts obtain (at least in part) due to human agents’ attitudes and actions in social contexts. A reductionist micro-theory would aim to reduce social facts to some psychological antecedents (like the intentional mental states of social agents). But doing so plausibly loses sight of some important structural components in our explanations. Take the claim that the rise of capitalism in modern Europe derives from a Protestant ethic (Jackson and Pettit 1992). Now, Protestant ethic may explain the rise of capitalism in a number of more specific ways: perhaps it “condemned activities inimical to capitalism; . . . encouraged the relationships between people which capitalism requires; . . . gave people a goal which inspired capitalist activity as a means” (Jackson and Pettit 1992: 103). But Protestant ethic is unlikely to involve merely



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

85

a set of psychological antecedents that alone make good the explanandum, that is, the rise of capitalism. Or, if we find that the rise of capitalism reduces to some psychological antecedents and intentional mental states, we are likely to miss something important along the way (e.g., that Protestant ethic condemned anticapitalist activities). By focusing on some “ultimate” individualistic features, our social explanations are conceivably obscured in that we fail to attend to those structural conditions also needed for good social explanations.

3  Non-ideal theory in political philosophy Depending on the goals of our investigations, we make different judgments about what is metaphysically important for those investigations. Thinking about what feminist metaphysicians hold (metaphysically) important affords us insights into the sort of meta-metaphysical commitments that serve feminist goals. These commitments (I maintain) are involved in doing non-ideal metaphysics. In order to explicate this idea further, I will apply non-ideal theorizing found in normative inquiry to metaphysical inquiry. However, clarifying what non-ideal theory in political and social philosophy amounts to is actually surprisingly tricky and doing so requires some philosophical excavation. I will engage next in such excavation before spelling out what subsequently follows from this when thinking about the methodology of metaphysics. The most obvious, rather banal, way to explicate non-ideal theory is to characterize it as a theory that avoids ideal theory. What might this mean? Practically all debates about the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction originate in some way as reactions to John Rawls’s (1971) theory of justice. What exactly is ideal about an ideal theory (and that non-ideal theorists should reject) is contentious, though. Rawls explicitly holds that we should endorse ideal theory when theorizing justice because the deeper the conflict, the more we must abstract away from particularities to get a clearer view of the problem’s roots. His theory of justice, then, is ideal (at least) in the following senses. First, it is ideal in its picture of human agency. The theory presumes that human agents/citizens fully comply with the relevant demands of justice and that the background conditions for so doing are favorable (e.g., there is no hunger or structural conditions that interfere with citizens fulfilling their obligations). Second, it is utopian and idealistic, rather than realistic. In this sense, Rawls’s theory is committed to ideal theory in its scope: his principles of justice are designed for

86

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

ideally “well-ordered” (not actual) societies. Third, it offers an end-state theory, rather than a transitional theory. Rawls’s conception of justice is the goal that we ought to strive toward. That is, ideal theory tells us what the long-term goal to be achieved is, while non-ideal theory examines how we get there (Rawls 2001). Nonetheless, ideal theory has priority because without normative ideals our transitional political endeavors would lack direction. Underlying the above ways in which Rawls’s theory is said to be ideal are certain methodological presumptions or theses. First, when doing political philosophy, we ought to start by formulating some relevant political ideal—in this case, a comprehensive conception of justice—after which we can investigate reality through the “lens” of this ideal in order to say something about nonideal circumstances and situations. Call this the “priority thesis.” Second, certain methods are particularly suited for doing political philosophy: when elucidating some political ideal (again, here principles of justice) we ought to abstract away from actual states of affairs and characteristics of real-world politics (just think of Rawls’s famous thought experiment of the “original position”). We ought to provide idealized characterizations of the phenomena under investigation in order to get a clearer view of the issues at hand. Call this the “distancing thesis.” With these theses in mind, one might hold that non-ideal theorizing is committed to simply rejecting them. One can find non-ideal theory elucidated in this spirit in the literature in that non-ideal theory is said to attend to actual, instead of ideal, states of affairs. We can understand this in a weak or a strong sense. The former holds that we pay attention to actual, rather than counterfactual/ideal, worlds. The latter sense maintains that we focus not only on actual lives, but on those lives that are particularly far from the ideal. That is, we ground theoretical work in actual non-ideal states of affairs (i.e., reject the distancing thesis) and we start theory building from non-ideal perspectives (i.e., reject the priority thesis). In line with this, for instance, Lisa Tessman notes that feminist antiracist questions are “about a non-ideal, actual world . . . [which] is marked by features of oppression” (2009: xiii). My contention is that understanding non-ideal theory as just avoiding ideal theory is unsatisfying. To begin with, not being committed to some theses isn’t a programmatic methodological approach in itself. But non-ideal theorizing is typically put forward in the spirit of having particular constructive or positive methodological commitments—it is not just about rejecting the priority and distancing theses. If non-ideal theory aspires to be a distinctive approach to doing philosophy (as socially engaged philosophers often allude to), it is



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

87

presumably something more substantive than a mere critical tool. And so, simply rejecting the priority and distancing theses is insufficient to ground a distinct methodological position. Furthermore, the idea that non-ideal theory is distinctive in privileging actual oppressive states of affairs is too permissive. It falsely suggests that all feminist and anti-racist theory is non-ideal (by way of counterexample, just think of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s [1971] work on abortion that makes use of a highly abstracted and idealized “famous violinist” thought experiment). Moreover, even Rawls was interested in the actual world marred by injustice and oppression; he simply viewed idealized methods to be more useful when theorizing the goal of justice. So, recognizing in one’s theory that features of oppression mark the actual world cannot be what distinguishes ideal and non-ideal outlooks. Charles Mills’s (2005) work provides a more fruitful understanding of nonideal theory that rejects the above priority and distancing theses. Mills provides a typology of ways in which a theory can be ideal and distinguishes theorizing that is committed to either (1) Ideal-as-Normative or (2) Ideal-as-Model. The former denotes theory that makes an appeal to normative values and ideals. Of the latter, Mills outlines two versions. Take some phenomenon like university education. On the (2a) Ideal-as-Descriptive-Model, our representation of university education purports to be descriptive of its crucial aspects (its essential nature) and of how such education actually works. This necessarily involves abstracting away some features of university education (like the number of chairs in each class room) and of making simplifying assumptions based on importance (focusing on pedagogical issues, for instance). However, on the (2b) Ideal-as-Idealized-Model our theorizing produces an idealized representation of university education: an exemplar of ideal-education. This yields gaps between reality and utopia, between the descriptive and idealized models, and between how university education actually is organized and how it should be organized. With these in mind, Mills explicates what is problematic about positions like Rawls’s. The problem is not (1): that his theory appeals to values and ideals (like the ideal of justice). (1) is committed to an uncontroversial background sense of ideal and not to something that critics of ideal theory in general oppose. (2a) is also unproblematic: making some simplifying assumptions and abstractions is necessary for all theoretical modeling exercises. Importantly, this model can help in non-ideal theorizing despite being perhaps confusingly characterized as a kind of ideal theory. By contrast, for Mills the real culprit is (2b): problematic ideal theory either tacitly represents the actual as a deviation from the ideal and

88

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

as thus not worth theorizing or takes the ideal starting point as the best one. The distinguishing feature of this kind of theorizing is its reliance on idealizations to the exclusion or marginalization of actual circumstances. Problematic idealization intentionally adds simplifying distortions to our theory, such as postulating the existence of well-functioning societies in Rawls’s case, in order to analyze some phenomenon. Thus, it is (2b) that characterizes problematic ideal theory. Onora O‘Neill (1987) has further provided a helpful illustration of what is problematic with this model, although she does not employ Mills’s terminology. She distinguishes between idealization and abstraction. Abstraction is about reasoning that leaves out, brackets, or selectively omits certain aspects of particular cases. In O’Neill’s view, we should not eschew abstraction because it is unavoidable in reasoning and not always objectionable. Idealization is the real culprit and to be avoided. By way of example, O’Neill outlines how postEnlightenment models of human agency made two problematic moves. First, they idealized such agency and made it superhuman. The conception of agency put forward could only be satisfied by hypothetical agents—not real and actual human agents. This (according to O’Neill) is problematic not because the picture omits something true about agency, but because it adds too much false information (like superhuman cognitive and volitional capacities). Second, such superhuman agency was treated as an ideal for human agency per se— as a standard for actual human (economic, political, moral) action. The basic problem is that (in Mills’s terms) such an ideal-as-idealized-model of agency obscures and distorts our accounts of human agency. That said, not everyone holds that idealization cannot serve feminist ends. Considering why tells us something beneficial about the sort of non-ideal theorizing that on my view forms the basis of non-ideal metaphysics. Lisa Schwartzman (2006) argues against O’Neill and claims that abstraction is the real problem: it may bracket off too much. (In short, Schwartzman and O’Neill disagree about what is objectionable about the distancing thesis.) Selective omissions involve evaluative judgments; thus, we need criteria to decide which omissions are legitimate and which are not. Furthermore, normative ideals are “unavoidable,” even helpful, in critical theorizing. They play an important role in understanding oppressive social structures and in envisioning democratic and non-oppressive alternatives. As Schwartzman puts it: “Rather than setting up unattainable ideals for how individuals should be, the ideals offered by [feminists] are put forth in an effort to transform society” (2006: 567). Critical



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

89

theories can benefit from normative ideals in that they can help us “creatively” to transform social structures of power. Specifically with respect to O’Neill’s critique of idealized superhuman qualities, Schwartzman holds the following. O’Neill’s qualm with false idealization is that it functions to distort the matter at hand; but this does not, according to Schwartzman, entail that we should eschew idealization. Rather, since normative ideals are crucial for elucidating an ideal society and we cannot do away with them, we must aim to utilize “good” idealizations and emancipatory normative ideals in our theorizing. Thus, feminists should strive to replace false idealizations with more accurate and less deformed versions, not give up on idealization altogether. I am not convinced, however, that idealization is needed and Schwartzman’s critique of O’Neill ends up equivocating on the notion of ideal. For Schwartzman, the abstract ideals of liberalism are a cause for concern; thus, we should rely on substantive ideals of feminism. Feminism allegedly needs idealization because getting from oppression to utopia requires a normative ideal of how society should be. But this captures Mills’s unproblematic and uncontentious conception of ideal-as-normative (1). Schwartzman is talking about a feminist utopia, but appealing to utopian ideals is not the problem. Rather, for O’Neill and Mills, the ideal-as-idealized-model (2b) is problematic. So (1) is not at issue when critiquing ideal theory. Theorizing that aims at emancipation and social justice obviously requires normative goals and ideals (like normative commitments to ending gendered and racialized injustices). Since critics of ideal theory do not take issue with this conception of idealization, Schwartzman’s critique of O’Neill ends up conflating (1) and (2b). What this digression into political and social philosophy tells us is that nonideal theorizing is compatible with and it involves (2a): ideal-as-descriptivemodel of theory building. Our theorizing should not rely on distorting idealizations, although abstraction understood as selective attention (Mackie 1976) is legitimate. Providing helpful models of some phenomenon typically requires us to bracket off some information, thereby focusing our attention on particular aspects of the matter at hand. It is hard to comprehend how any theorizing could proceed otherwise. However, engaging in abstraction may not be unproblematic. After all, abstraction also played its part in what went wrong with Rawls’s theory of justice: because of his methodological distancing and bracketing off of the “right” information, we were left with idealized pictures of human agency and society that the proponents of non-ideal theory typically critique. So, in order to have a workable ideal-as-descriptive-model in the

90

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

service of non-ideal feminist and anti-racist theorizing we need a way to focus on the right abstractions. How then can we home in on abstractions that are not partial and incomplete in problematic ways and that will be useful for feminist anti-racist social metaphysics? I will turn to this issue next.

4  Meta-theory of abstraction I contend that what we need in socially engaged philosophy are ideal-asdescriptive-models that are guided by feminist and anti-racist normative commitments (among other commitments to bring about social justice). Think back to Haslanger’s critical social realism. It is a feminist metaphysical project that aims to limn the structure of social reality by (re-)classifying entities so that our classificatory schemes can better facilitate attaining social justice. In so doing, our social ontological explanations will identify important “joints” in social reality that figure in the creation and maintenance of unjust social conditions, where this will provide insights into the “levers of change.” For this kind of non-ideal model building, Mills’s conception of ideal-as-descriptivemodel will be relevant. In so doing, we must selectively omit some information, but we must do so without abstracting in a partial and misleading manner. What then is needed for good abstractions? I will propose next four features of abstraction as methodological guides. These features (I maintain) are central for taking a non-ideal perspective in theorizing and something that departs from (say) idealized metaphysics noted earlier. The first feature is empirical adequacy. For Mills, Rawlsian ideal theory functions like (bad) ideology: it involves a complex of norms, values, and beliefs that distort our visions of reality. Thus, in his view, such philosophizing reflects the interests and experiences of middle-to-upper-class white cis men, which reproduces certain injustices in the philosophical profession and in our theory building. According to non-ideal theory, however, our theoretical frameworks should accurately map (onto) reality. Actual cases are not and should not be seen as deviations from the ideal. Rather, actual states of affairs should be our starting points when formulating adequate philosophical theories—it is the ideal that deviates. On the ideal-as-descriptive-model, our representation of some phenomenon purports to be descriptive of that phenomenon’s crucial aspects, its essential nature, and how the phenomenon actually works. In order to achieve this, we should aim to model the phenomenon as accurately as



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

91

possible and not omit key features in ways that undermine empirical adequacy by either distorting the actual phenomenon under investigation or rendering it so removed from actuality that assessing empirical adequacy becomes impossible. This does not reduce philosophy, which I take to be an essentially normative endeavor, to an empirical investigation. Rather, as I see it, normative and evidential considerations interact. To understand this better, consider Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of those who attack value-laden inquiry in the sciences. Mainstream philosophy of science typically accepts that some epistemic or cognitive values have a legitimate role to play in theory choice. These acceptable values are internal to science, like accuracy, consistency, fruitfulness, breadth of scope, and simplicity (Anderson 1995: 29). Political, moral, and practical values that come “from outside” and from the broader social context are nevertheless unacceptable. Proponents of value-neutral inquiries are willing to accept that practical values may affect the contexts of discovery and practical application; but they deny that these values affect the context of theory justification. By contrast, Anderson holds that contextual values are also admissible as criteria for scientific theory choice. Value-neutral models falsely presuppose that political or moral considerations compete with evidence and facts. And so, these models presume that “to the extent that moral values and social influences shape theory choice, they displace attention to evidence and valid reasoning and hence interfere with the discovery of truth” (Anderson 1995: 33). Value-neutral accounts assume that the goal of scientific inquiry is to tell us truths. So, it follows that since value judgments provide no evidence for some claim being true, they cannot figure in the context of theory justification. Contra the bare accumulation of truths, however, theoretical inquiry “aims at some organized body of truths that can lay claim to significance” (Anderson 1995: 37)—theoretical inquiry aims at elucidating an organized body of significant truths. Since our theoretical goals go beyond the mere accumulation of truths, we will have “multiple grounds for criticizing, justifying, and choosing theories besides truth” (Anderson 1995: 53). For one thing, we must ask: What counts as significant? What renders the organization good and adequate? After all, significance is not merely a function of truth and there are many trivial truths that are not significant. Instead, significance relates to our inquiry’s background interests through the way we frame our central questions. These interests are (at least partly) drawn from the social context of inquiry and they have practical content. So, our salient moral, political, and practical values

92

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

justify our background interests, which then justify the factual criteria of significance. Significance is used to justify theory choices. Thus, moral, political, and practical considerations figure in theory justification (Anderson 1995: 42). This yields a dual justificatory burden and pushes us toward a cooperative model of justification, where normative and evidential considerations interact. This demonstrates that settling empirical adequacy isn’t a “purely” descriptive undertaking since evaluative judgments figure in our decisions about what we take to be the significant piece of empirical reality that is to be accurately modeled. The second feature of helpful abstraction (I contend) is practical realism. Following Lynne Rudder Baker (2007) this means that our investigations begin from “the middle of things,” not from some presuppositionless transcendent position. Practical realism further requires that we philosophers be explicit about our (often non-transparent) presuppositions and that we subject them to philosophical inquiry too. Finally, the world of common experience is an important source of data for philosophical reflection. And so, philosophical inquiry should not be detached from the rest of human inquiry. For non-ideal theorizing this means that we start from actual states of affairs (namely, we start in the “thick of it”) and “work our way up” while theory building. We do not first device a comprehensive conception of some phenomenon a priori, and then see what falls under it and which pieces of reality deviate (contra the Rawlsian priority thesis). Rather, we should methodologically proceed by taking the world of injustice and non-ideal circumstances as the default and the starting point. As Miranda Fricker puts it: “The focus on justice creates an impression that justice is the norm and injustice the unfortunate aberration. But, obviously, this may be quite false” (2007: vii). To put the point somewhat metaphorically: much of philosophizing starts by assuming that on Day 1 perfection reigned; but then on Day 2 some irrational forces (like ideology, prejudice, bad knowledgeseeking procedures) distorted and warped our access to that perfection, thus leading us astray. The task is now to dismantle those distortions to get back to perfection. However, from a non-ideal perspective the story should rather go: that state of perfection never existed; and a continued belief that it did leads our philosophizing astray. The challenge is not to return to some earlier perfect state of affairs, but to advance wholly new and as of yet unrealized states. This requires that we understand non-ideal realities, which in turn requires theoretical tools different from those used to understand idealized realities. Examining non-ideal circumstances through an idealized “lens” won’t do.



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

93

Related to this is the third feature of good abstraction: embeddedness. The commitment to practical realism might have sounded as follows: we start in the thick of it, but in working our way up we transcend our non-ideal starting point. However, this is not what I am advocating. Instead, in working our way up (so to speak), we stay grounded in our starting point and we do not aim to transcend it. I have in mind here what Haslanger (1999) calls an “immanent strategy” to theorizing. This strategy takes seriously that the objects of our philosophical analyses are embedded in various social practices. Thus, it is impossible to discard those practices as irrelevant “extra” features in contrast to some philosophically important features of our subject matter. For instance, both feminist and mainstream epistemologists aim to provide analyses of knowledge. Traditionally, the latter have tended to conduct their investigations by employing the method of progressive detachment (Nagel 1986): our efforts to analyze knowledge should proceed by doing away with extraneous “sociological” evidence, so that we can rationally explicate the concept’s uncontaminated content. (This is akin to the Rawlsian distancing thesis.) Feminist philosophers tend rather to ask: What (if anything) can we learn by taking the apparently extraneous evidence seriously? Do our key epistemic concepts perhaps embody some false androcentric assumptions? Might this be apparent to us only once we acknowledge that differences in social position occupancies make a difference to philosophizing? Taking social embeddedness seriously as something that guides our efforts to selectively omit some information in theory and model building pushes us toward what Sandra Harding (1996) calls “strong objectivity.” On the traditional conception of objectivity, we aim at impartial, neutral observation and description of the facts. The observer’s own subject position should not influence knowledge-seeking processes provided that they employ some appropriate methods correctly. On a non-ideal approach, though, we acknowledge difficulties with such observation. Thus, we should examine critically not only the objects of knowledge and knowledge-production methods, but also the subjects of knowledge: in short, those doing the observing (or, in this case, the philosophizing). Doing so may (and probably will) reveal some background interests guiding our theory choices and justifications in that they play a part in fixing what counts as significant when framing our questions and acquiring relevant evidence. For example, one may ask what this tells us about the method of using “competent” subjects’ intuitions to test hypothetical cases (cf. Hutchison 2013). In using such methods, a non-ideal approach would require taking the

94

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

subject whose intuitions are being relied on as also being in need of critical examination. And we can motivate this move without a political argument: social psychological research shows that those who view themselves as objective observers and reasoners tend to be influenced by biases in that their belief in their own objectivity prevents them from keeping their biases in check (Uhlmann and Cohen 2007). So facts about human psychology—rather than “ideology”— motivate the idea that both objects and subjects of philosophical analyses should concern us. Furthermore, this has the result that avoiding theoretical distortions may only be possible by theorizing from within certain situated perspectives. A non-ideal perspective may in fact allow us to see things more clearly. Finally, the fourth feature of good abstraction is ontological naturalism: we do not posit any “supernatural” or other “mysterious” kinds of entities. Above, I noted that Schwartzman found the abstract ideals of liberalism suspicious. I contend, however, that there is a difference between abstract and empty ideals— and it is the latter that I find problematic. So, on a non-ideal approach we would do well to avoid positing abstracted empty ideals: mysterious primitive concepts that our theorizing ultimately relies on. These sorts of concepts usually appear when we run out of arguments and they typically include freedom, autonomy, dignity, practical rationality, human nature, and respect. Such concepts are often used as methodological regulatory ideals and intuitively relied on. A non-ideal approach should, however, avoid this sort of reliance on “big” philosophical concepts that intuitively pull us in some direction. This point also pertains to thought experiments. The results gained via outlandish counterfactuals and thought experiments are theoretically suspect because we have no reliable philosophical methods for judging their correctness. That is, if we rely on our intuitions and there is no good way to arbiter between different intuitions, I am less convinced of the value that counterfactuals and thought experiments afford. Consider for instance brain fission and fusion cases when thinking about personal identity (Wilkes 1988). When thinking about what happens to personal identity in such fantastical thought experiments, we must either imagine the test case within our actual world or against radically different worlds to our own. In the former instance, however, we end up having to violate biological or physical laws—the background conditions for testing our intuitions become impossible. In the latter case, we end up having to imagine what would be the case in an utterly fantastical realm and we might have no intuitions at all about such cases precisely because they are too fantastical. Either way, we are not able to say much that is philosophically important and interesting about this world



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

95

with such thought experiments. Thought experiments may also be theoretically unhelpful if they are too under-described for us to have reliable intuitions one way or another. This demonstrates something further about abstraction: if our thought experiments are so under-described as to be unhelpful, we have probably abstracted too much of relevant information. Much more should be said about these points. But at least minimally one might say that a non-ideal approach committed to ontological naturalism should avoid merely conceivable cases, and it should prioritize cases that could actually (and plausibly) occur (for more, see Elster 2011). Furthermore, we have good reasons to take personal testimonies and experiences as important sources of data and justification, instead of relying on under-described and fantastical possible cases. Finally, commitment to ontological naturalism points out that selective omitting of information need not yield simplified models in the sense of yielding parsimonious models. A non-ideal perspective starts from the complex and messy reality. Omitting some information does not then eo ipso yield simplistic models because we might be omitting away some irrelevant aspects in order to focus on the messy, core phenomenon. This need not be an intellectual vice: if we are focusing on the “big” macro-picture, eschewing parsimony may be precisely the right thing to do.3

5  Metaphysical lessons How does the above relate to metaphysics? Let me offer some tentative methodological reflections. A non-ideal perspective to and in metaphysics has implications for the scope of metaphysical theories. First, non-ideal metaphysics places a higher value on empirical adequacy than some extant investigations. Of course, idealized metaphysics does not aim to be empirically inadequate. But there are differences in philosophers’ aspirations for their theories to be so—and for some modes of theorizing this aspiration does not go very far. A prevalent way of doing contemporary metaphysics is not via conceptual analysis, but via quasi-scientific means. This takes different ontological positions to be competing hypotheses about reality’s fundamental structure that are then assessed with a “loose battery of criteria for theory choice. Match with ordinary usage and belief sometimes plays a role in this assessment, but typically not a dominant one” (Sider 2009: 385; see also Sider 2011: 12). This loose battery of criteria guiding theory choices typically includes being able to provide a unified (non-disjunctive),

96

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

coherent, noncircular total theory of some phenomenon that purports to tell us truths, where our theory is elegant, parsimonious, non–ad hoc, and theoretically rigorous—akin to and continuous with science. Subsequently, some deny the existence of tables, chairs, and other middle-sized goods: we need only posit the existence of fundamental particles arranged table- and chair-wise since only they are needed for adequate explanations (van Inwagen 1990; Merricks 2001). We might then say that from a non-ideal perspective, privileging empirical adequacy has implications for the scope of metaphysics: it pushes us toward privileging “big” (macro-level) over “small” (micro-level) in our metaphysical investigations. Second, bearing in mind that abstraction need not entail simplification, we might critique (what Frank Jackson calls) “serious metaphysics”: that metaphysics is a discipline with simplifying and explanatory functions akin to science that seeks “a comprehensive account of some subject-matter . . . in terms of a limited number of more or less basic notions” (1998: 4). Although theory building and modeling require some selective omissions, this should not result in partial and incomplete representations of reality that distort our investigations. And one might say that a focus on the fundamental structure yields just that since much of putatively existing derivative phenomena will simply fall outside of the scope of metaphysics. This unhelpfully perpetuates a distinction between proper “pure” metaphysics and “applied” ontology that is not really metaphysics, but social theory. Rather, a non-ideal metaphysics aims to make explicit that this view of metaphysics as a discipline is rather parochial (Barnes 2014). In the spirit of doing non-ideal theory: we should not fix the limits of metaphysics as a discipline via definitional fiat that relies on ideal-asidealizing-models about metaphysics. Practical realism and our inquiries’ embeddedness in social practices aim to motivate the view that the ordinary everyday world is an important source of metaphysical knowledge. Of course, this is already recognized by some contemporary metaphysicians, like Baker (2007) and Thomasson (2007). Still, I think that a feminist non-ideal perspective in metaphysics further puts pressure on the idea that metaphysics is about elucidating the fundamental structure “carved in nature’s joints.” This hinges on the epistemic gains that our investigations yield. Ted Sider holds that it is “better to think and speak in joint-carving terms” (2011: 61). This is because the goal of inquiry requires that we grasp the world “in its own terms,” which means to carve the world at its joints. Thus, “wielders of non-joint-carving concepts are worse inquirers”



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

97

(Sider 2011: 61). Such inquirers are apparently missing out on some important knowledge. This is precisely what a non-ideal approach in metaphysics challenges. In fact, one might say that those investigating the nature of gender, race, or sexuality (to name but a few topics in feminist and anti-racist metaphysics) are in fact engaged in deeply important debates to grasp the world without focusing on joint-carvingness. Again, a non-ideal methodological approach pushes for a shift in focus about what is metaphysically speaking important: is it the big or the small? A non-ideal approach should also yield more self-critical examinations. For instance, when thinking about which examples, thought experiments or intuitions to rely on, metaphysicians would do well to ask: what does my choice of methods tell us about me? This may yield surprising results that we should not treat as simply external and sociological to our metaphysical investigations. Abstraction is a process that filters information. And decisions about what information is relevant and pertinent in many ways depend on our prior interests and needs. One might claim that information pertaining to our inquiries’ moral, political, and practical contexts is irrelevant for ontological theory choices. I have argued elsewhere against this (Mikkola 2015). In any case, one upshot of a non-ideal perspective is that we cannot filter out some information, like information coming from the social context of our inquiry, by definitional fiat and without justification. Finally, ontological naturalism counsels against positing mysterious entities. This is clearly already a large part of mainstream contemporary meta­physics. But the sort of naturalism that I am pushing for should also push us toward a particular way of doing metaphysics. Both mainstream and feminist metaphysicians aim to limn the structure of reality. But in so doing they disagree on what falls under reality, which warrants our attention. For mainstream metaphysicians like Sider (and not all metaphysicians agree), only that which is fundamental does; for feminists like Haslanger, whatever has causal efficacy counts as real. So, we have a dispute over real and our resulting metaphysical theories depend on which conceptual scheme we adopt. Metaphysicians like Sider are doing (what Thomas Hofweber calls) “esoteric metaphysics” that takes “the questions metaphysics aims to answer [to] involve distinctly metaphysical terms” (2009: 267). By contrast, feminist metaphysicians are not typically engaging in esoteric metaphysics. Rather, when they aim to limn the structure of reality, they are largely engaging in egalitarian metaphysics (cf. Hofweber 2009: 266): metaphysical questions can be expressed in ordinary, everyday terms that do not require specialized knowledge

98

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

of some metaphysical ways of understanding, for example, “real.” So, a further upshot of non-ideal investigations is the choice of metaphysical languages. Conceptual choices are important for fixing the ideology of our theories in Quine’s (1951) sense: those conceptual presuppositions and decisions underlying our (best) theories. Such conceptual choices are metaphysically relevant and important, I contend, and here our chosen perspective makes a great deal of difference. Still, I do not think that this renders metaphysical disputes merely verbal and non-substantive. Instead, it demonstrates that there are different ways to do metaphysics and that feminist anti-racist normative commitments plausibly afford one way to do metaphysics from a non-ideal perspective.

6  Final words In this chapter I began sketching a non-ideal perspective in metaphysics that derives from feminist anti-racist considerations and that should further serve such political commitments. This involved Mills’s ideal-as-descriptive-model that bulks distorting idealizations. But, as argued, in order to make headway in articulating such a model, we must have an account of theoretically helpful abstraction at our disposal. I proposed four features of such abstraction and considered how a feminist metaphysics that involves these features comes apart from metaphysics that does not. However, I wish to stress that my proposals in this chapter are intended to instigate further reflections on the nature of metaphysics—both explicitly feminist and nonfeminist. Such self-critical inquiries should be at the heart of good philosophizing. And so, whatever one thinks about feminist metaphysics or non-ideal theory, as philosophers and metaphysicians we should want to ask: What are we in the business of doing? I hope that a non-ideal perspective will yield interesting and novel answers to this question.

Acknowledgment I have presented earlier versions of this paper at the “GRSelona: Barcelona Conference on Gender, Race, and Sexuality” at the University of Barcelona in May 2014 and at the “Non-Ideal Social Ontology”—Conference, University of Stockholm in May 2016. I am very grateful to all those present for their insightful



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

99

comments and constructive advice on how to develop the paper further. A particular thanks goes to Pieranna Garavaso, Esa Diaz-Leon and Åsa Burman for their detailed, interesting, and helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes 1 For more on the (sometimes unhappy) relationship between feminism and metaphysics, see Battersby (1998), Haslanger and Ásta (2011), and Mikkola (2016a, b). 2 The watershed event was the publication of Sally Haslanger’s important collection of papers written over the past twenty years, Resisting Reality (2012). Of course, this collection did not invent feminist metaphysics and some of the first “head-on” metaphysical papers (including Haslanger’s well-known article “Being Objective and Being Objectified” reprinted in her 2012) were published some twenty years earlier in Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt’s groundbreaking and still-timely collection A Mind of One’s Own (1993). 3 One might worry that the above (preliminary) non-ideal methodology undermines Haslanger-type ameliorative projects, which does not aim to explicate our ordinary concepts or to investigate “the kind that we may or may not be tracking with our everyday conceptual apparatus; instead we begin by considering more fully the pragmatics of our talk employing the terms in question” (Haslanger 2000: 33). One might worry that amelioration yields ideal-as-idealized-models: we posit a distorted, idealized representation of some phenomenon that generates a gap between actual and idealized understandings of the phenomenon. However, I disagree: much of what guides Haslanger’s amelioration is the ideal-as-normative conception of ideal theory. Ameliorative projects are clearly goal-/ideal-oriented; but this is unproblematic. Furthermore, Haslanger-type amelioration fits the ideal-asdescriptive-model, where the offered representation purports to be descriptive of some phenomenon’s crucial aspects and of how that phenomenon actually works. Much more should be said about this though and I must leave discussing it for another time.

References Alcoff, Linda (2006), Visible Identities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, Elizabeth (1995), “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology,” Philosophical Topics 23: 27–58.

100

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Antony, Louise (1998), “‘Human Nature’ and Its Role in Feminist Theory,” in Janet Kourany (ed.), Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, 63–91, New Haven, NJ: Princeton University Press. Antony, Louise and Charlotte Witt eds. (1993), A Mind of One’s Own, Boulder, CO: Westview. Ásta (2011), “The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender,” in Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, 47–65, Dordrecht: Springer. Ásta (2013), “The Social Construction of Human Kinds,” Hypatia 28 (4): 716–32. Baker, Lynne Rudder (2007), The Metaphysics of Everyday Life. An Essay in Practical Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnes, Elizabeth (2014), “Going Beyond the Fundamental: Feminism in Contemporary Metaphysics,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114: 335–51. Battersby, Christine (1998), The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity, New York: Routledge. Elster, Jacob (2011), “How Outlandish Can Imaginary Cases Be?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 28: 241–58. Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harding, Sandra (1996), “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology,” in Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Longino (eds.), Feminism and Science, 235–48, New York: Oxford University Press. Haslanger, Sally (1999), “What Knowledge Is and What It Ought to Be: Feminist Values and Normative Epistemology,” Philosophical Perspectives 13: 459–80. Haslanger, Sally (2000), “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?” Noûs 34: 31–55. Haslanger, Sally (2012), Resisting Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haslanger, Sally and Ásta (2011), “Feminist Metaphysics,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2011/entries/feminism-metaphysics/ (accessed November 13, 2015). Heinämaa, Sara (2011), “A Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Types, Styles, and Persons,” in Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, 131–55, Dordrecht: Springer. Hofweber, Thomas (2009), “Ambitious, yet Modest, Metaphysics,” in David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, 260–89, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchison, Katrina (2013), “Sages and Cranks,” in Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins (eds.), Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, 103–26, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Frank (1998), From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Frank and Philip Pettit (1992), “Structural Explanation in Social Theory,” in David Charles and Kathleen Lennon (eds.), Reduction, Explanation, and Realism, 97–131, Oxford: Clarendon.



Feminist Metaphysics as Non-Ideal Metaphysics

101

Lloyd, Elisabeth (1995), “Feminism as Method: What Scientists Get that Philosophers Don’t,” Philosophical Topics 23: 189–220. Mackie, John Leslie (1976), Problems from Locke, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merricks, Trenton (2001), Objects and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon. Meyers, Diana (1997), Feminists Rethink the Self, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Mikkola, Mari (2015), “Doing Ontology and Doing Justice: What Feminist Philosophy Can Teach Us about Meta-Metaphysics,” Inquiry, doi:10.1080/00201 74X.2015.1083469. Mikkola, Mari (2016a), “Feminist Metaphysics and Philosophical Methodology,” Philosophy Compass 11: 661–70. Mikkola, Mari (2016b), “On the Apparent Antagonism between Feminist and Mainstream Metaphysics,” Philosophical Studies, doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0732-1. Mills, Charles W. (2005), “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” Hypatia 20: 165–84. Nagel, Thomas (1986), The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, Onora (1987), “Abstraction, Idealization and Ideology in Ethics,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 22: 55–69. doi:10.1017/S0957042X00003667. Quine, Willard Van Orman (1951), “Ontology and Ideology,” Philosophical Studies 2: 11–15. Rawls, John (1971), A Theory of Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John (2001), The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schaffer, Jonathan (2009), “On What Grounds What,” in David Chalmers, David Manley, and R. Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, 347–83, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwartzman, Lisa (2006), “Abstraction, Idealization, and Oppression,” Metaphilosophy 37: 565–88. Sider, Theodore (2009), “Ontological Realism,” in David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, 384–423, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sider, Theodore (2011), Writing the Book of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tessman, Lisa ed. (2009), Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal, Dordrecht: Springer. Thomasson, Amie (2007), Ordinary Objects, New York: Oxford University Press. Thomson, Judith Jarvis. (1971), “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1: 47–66. Uhlmann, Eric Luis and Geoffrey Cohen (2007), “‘I Think it, Therefore It’s True’: Effects of Self-Perceived Objectivity on Hiring Discrimination,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 104: 207–23. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2007.07.001. van Inwagen, Peter (1990), Material Beings, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Warnke, Georgia (2008), After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkes, Kathleen (1988), Real People, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

102

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Witt, Charlotte (1993), “Feminist Metaphysics,” in Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own, 273–88, Boulder, CO: Westview. Witt, Charlotte (1995), “Anti-essentialism in Feminist Theory,” Philosophical Topics 23: 321–44. Witt, Charlotte (2011), “What Is Gender Essentialism?” in Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, 11–25, Dordrecht: Springer.

7

Kinds of Social Construction Esa Diaz-Leon

1 Introduction An important question in the debate regarding the nature of politically significant human kinds, such as gender, race, and sexual orientations, is concerned with the question of whether these human kinds are socially constructed (Stein 1999; Root 2000; Haslanger 2012; and Ásta 2013). In order to settle this debate, a more fundamental question needs to be answered: what does it mean to say that a category is socially constructed? Recently, many philosophers have become interested in this issue (Hacking 1999; Stein 1999; Haslanger 2003; Mallon 2007; Diaz-Leon 2015; Ásta 2015). They all seem to agree that there is not a single notion of social construction, but rather, there are different notions of social construction for different purposes. The important question in order to formulate a useful notion of social construction, then, is which project is at issue, and which notion of social construction is more useful for the purposes of that project. In this chapter I will focus on two projects that social constructivists are often interested in, namely, (i) the project of arguing against the inevitability of a trait, that is, to show that those features are not determined by human nature; and (ii) the project of arguing against the universality of a trait, that is, to show that a certain human category or kind is not a universal, transcultural, culture-independent property and that it cannot be applied to other cultures, places, and times; and I will discuss which notion of social construction is more useful with respect to each project. My main questions, then, will be the following: (a) Is there any notion of social construction that entails that if X is socially constructed, then X is not inevitable, that is, X is not determined by human nature? (b) Is there any notion

104

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

of social construction that entails that if X is socially constructed, then X is not transcultural or universal? In order to answer these questions, we will examine and develop several notions of social construction that have been introduced in the recent literature, as follows. I will start by distinguishing two notions of social construction based on how the objects are constructed, namely, social construction in the causal sense and in the constitutive sense, which we can initially characterize as follows: A property is constitutively socially constructed just in case it is part of the definition (or the nature) of the property that in order for an entity or system to instantiate it, the entity must instantiate a certain social role or occupy a certain social position; whereas a property is causally socially constructed just in case certain social factors play a causal role in bringing about the instantiation of that feature.1 Regarding the project of arguing against the inevitability of a trait, I will argue (drawing on Haslanger 2003 and Diaz-Leon 2015) that the notion of social construction in the constitutive sense is more useful than the notion of social construction in the causal sense. Regarding the project of arguing against the universality of a trait, I will explore the prospects of these two notions, and I will argue that none of these notions is clearly suited to this task. I will then introduce two further notions of social construction, namely, social construction as concept dependence and social construction as the lack of naturalness (or jointcarvingness), and I will explore the prospects of these two additional notions with respect to the project of arguing that a socially constructed trait in that sense is not universal.

2  Social construction and inevitability One of the main motivations to claim that a certain trait is socially constructed has to do with the goal of arguing that such a trait is not determined by human nature, that is to say, that it is due to contingent social factors that could have been otherwise if our social practices had been different. For instance, one of the main motivations for distinguishing between sex and gender was to be able to show that even if there are some biological and anatomical differences between males and females, those do not suffice to determine the different social roles that women and men occupy in our societies.2 Rather, these are due (also) to contingent cultural, social, and political factors. Furthermore, if one can argue that these different social positions occupied by men and women are unjust



Kinds of Social Construction

105

(because, for instance, women are typically subordinated along economic, social, legal, or political dimensions), then the claim of the social construction of gender paves the way for a possible strategy to achieve social justice, to wit: we should change the social factors that are responsible for those different social positions that constitute gender, and in this way we can achieve a more equal society. Likewise, regarding race, many philosophers and social scientists have argued that there is no significant biological basis for race. That is to say, the oldfashioned idea that there could be behavioral or cognitive differences between members of different races has been proven false in a conclusive manner. Therefore, the differences regarding social, political, or legal position that we can still unfortunately observe in our society between racial groups are not due to any racial essences, but rather due to the existence of hierarchical social structures that systematically privilege white people and subordinate people of color.3 Sally Haslanger (2003) has argued that in order to capture what these social constructivist positions about gender and race are trying to do, the notion of social construction in the constitutive sense is more useful than the notion of social construction in the causal sense. She characterizes these different notions of social construction as follows: X is socially constructed causally as an F iff social factors (i.e., X’s participation in a social matrix) play a significant role in causing X to have those features by virtue of which it counts as an F. X is socially constructed constitutively as an F iff X is of a kind or sort of F such that in defining what it is to be F we must make reference to social factors (or: such that in order for X to be F, X must exist within a social matrix that constitutes F’s). (2003: 317–18)

The main idea is the following: a property or trait is causally socially constructed when its instantiation has been caused by social factors or practices, whereas a property is constitutively socially constructed where the trait itself is constituted by social factors or practices, that is to say, what it takes for something to instantiate that trait is a matter of instantiating certain social factors or standing in certain relations to certain social practices or agents. In other words, we can say that a property is socially constructed in the constitutive sense when social practices or factors are part of its definition or nature. We can then see that in principle, the fact that a property is causally socially constructed does not entail that it is constitutively socially constructed, since the causes of a certain trait are not necessarily constitutive of such a trait.

106

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Let us consider some examples, in order to illustrate the distinction. Some feminist theorists have argued that the differences in height, weight, and strength that we can observe between men and women are caused (at least in part) by gender norms, that is, in virtue of the different patterns of exercise and diet that are expected of men and women, due to social and cultural norms regarding what is appropriate for men and women. If this is correct, then it follows that traits such as women’s height, weight, and strength are causally socially constructed, since they are caused by social factors and practices.4 But this does not entail that such traits are constitutively socially constructed, because in principle there is no reason for assuming that height, weight, and strength are features that are constituted by social factors; that is, we would not say that it is part of the definition or the nature of height, weight, and strength that in order for something to have a certain height, weight, or strength it has to instantiate a certain social role. These traits seem to be anatomical features that can sometimes be caused by social factors, but could also be caused in other ways (e.g., by genetic or environmental factors). Furthermore, they can be defined without appealing to any social practice; hence they are not socially constructed in the constitutive sense. There are many examples of features that are socially constructed in the constitutive sense. For instance, social roles such as being a landlord or a tenant are constitutively socially constructed, since it is necessary in order to be a landlord, say, that one occupies a certain position in a social practice. In addition, institutions such as the Supreme Court or Harvard University are socially constructed in the constitutive sense, since these entities would not exist were certain social and legal practices absent. When it comes to gender and race, many feminist theorists and critical race theorists have argued that there are certain social properties and relations that are very significant in order to explain the oppression and subordination of women and people of color, that is to say, they want to emphasize the existence of certain social structures of subordination, which give privilege to men and white people, and subordinate women and people of color, respectively. The notion of constitutive social construction is useful here since they want to emphasize that these social structures are significant precisely because they are constituted by our  social  practices, and that we could change those hierarchical structures if we could change the social practices that constitute them. Many people agree that there exist these hierarchical structures that systematically privilege some people and subordinate others, in virtue of their



Kinds of Social Construction

107

gender or race. What is interesting is that some philosophers want to define gender and/or race in terms of these very social structures of privilege and subordination. Haslanger (2012) provided a very clear defense of this view, and in particular she offered the following characterization of gender and race: A group G is a gender (in context C) iffdf its members are similarly positioned as along some social dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.) (in C) and the members are “marked” as appropriately in this position by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of reproductive capacities or function. A group G is racialized (in context C) iffdf its members are similarly positioned as along some social dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.) (in C), and the members are “marked” as appropriately in this position by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographical region. (2012: 252–53)

As we can see, the central idea of these characterizations is to define gender and race (or racialized groups) in terms of those social structures of oppression and privilege. It is clear that in this context, the notion of social construction that is operative is that of constitutive social construction. What these theories want to emphasize is that the properties that are politically relevant are constituted by social practices, and this is useful because it follows from the fact that a certain trait is constituted by such and such social practices, that we could get rid of such a trait if we could eliminate or radically transform those social practices. This idea facilitates the possibility of formulating strategies in order to achieve social justice by means of social and political actions. One of the main aims of Haslanger’s proposal (and other social constructivists about gender and/or race) is to define gender and race in terms of those very social structures that we want to transform, and the claim that these structures are socially constructed in the constitutive sense has clear consequences regarding the mechanisms that we could use in order to resist oppression and transform social reality. In contrast to these positions, others have argued that the notion of const­ itutive social construction is not clearly the most useful one in these debates. For instance, Teresa Marques (2016) has argued that the notion of causal social construction is at least as useful as the notion of constitutive social construction. She argues, rightly in my view, that when it comes to many properties that are causally but not constitutively socially constructed, it can be very useful to find out what the social causes of their instantiations are, in order to eliminate

108

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

or mitigate them, and in this way we could prevent those social factors from creating and perpetuating further harm. For example, she discusses the case of stereotype threat, where differences in performance between boys and girls are caused by social factors (such as stereotypes about boys being better at mathematics than girls). But clearly, Marques argues, these differences in performance are not constituted by those cultural stereotypes themselves. I agree with this claim, and her further claim that this illustrates the significance of the notion of social construction in the causal sense. However, Marques also wants to defend an additional view, namely, that every property that is constitutively socially constructed is also causally socially constructed, and this shows that this latter notion is at least as important as the former one. I disagree, for two reasons. First, I believe the notion of constitutive social construction can capture what social constructivists about gender and race aim to do, in a way that the notion of (mere) causal social construction cannot do, as I have explained above. In a nutshell, the main idea is that the notion of (mere) causal social construction of a property P is compatible with the fact that P is not socially constructed in the constitutive sense, and what many theorists about, say, gender and race want to assert is the latter, not only the former. That is to say, even if Marques’s claim that every constitutively socially constructed property is also causally socially constructed were true, it is still the case that some causally socially constructed properties are not constitutively socially constructed, and in this sense the claim that a property P is causally socially constructed might not capture the stronger claim that some theorists are interested in. Second, I do not believe that every property that is constitutively socially constructed has to be causally socially constructed as well. Marques defends the following claim: “For any actual kind X, if X is socially constructed in the constitutive sense as a K, then X is socially constructed in the causal sense as K” (2016: 5). In my view this claim is not always true, since it holds in most but not all cases of constitutively socially constructed properties. And there are good reasons for this: if it were the case that every social property has a social cause, then this would lead to an infinite regress, that is to say, for every social property at time t, it would have to be caused by social properties instantiated at a prior time, and so on and so forth.5 So if we want to block this regress, we have to posit a time t where there are social properties that are not caused by prior social factors. This seems plausible anyway: it seems clear that at a certain time in the past there were no social properties but nowadays there are many social properties that are instantiated in the actual world. What brought about these



Kinds of Social Construction

109

social properties? In many cases, such as Justin Trudeau’s property of being the prime minister of Canada, or Theresa May’s property of being the prime minister of the UK, these instantiations of social properties have been caused by social factors, such as certain elections taking place or certain groups of people reaching certain agreements. But we cannot generalize this claim, if we want to avoid an infinite regress. In order to stop this regress, we have to assume that at some point, certain nonsocial factors gave rise to social properties. That is to say, there was a time t1 when there were no social properties whatsoever and a subsequent time t2 when there were certain social properties that did not have social causes. Therefore, Marques’s claim noted above cannot be true in general. This gives rise to the interesting question of how social properties can be caused by entirely nonsocial factors. In my view, if we understand social properties in terms of collective intentionality, then this helps us to understand how nonsocial properties can give rise to social properties, that is to say, nonsocial factors can bring about facts about collective intentionality, which in turn constitute social properties. And these can in turn constitute socially constructed properties in the constitutive sense that are not causally socially constructed.

3  Social construction and universality As we saw above, another important project that social constructivists often pursue is the project of showing that a certain human category or kind is not a universal, transcultural, culture-independent property that is applicable to other cultures, places, and times. For instance, Edward Stein emphasizes this goal when he describes social constructionist claims regarding sexual orientation: The essentialist would have no problem saying that there were heterosexuals and homosexuals in Ancient Greece; it is just a matter of whether or not a person has the relevant properties (such as a certain gene, hormone, psychological condition, etc. or some combination of these). Even though people in past cultures may have no idea what constitutes a gene, a hormone, an Oedipal complex or whatever the relevant properties are, they either did or did not have such properties . . . . In contrast, while social constructionists agree that people in all cultures engaged in sexual acts, they think that only in some cultures (e.g., our culture) are there people who have sexual orientations. (1992b: 326)

In this passage, Stein is characterizing social constructionism about sexual orientations in terms of the claim that sexual orientations are not universal

110

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

features, that is, they are instantiated only in some cultures (such as contemporary Western societies) but not others (such as Ancient Greece). The interesting question for our purposes is this: which notion of social construction, if any, entails that if X is socially constructed, then X is not universal in that intuitive sense? In order to answer this question, I will examine several different notions of social construction in the recent literature, and I will ask whether they entail that the corresponding property is not universal, that is, whether social constructionism about X in that sense entails that X cannot be applied to other cultures that are different from ours (assuming that X is instantiated in the culture that the theorist about X belongs to).

3.1  Two notions of universality A preliminary question is in order here: how should we understand the crucial notion of a universal, transcultural, culture-independent property that is relevant for our purposes? Stein further develops this notion in the following passage: An essentialist . . . is committed to there being transcultural law-like generalizations that can be made about the nature and origins of sexual orientation. An example of an essentialist theory is a hormonal theory of sexual orientation. . . . If this theory is true, the categories of sexual orientation are transcultural because a person’s hormone level is what it is independent of culture; and the categories involve law-like generalizations because the theory claims, for example, that if a biologically female fetus is exposed to more than a certain level of testosterone, then this fetus will be strongly inclined to develop into a lesbian. (1992b: 330–31)

As I see it, we can find two different notions of a universal property in this passage. On the one hand, we have the notion of a universal property in the sense that it can be applied to many different cultures, places, and times; for instance, we can ask about the hormone level of individuals who live in cultures that are very different from ours. I will call properties that satisfy this criterion transcultural properties. On the other hand, we have the notion of a universal property in the sense that it appears in law-like generalizations, such as the generalization that all individuals with such and such hormonal levels will typically develop such and such sexual orientations. Following Stein, I will call properties that satisfy this second criterion objective (or deep) properties.6 In my view, these two notions are not always correlated: we can have properties that are transcultural but not objective, and vice versa. On the one



Kinds of Social Construction

111

hand, there are properties that can be applied to many cultures, places, and times but do not seem good candidates to appear in law-like generalizations. For instance, the properties of liking beer or liking wine are transcultural, at least in the minimal sense that they can be applied to individuals who live in societies that are very different from ours, precisely because these properties do not seem to be constituted by any specific social or cultural facts themselves.7 But it is my contention that the properties of liking beer or wine will probably not appear in any interesting law-like generalizations, so these are some examples of transcultural properties that are not deep properties. On the other hand, there are many social properties, such as being a slave or a master, or a tenant or a landlord, that are clearly socially constructed in the constitutive sense, that is, it is part of the definition or the nature of the property that one must stand in certain relations to certain social practices or social agents in order for the property to be instantiated. If we assume that the relevant constituting social facts are cultural facts, we could then say that these properties are culture-dependent in a strong sense, that is, they are constituted by cultural facts, and therefore they cannot be applied to cultures that differ from ours in the relevant aspects, because they couldn’t be instantiated in the absence of those cultural aspects. For instance, features such as being divorced seem to be culture-dependent in the sense that they cannot be instantiated in societies without the relevant social and legal practices. However, it could be argued that (at least some of) these culture-dependent properties could appear in law-like generalizations that can be of interest to social scientists, or in other words, they could play important explanatory roles. For example, certain categories in economics, such as inflation or recession, seem to be socially constructed in the constitutive sense, that is to say, they are constituted (at least in part) by certain social factors and practices, so they couldn’t be instantiated in the absence of those social factors that constitute them. Hence, they might fail to be universally applicable, but they could still appear in law-like generalizations in economics, so we can conclude that there can be cases of properties that are objective but not universally applicable. To recap, as we have seen, Stein wants to define essentialism about a feature in terms of properties that are both transcultural (i.e., universally applicable) and objective (i.e., appearing in law-like generalizations), and social constructionism in terms of properties that are neither transcultural nor objective. However, as I have just argued, it is important to notice then that this distinction is not exhaustive and there will arguably be cases of properties that do not fit either essentialism or social constructionism, when these properties are either transcultural or objective but not both at the same time. In the remainder of this

112

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

section, I will examine the connections between the different notions of social construction we saw above, and these different notions of universality, in order to answer the following question: which notion of social construction can be used in order to argue against the universality of a feature, in the sense of being culture-dependent or not objective, respectively?

3.2  Social construction and culture-dependence My first question is then the following: which notion of social construction entails that if a property is socially constructed, then it is not transcultural, that is, not universally applicable? Let’s examine the notions of social construction in the constitutive and in the causal sense. Do they entail that a property is not transcultural in this sense? It seems clear that if a property is constitutively socially constructed (i.e., it is part of the definition or the nature of the property that in order to instantiate it, one must instantiate a certain social role), then it will probably fail to be transcultural. That is to say, if a property is constitutively socially constructed, then whether it is instantiated or not will depend on whether the social and cultural facts that constitute it obtain or not. It is clear then that the property is culture-dependent, but it might be universally instantiated after all, if the required cultural or social factors happened to be universal, in the sense of being universally satisfied by every human being or every community (although this seems unlikely). On the other hand, if certain traits are causally socially constructed, then it does not necessarily follow that they are not transcultural, in the sense that it does not necessarily follow that they are culture-dependent (or socially constructed in the constitutive sense). It could be argued that even if most instantiations of a property are in fact caused by social practices and social agents, this does not entail that the property is constituted by social practices in virtue of its definition or its nature, and furthermore, the property could be universally instantiated after all, even if most instantiations are caused by social factors, because those social factors might turn out to be universal themselves, and even if they are not, those properties might be caused to be instantiated by different means. For example, even if some behavioral differences between men and women are typically caused by certain social practices and norms, it does not mean that these behavioral differences are constituted by those social practices (in the way constitutively socially constructed properties are), and therefore it could still be the case that those traits are instantiated at other cultures where they lacked those



Kinds of Social Construction

113

social practices, because the properties might have been caused by other means (although this also seems unlikely). In any case, it is of course very important to figure out whether certain traits are caused by social practices or not, even if this does not automatically entail that those traits are culture-dependent in the stronger, constitutive sense. Stein described a familiar Foucault-type of argument against biological essentialism, which is typically assumed to establish social constructionism about a category: “Foucault-type social constructionists also argue that different cultures produce different types of people and this difference shows that essentialism is false. . . . These examples are supposed to show that different cultures produce different sorts of sexuality and sexual desires” (Stein 1992b: 347). But in my view, if we pay attention to the distinction between causal and constitutive social construction, we can see that this argument does not succeed in justifying social constructionism about sexual orientations. In particular, if we understand the claim that different cultures produce people with different types of sexual orientations as a claim about the causal origins of these types of sexual orientations, this does not necessarily entail that sexual orientations are culture-dependent, since we can have properties that are caused by social factors but not constituted by them. For example, women’s height and strength are causally socially constructed, according to some feminist theories, but they are not constituted by social factors. Furthermore, the claim that a certain trait is causally socially constructed does not entail that it is not objective. For example, some intersex children have gone through surgical procedures in order to “correct” their genitalia so that they can be “properly” male or female, and it could be argued that in this case, the property of being biologically male or female (or at least, having certain genitalia) is caused by social factors but is objective nonetheless.8 In addition, it could be argued that some properties can be causally socially constructed and biologically real at the same time. For example, according to Philip Kitcher (1999), races are reproductively isolated breeding populations, where the reproductive isolation has been in part caused by social practices and norms banning interracial marriage, but these causally socially constructed populations can still be biologically significant. Finally, the claim that traits such as sexual orientations have been caused by certain social and cultural practices (as the Foucalt-type of argument above asserts) does not entail that these properties cannot be applied to other cultures and times (or even applied universally). That is, even if the sexual orientations that people instantiate today were the causal result of social factors, this does not necessarily

114

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

entail that individuals at other times and cultures cannot (or do not) instantiate those features. Compare: from the claim that certain anatomical differences between men and women (such as differences in height and strength, as we explained above) are caused by social factors, we cannot infer that we could not find the same anatomical differences at other times and cultures; or likewise, from the claim that races (qua reproductively isolated breeding populations) are caused by social factors, we cannot infer that we could not find similar reproductively isolated breeding populations at other times and cultures that lack those social factors. For these traits could also be caused by other means (either social or not), at least in principle.

3.3  Social construction, concept dependence, and empty categories In this section I want to examine two further notions of social construction, which are introduced by Stein (1992b). He claims that on all corresponding versions of social constructionism about sexual orientations, it would follow that sexual orientations are not transcultural. “Both types of social constructionist would agree, for example, that there were no homosexuals in Ancient Greece (although both would accept that there were people in Ancient Greece who engaged in sexual activities with people of the same sex)” (1992b: 343). I will argue that the corresponding notions do not necessarily have that consequence. The first notion of social construction that Stein discusses is this: “One version of social constructionism . . . holds that there are heterosexuals and homosexuals in today’s society but that there have been such people only since the homosexual emerged as a type of person sometime in the nineteenth century” (1992b: 341). According to Stein, another example of this sort of social construction is the category “yuppie:” “The term ‘yuppie’ is a recent creation, yuppies have only come into being recently, yuppie is not a transcultural category (e.g., there were no yuppies in Ancient Greece), but there clearly are yuppies here and now” (1992b: 342–43). My central point in this section is this: the property of being a yuppie is indeed socially constructed in the constitutive sense, but constitutive social construction about a property does not necessarily entail that the property has been instantiated only since the concept of that type of person emerged. Let me explain this point a bit more slowly. The property of being a yuppie is constitutively socially constructed precisely because the instantiation of the property depends constitutively on certain social and cultural factors. The crucial question is this: does it follow from this notion of social construction that



Kinds of Social Construction

115

the corresponding properties have emerged only since our conceptions of those properties emerged? In order to answer this question, we need to introduce a further distinction: It could be claimed that a property X depends constitutively on certain social or cultural factors in general, or more specifically, it could be claimed that the property X depends constitutively on a particular social fact, namely, that certain relevant subjects apply the very concept of X. The second view is a particular instance of social constructionism (in the constitutive sense) regarding category X, according to which the instantiation of X metaphysically depends on certain conceptual activities involving the concept of X itself. According to this view, the property of being an X cannot be instantiated in the absence of subjects who entertain the concept of X. (Some plausible examples of this version of social constructionism include the properties of being a university professor, or the president of the United States: arguably, these properties could not be satisfied by anything unless someone, somewhere, applied the corresponding concept in certain ways.) The version of social constructivism about sexual orientations that Stein mentions above, namely, one according to which there are homosexuals and heterosexuals only since these labels were introduced, strongly suggests a theory of this sort, namely, a concept-dependent constructionist account of sexual orientations, according to which someone has a certain sexual orientation S only when the concept of S is applied to them. On this view, it is clear that sexual orientations are strongly culture-dependent, and hence not transcultural, because they can be instantiated only in cultures with the same concept of sexual orientations that we have. (I am assuming that the property of entertaining a certain concept is a social or cultural practice since I am focusing on public concepts and public meanings, which require conventions, which are social practices in my view.) On the other hand, social constructionist views of the former sort, which hold that sexual orientations are constitutively determined by social and cultural factors that do not necessarily involve our particular concept of sexual orientation but just certain social and conceptual activities of certain subjects, have it that sexual orientations are also culture-dependent, but not concept-dependent in the previous sense. Arguably, that people use a certain concept is a cultural fact, and therefore concept-dependent constructionism is a version of culture-dependent constructionism, but culture-dependent constructionism about a category does not entail concept-dependent constructionism about that category. As Thomasson (2009) argues, there are many social kinds, such as gender bias and racism, that

116

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

somehow depend on collective intentionality (which we can assume is a social or cultural fact), but they do not depend on the fact that some subjects entertain the very concepts of gender bias or racism (although arguably they do depend on the fact that some subjects entertain some other concepts, beliefs, and attitudes). Our second question, then, is the question of whether a feature that is culturedependent but not concept-dependent is universally applicable or not. This will depend on the details of the particular view, and the social and cultural factors that they appeal to. In a sense, we can always ask whether the corresponding social and cultural factors that constitute the given trait obtain in other cultures and societies, but it is clear that if those social and cultural factors do not obtain in a given culture, then the corresponding trait cannot be instantiated in that culture, according to this culture-dependent (but not concept-dependent) version of social constructionism. However, social constructionist views of this sort do not always entail, as Stein seems to suggest, that sexual orientations exist only since the concepts of sexual orientations were introduced. Only conceptdependent versions of constructionism have this consequence. The second notion of social construction introduced by Stein is this: The other version, which I shall call the “empty-category” version of constructionism . . . holds that, although we have the categories heterosexual and homosexual, there are no people who actually fit into these categories. . . . The empty-category social constructionist thinks that the categories heterosexual and homosexual are like the category witch. There were people in the 17th century who were claimed . . . to be witches but we now know that there were no witches (i.e. there were no women with supernatural powers who had sex with the devil) and that the category witch . . . just did and does not properly apply to any person. (1992b: 342, emphasis in original)

This new version of social constructionism about X does entail that the corresponding category cannot be applied to other cultures and times, because it cannot be applied to any cultures and times. But this view differs from the notions of social construction in the causal and constitutive sense in an important respect: whereas the previous notions of social construction entail that a feature that is socially constructed in any of those ways is a real feature of the world, this new notion entails that socially constructed properties are not real properties of the world. And therefore, social constructionism about X in this sense would collapse into a version of anti-realism about X. But it seems to be a desideratum for an adequate formulation of social constructionism that it is an alternative to both biological realism and anti-realism. Hence, it seems that



Kinds of Social Construction

117

the only notion that can do that (out of the ones we have examined so far) is the notion of constitutive social construction. For, as we saw above, a property can be causally socially constructed but also biologically significant (such as races as reproductively isolated breeding populations, according to Kitcher’s account), and therefore the causal social construction of a trait is not incompatible with biological realism about it.9

3.4  Social construction and natural kinds To finish this discussion, I want to discuss yet another notion of social construction introduced by Stein, and explore its consequences. Stein presents this notion by means of “the Zomnia society” parable (1992b: 350–52): Zomnia is a society very similar to ours, but where its members are very interested in each other’s sleep habits. In particular, people are classified according to whether they sleep on their back (“backers”), on their fronts (“fronters”), or on their sides (“siders”). People who (are believed to) sleep on their backs are strongly discriminated against, in the Zomnia society. Stein claims that a natural reaction to this thought experiment would be to say that the practice of grouping people into backers and fronters is laughable and pseudoscientific. A way of formulating this idea more precisely in our terms above is to say that the categories of backers and fronters are not deep or objective, because there are no interesting law-like generalizations involving them. According to Stein, social constructionism about sexual orientations holds that sexual orientation categories are exactly like the categories “backer” and “fronter” in Zomnia, that is, they are not interesting objective kinds that could appear in law-like generalizations. Given this formulation of social constructionism about sexual orientations, does it follow that sexual orientations are not transcultural, that is, that they cannot be applied to other cultures and times? As I anticipated above, I will argue that this does not follow in this case: just because certain categories are not interesting categories that appear in generalizations, it does not mean that they cannot be applied to other cultures. It would make perfect sense to ask whether people in Ancient Greece were backers or fronters (although it is granted that this would not be a very interesting question, in terms of the explanatory power of these notions). More recently, Stein says: Constructionists think that sexual orientations are not natural human kinds but are merely social human kinds. . . . It does not make sense to try to apply the

118

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Zomnian terms “backer” and “fronter” to people in Attic Greece or contemporary North America because the Zomnian categories of sleep orientation are (or at least seem to be) merely social kinds. Similarly, constructionists say that it does not make sense to apply the terms “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” and “bisexual” to other cultures such as Attic Greece. (1999: 97)

In response, I want to argue that it does not follow, from the fact that a category X is not a natural kind (in the sense that it does not appear in law-like generalizations), that it cannot be applied to other cultures. First, regarding his characterization of natural kinds, Stein says, “Natural kinds play a role in scientific laws and explanations, while empty kinds and artifactual kinds (which are both sorts of nonnatural kinds) do not” (1999: 81). However, this characterization is problematic because there are some cases of social kinds that might also appear in interesting law-like generalizations. For example, Nussbaum (2002) argues that clearly social kinds such as runner and bassoonist might appear in law-like generalizations, concerning the plausible causal effects of such activities (such as the kinds of injuries that are common for them). Therefore, we shouldn’t assume that social kinds (including artifactual kinds) never play a role in scientific laws and explanations.10 Nonetheless, it could be argued on behalf of Stein that in these cases, even if it is true that there are some interesting law-like generalizations regarding the causal effects of kinds such as runner and bassoonist, it might still be the case that explanations about the causes of the instantiations of these human kinds do mostly appeal to locally specific social factors, and therefore the corresponding causal generalizations are not wide-ranging enough so as to count as genuine law-like generalizations. Second, and putting the first point aside, there are some cases of human kinds that do not seem to appear in interesting law-like generalizations, and therefore do not count as natural kinds according to Stein’s characterization, but might be applied in other cultures. One possible case here is Stein’s own example of backer and fronter: even if these categories are not interesting natural kinds (because arguably they do not appear in law-like generalizations), it makes sense to try to apply them to different cultures (because they have consistent application conditions, such that it is an open question whether they are satisfied or not in other cultures). Furthermore, they might be properly applied in other cultures (i.e., there might be actual instances in other cultures, if the application conditions are actually satisfied by any individuals), and moreover, they might even be universal features of human beings, if it turns out that all individuals satisfy the corresponding application conditions, which might happen even if



Kinds of Social Construction

119

the human kinds at issue are not substantive enough to appear in scientific laws and explanations. To recapitulate, we have explored several notions of social construction in order to assess whether they entail that socially constructed properties fail to be universal or not. For instance, Stein says, “I have tried to clarify what exactly is at issue between social constructionists and essentialists. The disagreement is over the nature of the categories of sexual orientation. Is it possible to develop a theory of sexual orientation which involves transcultural, objective categories . . . or are the categories merely culture-dependent ones (like being a witch and yuppie)?” (1992b: 353). In my view, this way of posing the question is conflating several notions of social construction that should be carefully distinguished. On the one hand, there are categories that are empty and do not refer to anything, such as “witch” or “phlogiston.” To say that these categories are culture-dependent is misleading: what it would take for someone to be a witch is not culture-dependent. Of course, that we have the concept of witch is culture-dependent, but this is the case for most of our concepts (and this does not entail that the property of being a witch is concept-dependent). It is true that these categories cannot be applied to other times and cultures, but this is due to the fact that they are not instantiated by anything. On the other hand, as we have seen, the category “yuppie” is clearly culture-dependent, but sometimes social constructionists about sexual orientations want to hold something stronger, namely, that a category X is not just culture-dependent but also concept-dependent, in the sense that instantiations of X depend constitutively on the concept of X being applied. Socially constructed properties of the concept-dependent variety will fail to be universal in a stronger sense than socially constructed properties merely of the culture-dependent variety, that is, the former can be instantiated only in cultures where people employ the concept of X, whereas the latter can be instantiated only in cultures with the corresponding social and cultural facts, whatever they are. However, in spite of this, some culture-dependent and even conceptdependent properties could turn out be fully objective properties, in the sense of appearing in interesting law-like generalization of the relevant special sciences. Finally, there might be properties that fail to appear in interesting law-like generalizations but they can still be applicable in other times and cultures, such as someone’s favorite sleep position or someone’s favorite beverage. Therefore, these considerations pose a dilemma for Stein’s characterization of social constructionism. On the one hand, we have seen that culture-dependent

120

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

properties can very well be objective, because the ways in which they depend on cultural factors can give rise to interesting generalizations, but they will not count as genuine social constructions in Stein’s sense. On the other hand, properties that are clearly not objective, such as someone’s favorite sleep position, or someone’s favorite beverage, can very well be transcultural, in the sense that they do not have to be either concept-dependent or culture-dependent, and therefore they could be applicable in cultures that are very different from ours. And finally, there are empty categories like “witch” or “phlogiston,” which clearly cannot be applied to other cultures (since they are not in fact satisfied by anything), but they fail to be real properties.

4 Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed several notions of social construction, and I have examined which notions are more useful with respect to the project of arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and the project of arguing against the universality of a trait. We can conclude that with respect to the first project, the notion of constitutive social construction is especially relevant, although the notion of causal social construction can also be very useful. Regarding the second project, I have argued that the notion of constitutive social construction does entail that some traits depend on certain cultural or social factors and therefore they cannot be instantiated in their absence, whereas causally socially constructed properties could be instantiated in other cultures, times, and places for all we know. We have also examined the distinction between conceptdependent and culture-dependent properties, and the connection between social construction and the notion of a natural kind (i.e., an objective, deep property that appears in law-like generalizations), and we have seen that it is possible to have culture-dependent (and even concept-dependent) properties that appear in law-like generalizations after all.

Notes 1 See Haslanger (2003), Mallon (2014) and Diaz-Leon (2015) for further elaboration and discussion of this distinction. I will provide a more precise characterization of the distinction below.



Kinds of Social Construction

121

2 See Mikkola (2016) for an excellent survey of the sex-gender distinction in the context of feminist theory. 3 See Appiah (1996), Mills (1998), Glasgow (2009), and Taylor (2004), among others, for further elaboration of this view. 4 This example is presented by Haslanger (2003) and further discussed by Diaz-Leon (2015). 5 I owe this point to Aurélien Darbellay. 6 See Lewis (1983) and Sider (2011) for further elaboration of this notion of objectivity, in terms of natural or joint-carving properties. 7 Of course, the property of living in a society where beer or wine is made is not universal. In any case, I think we can at least say that the property of liking beer or wine is socially constructed in the causal sense, but not in the constitutive sense: for these properties to be instantiated, the subjects have to live in societies that produce beer or wine, typically by means of social practices, but as far as I can see the property of liking beer can be defined without appeal to any social factors. 8 See Ásta (2011) for further discussion of these cases. 9 Here I draw on Diaz-Leon (2015), where I further elaborate this argument. 10 Mason (2016) explains that according to an epistemic understanding of the notion of natural kind, a property is a natural kind to the extent that it plays an explanatory and predictive role in our theories. On this conception, it might be a matter of degree whether a given property is a natural kind or not, and we could talk about some properties being more explanatory than others. Mason argues that social kinds can be natural kinds according to this conception, but some of them might be less explanatory than many kinds in physics, chemistry, or biology.

References Appiah, K. Anthony (1996), “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in K. A. Appiah and Amy Gutmann (eds.), Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, 30–105, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ásta Sveinsdóttir (2011), “The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender,” in C. Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, 47–65, New York: Springer. Ásta Sveinsdóttir (2013), “The Social Construction of Human Kinds,” Hypatia 28(4): 716–32. Ásta Sveinsdóttir (2015), “Social Construction,” Philosophy Compass 10 (12): 884–92. Diaz-Leon, Esa (2015), “What Is Social Construction?” European Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 1137–52. Glasgow, Joshua (2009), A Theory of Race, London: Routledge.

122

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Hacking, Ian (1999), The Social Construction of What?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haslanger, Sally (2003), “Social Construction: The ‘Debunking’ Project,” in F. Schmitt (ed.), Socializing Metaphysics, 301–25, Lenham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Haslanger, Sally (2012), Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kitcher, Philip (1999), “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in L Harris (ed.), Racism: Key Concepts in Critical Theory, 87–117, New York: Humanity Books. Lewis, D. (1983), “New Work for a Theory of Universals,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4): 343–77. Mallon, Ron (2007), “A Field Guide to Social Construction,” Philosophy Compass 2(1): 93–108. Mallon, Ron (2014), “Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction,” in E. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition). URL: http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/social-construction-naturalistic/. Marques, Teresa (2016), “The Relevance of Causal Social Construction,” Journal of Social Ontology, doi:10.1515/jso-2016-0018 Mason, Rebecca (2016), “The Metaphysics of Social Kinds,” Philosophy Compass 11 (12): 841–50. Mikkola, Mari (2016), “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender,” in E. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition). URL: http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/feminism-gender/. Mills, Charles (1998), Blackness Visible: Essays on Race and Philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nussbaum, Martha (2002), “Millean Liberty and Sexual Orientation: A Discussion of Edward Stein’s The Mismeasure of Desire,” Law & Philosophy 21 (3): 317–34. Root, Michael (2000), “How We Divide The World,” Philosophy of Science 67 (3): S628–39 Sider, Ted (2011), Writing the Book of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stein, Edward (1992b), “Conclusion: The Essentials of Constructionism and the Construction of Essentialism,” in E. Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, New York: Routledge. Stein, Edward (1999), The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Paul (2004), Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Thomasson, Amie (2009), “Social Entities,” in R. LePoidevin et al. (eds.), Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, 545–54, New York and London: Routledge.

8

Gender and the Unthinkable1 Natalie Stoljar

Many people experience their gender2 as an “elemental” or necessary aspect of their sense of identity. This goes for people who are transgender3 as well as those who fit neatly into the social categories of women and men, girls and boys: “We’re thrown off balance when something as elemental as gender is questioned. Transgender people have the same abiding sense of self as every other human being, but when they put their essential selves into words and say, ‘I am transgender,’ they are also saying, ‘This  thing we agreed upon—it’s not the same for me.’”4 For people whose gender aligns with the conventional categories, it is often unthinkable that their gender could be otherwise; for people who are transgender, it is equally unthinkable. Therefore gender is thought to correspond to an essential component of the self, and failing to recognize and acknowledge another’s gender is an injustice in part because it disregards the other’s authentic self.5 Philosophical questions arise in response to people’s experiences of gender as central to their identities. In what sense, if any, is gender an essential or necessary property of individuals? Without my gender, would I still be me? (Appiah 1990). One possible philosophical answer is metaphysical. Charlotte Witt’s recent work defends an Aristotelian metaphysical proposal called unification essentialism, or “uniessentialism” (Witt 2011a, 2011b).6 Uniessentialism focuses on the necessary conditions for the emergence of a new individual out of the parts that comprise it. For instance, a house is an independent ontological entity from the bricks, mortar, flooring, and roof tiles that make it up. The functional essence of providing shelter unifies the parts into a new entity, the house (Witt 2011: 6–7). On Witt’s view, gender is a functional essence that unifies individuals who inhabit many different social roles—for instance, teacher, parent, and citizen— into a single, ontologically separate individual: “In the case of social individuals

124

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

(us) what is organized by gender is our practical agency and the norms that govern it” (Witt 2011a: 12). This chapter rejects both Witt’s uniessentialism and the metaphysical strategy in general. I argue for a “social and psychological” or “ethical” analysis of gender essentialism on which gender is an essential component of a person’s sense of self or self-conception (Rorty and Wong 1990; Appiah 1990). Anthony Appiah observes that the question “would I still be me if I were a different gender?” is both metaphysical and “ethical.” Even if the answer to the metaphysical question is “yes,” the answer to the ethical question may be “no” because it depends on how central my gender is to my sense of identity, in particular how it contributes to “the ethical project of composing a life for oneself ” (Appiah 1990: 495). I propose that gender is essential to self-conception in two senses: gender can be a “volitionally necessary” component of self-conception, an aspect of the will that is so significant for one’s sense of self that it would be unthinkable to repudiate it (Frankfurt 1988: 177–90). In addition, or alternatively, gender can be an aspect of self-conception that is “circumstantially” inescapable, “over whose presence in the person’s life and effect on her life she has no say” (Oshana 2005: 83). Section 1 identifies and argues against three theses that are implicit in Witt’s theory of gender uniessentialism.7 The first is that gender is not essential to persons. On Witt’s account, there is a distinct ontological category of social individual in addition to those of person and human organism. Gender is the functional essence of social individuals not of persons or human organisms. I claim that Witt’s arguments do not support the first thesis; they do not convincingly show that gender is not essential to the first-person perspective of persons. Further, the first thesis does not do the explanatory work required of it. The initial datum to be explained is precisely the commonsense idea that gender is essential to persons, yet Witt’s uniessentialism claims that gender is not essential to persons. The second thesis is that gender ascriptivism is true: namely, gender is a feature of persons that is wholly ascribed or “conferred” from a third-person perspective (Ásta 2012: 5). This thesis also should be rejected: there are independent reasons for characterizing gender as a “hybrid” notion that is grounded in both firstpersonal and third-personal components (Stoljar 1995, 2011); in addition, because of the emphasis in Witt’s analysis on the role of gender in unifying practical agency, a solution that is open to other conferralist theories, namely to distinguish gender as a conferred social role from gender as a self-identification or lived identity, may not be open to Witt’s theory. The third thesis is that of gender universalism. Although uniessentialism is an account of the way in which



Gender and the Unthinkable

125

gender is essential to individuals, it has an implication for the criteria of group membership. Witt’s uniessentialism implies that all and only individuals that instantiate the functional essence “woman” (which Witt analyzes in terms of an “engendering function”) are women. In other words, to be a member of the class “woman,” individuals have to instantiate a gender universal. As I have argued elsewhere, there are many reasons to abandon gender universalism and adopt a form of nominalism (Stoljar 1995, 2011). Section 2 argues for a version of gender essentialism that does not depend on the three metaphysical theses. One of the most powerful aspects of Witt’s uniessentialism is that it promises to explain the way in which gender conceived as a feature of social reality functions in practical agency: “gender uniessentialism points . . . away from a focus on individual psychologies and toward the social world and its normative structure, which defines the conditions of agency for women” (Witt 2012: 3). Although I reject Witt’s metaphysical strategy as well as her particular unessentialist proposal, I agree that we should focus on gender as structural rather than psychological. Gender is usually not a matter of individual choice but rather an aspect of social reality. Yet it also defines and constrains practical agency. As Appiah puts it, “for us, in our society, being-of-a-certaingender or being-of-a-certain-race are for many people facts that are centrally implicated in the construction of life plans. To ignore one’s race and one’s gender in thinking about the ethical project of composing a life for oneself . . . requires a kind of ignoring of social reality” (Appiah 1990: 499). Indeed, there are a number of desiderata that constrain any theory of gender essentialism: genders are social, nonvoluntary, significantly variable, and play a central role in practical agency. The position that gender is volitionally necessary and/or circumstantially inescapable satisfies these desiderata while at the same time avoiding the problematic metaphysical commitments of Witt’s uniessentialism.

1  Three theses about gender—and why they should be rejected Witt aims to provide a philosophical argument that explains the “data,” namely people’s sense that their gender is essential to their identity, while at the same time endorsing the feminist position that gender is a feature of social reality and hence in part extrinsic to individuals, not intrinsic to their essential “natures.” One way to capture the notion that gender is social is to characterize it as a

126

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

property of a social entity rather than of a biological human organism. Indeed, Witt argues that gender is an attribute of social individuals. Social individuals essentially occupy social positions, one of which is gender: “Being a man and being a woman are social positions with bifurcated social norms that cluster around the engendering function. To be a woman is to be recognized as having a body that plays one role in the engendering function; women conceive and bear. To be a man is to be recognized as having a body that plays another role in the engendering function; men beget” (Witt 2011: 40). (On Witt’s account, the “engendering function” is social: it is the social interpretation of the biological function of human reproduction.8) Witt goes on to argue that gender in effect creates social individuals (Witt 2011a: 16). Gender is the “principle of normative unity” that unifies all the social roles occupied by a social individual into a new individual, and without which the individual would not exist. Hence, gender is uniessential to the social individual. In this section, I first briefly explain Witt’s arguments for adopting an ontology of social individuals; I then identify three theses implicit in her account and argue that they should be rejected.

1.1  Arguments for an ontology of social individuals As Witt remarks, the proposal that there is an ontological “trinity” of person, human organism, and social individual raises questions about whether all three categories are needed for explanatory purposes: “what is lost or missing in the simpler ontology of human organisms and persons?” (Witt 2011: 68). One argument offered by Witt for a tripartite ontology—which I call “the coherence argument”—is that the thesis of gender essentialism cannot be coherently stated without an ontological category of social individuals. Social individuals are “essentially social position occupiers” and are conceptually distinct from both persons and human organisms. Persons are “individuals who have a first-person perspective (or self-consciousness) and are characterized by the related property of autonomy” (Witt 2011: 54). There are social individuals who are not persons: young children are social position occupiers because they are sons, daughters, or preschool students, yet they have not developed the first-person perspective that is necessary for personhood (Witt 2011: 56). Conversely, there are persons who are not social individuals: it is logically possible for robots or angels to display the first-person perspective required for personhood, yet robots and angels can exist independently of a social world (Witt 2011: 56). Human organisms also are not “dependent on the existence of a social world” (Witt 2011: 56). Since neither



Gender and the Unthinkable

127

human organisms nor persons require the existence of the social world, the social phenomenon of gender cannot be essential to either. Witt claims however that the thesis of gender essentialism, irrespective of whether it is true or false, is coherent. Therefore, to account for its coherence, we need to posit an ontological category (that of social individual) to which gender essentialism could be attributed. Witt offers a second argument—which I call “the social normativity argument”—that focuses on the normativity that attaches to social positions. This is distinct from the normativity that applies either to persons or human organisms. Consider the term “mother,” which could refer to a female human organism capable of playing the female biological role in human reproduction. “Biological normativity” applies to the human organism: a female human is a good or bad mother according to how well her reproductive organs function for the purpose of bearing children. However, “mother” can also refer to someone in virtue of being “recognized by others as occupying the social position of being a mother” (Witt 2011: 62). A different form of normativity—“ascriptive social normativity”—attaches to this mother, who is “responsive to and evaluable under” social maternal norms (Witt 2011: 43). Witt points out that one can be responsive to and evaluable under the social norms that attach to a social position even if one does not adopt them voluntarily or treat them as an ethical standard from one’s own first-person standpoint (Witt 2011: 43). “Voluntarist normativity” applies only when a mother endorses maternal norms and applies them as ethical standards to herself. Thus, “the normative domains [of social position occupiers] are fixed by their social position occupancy” (Witt 2011: 62); and this ascriptive normativity is distinct from both voluntarist and biological normativity. Witt argues that we need to posit an ontology to which ascriptive normativity applies: the ontology of social individuals.

1.2  Thesis 1: Gender is not essential to persons The coherence argument says that gender is not essential to persons because it cannot be: there are logically possible persons such as angels who exist in the absence of a social world, so cannot be gendered. Human persons have gender properties in virtue of being constituted by the same bodies as social individuals who are essentially gendered. Consider a lump of clay that constitutes both a statue and a religious object. Witt claims that the statue has properties derivatively that the religious object has essentially: both have the property of being venerated, but the religious object is venerated essentially whereas the statue is venerated

128

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

derivatively. Similarly, if a social individual has the essential property “woman,” the person constituted by the same body has the derivative property “woman” (Witt 2011: 119). It has not been established however that gender could not be essential to persons who are constituted by human organisms. Social and dialogical conditions play a crucial role in the development of the first-person perspective of human persons (Witt 2012: 6–7). Children brought up by wolves do not develop the capacities for self-reflection and autonomy that are necessary for personhood. This suggests a conception of personhood under which social conditions are both causally necessary for and constitutive of the first-person perspective (e.g., Cudd 2012). For instance, Charles Taylor says that “we define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us” (Taylor 1994: 28). If the first-person perspective of human persons is constitutively social, there is no in-principle impediment to characterizing gender—a social phenomenon—as an essential feature of human persons.9 Even if human persons could be essentially gendered, however, the social normativity argument concludes that they are not, because it claims that the ascriptive normativity attached to social roles is not incorporated into the firstperson perspective. Witt says that “much of our social agency is habitually and tacitly normed; only occasionally do we consciously attend to the norms that we are responsive to and evaluated under by others” (Witt 2012: 2). She implies that the aspects of agency that are “habitually and tacitly” normed are governed by the ascriptive normativity that attaches to social individuals not the voluntarist normativity that attaches to persons. For example, the standpoint of a contractor, to which social norms like punctuality or efficiency attach, is distinct from “acting from a first-person perspective or a self-reflective identification with a standpoint” (Witt 2011: 61). The standpoint of a “white North American is thoroughly inflected by being white” even if there is no conscious or selfreflective identification with the practical identity “white” or endorsement of the associated social normativity (Witt 2011: 61–62). Witt seems to treat selfreflective identification with a standpoint as exhaustive of the first-person standpoint. But this conclusion can be questioned. The habitual and tacit norms of practical identities can be internalized in self-conception without being explicitly endorsed or part of reflective self-understanding. Consider Katharine Jenkins’s suggestion that gender identity corresponds to an internal gender “map.” The “map” is internalized—it is habitual, tacit, and bodily10—and guides members of gender classes “through the social or material



Gender and the Unthinkable

129

realities” that are characteristic of being a member of that class (Jenkins 2016: 409–10). Such maps are not voluntarily taken on or endorsed as ethical norms by the agent, yet they are phenomenological and first-personal features of agents. Moreover, ascriptive social normativity attaches to internalized gender maps because the normative content of the maps corresponds to norms that are characteristic of the social class to which the person belongs. Witt adopts a clear dividing line between the standpoint of persons, which is first-personal and to which voluntarist normativity attaches, and the standpoint of social individuals, to which (third-personal) ascriptive normativity attaches. However, internalized gender maps illustrate that norms that are ascribed due to social positions are incorporated into the first-person perspective even when they are not endorsed or consciously applied by the individual to herself. Witt may argue that nevertheless the thesis that gender is essential to social individuals (not persons) explains the intuitive centrality of gender in people’s practical agency: “The idea that our gender is our principle of normative unity just is the claim that one of our social roles prioritizes, unifies and organizes our other social roles into a practical normative whole” (Witt 2012: 2). Gender is the principle of normative unity because, in cases of conflict, it tends to “trump the normative requirements of other social roles”; and also it “prioritizes” other social roles: for instance, “if the doctor, who is also a parent, enters into these social positions as a woman, then the norms she follows in these roles are unified, organized, and defined by her gender” (Witt 2011: 79). However, people do not in fact always treat gender as the guiding principle that inflects all other social roles. In certain contexts, practical identities such as race, disability, or religion take priority over gender, and at certain times of life, gender norms are put “on hold” (Cudd 2012: 3). Witt’s response is that the metaphysical position she adopts does not depend on whether people take their gender to be unifying of their different social roles or indeed whether their gender actually unifies their practical agency. She emphasizes that, on her view, gender is a normative essence that is analogous to the functional essence of artifacts: “parts of a house are unified and defined by the house function whether or not the house actually serves the function” (Witt 2011: 91). Similarly, the engendering function can be the essence of social individuals even if there are people whose “social roles are not organized by the engendering function” (Witt 2011: 91). Witt argues that although other social roles like race or disability are candidates to provide normative unity for the social individual, they differ from gender in crucial respects. Gender is the principle

130

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

of normative unity because of its “systematic impact” both synchronically and diachronically (Witt 2011: 92). Unlike the social positions of race and disability, whose recognition has been (and is) variable depending on historical, cultural, and individual factors, engendering is a universal and stable feature of social structures: it is “a necessary social function in that it is required for society to persist” (Witt 2011: 100). Hence gender is the “mega” social role or functional essence that unifies other social roles into a social individual. This response raises a number of further questions, however. First, the analogy with the functional essence of artifacts implies that individuals whose practical agency is not actually unified by their gender are defective instances of that gender. Because Aristotelian functional essences are normative, a house that has holes in the roof and does not provide shelter is still a house, though a defective one. This consequence is plausible for artifacts, but unpalatable for the case of gender. If the analogy holds, people who have the social position “woman” but whose agency is not in fact organized by this practical identity count as defective women. Second, the claim that gender as a social position has priority over all others seems to fly in the face of well-known intersectionality arguments. According to intersectionality theorists, there is no such thing as a social position that trumps all others. The social position “woman” is inflected by all the intersecting social positions that a particular individual inhabits, such as race, disability, and sexuality, and hence is particular to her (Crenshaw 1991). Finally, Witt’s account of the relationship between the ascriptive normativity that attaches to social roles and practical agency is puzzling. She says that “whether and which social roles apply to one is not up to us but is a matter of social position occupancy and social recognition” (Witt 2012: 6). She also says that social individuals such as women are “responsive” to social normativity, “enter into” other social roles as women, and “follow” gender norms. If the ascriptive normativity that governs social individuals emerges solely from social recognition and hence is in principle independent of first-person standpoint, how is it connected in these ways to practical agency?

1.3  Thesis 2: Gender is ascribed from a third-person perspective Witt analyzes gender wholly in terms of the social role ascribed to agents from a third-person perspective. As we saw, “to be a woman is to be recognized as having a body that plays one role in the engendering function; women conceive and bear” (Witt 2011: 40). Therefore, Witt’s account is an instance of what Ásta



Gender and the Unthinkable

131

Sveinsdóttir calls “conferralism” about gender (Ásta 2011, 2013). For Witt, gender is a property that is conferred by external social structures on the basis of a “grounding property,” namely a body that plays a role in the engendering function (Ásta 2013: 723).11 There is a single grounding property in virtue of which genders are conferred—being a body that plays a role in the engendering function—and gender has a binary structure due to the bifurcating social norms that are associated with the engendering function.12 In this subsection, I reject Witt’s particular form of conferralism, and sketch an alternative “hybrid” account of gender. One question that arises for Witt’s particular form of conferralism is whether it can accommodate plural genders including transgender identities. It can accommodate gender transition by saying that a new social individual emerges as a result of transition (Witt 2011: 88). But what of trans people whose gender identity does not correspond to the gender binary? As Witt puts it, “The notion of a third gender is compatible with my approach to gender [only] if the third gender itself is described in relation to women and men as I have defined them. . . . My focus on the engendering function rules out . . . a third gender that is defined with no relation at all to the engendering function” (Witt 2011: 41–42). Thus, it may be possible in principle to accommodate plural genders within Witt’s account if they are defined “in relation to” the engendering function. For instance, an agender person could be defined as “someone who is recognized as occupying neither engendering function” and a gender-fluid person as “someone who is recognized as occupying both engendering functions,” and so forth.13 Despite these possibilities, it has been argued that limiting the grounding property of gender to the engendering function is too restrictive (Ásta 2012:  5). Further, in most contexts, there are as yet no social structures that in fact recognize transgender identities such as agender, nonbinary, or gender-fluid as social roles (social positions with a set of social norms attached). In the absence of a plurality of actual social roles that are defined in relation to the engendering function, social individuals who identify as trans will be recognized as occupying one of the gendered social positions on offer, namely woman or man. Recall that, on Witt’s account, a person in the same body as a social individual unavoidably has the same gender as the social individual. This means that the gender self-identification of trans people will often diverge from the actual gender of both the person and the social individual. For instance, even if someone does not identify as a woman, her actual gender both as a person and as a social individual could be “woman.” Although one “has the ability to stand back from”

132

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

(Witt 2011: 120) the social normativity associated with ascribed gender, and to reject it, this is not what is happening for people who are transgender. Unlike an unconventional mother who rejects conventional maternal norms, a trans person is not necessarily rejecting the norms attached to any conferred social role. Rather, they are asserting their actual gender. Witt’s view contradicts this assertion and hence is potentially both epistemologically and morally problematic.14 Some assertions of practical identity in some contexts could be mistaken (e.g., McKitrick 2015: 2582). But it disregards the evidence to claim that the assertions of actual gender of trans agents should generally be treated with skepticism. Moreover, as Jenkins puts it, “failure to respect the gender identifications of trans people is a serious harm and is conceptually linked to forms of transphobic oppression and even violence” (Jenkins 2016: 396).15 Jenkins’s proposed solution is to distinguish two concepts of gender16: gender as a lived social identity and gender as an imposed social class (Jenkins 2016: 397). However, this strategy is not open to Witt’s particular conferralist account precisely because of its emphasis on the role of gender in unifying practical agency. For Witt, gender is both a social role and a lived identity through which social individuals operate in the world. Indeed, Witt herself quotes Jennifer Finney Boylan: “The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life, the lives we live each day” (Witt 2011a: 11).17 Elsewhere, I have argued for an alternative to Jenkins’s suggestion, namely that gender concepts are hybrid cluster concepts: they include both first-personal components such as gender self-attribution and third-personal components such as ascribed social role (Stoljar 1995, 2011).18 The concept “woman” and the property it picks out in the world are both complex. The concept articulates what we’re talking about at the linguistic level when we refer to people as women. There is a complex cluster of features that the concept “woman” tracks, including having female anatomical characteristics, calling oneself a woman, having female phenomenal and bodily lived experience, and occupying social roles that are typically associated with being female. Although these features are necessary components of the concept “woman,” there is no single set of necessary and sufficient features that individuals who are women must exemplify. To be accurately labeled a woman, a person must exemplify enough of the features in the cluster.19 For instance, if a person does not have female anatomical features, but satisfies the other dimensions in the cluster, she is (fully) a woman. This approach has a number of advantages. First, people can fall outside the categories “man” or “woman.” People are agender if they do not satisfy enough of the



Gender and the Unthinkable

133

features of either (or any) gender. Second, one’s actual gender depends in part on one’s first-personal self-identification and phenomenal, bodily experience, and hence misgendering is less likely to occur. Third, genders can be a matter of degree and genders can overlap, thereby allowing the potential to attribute gender-fluid and nonbinary genders. I have offered a number of reasons to reject Witt’s second thesis, namely that gender is something conferred or ascribed from a third-person perspective. I suggested that Witt’s particular conferralist position cannot avail itself of a distinction between gender as a lived identity and gender as an imposed category because her argument is precisely that gender as an imposed aspect of social reality functions in social individuals as a standpoint that directs their lived identities and practical agency. Moreover, the hybrid conception offers an alternative notion of gender that is more plausible on its own terms than a purely conferralist one.

1.4  Thesis 3: Gender is a social universal The third thesis that is implicit in Witt’s theory is that gender is a social universal. There are two notions of “essentialism” that were often run together in feminist writing on essentialism (Stoljar 1995). “Essentialism” can refer to the individual essentialism defended by Witt or to the claim that there are essences that determine membership in gender classes. Is there a single property or set of properties that is necessary and sufficient for individuals to count as members of classes? Universalism (“realism”) argues that universals provide the metaphysical glue that binds individuals into groups. Nominalism responds that there is no need to posit universals to explain group membership (Stoljar 2011).20 Even if universalism is true, this does not imply individual essentialism. For instance, it has been claimed that Sally Haslanger’s analysis of gender implies gender realism (Mikkola 2006). Haslanger proposes a gender universal: it is necessary and sufficient for “being a woman” that one occupies a subordinated position in a social hierarchy and is “marked” for this treatment on the basis of actual or perceived female bodily features (“Gender and Race,” in Haslanger 2012: 221–47). This does not imply that, if this social hierarchy were eliminated, the people occupying the position of social subordination (the women) would cease to exist. That is, gender universalism does not imply individual essentialism. The question now is whether uniessentialism, a version of individual essentialism, implies gender universalism. Witt argues that uniessentialism

134

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

is conceptually distinct from “kind essentialism” because the classes of things with the same functional essences do not necessarily correspond to kinds (Witt 2011a: 19). Assuming hearts and houses both have functional essences, it is a separate question whether classes of hearts or houses satisfy the additional conditions necessary to be either natural or artifact kinds. Nevertheless, uniessentialism is committed to gender as a social universal. To be a member of the class “woman,” a person has to instantiate a functional essence, or a property that is numerically identical to that of all other members of the class. All and only people who are recognized as having the engendering function of conceiving and bearing children are women. Uniessentialism implies therefore that the property “being a woman” is exactly the same property in all people who are women. The universalist implications of uniessentialism may seem trivial until we notice the significant differences among people within gender groups. As the history of feminist philosophy has emphasized, there is considerable cultural and historical diversity in what it means to be a woman. In addition, each person’s gender is intersectional: it is inflected by other social positions such as race, class, and sexuality, and therefore cannot be identical to the gender of anyone else (Crenshaw 1991). Witt responds to this diversity by saying that the differences among women are differences in how gender is manifested: gender “as a social or cultural role responds to the variability in specific manifestations of gender around the globe and in different historical periods. It thereby avoids the trap of overgeneralization about women and men that anti-essentialist feminists have articulated” (Witt 2011: 39–40). I am doubtful however that universalists can accommodate diversity and intersectionality arguments, and I advocate a version of nominalism, “resemblance nominalism,” to explain gender classes (Stoljar 1995, 2011). What about Witt’s universalism specifically? I briefly mention two potential objections. First, the engendering function that Witt employs to define “woman” and “man” is a universal feature of social structures. Hence, gender diversity must correspond to diversity in the contents of the bifurcating social norms that attach to the two engendering functions. However, as Ann Cudd argues, the social normativity associated with gender is not always tied to the engendering function (Cudd 2012: 6). For instance, Cudd comments that there have been periods in her life when childbearing and child-rearing were unimportant. Yet, at such times, “there were gender norms and stereotypes being applied to me, but they did not have to do with, except in rare circumstances such as visits to the gynecologist, childbearing, much less childrearing” (Cudd 2012: 6). If Cudd



Gender and the Unthinkable

135

is right, Witt’s definition—in which norms always attach to the engendering function—does not fully capture the diversity of gender norms. Second, Witt’s definition of gender implies that everyone with ovaries and a uterus is a woman because everyone who has ovaries and a uterus will be recognized as having a body that potentially fulfills the engendering function of bearing children. This definition will either wrongly exclude or wrongly include people who are transgender (cf. Jenkins 2016). Indeed, in advocating a definition of gender, gender universalism advocates that there are sharp boundaries around gender categories. Diverse and nonbinary genders are less likely to be captured by universalism than by nominalist accounts.

2  The unthinkable and the inescapable Gender uniessentialism offers a metaphysical approach to explaining the centrality of gender for individual identity, namely that gender is the functional essence of social individuals. I argued that uniessentialism should be rejected because it is committed to three implausible metaphysical theses. Since the metaphysical strategy in general is implausible, I turn to a “social and psychological” or “ethical” approach (Rorty and Wong 1990; Appiah 1990).21 Appiah proposes that the question “would I still be me if I were a different gender?” is either metaphysical or ethical (Appiah 1990). Although the answer to the metaphysical question is likely to be “yes,” the answer to the ethical question depends on the centrality of gender in a person’s self-conception. For Witt, an ethical approach based on the centrality of gender in self-conception overlooks an “ontological question about the unity of the social individual that is prior to, and independent of, how we understand ourselves” (Witt 2011: 23). However, this prior ontological question arises only if we agree with Witt that there is an explanatory need for the ontology of social individuals in the first place. Since in my view there is no such explanatory need, I here offer a preliminary sketch of the self-conception approach. Harry Frankfurt argues that certain aspects of our will are “volitionally necessary.” There are situations when a course of action is possible, a person may desire to follow this course of action, and even think that it is something she ought to do. Nevertheless the course of action is “unthinkable” for her. She cannot “bring herself to perform it”; it is something she “simply cannot do” (Frankfurt 1988: 183–85). Actions that repudiate attachments to family

136

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

members are often unthinkable in this sense. It would be unthinkable to abandon a family member who needs support, irrespective of whether I desire to do so, or think I ought to do so.22 The characteristic of unthinkable action is not only that I am unwilling to pursue some action. The unwillingness itself is not up for rational reconsideration: “A person who is constrained by volitional necessity . . . accedes to it because he is not willing to oppose it and his unwillingness is itself something which he is unwilling to alter” (Frankfurt 1988: 87). Volitional necessity “specif[ies] the limits of what the person can will to do. It defines his essence as a volitional creature” (Frankfurt 1988: 188). Recall from the introduction that there are four desiderata that constrain any theory of gender essentialism: genders are social, nonvoluntary, signifi­ cantly variable, and play a central role in practical agency. Volitional necessities satisfy these desiderata. First, they are the product of historical or social circumstances, such as attachments to family members, social roles, or even opposition to social roles. Frankfurt describes an example in which the fictional Lord Fawn has a conception of himself as an English “gentleman” that makes it unthinkable for him to pursue a conversation about intimate matters with a person of a lower class (Frankfurt 1988: 183). Lord Fawn confronts volitional necessity due to social circumstances, namely his practical identity as a member of the English upper class. Volitional necessities can also have their origin in dissatisfaction with conventional social roles. The first-person testimony of people who are transgender brings this into relief. Mary Rogan points out that “transgender people have the same abiding sense of self as every other human being” but that “agreed-upon” categories often do not apply to transgender people.23 Second, volitional necessities are nonvoluntary precisely because it is not possible to alter them “by a sheer act of will” (Frankfurt 1988: 187). They are not something over which we have a choice; rather they provide the boundaries within which choice operates.24 This coincides with people’s conceptions of their practical identities. Gender, race, or sexuality are often not “up for grabs,” but provide the framework within which agency and voluntary deliberation operates. Third, and despite the previous point, volitional necessities vary from person to person and indeed need not remain stable even within a single person: “The necessities of the will are not necessarily or always permanent. They are subject to change according to the changes in the contingent circumstance from which they derive” (Frankfurt 1988: 187). Finally, volitional necessities define practical agency by setting the limits of people’s authentic volitional characters.



Gender and the Unthinkable

137

The formation of ethical identity—what Appiah calls “the ethical project of composing a life for oneself ”—is constrained by volitional necessities. Marina Oshana observes that there is an additional type of social limit on self-conception. There are social circumstances that are “inescapable” because they “announce to the world who a person is whether or not she accepts these factors as fixing her self-identity” (Oshana 2005: 83). For instance, “we cannot escape the racialized norms that define us, and that inform our self-concept, even where we regard these norms as alien. Consciously or not, welcome or not, one’s racialized identity contravenes upon most aspects of one’s self-conception” (Oshana 2005: 90). The notion of circumstantial necessity restates Witt’s insight that we are brought under the “umbrella” of the ascriptive normativity that is attached to social positions whether we like it or not: we are “responsive to and evaluable under” social normativity just in virtue of occupying a social position. Unlike Witt, however, Oshana proposes that circumstantial necessities are embedded in self-conception even if they are not consciously adopted by agents as ethical standards. This can happen in at least two ways. As we saw, lived experience is guided by habitual and bodily norms that are the products of the social categories that are applied to us. Further, the contours of agency are defined by circumstantial necessities because the options we take to be relevant for our choices and life plans are dictated by these externally imposed categories. In an illuminating account of her gender transition, Rachel McKinnon describes the way in which imposed gender constrained her self-conception until she realized that being trans was a “live option” for her: “While I experienced a distinct and persistent discomfort with my gendered self starting around age 12, I didn’t once consider trans as even a possible explanation. . . . What’s important is that this is a very common experience amongst those who undergo a gender transition: years of doubt, avoidance, of not viewing being trans as a live option. But the moment it’s opened up as an option, the phenomenology of the transition to knowing is abrupt and almost instantaneous” (McKinnon 2015: 427).25 Due to acquiring knowledge that being trans was a live option, McKinnon was able to redefine her agency and incorporate a new social identity into her self-conception.

Conclusion It is empirically true that for most people, gender—a social phenomenon—is deeply connected to one’s sense of who one is. It is also true that gender is an

138

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

external force that constrains both self-conception and practical agency. The metaphysical approach of uniessentialism attempts to solve this apparent puzzle: it reconciles gender as a social phenomenon with the idea that gender is essential to individual identity, and in so doing provides an account of the centrality of gender in practical agency. I have argued that a metaphysical strategy for achieving these goals, and in particular Witt’s theory of uniessentialism, is likely to fail. Instead, we should explicate the ways in which gender is connected to identity in two related ways: gender is often a volitionally necessary aspect of the will; it is also a circumstantially inescapable component of self-conception. Although there is more work to be done to develop these proposals, they promise an account of gender as both socially circumscribed and defining of practical agency. This is an important issue to address within feminist philosophy, as it advances a preliminary explanation of why social gender categories are intractable and resistant to change.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Pieranna Garavaso for comments on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank students in my Winter 2017 Feminist Metaphysics seminar at McGill University for very helpful discussions on many related issues.

Notes 1 The title is taken from Harry Frankfurt, “Rationality and the Unthinkable” (Frankfurt 1988: 177–90). 2 I will assume for the purpose of this chapter that genders such as “woman” or “man” refer to something social and sexes such as “female” or “male” refer to something biological. It is often said that gender corresponds to the “social meaning” of sex. A distinction between gender as social and sex as biological does not imply however that sex classification is not itself social. Although sexes are assigned on the basis of anatomical characteristics, sex assignment is nevertheless a social exercise (Gatens 1991; Ásta 2011). 3 In this chapter, I use the term “trans” or “transgender” in the most inclusive way possible, to refer to people whose gender identity does not align with the conventional gender binary. I intend my use of “trans” to include, for example, people who are agender, nonbinary, and gender-fluid. Some people use the



Gender and the Unthinkable

4 5

6

7 8

9

139

terminology “trans*” instead of “trans.” See the definition in McKinnon (2015, footnote 1). Mary Rogan, “Growing Up Trans,” The Walrus, September 12, 2016; https:// thewalrus.ca/growing-up-trans/ (accessed December 20, 2016). For example, as Jesse Singal puts it, “a huge part of the challenge of being transgender, after all, is having your identity—your very sense of self—endlessly, exhaustingly critiqued, invalidated, and disregarded by people who couldn’t possibly understand where you’re coming from” (“What’s Missing From the Conversation About Transgender Kids,” New York Magazine, July 25, 2016). Available online: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/07/whats-missing-from-theconversation-about-transgender-kids.html (accessed February 20, 2017). Another possible metaphysical approach is the “identity essentialism” of Saul Kripke, which argues that certain properties are logically or modally necessary to an individual being what it is. For instance, the essence of a biological individual is its origin in the actual sperm and egg from which it developed (Kripke 1980: 106). Most people agree that gender is not metaphysically essential to individuals in this identity essentialist sense (Appiah 1990; Stoljar 1995). It might be thought that the origin condition—being from the same sperm and egg—implies sex essentialism, but this is not so clear. Although the sperm and egg determine the chromosomal features of an individual, it is not biologically necessary that a fetus with an XY chromosome will develop with male sex characteristics. Hence, the origin condition does not seem to imply that being a female or a male is essential to the individual identity of the human organism in Kripke’s sense. Individual essentialism should be distinguished from “kind essentialism,” namely essentialism about the “criteria for kind membership” (Witt 2011: 5). I would add that individual essentialism should be distinguished from the question of whether gender properties are universals. For more detailed explanations of these distinctions, see Witt (2011, chapter 1), Stoljar (1995). For examples of other critiques of the uniessentialism defended in Witt’s The Metaphysics of Gender (2011), see Cudd (2012), Mikkola (2012), and Ásta (2012). Witt explains the difference between biological reproduction and engendering using an analogy between feeding and dining. “Feeding is an animal function,” whereas dining is a “socially mediated form of feeding” (Witt 2011: 37–38). Similarly, engendering is a socially mediated form of biological reproduction. Analyzing gender in terms of a social engendering function emphasizes its thoroughly social nature. There are examples from the feminist literature on autonomy of theories in which relational features play such a constitutive role. Witt characterizes this literature as providing an analysis of autonomy using purely internal psychological processes. She writes that “autonomy is a kind of inner self-legislation or self-conscious regulation of our desires, decisions and actions” (Witt 2011: 54). However many

140

10

11

12 13 14 15 16

17

18

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

proponents of what is called “relational autonomy” are attempting to provide an analysis of autonomy, and hence an analysis of a feature of personhood, using relational features of the agent as defining conditions. Jenkins’s notion of an internal gender map is taken from Sally Haslanger, “You Mixed? Racial Identity without Racial Biology” (Haslanger 2012: 273–97). Following Haslanger, Jenkins says: “To have a White racial identity, then, is to have a ‘map’ of this kind” (Jenkins 2016: 409). Ásta Sveinsdóttir provides a conferralist account of sex as well as of gender. Although sex may be the “grounding property” of gender, sex is itself a conferred property: for example, the property of being male or female is conferred according to which “sex-stereotypical” anatomical sex characteristics are regarded as grounding properties in a context (Ásta 2013: 726). I leave this aspect aside here. This distinguishes Witt’s conferralist account from that of Ásta Sveinsdóttir. The latter allows multiple grounding properties (Ásta 2011). I am grateful to Arabella Colombier for discussion on this point. This may be a problem for conferralist views in general. See McKitrick (2015) for a discussion. Jenkins refers to Bettcher (2007) here. Jenkins is considering the implications of trans identity for Sally Haslanger’s account, which also advocates an ascriptivist or conferralist notion of gender (Haslanger, “Gender and Race: What Are They? What Do We Want Them to Be?” in Haslanger 2012: 221–47.). Jenkins is not addressing Witt’s account (Jenkins 2016). The quote comes from Jennifer Finney Boylan, “The XY Games,” The New York Times, August 3, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/opinion/03boylan. html. Note that Jenkins’s methodology is different from mine. She adopts Sally Haslanger’s “ameliorative” strategy. The two gender concepts—gender identity and imposed social role—are posited because they are both useful in promoting the goals of feminist social justice (Haslanger, “Gender and Race,” in Haslanger 2012: 221–47). In Stoljar 1995, I (implicitly) argued for a kind of externalism about gender terms. I elaborated the meaning and reference of the term “woman” by first identifying exemplars that “woman” picks out, then arguing that the features of the exemplars form the cluster that is associated with the concept “woman.” I now think that this methodological approach corresponds to what Haslanger later called a “descriptive strategy” that aims to pick out an “operative concept” (Haslanger, “Gender and Race,” in Haslanger 2012: 221–47). I argued that what we’re taking about (i.e., what we’re picking out descriptively) when we use the term “woman” is a cluster of features such as first-personal self-attribution and “felt” experience, female anatomical characteristics, and conventional female social roles.



Gender and the Unthinkable

141

19 The cluster concept is derived from Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances.” For a more extended development of these ideas, see Stoljar (1995). 20 On my approach, “gender nominalism” does not imply that gendered individuals or gender categories do not exist. Gender nominalism is the position that gendered individuals are grouped into classes, not because they instantiate gender universals, but because they participate in a “resemblance structure” (Stoljar 1995, 2011). 21 I briefly considered Kripke’s approach of “identity essentialism” in footnote 6. I will leave aside a direct discussion of other potential metaphysical approaches, which could focus for example on whether gender is essential to the persistence of the person who has the gender, once she has it. There are two standard conceptions of what is metaphysically required for individuals to persist through change: continuity of the human organism (bodily continuity) and psychological continuity (Olson 2017). It seems unlikely that gender change is incompatible with either psychological or bodily continuity. 22 See Oshana’s example of her attachment to her mother: “I know I could never abandon my mother to a life of great poverty” (Oshana 2005: 81). 23 See footnote 4. Rachel McKinnon notes the great variety of trans experiences (McKinnon 2015, footnote 18). 24 This point is made by Thomas Nagel: “[One finds oneself] left with something one cannot choose to accept or reject. What one is left with is probably just oneself, a core without which there could be no choice belonging to a person at all. Some unchosen restrictions on choice are among the conditions of its possibility” (Nagel 1970: 23; quoted in Oshana 2005: 83). 25 In this discussion, McKinnon is focusing on the epistemic implications of gender transition, namely on how she acquired new knowledge when she realized that being trans was a live option and through coming to occupy a new social identity after transition.

References Appiah, Anthony (1990), “‘But Would That Still Be Me?’ Notes on Gender, ‘Race,’ Ethnicity, as Sources of ‘Identity,’” The Journal of Philosophy 87: 493–99. Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir (2011), “The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender,” in C. Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self, 47–65, New York: Springer. Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir (2012), “Comments on Charlotte Witt, The Metaphysics of Gender,” Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy 8 (2), Available online: http:// web.mit .edu /sgrp

142

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir (2013), “The Social Construction of Human Kinds,” Hypatia 28: 716–30. Bettcher, Talia Mae (2007), “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22: 43–65. Crenshaw, Kimberle W. (1991), “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Cudd, Ann E. (2012), “Comments on Charlotte Witt, The Metaphysics of Gender,” Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy, 8 (2), Available online: http://web.mit.edu /sgrp Frankfurt, Harry (1988), The Importance of What We Care About, New York: Cambridge University Press. Gatens, Moira (1991), “A Critique of the Sex-Gender Distinction,” in Sneja Gunew (ed.), A Reader in Feminist Knowledge, New York: Routledge. Haslanger, Sally (2012), Resisting Reality. Social Construction and Social Critique, New York: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Katharine (2016), “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman,” Ethics 126: 394–421. Kripke, Saul (1980), Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McKinnon, Rachel (2015), “Trans*formations,” Res Philosophica 92: 419–40. McKitrick, Jennifer (2015), “A Dispositional Account of Gender,” Philosophical Studies 172: 2575–89. Mikkola, Mari (2006), “Elizabeth Spelman, Gender Realism, and Women,” Hypatia 2: 79–96. Mikkola, Mari (2012), “How Essential is Gender Essentialism? Comments on Charlotte Witt, The Metaphysics of Gender,” Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy, 8 (2), Available online: http://web.mit .edu /sgrp Nagel, Thomas (1970), The Possibility of Altruism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Olson, Eric T. (2017), “Personal Identity,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Available online: https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/identity-personal/ Oshana, Marina A. L. (2005), “Autonomy and Self-Identity,” in John Christman and Joel Anderson (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges of Liberalism: New Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg and David Wong (1990), “Aspects of Identity and Agency,” in Flanagan and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stoljar, Natalie (1995), “Essence, Identity and the Concept of Woman,” Philosophical Topics 23: 261–93. Stoljar, Natalie (2011), “Different Women. Gender and the Realism-Nominalism Debate,” in Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics. Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self, 27–46, New York: Springer.



Gender and the Unthinkable

143

Taylor, Charles (1994), “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, 25–74, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Witt, Charlotte (2011a), The Metaphysics of Gender, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Witt, Charlotte (2011b), “What is Gender Essentialism?” in Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self, 11–25, New York: Springer. Witt, Charlotte (2012), “The Metaphysics of Gender: Reply to Critics,” Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy 8 (2), Available online: http://web.mit .edu /sgrp

9

Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin? Feminism and the Analytic Philosophy of Sex Katharine Jenkins

1 Introduction Sex, in the sense of “sexual activity,” is a topic of considerable relevance to the lives of many, if not most, human beings. It also poses a number of interesting philosophical questions, including definitional questions (What is it to “have sex”?), evaluative questions (What makes sex “good sex”?), normative questions (What makes sex morally good/right or bad/wrong?), and political questions (How, if at all, does sex feature in systems of oppression, inequality, or injustice?). Given that sex is an activity that most of us participate in at some point, the answers to these questions are likely to have weighty implications. For example, if our understanding of the ethics or politics of sex is distorted or incorrect then this could be expected to result in wrongs affecting large numbers of people. Sex has long been a prominent topic within feminist philosophy. Within analytic philosophy, the philosophy of sex has constituted a small but growing field for about forty-five years. However, the topic of sex provides a stark illustration of the tendency for feminist philosophy and analytic philosophy to operate in isolation from one another, for there is vanishingly little interaction between the analytic literature on sex and the feminist literature on sex. This division is especially worthy of comment given that the surge of interest in sex and sexuality within analytic philosophy in the late 1960s and the 1970s that gave rise to analytic philosophy of sex as a field (Primoratz 1999: 7) coincides with a renewed focus on these topics within feminist writing.1 One of the most distinctive and prominent feminist philosophers to have written about sex is Andrea Dworkin. An out lesbian, Dworkin, who died in 2005, was a vocal campaigner on issues of sexual violence, pornography, and



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

145

prostitution, and an author of numerous uncompromising books, essays, and speeches, including the 1987 book Intercourse.2 In this chapter, I will use Dworkin’s work to argue that greater interaction between feminist philosophy of sex and analytic philosophy of sex would be mutually beneficial. I will begin, in Section 2, by summarizing Dworkin’s arguments about sex in general and about sexual intercourse (i.e., coitus) in particular, and clarifying some aspects of her position that are easily misunderstood. Then, I will show how analytic work on social construction can be used to distinguish a number of distinct claims about the social construction of intercourse that are advanced in Dworkin’s account. Since these claims have different implications, require differing degrees of defense, and can be defended independently of one another, separating them out is an essential preliminary to assessing Dworkin’s arguments. In Section 4, I will turn my attention to the analytic philosophy of sex, in particular to the analytic literature on how sex should be defined. I will argue that Dworkin’s work draws our attention to the marked lack of engagement with social construction and with social context more generally within this literature, and I will assess some of the problems that arise from this oversight. Finally, in Section 5, I will compare Dworkin’s account of sex to an account put forward by analytic philosopher Seiriol Morgan to show how such interactions can advance our understanding of sex. I have selected Dworkin as an example of feminist philosophy of sex for two reasons: first, her work on sex stands out as a particularly detailed, rich, and ambitious study and so repays close critical scrutiny and, second, because Dworkin’s methodology and style are very much in counterpoint to analytic philosophy; thus, if there can be a productive engagement between Dworkin’s work and analytic philosophy of sex, then this bodes well for other feminist writers. The example of Dworkin will, I hope, provide an illustration of the sort of contributions that feminist philosophers might be well placed to make to the analytic philosophy of sex, and the ways in which, in turn, an analytic interpretation can augment feminist philosophical work on sex.

2  Dworkin’s account of intercourse as dominance Dworkin’s aims in Intercourse are overtly political; in a later interview, she said, “I decided to write a book about intercourse as an institution of sexual politics and to try to figure out the role of intercourse in the subordination of women” (1996: 210). The book can be seen as a work of ideology critique—

146

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

an interrogation of male supremacist ideology—and functions in large part through the analysis of literary texts. In what follows, I focus primarily on Intercourse ([1987] 2007), especially Chapter 7, “Occupation/Collaboration,” and references are to that volume unless indicated otherwise. Dworkin’s prose is dense, lyrical, and polemical (in the best sense of the word), and much is lost in paraphrasing it; what follows is thus an inevitably limited summary of what I take to be her main points. Dworkin uses the term “intercourse” to describe coitus specifically, that is, penile penetration of the vagina.3 She observes that there is a prevalent conceptualization of intercourse as an act of possession, with the man the active penetrator/possessor and the woman the passive penetrated/possessed, the boundaries of her body violated by this act of possession.4 This model, which I shall call “intercourse as dominance,” both presupposes and perpetuates inequality: it would not be appropriate to penetrate/possess an equal, and once someone has been penetrated/possessed, they are rendered unequal regardless of their prior status. The tacit social conceptualization of intercourse as dominance is accompanied—and indeed masked—by the idea that intercourse is a natural phenomenon, and therefore an appropriate one. All of this generates a tension between, on the one hand, the idea that having bodily integrity and privacy is an important component of humanity, and, on the other, the idea that intercourse— penetration of a woman’s body—is a natural and therefore appropriate act. If human beings have inviolable bodily boundaries, and if women’s bodily boundaries are supposed to be violated through intercourse, then women must lack privacy and integrity, and hence full human status; this is the logic of male supremacy that Dworkin takes herself to have identified (154). Dworkin further argues that women are faced with a double bind based on the logic just outlined. According to this double bind, penetration is the normal use of a woman (women who refuse it are defective qua women); yet being penetrated degrades a woman (affirms that she lacks bodily integrity and privacy and so has a less-than-human status).5 Whether or not women participate in or seek to avoid intercourse, their social status as fully human is rendered precarious. This ideological construction of intercourse as dominance, with the accompanying double bind, takes place in a context in which men have material power over women, thereby pushing women toward participation rather than refusal (160).6 Thus, women are encouraged to see intercourse as necessary to affirm their worth and to present themselves as unequal in order to facilitate intercourse as dominance; and, moreover, in doing so they actively collaborate



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

147

in their own subordination. For Dworkin, the main way that women present themselves as unequal is through presenting themselves as sexual objects and inviting men to treat them in ways that are characteristic of objects rather than of persons.7 As she puts it, “in becoming an object so that he can objectify her so that he can fuck her, she begins a political collaboration with his dominance; and then when he enters her, he confirms for himself and for her what she is: that she is something, not someone; certainly not someone equal” (178). The conclusion is that intercourse, socially constructed in terms of gendered dominance, plays a central role in women’s subordination. Dworkin’s analysis of intercourse as dominance is both complex and controversial. One aspect of it that is likely to provoke immediate resistance is her apparent claim that the oppressive nature of intercourse applies even when intercourse is chosen and desired by women (168). It is important, then, to be clear about what Dworkin is claiming. As I read her, she holds that because all women are subject to male social power, no woman engages in intercourse from a position of freedom (170). This is to say that although a particular act of intercourse may be chosen by the woman to a greater or lesser degree, this choice always takes place in the context of a background structure that limits women’s options.8 Although Dworkin’s work is not linked to the neo-republican tradition in political philosophy, the sense in which she uses the term “dominance” may be familiar to readers from that body of work, and we can profitably think of her analysis of intercourse as dominance in terms of Philip Petit’s account of domination (1996). According to Petit, to be dominated is to be subject to the arbitrary power of another, even if the dominating party does not exercise this power. Similarly, I read Dworkin as claiming that women are dominated through intercourse in the sense that they are subject to the arbitrary power of men with regard to intercourse. Domination in this sense does not depend on the agency of the dominator or the experience of the dominated; rather, it is a feature of the structural circumstances in which the parties are situated. For example, it is extremely difficult for a man to be successfully prosecuted for raping a woman who is his partner or even his voluntary companion, especially if he does not cause her additional serious physical injuries. So when a man and a woman both choose to have intercourse, they do so under circumstances in which he could, with effective impunity, force her to have intercourse if he chose to do so. The fact that a particular man would never dream of doing this and that a particular woman experiences her choice as free does not mean that they are not in a relationship of domination. It is primarily via a contrast between freedom

148

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and domination, rather between freedom and force, that we should understand Dworkin’s claim that intercourse as currently practised—that is, as practised in the context of men’s material power over women—is antithetical to women’s freedom.9 This is not to say that Dworkin does not hold that force is a prominent part of many women’s experiences of intercourse, for she most certainly does; it is simply to say that Dworkin should not be read as claiming that force is always present in women’s experience of intercourse. Another point on which it is crucial to be clear is that Dworkin does not take the role of intercourse in women’s subordination to be determined by its anatomical features. At certain points in her discussion, she seems to hint at such a view; for example, she poses the following questions in reference to intercourse: “Can an occupied people—physically occupied inside, internally invaded—be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically-based physical integrity have self-respect?” (156). The use of terms such as “biologically based” might direct us toward an interpretation that takes Dworkin to hold that the problematic nature of intercourse is determined by the physical configuration of the act itself.10 On this reading, Dworkin would be committed to the claim that intercourse as such always and inevitably poses a threat to women’s political status as fully human. In the final analysis, however, Dworkin takes it to be an open possibility that intercourse can exist without objectification and without male power over women (181); it is only intercourse as dominance that could not.11 This strongly suggests that she takes the view that the politically problematic nature of intercourse as currently practiced is something that is at least partly created by social practices rather than something that is determined by biological factors alone. This interpretation directs us toward reading the “metaphysics” and the “biology” of the phrase quoted above as the supposed “metaphysics” and “biology” posited by the logic of male supremacy that Dworkin seeks to elaborate.

3  Intercourse, sex, and varieties of social construction The interpretative question discussed at the end of the previous section serves to highlight that Dworkin is concerned with social construction, which is to say, with the process by which human social practices create and shape categories and artifacts. More precisely, she is concerned with a social construction that is ideological in the (pejorative) sense that it both emerges from and sustains a set



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

149

of material circumstances in which one group dominates another. This much is clear; what is less clear is precisely what Dworkin takes to be socially constructed: Is it intercourse itself, or the activity of sex more broadly conceived, or both? And exactly what kind of process of social construction is being posited? These are important questions, because unless we are clear on what Dworkin’s thesis is then it will be impossible to evaluate her arguments. Given the importance of intercourse in particular and sex in general to many people’s lives, and given the severity of the negative implications Dworkin attaches to them, it is a matter of some urgency to establish whether or not her argument is sound. It is, however, difficult to answer these questions based on Dworkin’s text alone, in part because she does not offer an explicit account of her understanding of social construction and in part because of her writing style, which, although highly evocative and rhetorically powerful, does not lend itself to precision. In order to answer this question, then, we need to utilize a more fine-grained account of social construction and apply it carefully to Dworkin’s work. Work on social construction within analytical philosophy has aimed to provide a fine-grained account of the kind that is called for. One of the most detailed and rigorous accounts available is that offered by Sally Haslanger (2012). Haslanger draws a useful distinction between causal social construction and constitutive social construction. Here is how she defines these two kinds of social construction: Causal: “Something is causally constructed [if and only if] social factors play a causal role in bringing it into existence or, to some substantial extent, in its being the way it is.” (2012: 87) Constitutive: “Something is constitutively constructed [if and only if] in defining it we must make reference to social factors.” (2012: 87)

As an example of something that is causally socially constructed, consider the species Gallus gallus domesticus, the domestic chicken. Domestic chickens have been selectively bred to have certain features, and they are currently bred in large numbers. Human beings, through various social practices, have caused domestic chickens to exist as a kind, to exist in the numbers in which they exist, and to have certain significant features that they have, such as laying eggs frequently. However, we can define a domestic chicken with reference to biology alone: if someone does not know what a domestic chicken is, I can explain this to them without referring to social practices (i.e., farming, selective breeding, the consumption of chicken meat and eggs, etc.) by describing the

150

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

biological features that define the species, including, if necessary, its genome. I only need to refer to social practices if the person goes on to ask me why there are domestic chickens, or why domestic chickens are the way that they are (e.g., why they produce eggs at the rate that they do). By contrast, as an example of something that is constitutively socially constructed, consider legal adults. The age at which a person is considered a legal adult is determined by social practices, more particularly by laws, and varies between different legal jurisdictions. If someone asks me what a legal adult is, I must refer to social factors such as the social practice of holding someone fully legally accountable for their actions, the social practice of treating one person as having the rights and responsibilities of parenthood or guardianship with respect to another, and so on (spelling out these social practices precisely would of course be quite involved). Let us now consider how these two kinds of social construction apply to Dworkin’s arguments about intercourse. Dworkin clearly takes intercourse to be causally constructed: social factors cause intercourse to be the way it is (or, more aptly, to happen the way it happens), and these factors include both social arrangements that give men power over women and a certain set of ways of thinking and talking about intercourse. For example, she writes: The culture romanticizes the rapist dimension of the first time: he will force his way in and hurt her. The event itself is supposed to be so distinct, so entirely unlike any other experience or category of sensation, that there is no conception that intercourse can be part of sex, including the first time, instead of sex itself. There is no slow opening up, no slow, gradual entry; no days and months of sensuality prior to entry and no nights and hours after entry. (165)

The idea here is that the first occasion of intercourse experienced by a woman is conceptualized as (a) a discrete event which (b) can be expected to hurt. This conceptualization causes many women engaging in intercourse for the first time to do so in a way that is disconnected from a broader sensual process and for that very reason is likely to be painful, and may also (we might suppose) lead them to continue with intercourse despite experiencing pain, thinking that pain is “normal.” Thus, social factors such as widely shared conceptualizations of initial sexual experiences have a causal effect on how and when intercourse takes place. We can summarize this general claim as follows: Causal Claim about Intercourse (General) (CaIG): Intercourse is causally socially constructed.



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

151

We can also identify a more specific claim that incorporates Dworkin’s account of the effect of social factors on how and when intercourse takes place, which is to say, her account of intercourse as dominance: Causal Claim about Intercourse (Specific) (CaIS): Intercourse is causally socially constructed as an act of male dominance that undermines women’s social and political status as full human beings.

Note that CaIG is implied by CaIS, but CaIS is not implied by CaIG. In other words, it is possible to accept the general claim that intercourse is causally socially constructed without agreeing with Dworkin about the features that intercourse has come to have. Moreover, CaIG is clearly much easier to defend than CaIS. Indeed, in light of the differences that we can observe in how intercourse is practised in different places and at different times, it is difficult to see how anyone could seriously argue that social factors have no causal impact on the phenomenon of intercourse. By contrast, Dworkin’s account of intercourse as dominance, though arresting, is controversial. If we replace the notion of causal social construction with the notion of constitutive social construction, we get a different pair of claims. Constitutive Claim about Intercourse (General) (ConIG): Intercourse is constitutively socially constructed. Constitutive Claim about Intercourse (Specific) (ConIS): Intercourse is constitutively socially constructed as an act of male dominance that undermines women’s social and political status as full human beings.

ConIG states that it is not possible to define intercourse without reference to social factors. ConIS states, in addition, that the social factors required to define intercourse are male dominance and the undermining of women’s social and political status as full human beings. Again, ConIS implies ConIG, but ConIG does not imply ConIS. Dworkin certainly rejects the stronger of the two claims, ConIS, for she is, if not exactly happy, at least tentatively willing to discuss the possibility that intercourse could exist outside of a context of male dominance, and if something could be intercourse without being an act of male dominance then it must be possible to define intercourse without reference to male dominance.12 Note, then, the important difference that the distinction between causal and constitutive construction makes to Dworkin’s view: although Dworkin thinks that intercourse is causally constructed as dominance, she does not think that is it constitutively constructed as dominance.

152

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

The claim advanced by ConIG is that it is impossible to define intercourse without reference to social factors. Dworkin herself does not explicitly endorse or reject this claim. Given that it has already been stipulated that intercourse is to be understood as penile penetration of the vagina, there are two questions that we would need to answer in order to settle this issue. The first is the question of whether the idea of “penetration” involves reference to social factors. The second question is whether the definitions of “penis” and “vagina” involve reference to social factors. Neither of these questions obviously merits a negative answer. One consideration that suggests that social factors are involved in the concept of penetration is the fact that is possible to conceive of coitus in terms of a concept other than penetration—for example, as an act in which the vagina envelops the penis. This suggests that the concept of “penetration” is somewhat thicker than the idea simply that one thing ends up inside another thing, perhaps involving the interpretation of movement and relative positioning in terms of agency. If this is right then it would follow that the definition of “penetration” involves social factors. One consideration that suggests that social factors are involved in the definition of “penis” and “vagina” concerns the assignment of sex to intersex infants with ambiguous genitalia. Work by Anne Fausto-Sterling, among others, shows that, in such cases, social factors strongly influence decisions about whether to classify a phallic structure as a penis or as a clitoris; these include whether doctors judge that the structure would prompt “locker room teasing” if classified as a penis (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Both of these questions are worthy of further consideration, although a full assessment of them is beyond the scope of the present investigation. Let us now, more briefly, consider how the distinction between causal and constitutive social construction can clarify Dworkin’s account of sex. It is important to consider sex separately from intercourse because Dworkin does not hold that intercourse and sex are socially synonymous. Rather, she claims that sex is socially equated with the violation of women, of which intercourse is only one form. As she puts it, “intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women, but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men” (175). Part of Dworkin’s point appears to be that nothing unites the eclectic assortment of things that people deem to be sex apart from their function of violating women’s bodies. According to Dworkin, then, to define sex we must make reference to violations of women’s bodies, which is a social factor, because what counts as violation



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

153

depends on social norms, such as how dignity is understood in a particular social context. This is, then, a claim about constitutive construction: Constitutive Claim about Sex (Specific) (ConSS): Sex is constitutively socially constructed as any violation of a woman’s body.

For completeness, we can add the other three possible claims about sex, all of which I take to be endorsed by Dworkin: Causal Claim about Sex (General) (CaSG): Sex is causally socially constructed. Causal Claim about Sex (Specific) (CaSS): Sex is causally socially constructed as the violation of women’s bodies. Constitutive Claim about Sex (General) (ConSG): Sex is constitutively socially constructed.13

As with the claims about intercourse, the four claims about sex vary in terms of their prima facie plausibility. For example, all that CaSG commits us to is the claim that if social factors such as the way that people conceptualize sex were different, then people would have sex—which is to say, would be sexual with one another—in different ways. As with CaIG, this seems hard to deny. By contrast, ConSS is much more controversial. It is easy to think of examples that clearly seem to be sex but that are very difficult to conceptualize as involving the violation of women’s bodies: two women affectionately performing oral sex on one another, for example. Nevertheless, even this claim ought not to be dismissed out of hand. It gains some support from the fact that the sort of sex just described is commonly seen as less paradigmatically sex than, for example, intercourse. It gains further support from the fact that a wide variety of practices that are explicitly presented as violations of women’s bodies are highly prevalent in commercially successful pornography, some of them quite outlandish from the perspective of one who is not a habitual viewer (Dines 2011). The least we can say is that violence and hierarchy are sexualized; as Judith Grant puts it, “how could I think otherwise when I saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib and heard about the sexualized torture of prisoners there, a sexual torture that used the always already eroticized bodies of women soldiers as weapons?” (2006: 968). To grant this is already to grant that ConSS is, though not necessarily true, worthy of consideration. To sum up, I have distinguished four different claims about intercourse and established whether Dworkin advances or rejects each of them: Causal Claim about Intercourse (General) (CaIG): Intercourse is causally socially constructed. ●● Advanced by Dworkin

154

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Causal Claim about Intercourse (Specific) (CaIS): Intercourse is causally socially constructed as an act of male dominance that undermines women’s social and political status as full human beings. ●● Advanced by Dworkin Constitutive Claim about Intercourse (General) (ConIG): Intercourse is constitutively socially constructed. ●● Neither advanced nor rejected by Dworkin Constitutive Claim about Intercourse (Specific) (ConIS): Intercourse is constitutively socially constructed as an act of male dominance that undermines women’s social and political status as full human beings. ●● Rejected by Dworkin

I have also identified four corresponding claims about sex (CaSG, CaSI, ConSG, ConSI), all of which I take to be advanced by Dworkin. The asymmetry between Dworkin’s stance on intercourse and her stance on sex—for example, the fact that she advances the specific constitutive claim about sex but rejects the specific constitutive claim about intercourse—highlights the need to keep the intercourse/ sex distinction in mind when assessing Dworkin’s arguments. Moreover, as I have shown, the eight claims differ significantly with regard to how difficult they are to argue for. For example, CaSG is easy to defend based on observable differences in how sex is practised in different places and at different times. By contrast, defending ConIS would be extremely difficult; in order to establish that intercourse cannot be defined without reference to dominance, we would have to offer an explanation of the fact that we seem to be able to define intercourse perfectly well without any reference to dominance whatsoever. Separating the claims in this way is therefore an essential preliminary to assessing Dworkin’s arguments about intercourse and sex: unless we know what kind of construction she is positing, we cannot judge what kind of justification she owes us.

4  Analytic attempts to define sex In this section, I will show that the possibility that sex is in some way socially constructed holds major significance for analytic philosophy of sex, in particular for the prominent strand within this literature that seeks to define or otherwise characterize sex. Early contributors to this debate tended to focus on the representational or intentional features of sexual desire. Thomas Nagel (1969) argued that sexual desire is characterized by a complex, multilayered form of



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

155

mutual awareness, while Robert Solomon (1974) offered an account of sex as a form of communication. In contrast to these accounts, which are termed “intentionalist” because of their focus on representational mental content, later “hedonist” accounts focused on bodily pleasure. Most notably, Alan Goldman defined sexual desire as “the desire for contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces,” and sexual activity as activity that tends to fulfill sexual desire (1977: 104). Goldman’s definition is known as the “plain sex view,” and it aims to account for forms of sexual interaction that are not loaded with psychological significance, such as casual sex between strangers. Igor Primoratz (1999) offers an alternative hedonistic account of sex, termed the “plainer sex” account, that differs from Goldman’s plain sex account in that it omits the reference to contact with another person’s body from the definition of sexual desire, in order to allow for solitary sexual activities such as masturbation. This literature does not engage with the idea that sex is socially constructed. Nor does it engage at all with social context: even in cases where the definition of sex refers to interpersonal factors, the relevant kinds of interpersonal interactions are considered in an abstracted way that divorces them from any particular social context. Whether or not the neglect of social construction and of social factors more generally in the analytic philosophy of sex is a shortcoming depends on whether or not sex is socially constructed, and, if it is, on the type of social construction that is involved. We have seen that there are strong reasons for thinking that sex is causally socially constructed. If this is so, then social factors will be relevant to a full understanding of sex, but it will nevertheless be possible to define sex without reference to social factors. It follows that the approach adopted by analytic philosophers of sex has the potential to succeed, although its value may be limited. However, we have also considered the possibility that, as Dworkin argues, sex is constitutively socially constructed. If sex is constitutively socially constructed, then it cannot be defined without reference to social factors. This would thoroughly undermine the main approach adopted by analytic philosophers of sex, that is, the attempt to define sex by reference to factors that are nonsocial. If sex is constitutively socially constructed, we would expect to see attempts by analytic philosophers to define it without reference to social factors run into difficulties for that reason. One account that runs into difficulties of precisely this sort is Igor Primoratz’s definition of sex, set out in his book Ethics and Sex (1999). Primoratz argues that Goldman’s “plain sex” view is an improvement over intentionalist accounts because it takes sex “on its own terms,” not treating it

156

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

as a part of, or a means to, something else; it takes sex “as it finds it” (1999: 41–43). Primoratz argues, however, that the plain sex account cannot deal adequately with masturbation: defining sexual desire in terms of contact with another person’s body relegates masturbation to the status of being only derivatively or indirectly sexual in nature, a consequence which Primoratz finds unacceptably counterintuitive. He therefore puts forward his own hedonist account, the “plainer sex” account, which removes the idea of interpersonal contact altogether, “The notion of sexual pleasure . . . can be specified as follows: it is the sort of bodily pleasure experienced in the sexual parts of the body, or at least related to those parts in that if it is associated with arousal, the arousal occurs in those parts” (1999: 46). Primoratz specifies that the sexual parts of the body are “the genitals and other parts that differentiate the sexes.” Primoratz’s account involves four claims. In logical order, we have (1) sexual activity is activity that tends to fulfill sexual desire. This might sound trivial, but in fact it represents a substantive choice to define sexual activity in terms of desire rather than, say, procreation. Next, we have (2) sexual desire is desire for sexual pleasure. This is where we get the contrast with accounts that focus on, for example, mutual awareness or communication. The next claim is (3) sexual pleasure is pleasure connected to the sexual parts of the body (it is experienced there, or it is liable to cause arousal there). This is where Primoratz distinguishes himself from Goldman’s “plain sex” view, by rejecting an interpersonal definition of sexual pleasure. Finally, we have (4) the sexual parts of the body are “the genitals and other parts that differentiate the sexes.” It is the fourth claim, the definition of the sexual parts of the body, that really does the work in Primoratz’s theory: unless we know which parts of the body are the sexual parts of the body, then both sexual desire and sex will remain mysterious. In light of this, it is surprising that Primoratz does not say anything about this definition beyond the single sentence quoted above. Moreover, the definition he offers is open to several counterexamples. First, what about nipples? Men and women both have nipples and plenty of people experience pleasurable sensations in their nipples that they would describe as sexual. On Primoratz’s account it seems that such pleasure can only be sexual in the secondary sense of being associated with arousal in the directly sexual parts of the body, since nipples are neither genitals nor “parts that differentiate the sexes.” Yet, it seems to me more apt to say that pleasurable sensations experienced in the nipples can be sexual in and of themselves, not in virtue of their connection to genital arousal; and indeed, nipples can undergo changes, such as hardening, that could



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

157

reasonably be interpreted as arousal. So nipples seem to be a counterexample to Primoratz’s definition of the sexual parts of the body because they are wrongly excluded: in other words, the account is too narrow. Second, what about laryngeal prominences? The laryngeal prominence, or Adam’s apple, is an anatomical feature very unevenly distributed between men and women (men on the whole tend to have larger laryngeal prominences than women), but there are surely few people who experience sexual pleasure in their laryngeal prominence—or, to put it another way, few people would be inclined to describe pleasure experienced in the laryngeal prominence as sexual. So the example of the laryngeal prominence seems to be wrongly included in Primoratz’s definition of the sexual parts of the body, showing that the account is too broad. These two examples indicate that a body part’s being one that “differentiates the sexes” is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to be, prima facie, a body part that is sexual. An even more serious difficulty for the plainer sex view, however, stems from the fact that Primoratz appears to assume that binary sex difference can be taken for granted, when in fact the claim that there are two discrete biological sexes has been robustly challenged by decades of research in biological science and gender theory, including in work by feminist theorists (see, e.g., Butler 1990; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Wittig 1996). This challenge rests in part on the fact that biological characteristics associated with sex, such as genitals, gonads, and hormone production, occur along a spectrum and can be found in various different combinations. The claim is that the apparent existence of two sexes, male and female, is a product of social practices that actively intervene to bring bodies with diverse sex characteristics into line with the norm for one of these two categories. Let me stress that I am not relying here on the claim that sex is socially constructed; my point is rather that Primoratz’s casual assumption that it is not socially constructed is illegitimate given the challenges that have been raised to this claim. I have shown, then, that Primoratz’s definition of the sexual parts of the body runs into two kinds of difficulties. First, the nonsocial conditions he proposes for a body part’s being a sexual part of the body (it’s being either the genitals or a part that “differentiates the sexes”) are neither necessary nor sufficient. Furthermore, it is not immediately apparent how these conditions could be amended to make them necessary and sufficient. Second, Primoratz makes the illegitimate assumption that binary sex categories are straightforwardly biological, demonstrating a marked disregard for the sizeable critical literature on the social construction of sex difference. In fact, he needs to offer an argument for the claim that “the sexes” can be defined without reference to social factors. These

158

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

are precisely the sorts of difficulties that we might expect to arise for an attempt to define sex without regard to social factors if sex was in fact constitutively socially constructed. If Dworkin is correct in her claim that sex is constitutively causally constructed, then analytic philosophers of sex such as Primoratz need to abandon their attempts to define sex without reference to social factors and instead begin attending to sex as a social phenomenon situated in a particular cultural location. However, even if sex turns out not to be constitutively socially constructed, there is still plenty of reason for analytic philosophers to attend to social factors. This is because, as we have seen, it is very likely that sex is causally socially constructed. It follows that even if attention to social factors is not necessary in order to define sex, it is nevertheless necessary in order to achieve a rich understanding of sex as a phenomenon. In either case, then, analytic philosophers of sex have reason to incorporate social factors into their accounts of sex.

5  Dworkin, Morgan, and “Sex in the Head” So far, I have shown that analytic philosophy can be used to clarify Dworkin’s work in ways that are an essential preliminary to assessing her arguments, and that Dworkin’s claim that sex is constitutively socially constructed is one that should be taken seriously by analytic philosophers of sex. In this final section, I will demonstrate that Dworkin’s specific claims about sex and intercourse can be brought into productive dialogue with analytic work on sex. I do this by comparing Dworkin’s account of intercourse as dominance with Seiriol Morgan’s account of the role of meaning in sexual desire. In his 2003 paper “Sex in the Head” (2003b), Morgan intervenes in the debate between intentionalists and hedonists, advancing a sophisticated and compelling account of the role that intentionality plays in sexual desire and sexual experiences which cannot easily be placed in either camp. According to Morgan, although sexual desire is not necessarily intentional in nature, it is nevertheless “essentially open to being caught up in intentional significance, and . . . its nature is partially transformed when this happens” (2003b: 7). In other words, although we do not need to make reference to intentionality or meaning in defining sexual desire, our understanding of sex would be severely impoverished if we did not take note of the various ways in which people can and do attach meaning to sex. Moreover, Morgan stresses that the meanings we attach to sex and the ways in which we



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

159

conceptualize sexual activities are not separate from the physical sensations we experience. Rather, the intentional significance a particular sexual encounter has for the parties involved can modify and inflect their physical experiences. Referring to the particular smell or taste of a long-lost lover with whom one is reunited, Morgan notes that “saturated with significance as it is, it is experienced very differently [from the way it would be experienced if it held no significance], though it is still that sensation that is being experienced” (2003b: 11). Morgan concludes that, since different experiences of sexual desire vary vastly with regard to how significant a role is played by intentionality, attempts to give a unitary account of the role of intentionality in sex are misguided. Morgan thus holds that, pace the intentionalist, there is nothing unusual, still less problematic or perverse, about sexual desire where interpersonal intentional significance does not play a role, but that, pace the hedonist, when such intentional significance is present it is part of sexual desire proper, and not merely a “concurrently experienced emotional pleasure” (Morgan 2003b: 2). Morgan’s insistence on taking seriously both the embodied nature of sexual meaning and the meaningful nature of many embodied sexual pleasures finds a strong echo in some of Dworkin’s remarks, including her claim that, “the meanings we create or learn do not exist only in our heads, as ineffable ideas. Our meanings also exist in our bodies—what we are, what we do, what we physically feel, what we physically know; and there is no personal psychology that is separate from what the body has learned about life” (176). In fact, Morgan discusses Dworkin’s work in a separate paper on the ethical status of sexual desires (2003a). This is one of the very few serious discussions of Dworkin in the analytic philosophy of sex (for others, see Herman 1993; Hampton 1999). Although Morgan acknowledges that Dworkin’s work offers some important insights, he concludes that, “unfortunately, however insightful she may be about some of the disturbing ways in which male sexual desire can manifest itself, Dworkin very much overplays her hand” (2003a: 393). As Morgan reads it, Dworkin’s account leaves “no room . . . for individual men to feel nonexploitative desire for women, nor indeed for women to enjoy sex outside of a context of eroticized abjection” (2003a: 393). Morgan judges this to be false, and rejects Dworkin’s account on this basis. Dworkin is not without resources for responding to Morgan’s critique. As I argued above, we should understand Dworkin as concerned with domination in the sense of a structural situation in which one party is exposed to the arbitrary power of another. Read in this light, Dworkin can indeed allow that men can feel nonexploitative desire for women. The point is that, for Dworkin, the character

160

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

of a man’s sexual desire for a woman, however wholesome and respectful, cannot cancel out the fact of his dominance because male dominance is an objective structural feature of the situation in which that man finds himself.14 Similarly, Dworkin’s account does, I think, leave room for the possibility that women can have enjoyable experiences of sex, including intercourse, in which eroticized abjection is not part of what they are enjoying. What she is committed to is the claim that this experience happens in a context in which female abjection is strongly eroticized, and perhaps also the claim that to the extent that a woman’s pleasure is bound up with a sense of herself as female, eroticized abjection will be part of what she is experiencing. It is certainly true, however, that Dworkin seems to think that these more positive experiences of sexual interactions are extremely rare, and that eroticized male domination and female subordination not only characterize the structural context in which sexual encounters take place but are also central to the character of most sexual experiences. Her view seems to be that we need to establish a society free from ideologies of male dominance before we have a meaningful chance of regularly achieving erotic experiences that are not centered on gendered dominance and subordination (Dworkin 1974). Morgan, on the other hand, holds that although some erotic experiences are centered on gendered dominance and subordination, most are not. My own view is in the middle: I think that the ideology of eroticized and gendered dominance/subordination is easier to elide than Dworkin believes it to be, yet more pervasive than Morgan allows. Pace Dworkin, we do not have to establish a gender-free society before we can have sexual experiences in which gendered domination/subordination does not play a central role; but pace Morgan, gendered domination/subordination does structure the backdrop of our sexual world to a significant extent. My aim is to offer a partial defense of this intermediate position: I will be arguing that a sexual ideology of gendered dominance/subordination centered on intercourse is more prevalent than Morgan allows, although I will not have space to defend the companion claim that this ideology is less totalizing than Dworkin claims it is.15 I will seek to show that one of Morgan’s own examples from “Sex in the Head” actually presupposes a widely held understanding, linking intercourse with gendered dominance/subordination in just the way Dworkin describes. The example in question is called “Fucking the Police.” Here is the case as Morgan describes it: When I was a young man I had a friend who for obvious reasons was popularly known as “Johnny Drugs.” One summer, to everyone’s astonishment, Johnny



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

161

had a brief sexual relationship with a female police officer. He cheerfully told me that his attraction to her was dramatically enhanced by the fact that she was in the police force, to the extent that he found himself repeating the inner mantra “I’m fucking the Police! I’m fucking the Police!,” as he was penetrating her. This activity, I was informed, had the effect of dramatically increasing the intensity of his physical pleasure, in particular his eventual orgasm. (“Fucking the Police” was clearly an idea that very much appealed to Johnny.) (2003b: 7)

Morgan uses “Fucking the Police” to illustrate how someone’s conceptualization of an erotic situation can affect their embodied sexual experiences. I differ from Morgan in that I do not find this story terribly “amusing” (12).16 I do, however, find it immediately intelligible: there is nothing baffling, bizarre, or even surprising about Johnny’s experience; I do not have to pause and think carefully before I see how this case is supposed to work. I think that this is likely to be the response of most readers, and Morgan certainly seems to take this view, based not only on his use of the example to argue for his account of sex but also on his stated belief that although the intensity of Johnny’s pleasure is idiosyncratic, its general form is not, since “many men would no doubt experience some kind of frisson having sex with a policewoman” (8). Morgan does not, however, seem to fully appreciate the significance of this point, namely that the very ease with which we can understand “Fucking the Police” is evidence of a strong shared social meaning linking sexual penetration with gendered dominance and subordination that is consistent with Dworkin’s analysis. I will demonstrate this via a few reworkings of Morgan’s example. First, I submit that the default reading of the “Fucking the Police” example is as follows: in the ongoing battle of wills between Johnny and the police, the sex that Johnny has with the policewoman represents a “point” for Johnny; Johnny feels like he has “come out on top” (itself a phrase loaded with sexual significance). Since it is the policewoman who represents the police in this scenario, this reading rests on the idea that the intercourse that takes place between Johnny and the policewoman serves, in the first instance, to demonstrate or signify his dominance over her (and, by extension, the police force in general). To see how this is so, consider the following addition to the account: Intimacy: When questioned further, Johnny explains that when he is thinking “I’m fucking the police,” what he means (and what he is excited about) is the fact that he is being intimate with “the police.” In other words, “I’m so close to the police! I’m so close to the police!” would be an equally good description of what’s going on in his mind while he is penetrating the policewoman.

162

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

My contention is that most people will read this addition to the account as a reframing rather than simply an elaboration—as something that disrupts their previous understanding of the situation, rather than merely adding more detail to it. This shows that the idea of intercourse as domination is one that is readily available to us and, in at least some cases, the one we reach for by default. Of course, the very fact of the dual meaning of the word “fucking”—“fucking” in the sense of “engaging in intercourse, especially as the penetrating party” and “fucking” in the sense of “beating, winning against, generally putting down” (“the other team really fucked us out there”; “so-and-so totally fucked me over”)—also speaks to this conclusion. Furthermore, this understanding of intercourse as domination is gendered. Consider this revision to the original case: Jane Drugs: Switch the genders so that it is Jane Drugs who, while being sexually penetrated by a policeman, thinks to herself, “I’m fucking the police! I’m fucking the police!,” and experiences a particularly intense pleasure.

Again, I submit that this revision is much less intuitive than the original version. We have to pause a little to parse the Jane Drugs story, whereas we do not need to do so for the Johnny Drugs version. This shows that gender is important: we cannot interpret a case of a woman being penetrated by a man as a case of her dominating him as easily as we can read a case of a man penetrating a woman as a case of his dominating her. Of course, it might be that it is the switch from being the penetrating party to the penetrated party, more than gender, that is the difference between Johnny and Jane in these examples. Even so, to the extent that the roles of penetrator and penetrated are related to (though not determined by) gender in prevailing social conceptions, gender seems to play some role here. Finally, the activity of intercourse seems to be playing a crucial role, in that the example becomes less intelligible if it is swapped for a different sexual activity. Oral Sex: Re-write the case so that instead of referring to penetration, it states that while Johnny Drugs is performing oral sex on the policewoman he is thinking “I’m going down on the police! I’m going down on the police!,” and experiences a particularly intense pleasurable sensation as a result.

I think this revision once more makes the example less intuitive, suggesting that the association is between domination and intercourse specifically, rather than domination and sex acts in general. If I am right that each of these three revisions—“Intimacy,” “Jane Drugs,” and “Oral Sex”—renders the example less easy to understand and less intuitive,



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

163

then it follows that the form of the original case must fit with background social understandings of sexual meaning, and that those meanings must, to some extent, link intercourse with gendered domination. This is, of course, precisely the kind of link that Dworkin posits, although it does not follow that this link is as strong as Dworkin takes it to be. Far from being merely a feature of a few people’s attitudes to sex, the conceptualization of intercourse as an act of gendered domination/subordination is, at the very least, a feature of widely shared implicit understandings of sex. By no means does this fully vindicate Dworkin’s account of intercourse as dominance; however, it does show that she has not “overplayed her hand” as much as Morgan believes. More importantly, however, this exploration highlights that, besides the idiosyncratic meaning that the sex in “Fucking the Police” has for Jonny Drugs in particular, there is also a shared social meaning at work in the case that informs our reading of the example.17 This shared meaning is publically available even though we might not become conscious that we are drawing on it until we contrast the original example with similar cases that run counter to this meaning. These insights are important for three reasons. First, they shed further light on the nature of sexual meaning. Sex may indeed be “in the head,” but this is not to say that sexual meaning is always easily available to introspection. Moreover, there is an interesting sense in which sex is not just in my head or in your head, but in our heads. Given that shared meanings typically play a role in social construction (Haslanger 2012; Hacking 1990), and given that we have seen some reasons for thinking that sex may be socially constructed, this point merits further investigation. Second, these insights offer further confirmation of the importance of recognizing that sex requires investigation as a social phenomenon situated in a cultural context. As we saw in the previous section, even those analytic accounts of sex which emphasize intentionality and interpersonal interaction typically fail to attend to sex as a social phenomenon occurring in a cultural context (Nagel 1969; Solomon 1974; Goldman 1977; Primoratz 1999). Correcting this failure would involve attending to shared social meanings, and Morgan’s account provides excellent tools for this purpose.

6  Concluding remarks My aim in this chapter has been to show that greater interaction between feminist philosophy of sex and analytic philosophy, including analytic philosophy of sex, would be mutually beneficial. Taking Andrea Dworkin’s work as a case study, I

164

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

have explored three different lines of support for this claim. First, I have argued that it is not possible to assess Dworkin’s arguments about intercourse, sex, and social construction without gaining greater clarity concerning the claims that she is making. Analytic work that distinguishes between causal and constitutive social construction provides this clarity. This shows that analytic philosophy can make valuable contributions to feminist philosophy of sex. Second, I have argued that the possibility that sex is constitutively socially constructed threatens to seriously undermine existing attempts by analytic philosophers to define sex: if sex is, as Dworkin argues, constitutively socially constructed, then it cannot be defined without reference to social factors, and definitions of sex that are proposed by analytic philosophers do not typically make reference to social factors. This is, therefore, a matter of great urgency for analytic philosophers of sex. Feminist work on sex that engages with social construction, such as Dworkin’s, both highlights this issue and provides resources for addressing it. This shows that feminist philosophy of sex can make valuable contributions to projects of interest to analytic philosophers of sex. Finally, I have argued that bringing feminist accounts of sex and analytic accounts of sex into conversation with one another yields important insights. Here, I compared Dworkin’s account of the intentional aspects of sexual desire with Morgan’s. This comparison shows that Dworkin’s account of intercourse as dominance is more plausible than Morgan allows. More importantly, considering these accounts together highlights two interesting aspects of sexual meaning that merit further investigation: the fact that sexual meanings are not always immediately apparent, and the fact that sexual meanings can be shared as well as idiosyncratic. Rectifying the separation of analytic philosophy of sex and feminist philosophy of sex is not a task that can be accomplished in a single chapter. What I have shown, however, is that it is a task that must be undertaken if we are to succeed in gaining a fuller understanding of the important, complex, and at times troubling phenomenon of sex.

Notes 1 This period of feminism is often termed “the second wave,” but I want to resist the terminology of “waves,” partly because I think it misleadingly minimizes the continuities between different generations of feminists, and partly because I find it unilluminating.



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

165

2 Dworkin’s arguments in Intercourse are sometimes incorrectly paraphrased as the claim that “all sex is rape”; she comments on this misconception in the “Preface” added to the work in 1995. (Dworkin 2007: xxxii) 3 Dworkin appears to assume, incorrectly, that a person with a penis is a man and a person with a vagina is a woman, in which case her project could be described as cis-normative (i.e., centering cisgender perspectives at the expense of transgender perspectives); however, she could perhaps also be interpreted as making the weaker (and in my view, true) claim that this is so according to patriarchal ideology. 4 “Intercourse is commonly written about and comprehended as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relation to her—over her and inside her—is his possession of her. He has her, or, when he is done, he has had her.” (79) 5 See Frye (1983) for an account of the role of double binds in oppression. 6 “There is a deep recognition in culture and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse, her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable. And it is recognized that the use and abuse are not distinct phenomena but somehow a synthesized reality: both are true at the same time as if they were one harmonious truth instead of mutually exclusive contradictions.” (154) “The uses of women, now, in intercourse—not the abuses to the extent that they can be separated out—are absolutely permeated by the reality of male power over women.” (160) 7 For more on the notion of objectification, see Nussbaum (1995) and Langton (2009). 8 “Experience is chosen for us, then, imposed on us, especially in intercourse, and so is its meaning. We are allowed to have intercourse on the terms men determine, according to the rules men make.” (170) 9 “Maybe we can only know this much for certain—that when intercourse exists and is experienced under conditions of force, fear, or inequality, it destroys in women the will to political freedom; it destroys the love of freedom itself.” (182) 10 For example, when I teach Dworkin to final year undergraduates, I find that many of them initially arrive at this reading of Dworkin’s position. 11 Dworkin also demonstrates that it is possible to conceive of intercourse in ways that run contrary to the possession/dominance model: “Remarkably, it is not the man who is considered possessed in intercourse, even though he (his penis) is buried inside another human being; and his penis is surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist shutting tight and release with a force that pushes hard on the tender thing, so vulnerable no matter how hard.” (80–81) 12 “If intercourse can be an expression of sexual equality, it will have to survive—on its own merits, as it were, having a potential for human expression not yet recognized or realized—the destruction of male power over women.” (181)

166

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

13 Since Dworkin endorses ConSS, and since ConSG is implied by ConSS, we are entitled to conclude that Dworkin also endorses ConSG. And although CaSG and CaSS are not logically entailed by the constitutive claims, it is difficult to see how one could hold that sex cannot be defined by social factors but that social factors have not influenced how sex is practised; these two claims would also be natural accompaniments to CaIG and CaIS, both of which are advanced by Dworkin, and there is nothing in her writing to suggest that she rejects them. 14 “Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible. The context in which the act takes place, whatever the meaning of the act in and of itself, is one in which men have social, economic, political, and physical power over women” (158–59). 15 Hopefully, however, this second claim will in any case seem more plausible to readers. 16 It would appear that I am a typical humorless feminist. 17 Morgan does allow that there are widely shared sexual meanings as well as idiosyncratic ones (2003b: 6–7), although the paper as a whole dwells more on the idiosyncratic meanings.

References Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Dines, Gail (2011), Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Dworkin, Andrea (1974), Woman Hating, New York: E. P. Dutton. Dworkin, Andrea (1996), “Dworkin on Dworkin,” in Diane Bell and Renate Klein (eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, 203–17, London: Zed Books. Dworkin, Andrea (2007), Intercourse, New York: Basic Books. Original edition, 1987. Reprint, 20 Anv edition. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000), Sexing the Body, New York: Basic Books. Frye, Marilyn (1983), The Politics of Reality, Berkeley: Crossing Press. Goldman, Alan (1977), “Plain Sex,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (3): 267–87. Grant, Judith (2006), “Andrea Dworkin and the Social Construction of Gender: A Retrospective,” Signs 31 (4): 967–93. Hacking, Ian (1990), “Making Up People,” in Edward Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, 69–88, London: Routledge. Hampton, Jean (1999), “Defining Wrong and Defining Rape,” in Keith Burgess-Jackson (ed.), A Most Detestable Crime: New Philosophical Essays on Rape, 118–57, Oxford: Oxford University Press.



Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

167

Haslanger, Sally (2012), “Ontology and Social Construction,” in Sally Haslanger (ed.), Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, 83–112, New York: Oxford University Press. Herman, Barbara (1993), “Could it Be Worth Thinking About Kant on Sex and Marriage?” in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own. Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, 53–72, Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press. Langton, Rae (2009), Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, Seiriol (2003a), “Dark Desires,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (4): 377–410. Morgan, Seiriol (2003b), “Sex in the Head,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 20 (1): 1–16. Nagel, Thomas (1969), “Sexual Perversion,” The Journal of Philosophy 66 (1): 5–17. Nussbaum, Martha (1995), “Objectification,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (4): 249–91. Petit, Philip (1996), “Freedom as Antipower,” Ethics 106 (3): 576–603. Primoratz, Igor (1999), Ethics and Sex, Abingdon: Routledge. Solomon, Robert (1974), “Sexual Paradigms,” The Journal of Philosophy 71 (11): 336–45. Wittig, Monique (1996), “The Category of Sex,” in Diana Leonard and Lisa Adkins (eds.), Sex In Question: French Materialist Feminism, 25–30, London: Taylor & Francis.

168

Part Three

Epistemology

170

10

Introduction to Feminist Epistemology Pieranna Garavaso

1  What is feminist epistemology? Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and all notions connected with the notion of knowledge, for example, belief, evidence, and justification. Feminist epistemologists engage in theorizing about epistemological themes in light of how gender and other dimensions of social inequality affect these themes. Among the fields of feminist philosophies, feminist epistemology has been one of the most prolific areas of debate in the last twenty to thirty years. In her introduction to a recent collection of essays in feminist epistemology, Heidi Grasswick effectively describes the field as follows: To be sure, feminist epistemologists continue to explore new ways of understanding the links between gender and knowledge. But the field is far from being appropriately characterized as “exploratory.” Competing theories have been set out, filled out, critiqued, further developed and critiqued again. Work outside of feminist epistemology, especially work outside of philosophy, now makes reference to and employs many of these theories. Key technical terminology and concepts have evolved that must be understood clearly by students of the field. A core body of works exists, much of it from the early 1990s when there was a burst of single authored monographs in the field. Work in feminist epistemology can also now be found in a wide variety of venues. Monographs on topics related to feminist epistemology and volumes of collected feminist works are no longer restricted to just a few interested presses. In addition to the well-established feminist philosophy journal Hypatia and numerous interdisciplinary Women’s Studies journals such as Signs, works in feminist epistemology are making appearances increasingly in both regular and special issues of mainstream philosophical journals. The field is vibrant, varied, and continues to evolve. (2011: xiii–xiv)

172

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Grasswick accurately points out many signs of a vibrant and productive philosophical field: distinct theories have been developed, discussed, and revised; scholarly works are produced and cited in a great variety of venues outside of philosophy. Teaching epistemology without mentioning the research in feminist epistemologies is doing philosophy students a great disservice.1 Critical discussion of the conditions of knowledge is an integral and ongoing part of mainstream epistemology as is the discussion of the notion of justification; apt examples of topics of lively and prolific debates are the Gettier counterexamples and internalist versus externalist accounts of justification. What is distinctive about feminist epistemologists is an explicitly political slant (Alcoff and Potter 1993: 13), which resulted in the introduction of new epistemically relevant notions such as epistemic communities (Longino 1990; Nelson 1993), “strong” objectivity (Harding 1991), and epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Kourany 2015). However, because of this openly committed point of view, a common criticism of “feminist epistemology” was that it was an oxymoron. This objection to feminist epistemologies was based on the argument that since the feminist approach to epistemology is grounded in a social subgroup “which has tended to be particularist, separatist, and even sexist; [and] ‘epistemology’ is the study of the conditions of knowledge, or more modestly of justified belief, which are common to human beings as such” (Hesse 1994: 445), “the very rubric of feminist epistemology is incongruous on its face” (Haack 1993: 32). The main goal for an epistemologist is to find the best route to truth; for a feminist, the main goal is to create the best social situation for women and other socially oppressed groups. By definition, these two goals appear to be incompatible as the feminist goal must come in conflict with neutrality and impartiality. Hence, feminist epistemology cannot be both feminist and a true epistemology. This objection lingers even today, as Phyllis Rooney documents (2011); yet the resistance to and marginalization of feminist epistemologies is wrong headed as the fecundity of this field has greatly enriched and deepened the debate in epistemology; the chapters included in this part of the book provide strong evidence of original analysis of mainstream and substantive epistemological themes. There are many diverse feminist epistemologies; in a worthwhile attempt to characterize some overarching feature of these various approaches to epistemology, Marianne Janack states: “What is common to feminist epistemologies is an emphasis on the epistemic salience of gender and the use of gender as an analytic category in discussions, criticisms, and reconstructions



Introduction to Epistemology

173

of epistemic practices, norms, and ideals” (2017). In this brief introduction, I aim at providing some basic helpful directions within this rich field of research; in order to do so, I outline the main strands of feminist epistemology that are commonly identified as persisting, influential, and undergoing some form of development: standpoint theory, empiricism and naturalized epistemology, postmodernism, and virtue epistemology. Before outlining the main features of these feminist epistemologies, however, I turn to outline what may be one of the main reasons of resistance to feminist epistemologies, that is, the difficulty of mainstream epistemology to accept that the primary target of criticism for feminist epistemologies has been the most highly valued domain of human research, that is, scientific inquiry.

2  Feminist epistemologies and philosophy of science The concerns of feminist epistemologists are tightly interwoven with questions that are central to philosophy of science. Knowledge and truth are the core goals of scientific inquiry; epistemology, as the area of philosophy that studies how I come to know anything, is deeply intertwined with scientific inquiry as this is one of the major domains of broad human epistemic endeavor. It seems difficult to separate the debates that pertain only to epistemology from those that engage topics that concern also scientific knowledge.2 For example, the main types of feminist epistemologies mentioned above are also the main approaches to the philosophy of science. In the preface to The Science Question in Feminism, a book that was published in 1986 and that is still well worth reading, Sandra Harding created two slogans that were to define two areas of research and political activism for generations of feminist epistemologists: “I began by asking, ‘What is to be done about the situation of women in science?’—the ‘woman question’ in science. Now feminists often pose a different question: ‘Is it possible to use for emancipatory ends sciences that are apparently so intimately involved in Western, bourgeois, and masculine projects?’—the ‘science question’ in feminism” (1986: 9). The woman question in science or the question of why so few women study and work in the STEM fields is a question that has been given broad attention and that has generated useful debates and initiatives in educational and research institutions, for example, summer programs devoted to attract and introduce female high school students to the sciences. Although the percentage of women employed in the scientific fields still reflects an imbalance in comparison with

174

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

the percentage of women in the population and in the lower levels of schooling, it is heartening to see the efforts toward redressing these disparities. The science question in feminism or the question whether science can be trusted as a tool to promote greater social justice is a question that has generated and still generates rich debate; it is at the center of feminist epistemology and science studies. Very few feminist epistemologists have taken the position that all science has to be discarded but the use of “the master’s tools”3 for the fight against social discrimination has come under close scrutiny. After historical and sociological studies of the development of scientific inquiry have brought to light how even medical research has been influenced by patriarchal, racist, and classist goals and agendas, the question whether scientific knowledge can be directed to benefit all people has become more and more difficult to answer. There are no easy answers to either question and the issues they raise are complicated and involve many different aspects of culture, education, and the effect of power imbalances on both. The second question has less clearly pragmatic and immediate putative answers but it elicits challenges to notions that are central to the human condition. I will mention in the third section below how reason and objectivity, that is, two of the most powerful “master’s tools” have been topics of much debate within feminist epistemologies. Harding’s comments are notable also because the focus of her denunciation is not merely on gender inequity, but also on other forms of social discrimination: “Despite the deeply ingrained Western cultural belief in science’s intrinsic progressiveness, science today serves primarily regressive social tendencies; and . . . the social structure of science, many of its applications and technologies, its modes of defining research problems and designing experiments, its ways of constructing and conferring meanings are not only sexist but also racist, classist, and culturally coercive” (1986: 9; my emphasis). When I identified the four necessary conditions for a theory or a political movement to be feminist in Chapter 1, I also mentioned that feminists do not focus merely on gender discrimination. The importance of paying attention to the intersectionality of the multiple systems of social discrimination was already obvious to Harding and to other feminist philosophers working in the 1980s (Spelman 1988). The rejection and condemnation of feminist epistemology as hopelessly political should be cast aside as superficial because feminist epistemologists have critically analyzed the notions of objectivity, rationality, universality, and impartiality. A critical step in the development of feminist epistemology was the unearthing of rationalizations, metaphors, symbolisms, and other widely



Introduction to Epistemology

175

prevalent representations of these notions as eminently male and dialectically contrasted with female or feminine notions such as subjectivity, passions, and emotions. Feminist philosophers have written much about these dualisms manifestly permeating much of Western philosophy from the ancient to the contemporary times.4 Hence, once feminist epistemologists started considering whether this dualistic thinking had affected not only Western literature and symbolic imagery but might have also affected core philosophical notions, the tasks ahead for feminist epistemologists became clear. The main remaining question was how to build a criticism of traditional views of knowledge and general epistemic notions and practices that would reveal and eradicate their androcentrism and sexism. The main feminist epistemologies are attempts to answer the above question.

3  The varieties of feminist epistemologies: Postmodernism, standpoint theory, empiricism and feminist naturalized epistemology, virtue epistemology Helen Longino effectively describes the variety of perspectives in feminist epistemologies: “There is no single feminist epistemology. Instead there are a plethora of ideas, approaches, and arguments that have in common only their authors’ commitment to exposing and reversing the derogation of women and the gender bias of traditional formulations” (1999: 331). For Longino, making explicit and addressing the multiple ways in which traditional epistemologies have been affected by gendered thinking is the minimum common denominator and overarching goal of feminist epistemologies. In this chapter, I give a brief outline of some of the most influential types of feminist epistemologies. Postmodernism in feminist epistemologies is the most radical and least supported approach among analytic feminist epistemologies as the philosophical tradition from which postmodernism originate is Continental rather than analytic philosophy. Some of the philosophers who have been influential for postmodern feminist epistemologists are Michel Foucault, HansGeorg Gadamer, and Jürgen Habermas; two of the most influential postmodern feminists are Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. Despite this basic separation of the theoretical traditions to which postmodern and non-postmodern feminist epistemologists appeal to, postmodern thinking has had a notable influence on the debates among feminist

176

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

epistemologists by bringing to attention central issues: “The very existence of feminist epistemological projects attests, to varying degrees, to the effects of postmodern contestations of ‘the Enlightenment project’” (Code 1998: 182). The Enlightenment project was to free reason from the constraints of minds enslaved by customs, religion, and bigotry. In theory, its message was that rationality is the distinctive feature of all humans and hence a powerful democratizing factor. Although postmodern feminists hold of course varied positions, in general they take a skeptical stance on the possibility to define, and hold on to, any consistent notion of truth, objectivity, reason, and consequently knowledge. This is because these notions are tainted by the political and power relations within which they are created. Analytic feminist epistemologists, who for the most part prize these notions, take the postmodern challenge quite seriously. One of the two most influential strands in feminist epistemology is standpoint theory. Its roots go back to the political views of Georg Hegel and Karl Marx who stressed the epistemic importance of the power relations between those who hold and those who lack political power. Developing further Hegel’s allegory of the relation between master and slave, Marx stressed how the proletarian masses have an epistemically privileged position in contrast to the capitalists as they can see how power relations affect both the dominant and the subordinate groups. Feminist standpoint theorists apply an analogous structure to the relation between dominant and dominated groups in a gendered, sexist, and racist patriarchy. The standpoint of the oppressed provides them with knowledge not available to those who oppress and dominate. Since current mainstream epistemology has been created by those who have social and political power in Western societies, it cannot capture the point of view, the interests, and the concerns of those who lack such powers. One example of the deficiencies of mainstream epistemologies is the prevalent focus on propositional knowledge, or the knowledge of truths, whereas women and other underrepresented groups have a greater share of and stronger interests in practical types of knowledge such as knowledge of objects and people or knowledge of how to do things. Mainstream epistemology overemphasizes the epistemic goals and accomplishments of individualistic and autonomous ideal knowers of propositions whereas in reality epistemic agents are most of the time operating in communities with epistemically meaningful relations to each other. Standpoint theorists seek to modify the templates of epistemic agents and of the epistemic process thereby stressing the specific point of view of each agent. Early standpoint theory (Hartsock 1983; Rose 1983) was criticized because it seemed to presuppose some sort of essentialism, according to which all women



Introduction to Epistemology

177

just in virtue of being women have a privileged perspective that men or other people cannot have, and universalism, according to which all women occupy one and the same social standpoint. In response to these criticisms (Spelman 1990), Harding further develops the notion of standpoint by stressing the significance of the interconnectedness of different systems of social discrimination that contribute to the complexity of standpoints for different women (1991). Furthermore, the notion of standpoint is understood not as a point of view that is automatically owned but rather as an achievement: “Only those individuals who view social reality through the lenses offered by the values and interests of the underprivileged can be said to have taken up a standpoint” (Tanesini 2011: 893). Being a woman is neither necessary nor sufficient to occupy a feminist standpoint on social reality. Probably the most widely supported feminist theory of knowledge is a version of feminist empiricism or feminist naturalized epistemology, that is, two views that originate from core mainstream epistemologies: “The virtues of feminist empiricism . . . are located in its ability to sustain a dialogue with mainstream science and philosophy” (Tanesini 1999: 97). Feminist empiricists initially proposed that the sexism and androcentrism of current science and epistemology could be eliminated by applying correctly the norms of impartiality and value neutrality that were supposed to be the characteristics of “good” science or science done by following correctly its guiding principles. Later on, thanks to the criticism of this naive form of empiricism, for example, Harding’s metaphor of “adding more women and stir,” feminist empiricists’ endeavors to reform science became more sophisticated and required more complex changes. One of the most important changes in the critical landscape was the abandonment of the principle of keeping values out of scientific inquiry where this latter was understood to be the domain of “pure” facts. Also in this case, feminist epistemologists’ critique builds on the already broadly discussed and to a certain extent accepted Kuhnian description of scientific theories as systems of beliefs immersed and affected by social, cultural, and political contexts (Kuhn 1970). The feminist critique was probably also affected by the less-known and yet like-minded strong program in the sociology of knowledge (Bloor 1976). Helen Longino and Lynn Hankinson Nelson have fostered versions of feminist empiricism that can be regarded also as feminist naturalized epistemologies, which have been differently influenced by the thought of W. V. Quine. Longino supports the thesis that scientific theories are value-laden and that the original early empiricist distinction between facts and values is untenable (1990). Quine’s thesis of the underdetermination of theories by evidence provides a stepping

178

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

stone on which Longino builds her review of the features that scientists use to support their theory choices. The values on the basis of which scientists choose their theories are not merely epistemic values such as consistency and simplicity; the political and moral values of the social contexts in which scientific research is carried out also play a role in the choice of theories (1990: 4). Nelson’s contribution to the development of a more sophisticated form of naturalized epistemology is based on the acceptance of Quine’s holism and places the process of justification in the hands of epistemic communities rather than in those of individual epistemic agents (1990, 1993). One other recent development is feminist virtue epistemology that has developed especially in the last decade (Daukas 2011). Interestingly enough, this strand of epistemology seems to have quite ancient roots: “The dominant tradition in ancient, medieval and even early modern times has been virtue epistemology in its various forms. The traditional concerns of epistemologists were the intellectual virtues and vices of knowers and the training required for the cultivation of an epistemically virtuous character” (Tanesini 2011: 886). This epistemological approach fits well with the attention that feminist epistemologists give to the knower: [Virtue epistemology] is often understood as the epistemic analogue of virtue ethics, as its approach is agent-centered instead of principles-centered. Where a principles-centered epistemology asks questions such as, “what criteria must a belief satisfy in order to constitute knowledge?” and “what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a belief to be justified?,” an agent centered epistemology asks questions such as, “what does it mean to be a knower?,” or, “what is involved in being an excellent epistemic agent?” (Daukas 2011: 46)

By focusing on epistemic practice, philosophers must pay attention to the conditions in which knowers find themselves, that is, to what feminist epistemologists call “situated knowledge” or the set of conditions within which epistemic agents acquire their beliefs and their knowledge. Finally, this renewed attention to the knower ensures that current and future epistemologies will not recreate models of epistemic agents who exemplify virtues accessible only to restricted groups of subjects as it was the case with the impartiality, the alleged universality, and the apparent lack of self-interest that characterized the knower in nonfeminist epistemologies until not long ago. In the most recent development of feminist epistemologies, I see an interesting convergence of theories such as the alliance of feminist empiricism and standpoint theory or the integration of standpoint and virtue theories. The



Introduction to Epistemology

179

variety of feminist epistemologies persists and so does the vitality of the debates focused on these theories. In the next section, I take a brief look at the topics that have been of broadest interest in these debates.

4  Main topics in feminist epistemologies: Reason and rationality; objectivity and the bias paradox; epistemic authority and ignorance It is hard to overestimate the influence of Genevieve Lloyd (1984) and Susan Bordo (1987) in the development of feminist thought on reason and knowledge. Lloyd provides a well-developed historical reconstruction of various views on reason from ancient to contemporary times. Bordo identifies the origin of prevailing Western notions of reason and objectivity in Descartes’s philosophy. Descartes’s dualism of mind and body has inspired the dualisms between concepts such as nature, passivity, emotions, and the female human being, on one side, with reason, activity, rationality, and the male human being, on the other side. Witt and Shapiro (2017) provide a keen contrast between Lloyd’s symbolic and Bordo’s sociocultural reconstruction of the generation of the metaphors and cultural tropes that characterize the oppositions between male and female features, men and women, in Western culture.5 Along with the persisting attention to the gendered history of the notions of reason and rationality, the notion of objectivity has been the focus of much feminist critical discussions and original proposals. The main criticism of objectivity arises from the same source from which feminist criticisms of reason derive: objectivity has been used in Western philosophy and science to mask the perspective of the privileged practitioners of scientific inquiry, that is, the male, white, middle-class, researchers who have maintained the power to study and do research. Value neutrality and impartiality have collaborated to keep these systems of selection functioning to the exclusion of women and other social and racial groups that have not been allowed to participate in the production of knowledge. Among the feminist epistemologists who have produced original elaborations of the notion of objectivity, I must mention Harding and Longino for their extended discussions of this notion. Harding’s “strong objectivity” is a development of standpoint theory and asserts the need to include social and political ideas as part of the evidence that is critically examined within the

180

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

processes of scientific inquiry (1991: 149). Longino’s central contribution to the development of a feminist notion of objectivity lies in the focus on the social and collaborative nature of scientific research. While she agrees with Harding that non-epistemic values are not eliminable background assumptions that affect research, she argues that I can still maintain objectivity in science by means of intersubjective criticism (1990: 71).6 The revision of objectivity with its broad acceptance of the situated and valueladen nature of scientific inquiry brought forth a new dilemma that has been the topic of much discussion within feminist epistemologies. Louise Antony is often quoted as the one who put this challenge in sharp focus: According to many feminist philosophers, the flaw in the ideal of impartiality is supposed to be that the ideal itself is biased: Critics charge either that the concept of “objectivity” served to articulate a masculine or patriarchal viewpoint (and possibly a pathological one), or that it has the ideological function of protecting the rights of those in power, especially men. But how is it possible to criticize the partiality of the concept of objectivity without presupposing the very value under attack? Put baldly: If we don’t think it’s good to be impartial, then how can we object to men’s being partial? (1993: 188–89)

The horns of the dilemma are either the acceptance of relativism, that is, no standpoint or bias is any better than any other, or the acceptance of the traditional notion of objectivity and the denial of the value-ladenness of science; either horn would lead to an undermining of the whole field of feminist epistemology. Much subsequent work in feminist epistemology has aimed at discussing and rejecting the so-called bias paradox (Heikes 2004; Rolin 2006). To conclude this listing of major topics of development within feminist epistemologies, it is worth mentioning also the recent attention given to the notions of epistemic authority and ignorance (Tuana and Sullivan 2006). These notions are intuitively connected with evaluative judgments of competency and incompetency and, within contexts that include political and social dimensions, to the possession or lack of power: “Feminist work on the epistemology of ignorance has stressed that ignorance is often the result not of a benign gap in our knowledge, but in deliberate choices to pursue certain kinds of knowledge while ignoring others (Sullivan and Tuana 2007; Tuana and Sullivan 2006)” (Grasswick 2011: xviii–xix). Once I acknowledge the value-ladenness of the contexts in which I pursue and obtain knowledge, ignorance also gains greater importance as a potential symptom of quite opposite social conditions: the lack of the ability to acquire knowledge or the possession of the power to ignore.



Introduction to Epistemology

181

5  An overview of the chapters Although it is useful and historically accurate to describe the main feminist epistemologies as I have done above, I have also mentioned that these approaches to knowledge and scientific inquiry are “persisting, influential, and undergoing some form of development.” Sharon Crasnow’s “Contemporary Standpoint Theory: Tensions, Integrations, and Extensions” provides a perfect example of the persistent, influential, and developing presence of standpoint theory in feminist epistemology. After providing a historical account of the debates surrounding the early development of standpoint theory and its critical exchanges with feminist empiricism, Crasnow reviews recent forms of empiricism that claim to blend with standpoint theory (Intemann 2010). Against this thesis, Crasnow argues that there are strengths in standpoint theory that are not guaranteed in any of the theories that are presented as perspective mergers with standpoint theory. Crasnow’s contribution is both a useful introduction to the varieties of feminist epistemologies and a discussion that brings attention to the most recent debates. The topic of objectivity takes us into the domain where the critical perspectives of feminist epistemologies merge with the perspectives on the philosophy of science. The notion of objectivity has been the subject of extensive research because of its central role in discussions of truth, knowledge, and science because of the variety of nonsynonymous meanings transpiring in such discussions. In “Objectivity in Science: The Impact of Feminist Accounts” Evelyn Brister starts from the acknowledgment of the variety of features that are collected under the umbrella of “objectivity”; without any unifying ultimate goal, Brister instead aims at pointing out the positive roles that these different notions of objectivity have played in the development of scientific research. The outcome of this defense of the many facets of the notion of objectivity developed within feminist philosophies of science is a rich account of the influence that feminist criticisms of science and of our epistemic practices have had on scientific methods, practices, and norms. Lynn Hankinson Nelson’s chapter, “Feminist Philosophies of Science: The Social and Contextual Nature of Science,” constitutes a natural segue to Brister’s chapter. After a brief introduction that contains a useful reminder of the main feminist criticisms to mainstream scientific research, Nelson focuses on two characteristics emphasized by feminist theorists in their critique of traditional science: contextualism, or the claim that the distinction between facts and values

182

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

is artificial and unrealistic, and the social nature of scientific theorizing and knowledge. Both theses have been widely criticized as leading feminist science to some form of relativism. Against these challenges, Nelson provides detailed accounts of two case studies that provide persuasive examples of contextualism and of the social nature of scientific inquiry. What Brister describes mostly from a theoretical point of view, Nelson’s case studies attest in the realm of actual research on sex determination in humans and on primatology. As mentioned earlier, the conceptualization of reason and rationality has been at the center of much debate because it is natural to mention reason and rationality when discussing the faculty that humans use to gain knowledge. Additionally, after the pervasive contrasting and hierarchical dualisms in Western philosophy have been revealed to display obviously gendered associations, these notions have been subjected to closer scrutiny. Deborah Heikes’s “Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue” discusses rationality starting from some of Immanuel Kant’s statements that exclude women and most men from the benefit of full rationality. Heikes restates the dilemma embedded in the bias paradox in terms of a contrast between opposing belief systems: either I should find a common denominator in all forms of cognition or accept a form of cognitive relativism. Hikes’s solution is to appeal to reasonableness as a notion that can both provide some normativity across differing practices and also allow for dissimilar reasoning abilities. Janet Kourany’s chapter, “Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy: Potentially the Closest of Allies,” discusses the topic of ignorance, that is, a topic that I mentioned in the previous section as one that has garnered increased attention in the last decade. “Agnotology” is a new term used to denote a new domain of research devoted to the study of ignorance. Kourany focuses especially on the fact that, unexpectedly and ironically, ignorance is generated by that very domain of human endeavor that is assumed to be the most productive source of knowledge, that is, science. Kourany first explains the contrast between the philosophical notion of ignorance, as it is understood in traditional epistemology and philosophy of science, and the new conceptions of ignorance elaborated within agnotology. In the second and third sections of her chapter, Kourany discusses the consequences of applying these new conceptions of ignorance to a specific area, that is, the knowledge or lack of knowledge of women. The discussion of how the process of scientific research produces ignorance brings to light the social power dynamics that lead to bestowing or withholding epistemic authority to different people. Thus, Kourany’s discussion is an apt introduction to the following chapter, which discusses the denial of epistemic salience for black women’s testimony.



Introduction to Epistemology

183

In “Say Her Name: Maladjusted Epistemic Salience in the Fight Against Anti-Black Police Brutality,” Ayanna Spencer provides an original example of how a feminist epistemological perspective can be a useful tool of analysis in the discussion of a vexing political issue. First, Spencer denounces the lack of attention to the voices of black women and girls in cases of anti-black police brutality in the United States. Then, building on the work of Kristie Dotson and Maria Gilbert, who have discussed the notions of affectability imbalance and epistemic oppression (Dotson and Gilbert 2014), Spencer proposes a template to analyze how black (cis and trans) women’s and girls’ experiences, testimonies, and knowledge are marginalized and epistemically suppressed. Spencer concludes her chapter by stressing both our need as philosophers to take into account what social movements bring to light and teach us and the usefulness of conceptual tools in the investigation of issues of social justice. The last chapter in Part 2 of this book ties together many distinct themes that I have discussed in this chapter. In “The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality,” Rachel Fraser starts from Charles Mills’s discussion of the ethics of sexual and romantic relationships between black men and white women (1994). First, Fraser states five of Mills’s arguments and then narrows her discussion to two of them, the argument from questionable motivation and the argument from racial solidarity. One of Fraser’s assumptions is that Mills’s arguments bear an interesting similarity with arguments against (certain) heterosexual relationships or for lesbian separatism; this similarity turns out to be based on the epistemic structures associated with the system of compulsory heterosexuality. Although Fraser at the end does not defend separatism, her chapter can be seen as a blending of analytic feminism and the often contested and controversial tradition of feminist separatism.

6  For further reading Anderson, Elizabeth (Spring 2017 Edition), “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/ entries/feminism-epistemology/ This entry contains a mine of detailed information and references about the main types of feminist epistemologies and philosophies of science, that is, standpoint theory, postmodernism, and feminist empiricism. It provides helpful

184

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

outlines of debates relevant to feminist epistemologies such as the question of objectivity and the relationship between facts and values. Tanesini, Alessandra (1999), An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies, Oxford: Blackwell. This book remains to date the best introduction to the field of feminist epistemologies. It has chapters on the main types of epistemologies, that is, empiricism, postmodernism, standpoint, and naturalized epistemology. It also has chapters on objectivity, reason, and power. The strengths of the book are its accessibility and clear writing, and the author’s willingness to state and defend some of her own critical positions. Tanesini, Alessandra (2011), “Feminist Epistemology,” in Bernecker Sven and Duncan Pritchard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, 885–95, London: Routledge. This short entry is highly informative; it contains (1) a concise outline of the main gendered features of mainstream epistemology; (2) an illustration of how gender matters in both the context of discovery and the context of justification of theories; and (3) a characterization of feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, virtue epistemology, and postmodernism. Harding, Sandra (1986), The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. This is a classic and very useful book. It provides a historical account of the development of the feminist critique of canonical philosophies of science. It contains discussions of case studies in biology and the social sciences; it also examines challenges for both feminist and nonfeminist, for example, PostKuhnian, epistemologies of science. Janack, Marianne (2017), “Feminist Epistemology,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, http://www.iep.utm.edu/ (accessed July 6, 2017). This entry provides an outline of feminist epistemologies that includes hermeneutics and phenomenology together with postmodernist views and sections devoted to epistemic virtue theory and pragmatism. Wylie, Alison, Elizabeth Potter, and Wenda K. Bauchspies (2010), “Feminist Perspective on Science,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This entry provides an overview of the challenges faced by women engaged in the sciences and of different phases of change. It discusses feminist empiricism



Introduction to Epistemology

185

and standpoint theories as well as examples of actual scientific research. This entry can complement the other online entries mentioned above as it offers a perspective on women and science that is both theoretical and sociological.

Notes 1 Phyllis Rooney’s contribution to Grasswick (2011) presents a clearly dissenting voice to the rosy picture that is described in this chapter. Rooney argues that feminist epistemology “still remains marginalized, if not invisible, in ‘mainstream’ epistemology” (2011: 3). Rooney provides sobering evidence in her essay and there are additional examples that support Rooney’s position. For example, Alessandra Tanesini’s informative and insightful ten-page entry on “Feminist Epistemology” in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2011) is the only one explicitly devoted to feminist epistemologies in a 900-plus-page volume devoted to epistemology. 2 For a partly dissenting view on this, see Lorraine Code: “the scope of feminist epistemology is broader than and different from that of feminist philosophy of science, even though commitments to a set of common causes allow for crossfertilizations that are both fruitful and innovative” (1998: 176). 3 “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” (Lorde 1984: 112, emphasis in original) 4 “Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy and certain forms of artistic production. . . . Women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality, but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions” (Hegel 1973: 263). Charlotte Witt and Lisa Shapiro, authors of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the feminist history of philosophy include this quote in their entry. It is exemplary of many such statements from eminent philosophers in the history of the Western canon. For further readings on this subject, see For further readings in Chapter 1. 5 See Rooney (1991) and Garavaso (2016) for more narrowly circumscribed discussions of feminist debates on reason and logic. 6 Chapter 7 in An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies (Tanesini 1999) contains a detailed overview of Harding’s, Longino’s, and other feminist epistemologists’ views on objectivity.

186

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

References Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter (eds.) (1993), Feminist Epistemologies, New York: Routledge. Antony, Louise (1993), “Quine as Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology,” in Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own, 185–226, Boulder: Westview Press. Bloor, David (1976), Knowledge and Social Imagery, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bordo, Susan (1987), The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture, Albany: State University of New York Press. Code, Lorraine, (1999) “Feminist Epistemology,” in Alison Jaggar and Iris Young (eds.), A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, 173–84, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Daukas, Nancy (2011), “Altogether Now: A Virtue-Theoretic Approach to Pluralism in Feminist Epistemology,” in Heidi Grasswick (ed.), Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Power in Knowledge, 45–67, Dordrecht: Springer. Dotson, Kristie, and Maria Gilbert (2014), “Curious Disappearances: Affectability Imbalances and Process-Based Invisibility,” Hypatia 29 (4): 873–88. Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garavaso, P. (2016), “The Woman of Reason: On the Re-appropriation of Rationality and the Enjoyment of Philosophy,” in Maria Cristina Amoretti and Nicla Vassallo (eds.), Meta-Philosophical Reflection on Feminist Philosophies of Science, 185–202, Dordrecht: Springer. Grasswick, Heidi E. (2011), Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, Dordrecht: Springer. Haack, Susan (1993), “Epistemological Reflections of an Old Feminist,” Reason Papers 18: 31–42. Harding, Sandra (1986), The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hartsock, Nancy (1983), “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, 283–310, Dordrecht, Holland; Boston: D. Reidel; Kluwer. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1973), The Philosophy of Right, T. M. Knox (trans), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heikes, Deborah (2004), “The Bias Paradox: Why It’s Not Just for Feminists Anymore,” Synthese 138 (3): 315–35. Hesse Mary (1994), “How to be Postmodern Without Being a Feminist,” The Monist 77: 445–61.



Introduction to Epistemology

187

Intemann, Kristen (2010), “Twenty-Five Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (4): 778–96. Kourany, Janet (2015), “Science—For Better or Worse, a Source of Ignorance as Well as Knowledge,” in Linsey McGoey and Matthias Gross (eds.), International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Kuhn, Thomas (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lloyd, Genevieve (1984), Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, London: Routledge. Longino, Helen (1999), “Feminist Epistemology,” in John Greco and Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, 327–53, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Longino, Helen (1990), Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lorde, Audre (1984), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Mills, Charles W. (1994), “Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women?” Journal of Social Philosophy 25: 131–53. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.1994.tb00352.x Nelson, Lynn Hankinson (1990), Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Nelson, Lynn Hankinson (1993), “Epistemological Communities,” in Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds.), Feminist Epistemologies, New York: Routledge. Rolin, Kristina (2006), “The Bias Paradox in Feminist Standpoint Epistemology,” Episteme 3 (1–2): 125–37. Rooney, Phyllis (1991), “Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason,” Hypatia 6: 77–103. Rose, Hilary (1983), “Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9 (1): 73–90. Spelman, Elizabeth (1988), Inessential Woman, Boston: Beacon Press. Sullivan, Shannon and Nancy Tuana (eds.) (2007), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Albany: SUNY Press. Tuana, Nancy, and Shannon Sullivan (2006), “Introduction: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance,” Hypatia 21 (3): 1–3. Witt, Charlotte, and Lisa Shapiro (Spring 2017 Edition), “Feminist History of Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/feminism-femhist/

11

Contemporary Standpoint Theory: Tensions, Integrations, and Extensions Sharon Crasnow

1 Introduction This chapter offers a brief history of thirty years of feminist epistemology beginning with the distinction Sandra Harding (1986) made between feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint approaches. In some recent feminist epistemology these approaches appear to have merged (Intemann 2010). I review various feminist empiricisms in order to evaluate that claim, but argue that feminist standpoint theory offers elements that are not captured by any of the proposed mergers. Consequently, the main focus of this chapter is feminist standpoint theory. It is important to note from the outset that “feminist standpoint theory” is ambiguous. The phrase has been used in some contexts to refer to a methodology and in others to an epistemology. Feminist standpoint approaches have their roots in feminist social science methodology. Social scientists that advocated for the approach did so by way of proposing “a theory and analysis of how research should proceed”—a methodology—rather than a “theory of knowledge or justificatory strategy”—an epistemology (Harding 1987: 2). Feminist philosophers of science in contrast have discussed and developed the approach as an epistemology following Harding’s original contrast between feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory in the context of feminist philosophy of science (Harding 1986). Because methodology and epistemology are different although related projects the ambiguity in discussions of standpoint theory creates tensions that have affected the philosophical treatment of standpoint theory. Feminist standpoint methodologies start with the idea that those in subordinate social locations have access to evidence relevant for knowledge



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

189

production that those in dominant social locations do not. This thesis of epistemic advantage or privilege informs the methodological directive to start research from the lives of women. Feminist standpoint methodology not only directs researchers to start from the lives of women but also to produce knowledge for, by, and about women. Spelling out in what way knowledge might be for, by, and about women is part of what goes into building a bridge from methodology (how to do research) to epistemology (how and why doing research in this way produces knowledge). Knowledge that starts from the lives of women and produces knowledge for women is socially situated. Thus feminist standpoint approaches appear to involve two theses: (1) a situated knowledge thesis and (2) a thesis of epistemic advantage. Minimally, a feminist standpoint epistemology needs to explicate these theses. I argue that in order to fully do so a feminist standpoint epistemology needs to address the question of the subject(s) of knowledge (the knowers)—the who the knowledge is for, by, and about. I consider several accounts of identity and conclude that while identity often can serve as a basis for political power, the primary political component is shared interests and goals. Standpoint methodology directs researchers to the basis of interests in lived experience and thus supports the formation of knowing communities as political coalitions that can serve as the agents of change.

2  Background: A brief history Since Sandra Harding distinguished three feminist approaches to epistemology, it has become standard to talk about feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. Of these three, the two that have received the most attention in the analytic Anglophone literature have been feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. Harding conceived of feminist empiricism as standard twentieth-century empiricism with feminist sensibilities. As she puts it, “Feminist empiricism argues that sexism and androcentrism are social biases correctable by stricter adherence to the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry” (Harding 1986: 24). What feminists brought to the table was awareness that gender mattered and that ignoring it often results in bad science. Apart from that, their commitments to empiricism as both a methodology and epistemology remained consistent with those of mainstream

190

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

philosophers of science.1 The focus of the earliest feminist work was typically on uncovering bias that resulted from ignoring gender by either excluding women as subjects or focusing on ways that the objects of inquiry were assumed to be gender neutral and thereby missing important features of the world. Harding’s work might be described as the critical project of feminist epistemology. As Sarah Richardson (2010) points out, this approach is consistent with the view that good science is value neutral—that is, it should not include political or social values. The primary error of sexist science on this view is that it is not empirically adequate. The lesson of this sort of feminist critique is that we should continue to do science as usual, but just do it better and one way to do it better is to make sure that we consider all of the evidence. Ignoring women when studying heart disease is bad science precisely because it fails to consider all the evidence. Focusing solely on the behavior of male primates in order to understand the behavior of all primates fails in a similar way. Sexist science goes awry precisely because it does not adhere to the value-free ideal. Sexist values distort its work. While this sort of feminist critique is still important—bias can and does distort scientific research—most philosophers of science now reject the value-free ideal. Feminist empiricism contributed to and learned from these challenges, moving beyond the critical work of identifying persistent sexism to the constructive work of understanding the role of social and political values in knowledge production. Helen Longino (1990), for example, uses Kuhn’s notion of observation as theory laden as part of an account of evidence in which observations only become evidence in relation to background beliefs and values in a particular context. This together with the Quine-Duhem thesis of the underdetermination of theory by evidence supports an argument that values, including feminist values, may play a legitimate role in science by filling “the gap” between the evidence and the theory. Values that fill the gap are often invisible to those who hold them and if they are the values of the dominant culture then the background assumptions shaped by these values are not open to the critical scrutiny needed for good science. Diversity of values—including feminist values—contributes to the likelihood that problematic background assumptions will be uncovered and replaced with alternatives on Longino’s view. Another empiricist approach is that of Lynn Hankinson Nelson (1990), who argues that values are subject to empirical evidence as part of a system of beliefs. She adapts Quinean holism to make her argument. As Nelson sees it, values are ineliminable in that all belief systems include beliefs about values among



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

191

the interconnected beliefs that make up the system. Here it is not a question of diverse values being beneficial for science but rather that systems incorporating feminist values are superior—that is, they fare better when confronted with the tribunal of evidence. Clough (2003) has a similar holistic approach, supported through her interpretation of Davidson’s work on meaning. Elizabeth Anderson (2004) also adopts a holist approach arguing that values are both supported by (and so changed by) empirical evidence and that they can, in turn, serve as evidence. Once we see this then it is clear that values are problematic only when they are held dogmatically. In this way, they are no different from other beliefs—all of which must answer to empirical evidence. Janet Kourany (2010) offers yet another approach calling for socially responsible science. Such a science is guided by explicit social and political value commitments that shape the projects and conduct of research. These commitments are to be expressed through “funding priorities and restrictions” (Kourany 2010: 68). I consider Kourany’s account to be another variation on feminist empiricism although her version of empiricism differs from the valuefree ideal both in its explicit value commitments and in the need for the evidence to include the extent to which the theory contributes to “human flourishing, what makes for a good society” (Kourany 2010: 68). As noted in the introduction to this chapter, Harding first presented feminist standpoint as an alternative to feminist empiricism and so as an alternative epistemology. While there are a variety of versions of feminist standpoint theory, feminist epistemologists generally agree that there are two core ideas through which the approach can be characterized: (1) a thesis of situated knowledge and (2) a thesis of epistemic advantage or privilege. The situated knowledge thesis is the idea that all knowledge is local and relative to a particular set of interests, values, and beliefs that derive from a social location. Standpoint approaches have their roots in Marxism and for Marxism, social locations are class locations and so it is the economic structure of society that is central. Feminist theorists recognized that social location could not be reduced to class and highlighted the way social and political life was structured through gender. The women social scientists who were early advocates of feminist standpoint approaches described themselves as located outside of dominant power structures—in terms of class, gender, or race. In fact, they were frequently outsiders along more than one axis. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1986) offers an evocative description of the marginal researcher as an insider/

192

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

outsider. She is trained in the frameworks of her discipline—an insider—but finds these frameworks to be an uncomfortable fit both for her own experience and for the lives of those she studies. But this lack of fit serves as an advantage in that, as an outsider, she is often able to see the limits of these frameworks.2 This “double-vision”—the ability to understand from the perspective of the disciplinary training and from the perspective of those for whom the discipline’s descriptions do not fit—manifests in the ability to recognize assumptions that go unquestioned within the scientific community.3 These might be assumptions about what phenomena are relevant, how to conceive of those phenomena, or how features of the world are related to each other. Thus the marginalized position of the researcher provides access to evidence that is not accessible to other researchers. Social location—one’s location within the class system in standpoint’s original form and, as the approach developed, in the gender/race/ ability or other social structuring system—is thus relevant to the production of knowledge. As researchers from marginalized segments of society were trained in the practices of knowledge production in their disciplines—sociology, anthropology, political science—they found many ways that their disciplinary practices neither accommodated their own experiences nor the experiences of those they were studying. Often it was clear that the assumptions of the dominant social location did not serve the interests of those who do not occupy that location. In this way (1) the situated knowledge thesis leads to (2) the thesis of epistemic advantage or epistemic privilege. The insider/outsider has access to evidence to which the insider does not.4 Feminist standpoint methodology, as thus described, offers insights into how some social locations might contribute to knowledge in ways that other social locations do not, thus providing a clue to how standpoint methodology might be developed as an epistemology. This epistemic element in turn speaks to a methodology that is sensitive to social location. The key idea that one is to start from the lives of women is a methodological recommendation. However, the insights that standpoint approaches offer are not an epistemology—a justificatory theory of how the methodology produces knowledge—in themselves. Perhaps for this reason, as well as because of a number of worrisome critiques raised to standpoint theory in the late 1980s and 1990s, standpoint theory first received less attention from feminist epistemologists than the feminist empiricisms discussed in the first part of this section. Among the concerns raised about standpoint theory were first that the idea of woman’s standpoint might essentialize women by assuming some social location



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

193

that all women shared in virtue of being women and second the related idea that a homogeneous woman’s standpoint universalized dominant women— white, heterosexual, middle class—and in doing so reproduced oppressions by replacing one impossible ideal knower (male) with another.5 If something about being a woman—some essence—gave rise to epistemic privilege then this privilege would seem to be automatic, a claim that is clearly false given that those who are oppressed do not always understand or even see the structures that oppress them. While it is mostly misreadings and misunderstandings of standpoint approaches that drove these objections, responses to these concerns are among the forces that have shaped efforts to elucidate the epistemic value of standpoint approaches. And thus efforts to provide a philosophical framework or epistemological justification for insights from standpoint methodology and to explain what epistemological work standpoint approaches are doing have given rise to more nuanced interpretations of feminist standpoint theory in the last decade. It is these approaches that I refer to as “contemporary standpoint theory” and to which I now turn.

3  Contemporary standpoint theory—merging feminist empiricism and standpoint Kristen Intemann (2010) has argued that the sorts of changes in both feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory mentioned in the previous section have resulted in a blurring of the distinction between the two. Specifically, Intemann argues that the views share three features: they are contextual, normative, and social. Feminist empiricism is contextual in that it takes background assumptions and beliefs within a particular context either as part of the evidence for a theory or as determining what counts as evidence. Contemporary standpoint approaches are contextual in that they point to social situatedness as a determinant of knowledge through the role that it plays in revealing either the evidence itself or the relevance of it. Both sorts of approaches are normative in their focus on the role of social, political, and cultural values for knowledge production, in specification of evidence and in determining the ends or goals of science. Both sorts of accounts are also social in focusing on the sociopolitical structure of the knowledge community. An example of the sort of merging of approaches that Intemann has in mind is Alison Wylie’s analysis of standpoint theory. Wylie can be read as offering

194

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

an epistemological justification of feminist standpoint methodology, grounded in traditional standards of theory assessment that include objectivity. She interprets the traditional notion of “objectivity” as a judgment that knowledge claims conform to a set of epistemic virtues, such as empirical adequacy, explanatory power, internal coherence, and consistency with other established bodies of knowledge.6 Wylie argues that such virtues can rarely if ever all be maximized at the same time—an argument that she takes from Thomas Kuhn (1977)—and theory acceptance involves a trade-off among these virtues. This trade-off is mediated by social values. Feminist standpoint theory provides a way of understanding how social values should motivate such trade-offs, since some virtues are more useful to maximize than others for revealing and resisting oppression. Consider the epistemic virtue of empirical adequacy, for example. This is a virtue that empiricists often take to be “rock bottom.” But Wylie notes that empirical adequacy is ambiguous. It might be either “fidelity to a rich body of localized evidence (empirical depth), or . . . a capacity to ‘travel’ (Haraway) such that the claims in question can be extended to a range of domains or applications (empirical breadth)” (Wylie 2004: 345). In any particular context the question of whether we should maximize empirical adequacy as breadth or depth can arise. The feminist sociologist Margaret DeVault, for example, found that, in interviewing women, features of everyday speech—the hesitations, the ums, and you knows—often revealed emotional attitudes. DeVault came to believe that such features of speech were evidence and that transcription should preserve “some of the ‘messiness’ of everyday talk” (DeVault 1999: 78) since it provided information about the respondent’s relevant emotions toward the topics discussed. Traditional interviewing and transcribing methods call for the interviewer to “smooth out” these features of speech and focus on the content of the respondent’s remarks and so favor empirical adequacy as breadth—content features are more likely to be transportable to other situations whereas emotional attitudes are often specific to contexts. But the standpoint admonition to “start from women’s lives” favors the specificity of the local. DeVault’s methodology has her opting for empirical adequacy as depth rather than breadth and thus her values affect what she considers evidence. Wylie’s account can be described as merging feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint by adopting an empiricism in which the standards we use to assess evidence might be thought of as value free or at least value neutral in that



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

195

they are relatively uncontroversial; however, the way we apply those standards is dependent on (feminist) values. A standpoint methodology is what guides the choice of those values. I have also offered an interpretation of standpoint theory that merges it with elements of empiricism using a notion of interest-based objectivity (Crasnow 2007, 2008).7 I contend that the aspects of the empirical world that we pay attention to depend on our interests and these in turn are a reflection of our values. Standpoint methodology directs researchers to pay attention to those interests and thus shapes understanding of the objects of inquiry. While standpoint approaches contribute to arriving at an understanding of objects of inquiry that is suited to liberatory goals, once the relevant characteristics are agreed upon, the criteria for evaluation of evidence are consistent with empiricism. On Intemann’s (2010) account, combining elements of standpoint with empiricism produces something that she suggests we call “feminist standpoint empiricism”—an empiricism in which the social justice commitments of standpoint theory are the values that guide assessment of the relevance of evidence. When we think of this in terms of methodology and epistemology as I have urged, feminist standpoint methodology directs us to relevant evidence, but the epistemology is empiricist. Intemann ultimately argues that standpoint approaches improve on more traditional empiricist approaches, such as Longino’s, in that they make clear commitments to social justice values. In this way she responds to a criticism of Longino’s account that it is problematic to focus on a diversity of values without distinguishing values that seem clearly problematic for emancipatory projects from those that support them.8 While both feminist empiricism and ways to merge approaches identify how contextual, sociopolitical values play a role in knowledge production, they do not amount to an alternative feminist epistemology, since the epistemological work is done through some version of empiricism. In contrast, feminist standpoint methodology does offer resources for developing such an alternative, but making use of these resources depends on understanding more fully the epistemological assumptions and implications of the methodology. I now turn to this task.

4  Standpoint methodology and epistemology The idea that feminist standpoint theory is not an epistemology is not a new one. Smith criticizes Harding’s 1986 characterization of standpoint theory as an

196

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

alternate epistemology noting that its social science practitioners had not seen it in this way: Feminist standpoint theory, as a general class of theory in feminism, was brought into being by Sandra Harding (1986), not to create a new theoretical enclave but to analyze the merits and problems of feminist theoretical work that sought a radical break with existing disciplines through locating knowledge or inquiry in woman’s standpoint or in women’s experience. Those she identified had been working independently of one another and have continued to do so. In a sense, Harding created us. (Smith 2004: 263)

Here Smith explicitly distinguishes between standpoint as methodology—what she believes that she and other feminist social scientists are concerned with— and standpoint as epistemology—the concern of philosophers. To understand what Smith means, we can use Harding’s distinction between methodology and epistemology referred to in the introduction. Methodology is a theory of how research should proceed whereas epistemology provides the justificatory theory underlying methodology. To say that standpoint approaches constitute a feminist methodology does not indicate precisely what methods/ techniques should be employed but rather how best to conduct research as a feminist. Methodology is theory of how research should proceed, not what methods one should use, although methodology might both suggest and constrain the choice of method under some circumstances.9 Feminist standpoint methodology directs researchers to start with the lives of women through listening to their experiences and observing how their daily lives are structured. This methodology directs researchers to look for places where their disciplinary frameworks are not adequate to capture what they seek to understand—that is, to produce knowledge of and for these lives. Standpoint methodology offers theoretical analysis of why starting from women’s lives is appropriate—that is, what value this approach will have for the knowledge produced. This is not itself an epistemology in that it is not a justification of the methodology as adequate to the production of knowledge. In Harding’s most recent book, Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (2015), she appears to acknowledge this point. She rarely refers to standpoint theory, but instead discusses standpoint methodology together with its strong objectivity program.10 She thus shifts most of the epistemological work from standpoint onto strong objectivity—the view that the standards of evidence and justification should be as subject to scrutiny as the theories that



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

197

they are intended to support. Strong objectivity addresses the justification of knowledge (epistemology)—what it is about the methodology (standpoint) that successfully produces knowledge. Harding argues that by starting research from outside the dominant framework—starting from the lives of women—the values that shape research are more likely to be visible.11 When values are shared, as they are in the dominant culture, they tend to be invisible and thus not questioned. Such values will have “shaped the design of research processes, what counted as relevant evidence, and the interpretation of data. They had shaped the conclusions drawn from the data, and the choices of to whom the results of research were disseminated” (Harding 2015: 30) and so they affect reasoning throughout. An epistemology that does not address the ways in which values function throughout knowledge production is only able to be weakly objective—objective under the value-free ideal of science. That ideal neither acknowledges nor questions the role of shared assumptions and thus can only ensure that given those assumptions knowledge consistent with the unexamined dominant interests will be produced. In this way seemingly good science—science that follows all of the rules of evidence and justification—can still be biased in that it is unable to produce knowledge that addresses the epistemic needs of nondominant groups. As a methodology standpoint theory directs researchers to investigate in ways that bring dominant assumptions under scrutiny, but it is strong objectivity that provides the epistemic justification for how that methodology can be successful.12 Standpoint methodology consists of methodological directives that bring to light the assumptions that shape research. By starting research from the lived experience of women, the researcher finds “lines of fault” or ways in which the standard concepts do not fit with this lived experience. This lack of fit signals a need to correct old concepts or develop new ones. In addition, it may be that disciplinary practices (methods and methodology) do not work to capture relevant evidence and so these too may need to be revised or replaced. In order to make this abstract description more concrete, here are some examples of feminist social science guided by standpoint methodology. Dorothy Smith presents research that starts with interviewing women about their daily routine—paying attention to their lived reality. The work that they do both is shaped by and sustains the economic structure and institutions in which they live (Smith 1987). When their children come home from school is not their choice, for instance, and yet it structures their lives. This reality contrasts

198

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

with the way work is conceived of within those structures however. The tension between sociologists’ accounts of work and the actual working lives of women creates a kind of “line of fault” that calls for reconceiving the concept “work” so that it is not limited to paid work but also takes into account the domestic tasks paid work depends on. DeVault (1991) investigates what she calls “feeding the family”—a topic that seems outside of her discipline’s framework. “My topic is activity without a name, activity traditionally assigned to women; often carried out in family groups: activity that I know from experience but cannot easily label” (DeVault 1991: 4). She goes on to note, “This particular insufficiency of language is an example of a more general problem, a more pervasive lack of fit between women’s experiences and the forms of thought available for understanding experiences” (DeVault 1991: 5). Again, the difficulty rests at least in part in how “work” is understood in her discipline. It does not seem to include the caring work that she seeks to study. In another well-known example, it is not a matter of altering or refining a concept but rather of not having a concept through which to even recognize the phenomenon as one to be studied. Thus Lin Farley introduces a new term— “sexual harassment”—to describe common experiences reported by working women in consciousness-raising groups (Farley 1978). This new term comes out of the lives of working women who discover that they share similar experiences in the work place and recognize a pattern of behavior—a phenomenon—for which there is no name. These are the sorts of changes in concepts—the understanding of the objects of inquiry—that the critical stance of feminist standpoint theory uncovers. In each of these cases there is something jarring in the misfit between the concepts that are available to understand social phenomena and the lived experiences of those who are trying to understand them—and this misfit ranges from entirely lacking a way to think about the experience—not being able to name it—to thinking that the concept is ill-defined in that it does not adequately capture the salient aspects of experience or is inadequate for producing an understanding of lived experience. The inadequacy of the concepts is a reflection of the assumed values that are uncovered through feminist standpoint methodology and consequently open to critique. The assumption that paid work in the public sphere is the appropriate focus of social science only becomes visible as an assumption when those who are made invisible through that assumption are seen as worth studying.



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

199

Another point of tension that comes from this sort of misfitting is disciplinary norms. DeVault’s shift in how she transcribed interviews discussed in Section 3 illustrates this. As she works to listen to and capture the voices of those she interviews, that which would have been discarded as irrelevant under dominant norms becomes evidence. The assumptions made about “what counts” are challenged and replaced when made visible through feminist standpoint methodology. Feminist standpoint as methodology—a theory of how to do feminist research—both makes epistemological assumptions and has epistemological implications as do all methodologies. The assumptions include how to think about what one observes, what is a proper object of study, what aspects of what one studies are significant, and thus ultimately what counts as evidence. When these assumptions are challenged, the understanding of what should be studied, how the objects of inquiry should be understood, and what counts as evidence changes. Harding proposes strong objectivity where scrutiny of the values guiding the research in the myriad ways discussed above is the epistemological justification of the methodology—and this approach allows for scrutiny of the dominant assumptions and so supports the possibility of evaluating them. Wylie’s approach is to show that standpoint methodology allows values to aid in the adjudication of standardly accepted epistemic norms—that is, norms that are accepted by the entire scientific community. Intemann suggests that the merging of standpoint approaches with empiricist approaches is beneficial only insofar as it includes the recognition of standpoint’s commitment to feminist values, arguing that this points to the sort of diversity that needs to be taken into account as diversity of experience rather than diversity of values (contra Longino). I have argued that values (understood as interests) shape our understanding of the objects of inquiry so that what is relevant about them, and hence what counts as evidence, is dependent on these interests. In each of these proposals what differs from the feminist empiricist approaches is the explicit commitment to feminist values as a means to produce knowledge for, by, and about women, although how that commitments works varies. In each of these accounts there is a tension between the desire to present an epistemological justification of standpoint and the core ideas that underlie the methodology: the theses of situated knowledge and epistemic advantage. The epistemic advantage offered by standpoint methodology can only be understood as a part of an epistemology if we take seriously the commitment to knowledge as

200

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

always local—always socially situated. If knowledge is always local—situated— then we need to say something more about the social location of knowers if we are to have an understanding of standpoint theory as an epistemology. Among the epistemological assumptions that methodologies make are assumptions about knowers. Feminist standpoint methodologies explicitly identify the knowers as women, but this is not terribly helpful. As early critics pointed out, assuming that there is “woman’s standpoint” is misleading in a number of ways. First, we run the risk of treating the experiences of some women as primary and ignoring others. Or we might essentialize woman, mistaking some features or experiences as crucial to that essence and thus replacing the universal man assumed to be the knower in traditional epistemology with universal woman. On the other hand, if we are fully sensitive to the diversity of women in a way that includes the insights of intersectional analysis—recognizing that diversity corresponds to an intersection of gender with other factors that make up social location (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, ability differences)— as surely we ought—we run the risk of social location fragmenting so severely that identifying knowers that share knowledge with others might prove impossible. Standpoint theorists were not insensitive to these sorts of criticisms when they were raised in the 1990s. As I noted in Section 2, they responded that woman had never been intended to be understood as homogeneous. Advocates of standpoint have always expressed an awareness of the diversity of women’s lives and in fact, starting from the lives of women is specifically intended as a means of capturing this diversity. While the stated commitment to recognizing such diversity is certainly a good commitment, how specifically to think about knowers remains an issue. And in fact the commitment to acknowledging the diversity of women points to the second worry—the fragmentation of the knowing community. Arguably each individual exemplifies a different intersection of social factors and in addition to concerns about the intersubjectivity of knowledge, one might also wonder how the solidarity needed for a social movement such as feminism could emerge if there is this degree of fragmentation.13 Standpoint theory evokes the knower in ways that need to be more fully addressed and so the project of developing a feminist standpoint epistemology needs to say something more about knowing communities and what it means to say that knowledge is for the members of those communities. I take it that this is part of the project of Harding’s 2015 book. The project of her last chapter is to



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

201

address the question of new “scientific selves” (Harding 2015: 150); the approach that I develop in the next two sections is very much in this spirit. Standpoint epistemology is not unique in needing to address the question of knowers. If epistemologies are justificatory—offering accounts of how particular activities, attitudes, and methodologies result in knowledge—then they either say or presume something about the knower in the process.14 A self-reflective epistemology should therefore address the issue directly.

5  The achievement thesis and the knowing community Epistemic advantage as evoked in standpoint theory is not automatic. Just being in a particular social location—being a woman, for example—does not immediately confer epistemic advantage. This point is captured in a third thesis of standpoint theory—what I have referred to as the achievement thesis (Crasnow 2013, 2014). To better understand this idea and to see how it might be helpful in getting a clearer idea of the knower I turn to an insight about standpoint theory offered by Gaile Pohlhaus (2002). Pohlhaus starts by critiquing standpoint’s metaphor of social location, arguing that it individualizes the knower, since only one individual can occupy a place at one time. She argues that standpoint theory needs a more social conception of knowers—one that more clearly identifies the knower as a community and acknowledges the political nature of such communities. The political nature of these communities is closely tied to the notion that standpoint is achieved— something lost when standpoint is thought of as an individual’s location. Pohlhaus notes that standpoint is most frequently described as achieved by struggling against a dominant understanding. She argues that political struggle is not only a struggling against but also struggling with. “To strugglewith would involve building relations with others by which we may come to know the world and understand one another, that is the project of building knowing communities” (Pohlhaus 2002: 292). Pohlhaus calls for a return to consideration of the political aspect of standpoint. A standpoint—a consciously identified social location—emerges out of struggling with others to make sense of similar or shared experiences. It is in this way that the epistemic advantage associated with “standpoint” is achieved rather than automatic. The building of communities involves identifying, forging, and/or negotiating shared interests— fundamentally political activities. The role of social values in knowledge, both

202

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

their role in determining what counts as evidence and their role prioritizing some experience as more relevant to goals than others, requires these communitybuilding activities. There is another way in which the social location metaphor is misleading. A spatial location is a fixed point, but social locations are not. They may change since individuals are socially located differently in different contexts. This point speaks to earlier criticisms of feminist standpoint theory. Feminist standpoint or women’s standpoint seemed to suggest a universal or essential notion of woman—attributing characteristics to all women in the same way that early feminist critique identified the attribution of the characteristics of some males (those in the dominant group) to all humans as a source of bias. On the other hand, awareness of the intersection of nexuses of oppression along axes of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability threatens to impossibly fragment knowing communities. Both of these worries are reflected in the critique of the metaphor. Pohlhaus calls attention to struggling-with as a way of thinking about standpoint that addresses both of these issues. Political communities are built on shared interests. Building such a community requires acknowledging diversity and working to find those shared interests. This is coalition building. A feminist standpoint is not a perspective derived from a social location—this mistaken view is what the achievement thesis addresses. The activity of struggling with others to find the sources of oppression brings about standpoint. While struggling-with requires identifying with at least some interests of others in order to form a knowing community, it does not result from some essential identifying feature or features of womanhood (or other categories). Shared interests are negotiated with others in order to form the community, the sociopolitical group, the coalition. Shared interests are often based on what are perceived to be similarities with others who are like us in some relevant way. Sometimes these interests arise from being marginalized because of identities attributed as a result of perceived similarities. Embracing such identities can sometimes be a way of coalescing around such interests. The extent to which identities arise in this way and the extent to which they can be useful for emancipatory projects—including knowledge projects—is a contextual and contingent matter. Such identities are neither essential for shared interests nor do they ensure shared interests. However, because identities may play a role in building knowing communities if we are trying to understand standpoint as an epistemology saying something



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

203

about such communities seems to require saying something about identities. To the extent that an account of identity is to be useful for these purposes it should have the following characteristics: ●●

●●

●●

It has to be flexible—acknowledging that identities are never fixed but rather change depending on context. It has to allow for individuals occupying multiple identities at the same time. It also has to be able to grapple with the way in which identities are social without being determinant. Both the force of the social identity as a causal factor and the ability of the agent to act in a way that is not wholly determined by that identity have to be part of the account.

With these needs in mind, I consider some accounts of identity.

6 Identity In this section I review some ways of thinking about identity that show potential to contribute to an understanding of the sorts of knowing communities through which feminist standpoint epistemology might be developed. While I think it is worthwhile to consider questions of identity, I argue that the political nature of feminism (or other liberatory social movements with which it has affinities) cannot be served through identity alone. This is primarily because political goals are grounded in interests and the political nature of achieving those goals is more directly related to interests. While identities can serve as a way of coalescing power around interests, the very idea of identity is too rigid. This is particularly so for accounts of identity that attempt to explicate identity through physical or biological features of individuals—some sort of natural essentialism.15 For that reason, I do not consider such accounts here but rather focus on accounts that understand identity as fundamentally social; however, I conclude that even these are problematic. Given the need for flexibility, I begin with accounts that are contextual. Georgia Warnke has argued for conceiving of identity in terms of interpretation. She argues that identities are “parts of contexts and make sense only within the contexts of which they are a part” (Warnke 2007: 245). Thus no one has an identity per se but rather only in relation to a particular context. Whether or not an identity “makes sense” depends on whether a coherent part-whole interpretation can be given. The interpretation proceeds in a circle—with parts making sense in

204

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

relation to the whole and the whole being understood through its parts. There are contexts in which interpreting someone as a woman is illuminating and others in which it is not. In the case of Smith’s discussion of work, the lines of fault that appear as she researches the lives of women are revealed precisely because she is conducting her research starting from the reality of their lives. That they are women is relevant in the context of a society that organizes the division of labor along gender lines in such a way that the labor of woman is no longer visible in discussions of the economy. Failing to identify women’s work as work results in an incoherence in the understanding of the agent (in the case of the concept of labor) due to a failure to take gender into account—a gendered identity is thus relevant for the full economic understanding of labor since the unpaid domestic work of (predominantly women) supports the economy as a whole. For Warnke’s interpretive approach coherence depends on prior value judgments about contexts—that is, which are to be preferred. My suggestion for how to use the approach in relation to Smith’s use of standpoint methodology assumes that the context in which women’s lives are to be understood is valuable— that this is a worthwhile knowledge project. Warnke’s approach to identity does not provide resources to determine which contexts are to be prioritized apart from coherence. Part of what is missing from Warnke’s interpretative approach is sensitivity to preexisting conditions of oppression and differential distribution of power that will prioritize some contexts over others. For example, if we consider debates about the wage gap, those who have argued that women choose to leave the workforce when they bear children and so create gaps in their resumes that result in their lower earnings (or other similar explanations), see women’s reproductive role and hence a particular conception of gender as relevant, whereas their opponents do not. The question of whether the work context is one in which gender identification is relevant is not obvious as it depends on a variety of other concerns that have to do with views on how society is best structured (and child-rearing is best handled). While it surely is the case that there are contexts in which gender identity is not relevant, nor would we want it to be, the question of where it is relevant for liberatory knowledge projects is not always obvious. It is one of the questions that feminist knowledge projects seek to address and they do so through a prior commitment to emancipatory values. Commitments to such values express shared interests and shared interests are prior to identity when identity is context dependent. Contexts in which power prevents interpretations that support liberatory projects would need to be disrupted in order to allow for preferred identities.



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

205

Jennifer Saul’s (2012) contextual account of identity reveals this more clearly. Her primary motivation for developing the account is to provide a means of understanding politically significant terms like “woman.” If the meaning of “woman” is context dependent, when the contexts have a distribution of power that violates principles of social justice, it is not clear that power can be resisted. The particular example that she worries about is the self-identification of trans women as women. Saul worries that trans self-identification might be rendered trivial—that is, become meaningful only within a very limited context— because another context might equally convincingly support a rejection of this identification by those who are trans misogynists and more crucially by a society that is such. Thus a social justice tension arises with contextualism. Saul proposes resolving this tension through adopting a political stance— in this case, to seek an understanding of woman that does justice to trans women’s experience (Saul 2012: 213). But she worries that this prioritizes what Sally Haslanger has called an ameliorative project in contrast to a conceptual or descriptive project for philosophy of language. Saul’s concern is that this proposed solution would introduce a methodologically unacceptable political element into philosophy of language.16 Saul’s problem is similar to that raised by Warnke’s interpretivist approach. When focusing on interpretation, we might want to prioritize some particular whole over others, which amounts to prioritizing particular contexts over others (in the case of Saul, prioritizing particular projects). While from a liberatory perspective a whole (a context) that supports democratic and egalitarian ideals is preferable, it is unclear how to resist an oppressive whole (context) when its priority is maintained through an imbalance of power. Values (and so interests) determine relevant contexts. There are resources for thinking about the way context might lead to prioritizing some similarities over others when intersectionality is considered.17 As Ann Garry describes it: Oppression and privilege by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, nationality, and so on, do not act independently of each other in our individual lives or in our social structures; instead, each kind of oppression or privilege is shaped by and works through the others. These compounded, intermeshed systems of oppression and privilege in our social structures help to produce (a) our social relations, (b) our experiences of our own identity, and (c) the limitations of shared interests even among members of “the same” oppressed or privileged group. (Garry 2012: 496)18

206

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

According to Garry, thinking of our social relations, our experiences of our own identity, and the limitations on shared interests along intersectional lines can be clarifying and useful because all of these are produced intersectionally. While this is surely correct and one reason why identity and interests are not interchangeable as notions, intersectionality serves at best as a tool for understanding the complex relationship between interests and identity in particular contexts. It is a useful tool and a good corrective for thinking of identities as fixed through one dimension but intersectionality does not provide a basis from which to develop an account of the knowing communities of standpoint epistemology. Intersectionality is not focused on the active element of building knowing communities that seems crucial to a standpoint epistemology. Allison Weir offers an account of identity that does focus on just such an active element. She offers the following: I argue that understanding identities as sources of freedom requires that we differentiate identity as category from identity as connection to and identification with ideals, each other, and defining communities. Thus, it involves a shift from a metaphysical to an ethical, political conception of identities, and to a focus on practical, ethical, and political identifications as practices of freedom. And this involves differentiating between appropriative identifications and identifications that are transformative: that risk connection, openness to the other and selfchange. (Weir 2013: 3, emphasis in original)

What I see in this approach is first, the idea that identity is not a category. The sort of flexibility that is needed for forming knowing communities requires that one not be bound by categories that are thought to transcend context. Second, the idea that identities come about through a connection to ideals and others. I have expressed this in terms of interests and I will stick by that. Weir looks to ideals in part to resist the notions that identities are predominantly produced through intersections of oppression and thus through power. It is one of the reasons why she does not see her account as intersectional. Ideals are sometimes the result of identification with others through a common history and while in some cases this may be shaped by power, power need not be the primary relevant factor. Finally, Weir’s account seeks to distinguish between appropriative and transformative identifications. The former are unwillingly imposed upon us and are oppressive. The latter provide us with the basis from which to act—perhaps to know. I find Weir’s account more promising than the other approaches that I have considered because of her emphasis on the active element of identity formation



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

207

and the notion that identities are developed for emancipatory purposes and not always the result of external, oppressive forces. The active identification of interests and the engagement in the activity of producing knowledge that I take to be relevant for a standpoint epistemology seem to fit more clearly with such a conception of identity. Nonetheless, even though understanding identity looks like a way to talk about knowing communities, I fear it is misleading since it is so easy to slip into treating identity as a static category.19 Individuals act to form coalitions, to identify shared goals, and negotiate both means and ends. They form groups around what they perceive as shared interests. Identities can play a role in this but a fundamentally political account of knowing communities—which is what standpoint epistemology needs—is going to ground identities in shared interests. This may be and is complicated by the histories that bind communities together and inform their sense of identity both for themselves and for others, but if identities are not to be straightjackets then understanding them as grounded in interests, and in that way a basis for political action, is crucial.

7 Conclusions It may seem odd that a discussion of contemporary standpoint theory would end with a discussion of identity, but the path is really not so strange after all. Accounts of knowledge always intertwine methodology and epistemology. The question of how we should go about knowing and what makes what we discover in that way count as knowledge are deeply connected. The feminist critique of knowledge has included the recognition that in the process of discussing the methods that we use to get at the knowledge that we need, the we disappears and all the assumptions of who we are is hidden when that occurs. Feminist epistemology has from its inception asked us to focus on the knowers and in some ways feminist standpoint approaches call for this more directly than other feminist epistemologies. Researchers are to start with the lives of women (those about and for whom the knowledge is sought) and they are to pay attention to where their research tools do not fit these lives. In this way, they need to form common interests with those lives. Knowers are very much present throughout the process. Accounts of standpoint that merge it with feminist empiricism play down the political aspect of knowledge through focusing on justification. Although

208

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

feminist empiricism is sensitive to the political context, the analysis of this context is primarily in terms of the background assumptions that shaped the research and the diversity of the community. Standpoint addresses the need for a coherence of the community in a way that the other accounts do not by focusing on knowers as actively knowing—producing knowledge. Sandra Harding has been a staunch supporter of standpoint theory for many years. It is not in the least surprising that she picks up this relationship between subjectivity (knowers) and objectivity (knowledge) that is part of this account in her recent work. My reading of standpoint epistemology calls for this intimate connection between knowers and knowledge as well. Standpoint epistemology needs an account of knowers that is ultimately deeply political.

Notes 1 This commitment did not necessarily extend to metaphysics however and so I do not here address the realist/anti-realist debate often associated with empiricism in philosophy of science. 2 The insider/outside characterization actually works both ways in that the marginal researcher is also an insider in the sense of sharing the social location of those studied and an outsider in that the discipline is not (originally) her world. 3 Double-vision might also be double-consciousness in DuBois’s phrase ([1903] 1994). 4 As will be clearer in the next section of this chapter, I do not mean simply that the insider/outsider has different experiences, although differences in experiences may be part of what is relevant. They also have access to the structures (and assumptions) that help determine what counts as evidence and, in part, their epistemic advantage is in that they are able to critique such structures and even offer alternatives. 5 These worries were among those reflected in the “science wars” of the 1990s and the identity politics that split feminism around the same time. 6 Wylie attributes this list to Kuhn, but acknowledges that there are other similar lists (2004: 345). She is not particularly concerned about precisely which epistemic virtues are on the list. Her point is simply that there are such lists and that there is a fair bit of agreement about what virtues they should include. 7 In Crasnow (2007) and (2008) I describe interest-based objectivity as model-based objectivity. I no longer use that latter description but the core ideas remain the same in my later works. 8 Dan Hicks makes a similar argument that Longino’s commitment to a diversity of values would allow Nazi scientists to “sit at the table” (Hicks 2011).



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

209

9 For example, a methodology that says that research should proceed in such a way so as not to cause unnecessary pain to animals might eliminate certain methods from being used. 10 For example, see Harding (2015: 31, 40, 45, 46) and others. 11 Longino makes a similar point in her call for diversity of values. Harding’s view differs in that she also makes the empirical claim that strong objectivity reveals that the commitment to democratic and liberatory values gives us better knowledge than merely diversity of values. 12 While the discussion of strong objectivity here relies on Harding (2015), the idea was originally introduced by Harding (1986). 13 This is a concern that Naomi Zack raises that leads her to reject intersectional analysis (2005). 14 This point is made by Lorraine Code in her What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (1991). 15 I am thinking specifically of accounts of woman’s identity that tie it to reproductive function such as Charlotte Witt’s (2011). 16 Esa Diaz-Leon (2016) has argued that there is a way to preserve contextualism without introducing this methodological worry. 17 The view was first put forward by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Patricia Hill Collins (2000) has developed it as well. 18 Garry’s account follows others in most respects although she includes privilege, as well as oppression as being intersectionally produced. 19 When I discuss “knowing communities” here I am identifying this approach as in the tradition of social epistemology. It shares with those approaches that such communities are dynamic, but differs from them in that I have identified these communities as political entities and not merely as epistemic entities. In fact, in my account, what is unique about standpoint theory is that it brings these two sometimes separate conceptions together and seeks to clarify why it is that knowing communities are both epistemic and political. It is also important to note that I am not claiming that communities (rather than individuals) are knowers as Nelson does, but rather claiming that knowers form communities and that the communities that they form affect what counts as knowledge.

References Anderson, Elizabeth (2004), “Uses of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, With Lessons From a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 19 (1): 1–24. Clough, Sharyn (2003), Beyond Epistemology: A Pragmatist Approach to Feminist Science Studies, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

210

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Code, Lorraine (1991), What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill (1986), “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33: S14–32. Collins, Patrician Hill (2000), Black Feminist Thought, New York: Routledge. Crasnow, Sharon (2007), “Feminist Anthropology and Sociology: Philosophy of Science Issues,” in Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord (eds.), Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, 755–89, Oxford: Elsevier. Crasnow, Sharon (2008), “Feminist Philosophy of Science: ‘Standpoint’ and Knowledge,” Science and Education 17 (10): 1089–1100. Crasnow, Sharon (2013), “Feminist Philosophy of Science: Values and Objectivity,” Philosophy Compass 8 (4): 413–23. Crasnow, Sharon (2014), “Feminist Standpoint Theory,” in Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montuschi (eds.), Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, 145–61, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989), “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Anti-Racist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67. DeVault, Marjorie L. (1991), Feeding the Family: The Social Organizaiton of Caring as Gendered Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DeVault, Marjorie L. (1999), Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research, Philadephia, PA: Temple University Press. Diaz-Leon, Esa (2016), “Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 31 (2): 245–58. DuBois, William Edward Burghardt ([1903] 1994), The Souls of Black Folk, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Farley, Lin (1978), Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job, New York: McGraw-Hill. Garry, Ann (2012), “Who is Included? Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender,” in Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson (eds.), Out from the Shadows, 493–530, New York: Oxford University Press. Harding, Sandra (1986), The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra (1987), “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” in Sandra Harding (ed.), Feminism and Methodology, 1–14, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Harding, Sandra (2015), Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hicks, Dan (2011), “Is Longino’s Conception of Objectivity Feminist?” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26 (2): 333–51.



Contemporary Standpoint Theory

211

Intemann, Kristen (2010), “Twenty-five Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (4): 778–96. Kourany, Janet (2010), Philosophy of Science After Feminism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Thoman S. (1977), The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Longino, Helen (1990), Science As Social Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nelson, Lynn Hankinson (1990), Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pohlhaus, Jr., Gaile(2002), “Knowing Communities: An Investigation of Harding’s Standpoint Epistemology,” Social Epistemology 16 (3): 283–93. Richardson, Sarah (2010), “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges,” Synthese 177: 337–62. Saul, Jennifer (2012), “Politically Significant Terms and Philosophy of Language: Methodological Issues,” in Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson (eds.), Out from the Shadows, 195–216, New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Dorothy E. (1987), The Everyday World As Problematic, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Weir, Allison (2013), Identities and Freedom: Feminist Theory Between Power and Connection, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Witt, Charlotte (2011), The Metaphysics of Gender, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wylie Alison (2004), “Why Standpoint Matters,” in Sandra Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Reader, 339–51, New York: Routledge. Zack, Naomi (2005), Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

12

Objectivity in Science: The Impact of Feminist Accounts Evelyn Brister

Besides being a standard of judgment in science, history, law, and journalism, the concept of objectivity is central to metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. Depending on the context, the concept of objectivity is used as a stand-in for truth, to certify what is real, or to highlight a contrast with the subjective or constructed. We talk about objective data and objective researchers, but it’s not clear if “objective” means the same thing in both cases. Sometimes, it seems, being objective means seeing different points of view while other times being objective means having the one correct point of view. Since a lot can hinge on whether someone or something is objective, it’s in our best interest to get as clear a grasp on this concept, and its various uses, as we can. When people are accused of lacking objectivity this is a serious charge—but it’s not always clear exactly what they’re being accused of. While objectivity is the sort of thing—like truth or virtue—that we should strive for, calls for greater objectivity can also be used to suppress valid points of view that seem too personal or that challenge a political status quo. Feminist analyses of scientific objectivity have identified failures of objectivity in the selection of phenomena to study and the methods used to study them. They have examined the social arrangements of scientific institutions and the implementation of norms; the role of values in justifying scientific beliefs; and the relationship between objectivity and trust in scientific findings. Although these feminist analyses of objectivity are diverse and do not all share a common core, all of them aim to improve the enterprise of science by revealing hidden biases and providing grounds for trust in science. Feminist analyses share the ultimate goal of changing epistemic practice and directing scientists toward producing theories that are more true, more complete, or more useful to women and marginalized others.



Objectivity in Science

213

A number of philosophers have created taxonomies of the various meanings associated with the concept of objectivity. Each of these classificatory systems is useful for some philosophical purpose, but they do not all identify the same set of meanings, or identify the same purposes for evaluating objectivity (Anderson 2015; Daston and Galison 2007; Douglas 2004; Fine 2004; Janack 2002; Lloyd 1995; Megill 1994; Nozick 2001; Roth 2013; Scheffler 1982). For instance, Daston and Galison (2007) track how concepts of objectivity have shifted in response to observational and representational technologies such as photographs to represent ideal types or, instead, the particularity of individual objects. Several of these taxonomies of objectivity develop feminist critiques of objectivity or classify how and why feminist theorists have found narrowly construed conceptions of objectivity to be problematic. In what follows I will focus on feminist theories of scientific objectivity, but it will be apparent that there are connections between how the concept of objectivity is used in science and how it is used in historical, legal, political, and other contexts. For most of these taxonomies, the purpose is to focus on one or two specific meanings which deserve priority, such as the ontological status of entities or how values in science undermine impartiality. Alternatively, some taxonomies aim to unify concepts of objectivity across theoretical domains, to find a core sense of objectivity common to various topics and disciplines. However, Marianne Janack (2002) argues that the concept of objectivity has taken on a hodgepodge of various and irreducible meanings, and there is no central core to bind them all. In a survey of philosophical work focused specifically on scientific objectivity, Janack distinguishes over twenty distinct uses of the term. Objectivity accrues to different kinds of things: to entities and phenomena, to theories, to epistemic standards and methodologies, to the aims of the scientific enterprise, and to the actions of individual knowers. Moreover, it is treated as both an epistemic ideal and a moral ideal, and sometimes both at once. While Janack is skeptical of attempts to reduce the concept of objectivity to a unified core as well as of attempts to redefine it and thus constrain future uses, she does not doubt the value of applying analytical rigor to examine the role that ideals of objectivity play in various contexts. This shifts the philosophical analysis from the extension and meaning of the concept of objectivity to the role the concept plays in figuring out how to achieve various epistemic ends. In this chapter, I follow Janack in acknowledging that “a vast and disparate array of virtues, goods and procedures are collected under the umbrella of the concept” (2002: 279) and that various dilemmas of objectivity have been

214

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

addressed by feminist analyses of objectivity. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is not to impose an artificial unity on diverse analyses. Feminists have analyzed objectivity in various ways, for example, in relation to scientific methodology and in relation to a community’s epistemic norms. My goal is not to argue for one account over another, or to argue that the concept of objectivity is so varied as to be practically useless. Rather, I will trace the significant positive and practical impact these various accounts have had in expanding the range of phenomena to be studied, in supporting the explicit analysis of how values influence research design, and in drawing attention to how objectivity emerges out of social interactions. In other words, I intend to highlight how and where feminist accounts of objectivity—whatever their different theoretical commitments— have had their greatest influence in shaping scientific methodologies, practices, and norms.

1  Feminist concerns with bias Feminist accounts of scientific objectivity—and of objectivity applied more broadly to knowledge production and knowledgeable decision-making—address a variety of concerns about epistemic practices that fail to pursue or achieve objectivity: practices, in other words, that display bias. Several decades ago, it was common for feminist theorists to be skeptical that objectivity was worth pursuing—either because objectivity as an epistemic goal is necessarily tied up with the social consequence of objectifying women, or because objectivity encourages and reinforces oppressive or silencing epistemic practices, or because objectivity is at odds with an explicit commitment to feminist values.1 For the most part, this skepticism about the possibility or value of objectivity has subsided. There is now wide agreement among analytical feminist epistemologists that objectivity, broadly construed, is worth pursuing. A common concern in most feminist accounts of objectivity is that uncritical, nonfeminist science has a greater potential to produce knowledge that is systematically biased to ignore the perspectives, needs, and interests of women and others who do not have a socially secure role in conducting scientific inquiry. Feminist critiques have sought to identify how science can be made more objective, such that scientific inquiry does not reproduce and further exacerbate existing social inequalities. We can think of this as a concern about bias, where bias is understood in the most general sense to mean a predilection



Objectivity in Science

215

to hold a preconceived view, usually with an inclination to ignore or fail to consider the merits of alternative views. Bias in this sense includes social prejudice against groups, but it also includes unreflective assent to background assumptions about, for instance, causal relationships or how natural or social phenomena are classified. Various feminist analyses identify different kinds and sources of bias, focus on different ways that bias intrudes into scientific inquiry, and have different prescriptions for remedying bias. Some seek to neutralize bias (Longino 1990; Solomon 2001); others defend the importance of explicitly supporting interested inquiry in order to create knowledge of value to particular end-users (Harding 1991, 2015). In both cases, a naturalized approach to bias in inquiry is presumed: whether bias is good or bad hinges on whether it facilitates or impairs the search for truth. As Louise Antony argues, it is “an open question” whether bias, in the form of “emotions, prior beliefs, and moral commitments hinders, or aids, the development of knowledge” (1993: 136). Many analytic feminist theorists have examined scientific objectivity, but I will focus on two, while noting that there has been a great deal of overlap and exchange among these and other theorists. First, I examine the effect that Sandra Harding’s notion of “strong objectivity” and contribution to feminist standpoint theory have had on feminist epistemology and feminist social science research. This approach to evaluating scientific objectivity emerges from a trenchant critique of how scientific research has investigated phenomena of interest to masculine or politically dominant interests and how it has framed research questions to incorporate assumptions that shape and reproduce regimes of social inequality. The response to this form of bias has been to expand the scope of research to investigate a wider range of phenomena and to develop a suite of feminist research methods. The second approach I look at was initiated by Helen Longino’s examination of how scientific theories are justified within a framework of epistemic and social assumptions. When the background assumptions that play a role in theory acceptance are partial or interested but are widely shared within the scientific community, then there may be insufficient critique to unearth distorting bias. Her account, called “contextual empiricism,” has developed into a rich philosophical debate about the appropriate role for value judgments and dissent in science. Finally, I trace several critiques of scientific practice which draw significantly on feminist insights concerning scientific objectivity and which lead beyond a theoretical approach to practical recommendations for reforming scientific practice. For instance, both the above accounts, whatever their differences, give

216

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

strong epistemic reasons for supporting inclusivity in STEM professions. Thus, crafting institutional norms and procedures to correct social inequities among scientists contributes to the achievement of objective science, whichever account of the achievement of objectivity is given priority. Since the goal of the feminist critique of objectivity in science is to make scientific research more objective in some way or other—whether or not there is internal agreement on which aspect of objectivity takes precedence—I will track how ideas raised through philosophical discussions of feminism and objectivity return to influence scientific contexts.

2  Strong objectivity and feminist standpoint theory Although feminist attention to epistemological concepts began in the 1970s, it was Sandra Harding’s critique of the ideal of scientific objectivity, and her development of the replacement concept of “strong objectivity” in The Science Question in Feminism (1986), that ignited epistemological critique throughout the social sciences and humanities. A traditional, positivist view of scientific objectivity entails a Baconian view, such that the only way to discover scientific truth is for disinterested investigators to employ an unbiased method that analyzes all and only unadulterated evidence. This means that the concept of objectivity must be isolated from accounts of social relations in order to gain the value neutrality that is the necessary basis for unbiased judgments. The quintessential knower is an individual who puts all contingent or situated assumptions to the side. In contrast to an understanding of objectivity as aiming for value freedom or representing a “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986), “strong objectivity” critically evaluates how status quo social biases (including assumptions about gender roles, ethnicity, and social status) can also bias scientific research. Building on prior work in feminist standpoint theory, Harding advocates starting research by taking into account the interests and lived experiences of people who have traditionally been left out of the institutions of knowledge production, including women, the poor, people of the Global South, and other marginalized groups (Harding 1986). Since these perspectives have been left out of the production of institutionalized scientific knowledge, attending to them extends our understanding of the natural and social worlds. But the production of strong objectivity requires more than extending the scope of science to include neglected subjects which, by itself,



Objectivity in Science

217

is not a challenge to the view of objectivity as “the view from nowhere.” The insight of strong objectivity is more radical, in that it identifies how mainstream scientific knowledge is “partial” in two senses: (1) it is only part of the picture and (2) it is biased. Namely, the operation of political power leads to the identification of some research as more worthy than other research, and it also directs how research questions are framed and investigated. Thus, merely doing more research or increasing the scope of research is insufficient. Researchers must also, Harding argues, “start research from outside the dominant conceptual frameworks—namely in the daily lives of oppressed groups such as women” (2015: 30). Making use of the classifications and measures that marginalized people find meaningful to their problems may require that researchers challenge status quo assumptions. Harding argues that by reframing research questions (or asking new research questions) so that they are meaningful to people whose perspectives have been neglected and by designing methodologies that are respectful of such people’s understanding of natural and social phenomena, we achieve not just a more complete body of knowledge, but a “stronger” form of objectivity. This is a stronger objectivity because at the same time that research investigates phenomena of interest to marginalized others, it also reveals the power relations that have led to the structuring of traditional research questions and methods. Thus, strong objectivity is pursued by expanding the scope of research to include research questions of interest to those whose perspectives in society are neglected, and also by attending to the development and use of methodologies that get at knowledge for the sake of public use. The notion of strong objectivity directly challenges standard philosophical notions of scientific objectivity by pointing out that assumptions about what counts as value neutral are not, themselves, value neutral. Harding was one of many philosophers and social theorists in the 1980s and 1990s who challenged the fact-value dichotomy, both by revealing the social power that operated through knowledge institutions and by demonstrating how perspectives motivated by value commitments could still be empirically rigorous (Harding 1991). Harding concludes that since values do in fact play a role in shaping research questions and priorities, as well as in the methodological choices about how to collect and analyze data, the values of science should be available for reflection and evaluation, and should be consistent with the achievement of epistemic and social goals (Harding 1993). In addition to challenging core philosophical concepts such as objectivity and the distinction between fact and value, Harding’s notion of objectivity

218

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

tests a key idea about the scope of philosophical inquiry. The scope of philosophy of science, even during the post-Kuhnian 1990s, had been limited to the examination of how scientific claims came to be empirically justified: the so-called context of justification. The key idea of strong objectivity, however, is that knowledge is always pursued relative to goals, and that the goals of knowledge—how knowledge can be used—determine both what is studied and how it is studied. When the initial framing of research questions ignores the interests and knowledge of some social groups—or, worse, produces knowledge that can be used to further marginalize, oppress, and isolate them from useful knowledge—then the selection of which phenomena to study can produce a skewed body of knowledge, or knowledge that incorporates bias into its background assumptions. How such an introduction of bias into the context of discovery could be analyzed using philosophy of science, which took the context of justification as its domain of investigation, was a puzzle, and challenges fundamental notions of the scope of epistemology of science.2 As a result, Harding’s work on strong objectivity has received a greater degree of attention and uptake by researchers in the social sciences than inside philosophy. Feminist social scientists, especially, found that Harding’s critique of objectivity led to creative rethinking of conceptual categories for social phenomena and that the idea of strong objectivity could be directly applied to guide choices between research methodologies (Ramazanoglu and Holland 2002). Her intent has been to give an epistemological articulation to the practice of feminist social scientists, and she sees herself as speaking primarily with social scientists. Her epistemological critiques have been included in or discussed by texts commonly used in undergraduate and graduate social science courses that emphasize socially responsible research (Hesse-Biber and Yaiser 2004; HesseBiber and Leavy 2006). Via this route, Harding’s work on objectivity has had a strong influence on both novice and established social science researchers. The Thomson Reuters Web of Science’s bibliometric data for two of her journal articles on strong objectivity (Harding 1992, 1995)—one published in a social science journal and one in a philosophy journal—show that these articles are cited four to five times more often in gender studies, sociology, anthropology, nursing, law, and education journals than in philosophy journals. Likewise, bibliometric data collected by Google Scholar identifies The Science Question in Feminism (1986) as her most-cited work. Among those twenty works that cite this book and are themselves most highly cited, only one (namely, Collins 2002) can be



Objectivity in Science

219

clearly categorized as philosophy. The remaining influential works that draw on Harding’s theory of objectivity are written by economists, sociologists, linguists, political scientists, and specialists in various forms of interdisciplinary social research. In addition, the constructive interaction between Harding’s account of objectivity and Donna Haraway’s work in feminist postmodernist science studies has been productive (Haraway 1988; Wylie 2015). Across a wide range of fields, then, Harding’s work has influenced research that reveals the perspectives of silenced or ignored subjects and has led researchers to investigate and expose the relations of institutional power that structure research priorities and frame research questions. Sandra Harding’s work on “strong objectivity” draws on early work in feminist standpoint methodology, and, in turn, feminist standpoint theory has subsequently been refined in response to Harding’s points and further feminist critiques. The link between objectivity and feminist standpoint theory is the idea that framing research questions according to the goals, conceptions, and knowledge of a marginalized group in some specific social context will lead to better, more complete, more responsive, and more useful social science (Crasnow 2007). Such research acknowledges its own partiality, and intentionally uses the researchers’ own awareness of what concepts are contested, how, and by whom as a resource for guiding further knowledge production. Though philosophy of science rejected the epistemic relevance of an intentional analysis of the context of discovery, or the ranking and framing of research priorities, Harding argues that standpoint theory’s examination of the logic of discovery improves the epistemic quality of research because it “can increase the pool of hypotheses to be tested” (2004: 34) and because it “demonstrates how social inequality can damage the reliability of scientific hypotheses that look most interesting to dominant groups, and it shows how different cultures will tend to produce different patterns of knowledge and, equally importantly, of ignorance” (2004: 35).3 This point effectively extends the scope of objectivity judgments from methodologies and individual research projects to larger research programs. Harding and standpoint theorists are now able to examine whether research programs—which are often shaped by funding agencies—give sufficient support to building and disseminating research that serves the interests of various subjects and users of knowledge. Thus, one impact of this view of objectivity is that it generates support for evaluating research priorities according to whether and how they advance democratic knowledge projects for scientific,

220

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

epistemological, moral, and political reasons. Harding’s claim is that standpoint approaches, democratic research environments, and a diversity of ideas, approaches, and researchers produce better science—science that is both more empirically accurate and that serves the interests of those who seek to use the knowledge. It conforms to both a set of logical and methodological standards and a set of social and political standards. Harding’s notion of strong objectivity and feminist standpoint theory may continue to expand their impact. One clear example would be through explicit evaluation of NSF broader impacts criteria, where there is a regulative opening to judge prospective scientific research with regard to its promise for improving human and environmental health, security, and flourishing—that is, according to social and epistemic values that also support the achievement of “strong objectivity.”

3  Contextual empiricism and a social account of scientific objectivity Like Sandra Harding’s feminist critical response to the positivist, aperspectival account of scientific objectivity, Helen Longino’s critique focuses attention on the social interactions and political commitments that shape scientific research projects (Longino 1990). But there are also significant differences between their approaches.4 Harding focuses on how the framing of research problems and choice of methodologies serve particular epistemic and social ends and should be generated to serve socially valuable needs. Longino, in contrast, examines how the social arrangements in scientific institutions and communities function to produce internal critique in ways that lead to the development of hypotheses and the evaluation of research results. Whatever hypotheses are investigated and whatever scientific research is carried out, results receive epistemic uptake only by passing through the process of peer review, being published, and being cited and used by other scientists. If systematic social biases shape or limit the reception of ideas, or if they shape the content of critical evaluation and evidential standards, then this bias threatens the achievement of scientific objectivity. Therefore, according to Longino, epistemic ends can be better met when there are social practices and norms in place that improve the scope and quality of the criticism that refines research results. Harding focuses on how interests and goals frame research problems and on how research methods are chosen; Longino is more interested in the justificatory process once research is under way.



Objectivity in Science

221

In Science as Social Knowledge (1990), Longino draws out the implications for scientific objectivity of two widely accepted theses: first, the theory-ladenness of observation and, second, the thesis that scientific theory is underdetermined by evidence. She argues that interpretive judgments require the use of background beliefs and assumptions in order to provide support to scientific theories. These assumptions are an ineliminable part of scientific practice: the goal is not to get rid of them but to recognize their often hidden role and to be more deliberate in choosing an optimal set of background beliefs. Many different sorts of beliefs play this constitutive role, including metaphysical assumptions, epistemic values, and social values and interests. For instance, in sixteenth-century astronomical debates, some astronomers assumed that if the earth moved around the sun, stellar parallax would be observable, but because stellar parallax had not been observed, the absence of evidence counted against a heliocentric model of the planetary system. Other astronomers questioned this assumption, taking the same failure to measure stellar parallax as evidence instead that the stars must be so far away that apparent movement was not measurable (Anderson 1995). Ultimately, the background assumption about whether stellar parallax was measurable was not decisive in the adoption of a heliocentric model of the solar system; the eventual observation of parallax in the nineteenth century required much more sophisticated telescopes. Instead, other arguments took precedence and led to additional improvements in the heliocentric model, such as Kepler’s model using elliptical orbits. Likewise, when feminist critique casts doubt on the use of a social assumption in the justification of a scientific hypothesis, this critique can motivate investigation of competing hypotheses. Since background assumptions, including epistemic and social values, typically contribute to the interpretive frameworks that assist in making evidence relevant to hypotheses, it is legitimate for feminist scientists to select background assumptions that fit their social and political values. According to Longino’s account, which she calls contextual empiricism, background beliefs play a role in interpreting evidence and are open to scientific critique. Thus, objectivity does not require individual scientists to pursue value neutrality, since that would require the elimination of at least some background assumptions that do play a legitimate role in the evaluation of scientific hypotheses. But objectivity does require that background assumptions, including social values, be open to explicit critique inside the scientific community. Since the scope of that critique is limited to the degree that members of a scientific community

222

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

all share the same background assumptions, this means that scientific theories will undergo a more thorough critique—and therefore have stronger epistemic support—if scientific communities embrace forms of diversity that generate new critical perspectives (Longino 1990). This line of reasoning supports organizing social practices in science so that diversity among background beliefs functions as an epistemic resource for generating critical evaluation of scientific theories. The practical impact of how objectivity can better be achieved emerges from paying attention to how we (1) structure avenues for criticism, (2) develop shared evidential standards, (3) follow norms for responding to criticism, and (4) recognize equal intellectual authority among qualified community members (Longino 1990: 76). Longino’s account rejects the positivist account of objectivity requiring knowers to be unbiased, but it is consistent with the idea that undesirable bias is eventually eliminated from justified scientific theories, and it proposes that community interactions be structured to achieve this end. The theoretical implications of Longino’s social account of scientific objectivity have been influential in several ways. Not only does her account encourage viewing scientific objectivity through the operation of social practices and criticism, but it has played a key role in establishing social epistemology as a significant area of philosophical inquiry and in developing pluralist accounts of scientific method and metaphysics (Longino 2002, 2013). This view of objectivity has practical implications for, among other things, the structure of peer review, responses to dissent, pursuit of social diversity on scientific teams, use of scientific evidence in social policy, the integration of diverse methodologies in scientific inquiry, and the role of democratic values in scientific institutions. Compared to Harding’s work, Longino’s direct and long-term influence has been felt most strongly within philosophy. For example, the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database identifies forty-five citations to Longino (1995), and of these 89 percent appear in articles published in philosophy journals. Only 7 percent of the citing articles are not written by philosophers. Longino’s books have had a more direct, though relatively recent, impact outside of philosophy, compared to her articles. According to Google Scholar, among the twenty mostcited works that refer to Science as Social Knowledge (1990), 35 percent are in philosophy, 30 percent appear in social theory and methodology journals, and the remainder are in education, linguistics, political science, and economics.5 Thus, while Harding’s research on strong objectivity has been taken up directly by social scientists who are developing localized critiques of methodologies in



Objectivity in Science

223

their fields, Longino’s examination of objectivity has primarily led to further disciplinary debates within philosophy. Core concepts in epistemology and philosophy of science have been addressed in these debates, such as how epistemological norms apply to practices of communities (and not just to individual knowers) and the criteria for more objective processes for scientific inquiry. As a result of her work, philosophers of science now widely accept that objectivity is produced within discourses that carry assumptions about epistemic and social values, and they examine how this broadened, socialized understanding of objectivity affects other aspects of knowledge production. To take one example, Kristina Rolin demonstrates how the function of critique in Longino’s contextual empiricism maps neatly onto Michael Williams’s more general contextualist account of how critique can shift the burden of proof. Rolin also highlights the role of feminist insights in developing general accounts of the value of situated critique in inquiry (Rolin 2011). However, the indirect effect of Longino’s account of objectivity on shaping scientific discourse and practice has been significant because many of the philosophers most influenced by her work—both those who work in feminist theory and those who do not—are committed to examining issues of science in practice, including the social structure of scientific institutions and the processes and assumptions that go into making science policy.6 For example, Jaana Eigi (2017) analyzes Alison Wylie’s work on changing ethical norms in archaeological practice, relates Wylie’s account of collaborative practice to Longino’s account of objectivity, and recommends refining and extending Longino’s account to better fit the constraints of a science policy context. In this way Longino’s account of objectivity has encouraged philosophers of science to engage both with other philosophers and with the scientific community.

4  Feminist analytic philosophy and philosophy of impact Harding’s rejection of a value-neutral concept of objectivity led to the development of an account of “strong” objectivity that validates using valuebased consideration to select research priorities and methods; Longino’s rejection of the positivist ideal of unbiased observation led to an examination of how social norms and practices contribute to the certification of knowledge claims as objective. There is some overlap in the argument strategies of each account, and there is wide overlap in their implications for diversifying scientific

224

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

communities and for assessing value assumptions. I would like to call attention, though, to significant differences in how and where these accounts have been used, by whom, and for what purpose. Analytic feminist epistemology opposes social inequality by clarifying and pursuing traditional epistemic concepts like truth, rationality, and objectivity. In particular, it identifies how these concepts can be deployed to buttress feminist science and other feminist knowledge claims in order to empower and liberate women and others (Cudd 1996; Garry 2012). Analytic feminist epistemology uses the tools of analytic philosophy to pursue socially valuable, democratic ends. At the same time, it also critiques mainstream epistemology, identifying how “traditional philosophy risks leaving out certain groups of persons, thereby becoming an elitist discipline that remains locked behind the walls of the ivory tower” (Crasnow and Superson 2012: 6). Analytic feminist philosophical approaches thus share a commitment to changing practices or social structures inside and outside of universities in order to support the political autonomy and social well-being of women and marginalized others. At its core, analytic feminist philosophy has a goal that is not merely intellectual or academic. Despite growing interest in public philosophy, there is still little agreement on how to conceptualize philosophy’s impact outside of our academic discipline and, especially, outside the university setting (Frodeman and Briggle 2016). Given the commitment that analytic feminists have to examining the effects of philosophical concepts in shaping social systems, we must have a stake both in understanding how our research can effectively achieve social change and in directing it effectively. The research and publication strategies exemplified by Harding and Longino illustrate two different routes to achieving such impact. Sandra Harding’s work has had its most significant impact among feminist social scientists. Her account of strong objectivity has an obvious role to play in helping frame research questions, categorizing social phenomena, and designing methodologies consistent with feminist commitments. In turn she has built on work of feminist sociologists (such as Dorothy Smith and Nancy Hartsock) and, in addition to publishing articles in philosophy journals, has also published articles on feminist philosophy of science and social theory in interdisciplinary feminist journals (such as Signs) and social science journals (such as Social Research). Helen Longino’s work, in contrast, has had its most significant impact on disciplinary debates within philosophy of science. While her work relies on concrete examples of feminist critiques of scientific theories, her conclusions extend beyond feminist contexts and have found purchase in mainstream



Objectivity in Science

225

philosophy of science, where they have been integrated into several ongoing areas of research. Longino’s work has recently circled back to social science cases (2013), but in the meantime it has transformed the standard understanding of objectivity in philosophy of science and has contributed to the development of the field of social epistemology.7 The different routes to impact taken by Harding and Longino illustrate two ways that Frodeman and Briggle conceptualize the broader effects of scholarship in the humanities. They describe one approach, exemplified by Longino’s strategy, as “trickle-down humanities” (2016: 145). As described by Callicott (1999) philosophers typically work out, in intricate detail and in dialogue with one another, the detailed arguments for—and implications of— changes in theoretical perspectives. Through this process of careful disciplinary argument and testing, challenges to older philosophical theories gain conceptual coherence and power, which can lead to conceptual shifts in other disciplines or society at large. Philosophical work sharpens the articulation of such conceptual shifts, and it provides theoretical legitimacy to researchers working outside philosophy. In the case of Longino’s theory of objectivity, her research has trickled down to where many scholars now work to trace further implications for science policy, for the organization of scientific institutions and communities, and for scientific methods. Frodeman and Briggle call a second route to extradisciplinary impact “curiosity plus respicere,” or inquiry that follows curiosity but also takes potential uses into account (2016: 147).8 It recognizes the researcher’s responsibility to imagine the broader implications and consequences of research for a variety of audiences. This model shakes off the traditional academic expectation that research results be ideally communicated to like-minded, similarly trained academic specialists through traditional disciplinary journals. It deliberately directs philosophical research to audiences where it is likely to affect practice, critique, or theory outside of a narrowly defined academic community. Such an approach is often practiced in interdisciplinary areas such as gender studies, and it is exemplified by Harding’s strategy of directing her research simultaneously to philosophical audiences and to social science researchers. Philosophers who use this route to produce impactful work will deliberately direct their ideas to knowledge communities who can use them—this may be non-philosophical academic audiences or it may be lay or professional communities. Valerie Tiberius has recently collected data on philosophers’ metaphilosophical commitments, demonstrating that across the profession there is now a strong

226

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

commitment to doing philosophical work that is interdisciplinary, relevant to “real-world” concerns, and engaged in public discourse (Tiberius 2017). Compared to their male colleagues, female philosophers are more likely to have this commitment (Tiberius 2017). However, her survey also found that there is uncertainty about how to achieve these metaphilosophical goals. The development of philosophical accounts of extradisciplinary impact and of practical guidelines and strategies for effective philosophical work are consistent with the goals of analytic feminist philosophers, raising the question of how we can best circulate philosophical work into other areas.

5  Directing feminist theories of objectivity to increased impact The next step in feminist epistemology is to develop deliberate strategies for translating philosophical debates into practical impact. Feminist accounts of scientific objectivity have implications for evaluating bias in scientific theorizing, for identifying and evaluating the purposes that scientific knowledge serves, for understanding the political origin of gaps in scientific knowledge, for evaluating the epistemic utility of critique and dissent in scientific contexts, and for organizing scientific institutions to support the inclusion of diverse perspectives. Although not all scholars who pursue work in these areas root their arguments in feminist commitments, case studies and considerations that are specifically feminist have had a strong influence. It is worth tracking some of the routes by which theoretical accounts of objectivity have had a practical impact. Research in these areas has drawn on both Harding’s and Longino’s accounts of scientific objectivity. For instance, Elizabeth Anderson (2004) draws on Longino’s argument from underdetermination to show how value presuppositions play a role in determining how researchers conceive of the phenomena they are investigating. Focusing on research on divorce, Anderson argues that much of the existing research looks exclusively for negative social consequences, while research grounded in feminist commitments also looks for and finds positive consequences of divorce and uses more complex models of the social interactions preceding and following divorce. The results of the case study show that feminist values can lead to more thorough social science models and can themselves be supported by the evidence uncovered by social research. Intemann and de Melo-Martín have made a similar case that social values affect



Objectivity in Science

227

how evidence is evaluated in medical decisions where assumptions about sex and gender act as background beliefs, such as in the development of the HPV vaccine and in disputes about the relative safety of home birth (2010, 2012). Feminist philosophers have argued that the implication of these case studies is that scientific research is more objective when underlying social values are discussed critically and openly. Case study arguments running along similar lines have also drawn on Harding’s account of objectivity. Sharyn Clough (2012) evaluates epidemiological research connecting hygiene with immune disorders and argues that an awareness of gendered social practices draws attention to gaps in that research program, shows how feminist political commitments make evidence salient that would be ignored if political values were not used as background assumptions, and argues that the public policy implications for the health of women and children should shape the research agenda. Other feminist philosophers hope to influence the policy uses of scientific research not by addressing scientists but by addressing policymakers directly by bringing awareness of feminist theories of objectivity to the regulatory or decision-making context (Meghani and Kuzma 2011). Case studies such as these have impact when there is uptake by scientific researchers, when they contribute to evidence that is used to influence policymaking, and when they assist in identifying similar cases of gaps in other research programs. Other threads of feminist research on objectivity ask the following question: if we impose conditions on the internal processes of inquiry (such as requirements of publicity, transparency, critique, and diversity), then what procedural considerations are relevant when it comes to involving laypeople in research, whether as research subjects or as potential users of scientific knowledge? Likewise, if our epistemic goal is to direct knowledge production so that it draws on the epistemic resources of lay communities, and if we intend our research to be effective in improving people’s well-being, then what sorts of duties exist to develop relations of trust between science and lay communities? Scientific knowledge can make a difference in improving the lives of women and others, but lay publics will, rationally, support science only when they trust science will not betray their interests. Scheman (2001) argues that the function of objectivity is to rationally ground trust, and so trust in scientific claims can be undermined by oppressive social conditions or histories, even if procedural conditions on the objectivity of knowledge claims are otherwise met. She takes this argument further when she notes that norms of scientific objectivity apply particularly well to laboratory sciences and less well to research involving

228

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

humans, precisely because of issues surrounding trust and the potential for bias and misuse of research. She argues that “objectivity understood as trustworthiness requires of researchers not detachment but, far more rigorously, responsible engagement” (Jordan, Gast, and Scheman 2014: 175). Thus, attention to objectivity within scientific institutions should be accompanied by attention to the development of epistemic trustworthiness in how scientific researchers and policymakers respond to the needs and critiques of lay communities (Grasswick 2010). When lay communities will be affected by science policy decisions, it is rational for them to expect that scientists share relevant significant knowledge. When scientists fail to meet this expectation, it can erode public trust in science and the perception of the objectivity of scientific knowledge claims. This line of theoretical feminist thought has clear and immediate implications for making scientific research more epistemically effective, and especially research that impacts indigenous communities and other politically marginalized groups (Wylie 2014). As such, it stands in need of a strategy for impact—a strategy for developing epistemic uptake among scientists and policymakers whose practice could be affected by these arguments. Google Scholar provides tools that allow tracking of citations. At the time of writing, this theoretical discourse has been widely discussed within a community of feminist epistemologists, but has received regretfully little attention from the researchers (and lay communities) who stand to benefit most from the insights it has generated. Finally, one effective strategy for translating the insight of feminist theories of scientific objectivity into changes in scientific practice has been through philosophical attention to the makeup and epistemic practices of research communities. In the 1980s, a schism developed between feminist science studies, on the one hand, and scholarship on women in science, on the other, creating a divide “between critical approaches to science and projects to help women achieve gains in their careers as scientists” (Richardson 2010: 343). While professional organizations and universities worked to improve conditions for women in science and to increase the social diversity of scientific fields, feminist philosophy focused on more theoretical critiques. In the last decade, however, feminist philosophy has given sustained theoretical and practical attention both to the lack of gender diversity in our own discipline and to the implications of gendered practices elsewhere in the academy (Fehr 2011; Hutchison and Jenkins 2013; Lee 2016; Lee and Schunn 2011). This is a promising role for feminist philosophers, as they work to promote social diversity in science at



Objectivity in Science

229

their institutions, by restructuring institutional practices such as peer review and grant funding, and through research that connects practical strategies for supporting diversity with epistemic goals coincident with the production of objectivity, such as equality of epistemic authority and uptake of critique.

6 Conclusion Feminist accounts of scientific objectivity show how science has failed to achieve epistemic goals by ignoring and undervaluing women’s perspectives, knowledge, interests, and needs, as well as their potential contributions to the scientific enterprise. The feminist examination of scientific objectivity has influenced scholarship and policy in a number of ways. First, feminist theorists demonstrated how objectivity emerges out of inquiry that examines phenomena from many different perspectives rather than presupposing that the only correct perspective is a value-free perspective. As Sarah Richardson (2010) recounts in her history of the development of feminist philosophy of science, this demonstration enabled feminist scholars across the academy to defend the legitimacy of their work against charges that by being feminist it was subjective and partisan and not aimed at truth and objectivity, like other forms of scholarship. Second, feminist critiques of objectivity have shaped and been shaped by the broader feminist project in science and science studies. Feminist analyses of scientific objectivity have played an especially important role in grounding feminist epistemologies and identifying methodologies for creating more complete, less partial, more “strongly” objective knowledge that “starts from women’s lives.” These methodologies have been of significant use to feminist researchers in the social sciences and humanities. In addition, feminist analyses of objectivity have influenced the direction of debates in mainstream philosophy of science and played a significant role in catalyzing social epistemology as an area of research. Examination of the social criteria that contribute to the justification of objective scientific knowledge, such as epistemic equality and the inclusion of diverse perspectives, has played a role in the now-prevalent goal of increasing social diversity in science. Feminist theories of objectivity have also driven philosophical debates about the role that values play in science, and these debates continue to have an impact on science policy and health-care ethics.

230

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Finally, the influence of analytic feminist philosophy of science has had a greater and quicker impact when researchers have utilized dissemination strategies that interact more directly with scientists and policymakers. Feminist theorists may increase the effectiveness of their work by deliberately designing strategies to support epistemic uptake in mainstream philosophy, in the academy at large, and through direct participation in knowledge-producing activities. They might take a proactive role in connecting practice with theory by identifying the relationship between epistemic failures in science (e.g., the “replication crisis” in social psychology and medicine) and feminist theories of objectivity. They may also take a larger role in contributing to a theory of impact. These approaches to scientific objectivity do not agree on a unified sense of objectivity. By identifying the success that each of them has had, what emerges is a commitment to local and negotiated standards for objectivity. While some feminist theorists and philosophers of science have argued that it would be best to eliminate or avoid the language of objectivity, I have treated objectivity as though it relates to high standards of epistemic responsibility, to the social coordination of epistemic resources, or to the achievement of trust within epistemic communities, depending on the context of its use. Seen in this way, a priority for analytic feminist philosophy shifts from internal debates about how to define objectivity to, instead, projects that seek to support the achievement and evaluation of inquiry that is more objective according to at least one feminist conception of objectivity. Such projects inevitably build connections between feminist theory and not-specifically-feminist philosophical projects or between feminist philosophy and other areas of feminist inquiry.9

Notes 1 Haslanger (1993) investigates the link between objectivity and objectification. Crary (2002) examines two versions of the feminist debate over objectivity—the charge that objectivity acclaims masculine knowing at the expense of feminine knowers and the charge that objectivity is at odds with knowledge projects motivated by social values, such as feminism. Like many other feminist theorists in this debate she denies that the problem is “objectivity” per se. The real problem is that the criteria for what counts as being objective are too narrowly constraining. 2 Actually, it wasn’t just a puzzle; it was a paradox. Richmond Campbell (1998) examines some implications of the seeming paradox that shows up when feminists, with their clear political interest in equality, claim that such an interested perspective can lead to more objective—and therefore less biased—inquiry.



Objectivity in Science

231

3 Since the early 2000s, the distinction between the contexts of discovery and of justification has been questioned by feminist philosophers of science (among others), who were in large part influenced by exactly these debates over the achievement of objectivity. Some question the distinction itself; others have argued that the distinction may be useful, but judgments made in the context of discovery have epistemic consequences that are not exempt from philosophical investigation. The growing field of agnotology (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008) is an example of the extension of epistemological analysis into systematic choices made in the context of discovery. 4 Intemann (2010) gives a thorough analysis of the points of agreement and the tensions between feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory, examining the work of Longino and Harding, as well as other feminist epistemologists. 5 In the context of this book, it is also worth noting that for the last two decades, Longino has had relatively little to say about specifically feminist values, which may contribute to making her ideas palatable to mainstream philosophy. 6 To put this point in a larger context, Longino’s work on how scientific objectivity is a social achievement is part of a contemporary movement in philosophy of science toward socializing epistemology and toward examining scientific practices alongside scientific theories. Therefore, not just a few but many philosophers of science now pursue philosophical inquiry with an eye to the difference that philosophical contributions can make for scientific research. 7 Further evidence for the difference in their intended audience can be found in the blurbs on the covers of their most recent books. Longino (2013) is recommended by three philosophers of science, while Harding (2015) is recommended by a feminist sociologist, a feminist epistemologist, and a sociologist of science and technology. 8 “Plus respicere” is a term meaning “to take more into account.” It is borrowed from engineering ethics, where it refers to engineers’ duty to take known possible harms into account and, in addition, to be aware of unique contextual requirements on moral (or, in this context, epistemic) action. 9 Thank you to Sharon Crasnow and Pieranna Garavaso for helpful comments on this essay. I am grateful to Carla Fehr for conversation that shaped the essay’s conception.

References Anderson, Elizabeth (1995), “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology,” Philosophical Topics 23 (2): 27–58. Anderson, Elizabeth (2004), “Uses of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons from a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce,” Hypatia 19 (1): 1–24.

232

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Anderson, Elizabeth (2015), “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Available online: https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/feminism-epistemology/ Antony, Louise (1993), “Quine as Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology,” in Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, 110–53, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Callicott, Baird (1999), “Environmental Philosophy Is Environmental Activism: The Most Radical and Effective Kind,” in Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy, 27–44, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Campbell, Richmond (1998), Illusions of Paradox: A Feminist Epistemology Naturalized, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Clough, Sharyn (2012), “The Analytic Tradition, Radical (Feminist) Interpretation, and the Hygiene Hypothesis,” in Sharon Crasnow and Anita Superson (eds.), Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, 405–34, New York: Oxford University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill (2002), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, New York: Routledge. Crary, Alice (2002), “What Do Feminists Want in an Epistemology?” in Naomi Scheman and Peg O’Connor (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein, 97–118, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Crasnow, Sharon (2007), “Feminist Anthropology and Sociology: Issues for Social Science,” in Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord (eds.), Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, vol. 15, 755–89, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Crasnow, Sharon, and Anita Superson (2012), “Introduction,” in Sharon Crasnow and Anita Superson (eds.), Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, 3–13, New York: Oxford University Press. Cudd, Ann E. (1996), “Analytic Feminism,” in Donald M. Borchert (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, 20–21, New York: Macmillan Reference. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison (2007), Objectivity, New York: Zone. De Melo-Martín, Inmaculada, and Kristen Intemann (2012), “Interpreting Evidence: Why Values Can Matter as Much as Science,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 55 (1): 59–70. Douglas, Heather (2004), “The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity,” Synthese 138 (3): 453–73. Eigi, Jaana (2017), “Different Motivations, Similar Proposals: Objectivity in Scientific Community and Democratic Science Policy,” Synthese 194 (12): 4657–69. Fehr, Carla (2011), “What Is in It for Me? The Benefits of Diversity in Scientific Communities,” in Heidi E. Grasswick (ed.), Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, 133–55, Dordrecht: Springer. Fine, Arthur (2004), “The View Point of No One in Particular,” in William Egginton and Mike Sandbothe (eds.), The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy, 115–29, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.



Objectivity in Science

233

Frodeman, Robert, and Adam Briggle (2016), Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st-Century Philosophy, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Garry, Ann (2012), “Analytic Feminism,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2017/entries/femapproach-analytic/ Grasswick, Heidi (2010), “Scientific and Lay Communities: Earning Epistemic Trust through Knowledge-sharing,” Synthese 177 (3): 387–409. Haraway, Donna (1988), “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. Harding, Sandra (1986), The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra (1992), “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ‘Strong Objectivity,’” Social Research 59 (3): 567–87. Harding, Sandra (1993), “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity?” in Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds.), Feminist Epistemologies, 49–82, New York: Routledge. Harding, Sandra (1995), “‘Strong Objectivity’: A Response to the New Objectivity Question,” Synthese 104 (3): 331–49. Harding, Sandra (2004), “A Socially Relevant Philosophy of Science?: Resources from Standpoint Theory’s Controversality,” Hypatia 19 (1): 25–47. Harding, Sandra (2015), Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haslanger, Sally (1993), “On Being Objective and Being Objectified,” in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, 209–53, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene N., and Michelle Yaiser (eds.) (2004), Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, New York: Oxford University Press. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy and Patricia Leavy (eds.) (2006), Feminist Research Practice, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Hutchison, Katrina and Fiona Jenkins (eds.) (2013), Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? New York: Oxford University Press. Intemann, Kristen (2010), “Twenty-five Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?” Hypatia 25 (4): 778–96. Intemann, Kristen, and Inmaculada de Melo-Martín (2010), “Social Values and Scientific Evidence: The Case of the HPV Vaccines,” Biology and Philosophy 25 (2): 203–13. Janack, Marianne (2002), “Dilemmas of Objectivity,” Social Epistemology 16 (3): 267–81. Jordan, Catherine, Susan Gast, and Naomi Scheman (2014), “The Trustworthiness of Research: The Paradigm of Community-Based Research,” in Naomi Scheman (ed.), Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Transgression and Trustworthiness, 170–90, New York: Oxford.

234

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Lee, Carole J. (2016), “Revisiting Current Causes of Women’s Underrepresentation in Science,” in Jennifer Saul and Michael Brownstein (eds.), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, 265–82, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lee, Carole J., and Christian D. Schunn (2011), “Social Biases and Solutions for Procedural Objectivity,” Hypatia 26 (2): 352–73. Lloyd, Elisabeth (1995), “Objectivity and the Double Standard for Feminist Epistemologies,” Synthese 104 (3): 351–81. Longino, Helen (1990), Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen (1995), “Gender, Politics, and the Theoretical Virtues,” Synthese 104 (3): 383–97. Longino, Helen (2002), The Fate of Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen (2013), Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meghani, Zahra, and Jennifer Kuzma (2011), “The ‘Revolving Door’ between Regulatory Agencies and Industry: A Problem that Requires Reconceptualizing Objectivity,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 24 (6): 575–99. Megill, Allan (1994), “Introduction: Four Senses of Objectivity,” in Alan Megill (ed.), Rethinking Objectivity, 1–20, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nagel, Thomas (1986), The View from Nowhere, New York: Oxford University Press. Nozick, Robert (2001), Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Proctor, Robert N., and Londa Schiebinger (2008), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ramazanoglu, Caroline, and Janet Holland (2002), Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Richardson, Sarah S. (2010), “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges,” Synthese 177 (3): 337–62. Rolin, Kristina (2011), “Contextualism in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” in Heidi E. Grasswick (ed.), Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, 25–44, Dordrecht: Springer. Roth, Amanda (2013), “A Procedural, Pragmatist Account of Ethical Objectivity,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 22 (2): 169–200. Scheffler, Israel (1982), Science and Subjectivity, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Scheman, Naomi (2001), “Epistemology Resuscitated,” in Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen (eds.), Engendering Rationalities, 23–52, Albany: State University of New York Press. Solomon, Miriam (2001), Social Empiricism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tiberius, Valerie (2017), “The Well-Being of Philosophy,” Proceedings & Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 91: 65–86.



Objectivity in Science

235

Wylie, Alison (2014), “Community-Based Collaborative Archaeology,” in Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montuschi (eds.), Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, 68–82, New York: Oxford University Press. Wylie, Alison and Sergio Sismondo (2015), “Standpoint Theory, in Science,” in James D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., 324–30, Amsterdam: Elsevier.

13

Feminist Philosophies of Science: The Social and Contextual Nature of Science Lynn Hankinson Nelson

1 Introduction This chapter focuses on feminist engagements with the philosophy of science and emphasizes feminists’ arguments for the contextual and social nature of scientific theorizing and knowledge. Feminist work in the philosophy of science is part of the larger research tradition of feminist science scholarship (or feminist science studies) that emerged over four decades ago. Feminists who engage in the philosophy of science include scientists, philosophers, and historians of science and science studies scholars in other disciplines. I speak of feminist philosophies of science because work in the tradition is neither monolithic nor static. That said, there are general themes and emphases that are characteristic of feminist philosophical engagements with science.1 Feminists who engage in the philosophy of science focus on relationships between gender and science. They analyze scientific hypotheses that purport to explain alleged gender differences by showing that they are based in biology; they examine the evidence that is taken to support these hypotheses; and they call attention to the potential implications of these hypotheses for public perceptions of gender as well as for social policy. These feminists also analyze androcentrism (“male-centeredness”) in scientific theorizing, which they argue is a subtle but consequential way in which assumptions about gender have influenced scientific theorizing and knowledge. Research that is androcentric emphasizes the behaviors and activities typically (or at least stereotypically) associated with men or males more generally, and fails to study (or adequately study) those



Feminist Philosophies of Science

237

behaviors and activities typically (or stereotypically) associated with women or females. Feminists who engage philosophical issues about science also study gender inequities in science, and their potential impact on scientific theorizing, including theorizing about gender. We will discuss each of the focuses just noted in the forthcoming discussion. There are parallels between feminist and nonfeminist philosophies of science. Both emphasize epistemological issues, focusing on the nature of scientific reasoning, the norms that guide it, and the empirical warrant for scientific hypotheses and theories. Both also focus on ontological issues, studying the objects and kinds of causal relationships posited in scientific theorizing and hypotheses. Finally, both research traditions are normative rather than merely descriptive. So, in their critiques of specific hypotheses about gender and purported gender differences, feminists analyze the nature and strength of the evidence offered in support of these hypotheses and cite evidence that they argue supports the alternative approaches and hypotheses they propose. Several qualifications are in order. It is not possible in a discussion of this length to mention, let alone discuss, all the issues raised in and by feminist engagements with science. The issues we consider—feminists’ arguments for the contextual and social nature of science—are important, but they are not the only important issues raised in and by such engagements. Second, we focus on feminists’ analyses that emphasize evidence, and the nature of evidential relations, in scientific practice. These emphases stand in contrast to other approaches in science studies, including those adopted by some feminists, that also emphasize social and contextual nature of science, but are skeptical about the role of evidence in scientific theorizing. Feminist social constructionist approaches provide one example of such approaches. It is fair to say that accounts of science that are dismissive of the role of evidence in it are rejected by many, if not most, feminist philosophers of science, precisely because they undermine the appeals feminist scientists and science scholars make to evidence in their critiques of and alternatives to hypotheses about gender (Longino and Doell 1983). The feminist approaches to science we will consider are aptly described as empiricist. Just as there is more than one empiricist approach in the nonfeminist philosophy of science, there are different empiricist approaches within feminists’ work in the philosophy of science. We can say, however, that almost all empiricist accounts of science take the role of sensory experience, and the data or “facts” such experience yields, to constitute core evidence for scientific hypotheses and

238

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

theories. It needs to be noted, however, that most feminists who engage in the philosophy of science do hold that the data and facts sensory experience yields are to a greater or lesser extent shaped in part by background assumptions, prior experience, and currently accepted hypotheses of the relevant science community. This is not a thesis unique to feminist philosophies of science; it had been argued for and largely accepted in mid-twentieth-century philosophy of science based on arguments offered by N.R. Hanson among others (Hanson 1958). There are also feminist approaches to science that have been argued to constitute alternatives to empiricism or even construed as “anti-empiricist.” One of the more influential is feminist standpoint theory (Harding 1986, 1991; Wylie 2003). In general, feminist standpoint theorists argue that divisions in power in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality, and culture impact what individuals can and do know, and that political movements such as feminism can help individuals acquire better knowledge. Although the theory is beyond the scope of the present discussion, arguments offered by feminist standpoint theorists are important and have had an influence on feminist empiricist approaches (Wylie 2003). Finally, this discussion focuses on feminists’ engagements with biology although feminists critically and constructively engage with many sciences. In part, this reflects my research background. But the focus on biology also reflects the fact that hypotheses that propose gender differences based on biology raise important ethical issues. There is, among scientists and science scholars (including but by no means limited to feminists), a growing interest in identifying features of what would constitute “socially responsible science” in promoting such science (Douglas 2000). Although this research project is not specifically addressed in this discussion, the ethical/social implications of scientific hypotheses proposing innate gender differences are among the issues those interested in promoting socially responsible science address for reasons that will be clear in this discussion. We turn now to the two emphases in feminist engagements with the philosophy of science on which this chapter focuses. The first of these is contextualism.

2  Contextualism in feminist philosophies of science Feminist scientists and science scholars who approach the study of science from the perspective of “contextualism” take all scientific research and theorizing to reflect, in various ways and to varying degrees, the historically specific contexts,



Feminist Philosophies of Science

239

both internal and external to the relevant science community, within which that research and theorizing is undertaken. Feminists analyze how scientific research questions, assumptions, and hypotheses about gender can and often do reflect both the historically specific social and scientific contexts within which that science is undertaken (Anderson 2004; Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1985; Longino 1990; Nelson 1990; and Sayers 1982). Today, few philosophers of science deny that scientists’ theorizing is shaped by the methods, norms, hypotheses, and theories currently accepted in their field. What is controversial among some philosophers of science are feminists’ arguments that beliefs and values accepted in the social contexts external to science can and often do have an impact on scientists’ assumptions and hypotheses. In addition, and in contrast to arguments common in mid-twentieth-century philosophy of science, feminists maintain that social beliefs and values impacting the directions and content of a science does not itself make the science in question bad science. Such research can be, and often is, good science. In contrast, feminists maintain that the hallmark of good science is not the absence of the influence of social beliefs and values, but is rather that, in the science in question, what is recognized as evidence is given its due. Of course, there have been instances of scientific research in which evidence was not or is not given its due, and these are instances of bad science. But feminists do not find such cases interesting, for once they are recognized as instances of bad science, there is little more to say about them. (Albeit, sociologists and historians of science may be interested in exploring why and how the research in question failed to give evidence its due.) Just what constitutes “giving evidence its due” is not a simple question. But the broad outlines are clear. To give evidence its due is, in large part, to recognize and pay attention to the evidence that one could reasonably be expected to recognize. And it requires considering, when offering an explanation or account of some phenomenon, possible alternative explanations and accounts. One aspect of scientific theorizing that feminists point to as evidence that social contexts can impact scientific theorizing involves the role of “background assumptions” in scientific reasoning. Arguments that background assumptions are part of scientific reasoning did not originate in feminist philosophies of science. In the 1960s the philosopher Carl Hempel argued that background assumptions are always at work in tests of scientific hypotheses; the specific assumptions he used as examples were scientific in nature (Hempel 1996). According to Hempel and Bas van Fraassen, among other empiricists, background assumptions function to “fill in the distance” between what is

240

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

recognized as data and the hypothesis for which the data is taken to be evidence (Hempel 1996 and van Fraassen 1980). Feminists have argued that background assumptions about gender that reflect historically specific social contests have in fact been of significant importance in biology. For example, they have argued that unquestioned and/or unwarranted background assumptions about gender have often led biologists to posit gender differences for which there is no compelling evidence. One example is the commonly accepted hypothesis that men and boys are better at math than are girls and women, and that this difference has its roots in biology rather than in social expectations and educational policies (Bleier 1984; Longino and Doell 1983; Fausto-Sterling 1985; Longino 1990; and Nelson 1990, 2017). Feminists’ arguments for the role and consequences of background assumptions in scientific theorizing about gender often appeal to what is commonly referred to as “the underdetermination of scientific theory”—the thesis, as advocated by W. V. Quine among others, that there is “empirical slack” between all our theories, on the one hand, and all the evidence available to us, on the other hand (Quine 1966: 241). The basic claim of this thesis is that it is always possible, no matter how much evidence we have for a hypothesis, that the hypothesis is false. This is simply the nature of empirical science. We are always at risk of “getting it wrong,” no matter how much research we do, no matter how much evidence we accumulate. In practice, feminists argue, one of the ways science deals with this gap between evidence and hypothesis is by appeal (conscious or not) to background assumptions. And sometimes, as in the case of how biology came to accept hypotheses about gender differences in humans, these background assumptions turn out to be unwarranted (Longino and Doell 1983). As earlier noted, many philosophers of science working in the twentieth century did not recognize a role for social beliefs and values in scientific theorizing, at least in good science. One reason is that many maintained that there is an important distinction between what they called “the context of discovery”—what leads to the proposal of some hypothesis, and “the context of justification”—the ways in which scientific hypotheses are tested and evaluated. It is unimportant, according to philosophers who maintained the distinction, how a hypothesis comes to be proposed. The thought process that leads to some hypothesis might be rational, or wildly irrational (e.g., based on clearly unwarranted beliefs). What is important, it was argued, is only how the hypothesis fares in the context of justification (Hempel 1996). That is, what is important is whether convincing evidence is or is not available (and recognized) for the hypothesis.



Feminist Philosophies of Science

241

But feminists argue, citing many cases, that there is no reason to think that inappropriate factors such as subjective preferences can be at work only in the context of discovery. Unwarranted background assumptions, including those reflecting current social and scientific contexts, are often at work even in the context of justification. In such cases, the unwarranted assumptions are typically not recognized as assumptions, and consequently are not seen as needing scrutiny (Anderson 2004; Longino and Doell 1983; Longino 1990; Nelson 2017). Feminists cite many examples that support this general argument. Among them are cases in which gender stereotypes inform relevant background assumptions, and cases in which hypotheses include gendered metaphors that are put forward as literal, rather than metaphorical, descriptions of entities and processes. We focus on examples of both that involve biology. A description is aptly described as “a stereotype” if it attributes characteristics to all members of a group (say, women or females more generally) that are not in fact attributable to all members of the group, or indeed even many. For example, feminists argue that many hypotheses in areas of biology that attribute “aggression” to males, including men, invoke gender stereotypes; in addition, they argue that clear identity criteria for “male aggression” are not typically specified and that the extrapolation of this phenomenon across species as different as rodents and humans is unwarranted (Bleier 1984). They also cite hypotheses that, unlike males, females, including women, are coy in their approaches to sexual encounters with males as invoking gender stereotypes (Hrdy 1986). Another example involves a hypothesis in neuroendocrinology that proposes to explain what are assumed to be women’s and girls’ inferior mathematical abilities relative to those of men and boys. The alleged differences, feminists argue, are substantively informed by gender stereotypes. Among other criticisms, they point out that the gender differences in such abilities alleged to be supported by performance that the hypotheses claim to explain are less than the differences that obtain within each gender (Fausto-Sterling 1985; additional critiques are offered by Longino 1990 and Nelson 2017). As a final example, feminists argue that the association of males with productive activities and that of females with reproduction has shaped many hypotheses and theories. These include what feminists argue are inaccurate accounts of behavior and social dynamics in contemporary hunter-gatherer groups that were developed by anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century (Zihlman 1978); and inaccurate accounts of behavior and social dynamics of many nonhuman primate species proposed during the same period (Hrdy 1986). In these and other cases, feminists argue, androcentric assumptions that relied on gender stereotypes informed scientists’ observations and hypotheses.

242

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

We earlier mentioned that feminists criticize the presence and role of “gendered metaphors” in areas of biology. Philosophers and others have sought to clarify the nature of metaphors. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that metaphors attribute characteristics that are appropriately attributed to one kind of entity to another kind of entity to which the characteristics are not literally attributable. Consider, as an example, saying of someone that “he is suffering from a broken heart” to describe that individual as emotionally hurt. Of course, the heart of the person so described has not literally broken into pieces, but the metaphor succeeds in conveying the person’s distress. Many point out that metaphors are frequently used in science, including biology, and that they serve to facilitate scientific theorizing. They are viewed to be unproblematic provided that they are recognized as metaphors—that is, as not literal descriptions of a phenomenon. Gendered metaphors, feminists argue, attribute traits associated (most often stereotypically) with male or female organisms to entities that are not sexed. They also maintain that gendered metaphors are often presented as if they are literal descriptions. One example involves the longstanding account of fertilization, according to which sperm fertilize a “passive, until fertilized, egg.” As early as 1983, two researchers observed the active role eggs play in fertilization, noting that rather than sperm burrowing into an egg, “small fingers” on the egg’s surface clasp the sperm so as to draw the sperm inside itself (Martin 1991; Schatten and Schatten 1983). Some developmental biology textbooks now state that although sperm capacitate eggs, eggs also capacitate sperm (Gilbert 2014). And the more general point is that attributing “passivity,” a characteristic often stereotypically attributed to females, to eggs is metaphorical. Another example of how biological theories can include gendered metaphors is that of parental investment theory. The theory maintains that gametic dimorphism—differences in the size and number of eggs and sperm—results in gender differences in parenting and mating strategies, given that females “invest” more in offspring than do males. Describing sperm as “cheap,” eggs as “expensive,” and time devoted to offspring as “investment,” as advocates of parental investment theory and human sociobiologists do, is to speak metaphorically. It applies concepts attributable to economic entities and processes to those that are biological in nature. The use of economic terminology is not unusual in biology; nor, many would argue, is it inappropriate. But in this case, feminists have argued that the differences in “parental investment” were taken to justify arguments for divisions in labor by gender, which maintained that women’s primary role was to be mothers and engage in activities in the so-called private sphere (as argued for in Barash 1979).



Feminist Philosophies of Science

243

Finally, some feminists argue that androcentric hypotheses, gender stereotypes, and gendered metaphors are “evaluatively thick.” As defined by some philosophers prior to the emergence of feminism, an evaluatively thick concept or statement is one that carries normative, as well as empirical or factual, content. Hypotheses in biology and other sciences that include evaluatively thick concepts, some feminists note, are therefore not “value free” (Anderson 2004; Nelson 2017), as the example of the concept of parental investment makes clear. The presence in areas of biology of androcentric background assumptions, including gender stereotypes, gendered metaphors, and evaluatively thick concepts involving gender, feminists argue, reflects the social contexts in which such research has been undertaken. But, as we noted earlier, feminists also argue that in many, if not most cases, the research is not aptly written off as “bad science.” In many of the cases on which they focus, feminists note that the research in question is or was in keeping with, and made use of, the methods, data, norms, hypotheses, and core research questions then currently accepted in the relevant scientific field (Longino 1990 and Nelson 1990).

3  The social nature of scientific theorizing and knowledge Even if one only focuses on feminists’ arguments that factors internal to a science—including its shared research priorities, general assumptions, and accepted methods and hypotheses—help shape the research in which scientists engage as well as hypotheses they propose, then clearly scientific theorizing and knowledge are inherently social. Feminist philosophers of science are not alone in noting that the research priorities and questions, methods, and accepted knowledge in a scientific discipline attest to the social nature of scientific theorizing, traditional philosophers of science reject the argument that social factors external to science can also impact scientific theorizing and knowledge at least in the case of “good science.” In the case studies to which we next turn, we consider feminists’ arguments that, to the contrary, such social factors can impact science. They include feminists’ arguments that androcentrism, and unquestioned and unwarranted background assumptions about gender informing a number of sciences, reflected historically specific social contexts. We will also find that feminists relate the emergence in the late 1970s of critiques offered by scientists of approaches to gender in their fields to the emergence and influence of feminism. Such relationships, feminists argue, are further evidence of the social nature of scientific theorizing and knowledge. Feminist scientists

244

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and historians of science have also chronicled relationships between various women’s movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the one hand, and an apparent increase on the part of some scientists to establish that alleged gender differences in power and roles can be explained by biology, on the other hand. These analyses, although beyond the scope of the present discussion, are also relevant to feminists’ arguments that social factors external to science can impact scientific theorizing and knowledge (Sayers 1982 and Schiebinger 1999).

4  Case studies We turn now to case studies that illustrate why feminists who engage in the philosophy of science view scientific reasoning as contextual and social. They are representative of many such cases on which feminists have focused. But they are also particularly interesting because the sciences involved, developmental biology and primatology, are generally recognized as having undergone significant changes in their approaches to gender of the sort feminists propose. In each science, some attribute the changes to feminism; but others, who recognize the changes, maintain they have nothing to do with feminism but with researchers’ interests in doing good science (Gilbert and Rader 2001 on developmental biology; and Fedigan 2001 on primatology).

4.1  Sex determination In 1985, the account of human sex determination presented in most biology textbooks was consistent with the accounts offered of sex determination in other mammals. It focused on the different trajectory of sex determination in individuals with an XY genotype, typically males, from those with an XX genotype, typically females. (We should note, however, that there are individuals who do not have one or the other of these genotypes.) Much more is known today about the processes that result in sex determination, but aspects of the textbook account that was accepted well into the 1980s are uncontroversial. The issues on which feminist biologists focused included the “incompleteness” of the account. We rely on biologist Anne FaustoSterling’s description of the account (Fausto-Sterling 1985). During the first five weeks of development, XX and XY embryos exhibit no anatomical differences. They develop what Fausto-Sterling describes as “an



Feminist Philosophies of Science

245

indifferent gonad” that includes Müllerian ducts, which in females will develop into the uterus, upper vagina, oviducts, and cervix; and also includes Wolffian ducts, which in males will develop into the ejaculatory ducts, vas deferens (a duct that permits sperm to travel from the testicle to the urethra), and epididymis (a duct sperm pass through when traveling to the vas deferens). During the sixth week, in males “primary sex determination”—that is, the development of gonadal sex—begins to occur. Genetic information present on the Y chromosome results in the synthesis of the protein, H-Y antigen, one of a group of hormones called “androgens” and designated as male hormones. The synthesis leads to the development of an embryonic testis from an initially undifferentiated gonad. The testis contains sperm-producing tubules and it synthesizes testosterone and Müllerian inhibiting substance (MIS) and these further promote aspects of male development. Testosterone promotes development of the male duct system, and MIS blocks the development of a female duct system. Until the eighth week, the external genitalia of XX and XY embryos are anatomically the same. During weeks 8 through 12, the development of secondary sex characteristics occurs. “Labioscrotal swellings,” tissues found in both XX and XY fetuses, develop into labia in females and a scrotum in males; and the previously bi-potential genital tubercle develops into a penis or a clitoris. Testosterone contributes to the development of the male anatomical features just noted. The structures of female external genitalia are evident in XX fetuses and those of male external genitalia are evident in XY fetuses by week 12. As Fausto-Sterling points out, this account provided details about various factors and processes involved in male sex determination. But it included virtually no information about the factors and processes that result in female sex determination. Apparently, Fausto-Sterling notes, developmental biologists assumed that female development is “the default trajectory,” and further assumed that it is exceptions to a default trajectory that call for explanation. Feminists argued that there are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, even if one assumes that female sex determination is the “default” trajectory, one would expect scientists to investigate the processes involved (Fausto-Sterling 1985: 81). As importantly, the assumption that it is exceptions to a default condition that require explanation seems inappropriate in this case. About half of developing humans do not exhibit what was assumed to be the “default” path of development. So, it hardly seems appropriate to regard the trajectory of their development as exceptions. Feminist biologists argued that the lack of attention

246

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

to the processes involved in female sex determination was deeply androcentric, and that the textbook account was at best an account of male sex determination; it was not, as textbooks called it, an account of human sex determination (Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1985). Their arguments that the account was “at best” one of male development included the premise that knowledge about the details of female sex determination might require changes in it. Fausto-Sterling also pointed out that as early as 1985, there was evidence that more than androgens were circulating during development. She cited a then recent review article of then current research into development that cited results indicating that the XX gonad begins to synthesize quantities of estrogens about the same time that the XY gonad begins making testosterone. The authors of the article noted the presence of other circulating hormones during development. “Embryogenesis necessarily takes place in a sea of hormones . . . derived from the placenta, the maternal circulation, the fetal adrenal glands, the fetal testis, and possibly the fetal ovary itself . . . It is possible that ovarian hormones are involved in the growth and maturation of the internal genitalia” (Fausto-Sterling 1985: 81). Given the emerging information about other hormones potentially involved in fetal development, feminists argued that there were problems with the textbook account of male sex determination. They pointed to the lack of attention to the role of the maternal environment and the possible role of estrogens in male development, pointing out that male and female fetuses produce both hormones (it is the amount that differs). They also criticized the lack of attention to the X chromosome in sex determination. As Fausto-Sterling pointed out, research indicated that the Y chromosome leads to the synthesis of the H-Y antigen that in turn promotes the organization of embryonic testes. The testes in turn synthesize testosterone and MIS, which further contribute to male sex determination. But, Fausto-Sterling noted, it is not the Y chromosome that determines the testes’ ability to synthesize these hormones. It is genetic information on the X chromosome, as well as on some of the twenty-three pairs of nonsex chromosomes, that code for androgens (including testosterone) and estrogens. So, although the Y chromosome is involved in the translation of some of this genetic information, Fausto-Sterling argued that the emphasis on its role and the lack of attention to the other factors just cited were unwarranted (Fausto-Sterling 1985: 79–85). Feminist biologists also criticized the causal model of male sexual determination, which assumed the processes involved were “linear,” that is unidirectional. They cited evidence that indicated that during every stage of fetal



Feminist Philosophies of Science

247

development, there are complex and often nonlinear interactions between cells, and between cells and the maternal and external environments (Bleier 1984 and Fausto-Sterling 1985). Developmental biologist Scott F. Gilbert and historian of science Karen A. Rader made a similar point some years later, “Developmental biology . . . teaches us that in the determination of mammalian cell fate, context is critical. Whether a cell becomes a skin cell or a nerve cell, cartilage or muscle, is determined by the other cells it meets. A cell is not intrinsically programmed” (Gilbert and Rader 2001: 92–93). So why, one might ask, was the textbook account taken to be “empirically adequate” (an explanation of all relevant phenomena) and to exhibit “generality of scope” (applicability to all relevant phenomena)—two features of hypotheses and theories that scientists value? One reason is that at the time the account was accepted, androcentrism was not recognized to be problematic. When the textbook account of sex determination was developed and accepted, androcentrism was common in science, just as it was in the broader social communities in which science was undertaken. In other words, it reflected historically specific scientific and social contexts. Feminist philosophers of science argue that the recognition by feminist scientists that androcentrism is problematic—that it results in theorizing and theories that do not meet the norms of empirical adequacy and generality of scope—also attests to the contextual and social nature of science. We turn to these arguments following the discussion of feminist engagements with primatology, for feminists draw parallel conclusions about them.

4.2 Primatology Primatologists’ studies of nonhuman primates, both in the field and laboratory, take a variety of forms. Some primatologists focus on learning about the behaviors and social dynamics of a specific primate species. Others are interested in identifying relationships between evolutionary selection pressures, on the one hand, and the behaviors and social dynamics of one or more primate species, on the other hand. Some who focus on evolutionary issues also seek to relate the behaviors and social structures of the primates they study to human evolution, and what it yielded in terms of human behaviors and social structures. Indeed, some have sought to use what they learn about nonhuman primates to gain insights into what they assume is a basic “human nature” (Wilson 1975). The reasons for looking to primates for insights into human evolution, and even into “human nature,” are relatively straightforward. We are more closely

248

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

related to several primate species—gorillas and two species of chimpanzee— than any other living species. Evolutionary biologists believe that we and they split from a common ancestor some six million years ago, a hypothesis supported by studies of the relevant genotypes. Humans differ from one another in terms of about 0.1 percent of their DNA. Studies of the same aspects of the genomes of chimpanzees and gorillas indicate that the differences between chimpanzee and human DNA is about 1.2 percent, and between gorillas and humans about 1.6 percent. However, as we will see, feminists have criticized several generalizations about the behaviors and social dynamics of one or more of these nonhuman primate species that involve gender, as well as extrapolations from that data to accounts of human behaviors and social dynamics. 2 In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of anthropologists undertook the study of savannah baboons and proposed what they called “a primate pattern” based on their observations. That pattern, they predicted, would be found to characterize many if not all primate species. In her analysis of this research, primatologist Susan Sperling notes that anthropologists who argued for “a primate pattern” assumed a “structural-functionalist model” of social dynamics. The model (which was originally developed by social scientists such as Robert Merton to study human societies) maintains that the structural form of a social system functions to meet the needs of individuals in the system, as well as to maintain itself. Both, Merton argued, insure the stability of a social system (Merton 1968). Applying the model to their studies of savannah baboons, anthropologists viewed the behaviors and “social structure” they observed as evolutionary “adaptations” that functioned to promote the survival and reproductive success of individual baboons, and maintain the stability of their social system. Influential anthropologists, including Irven DeVore and Sheldon Washburn, argued that “male dominance” is the most basic and significant feature of savannah baboon social structure. It functioned, they argued, “to organize and control the troop in much the same way as political leadership functions in human cultures” (Sperling 1991: 1–2, citing DeVore and Washburn 1963, among others). Many primatologists working during the period accepted the hypothesis that male dominance is central to the social dynamics of nonhuman primate groups and focused on it in their studies of other primate species. There was also interest among the anthropologists studying savannah baboons  to extrapolate from their behaviors and social dynamics to human behavior and social dynamics. The hypothesis that early hominids evolved in the African savannah under conditions like those of savannah baboons was



Feminist Philosophies of Science

249

understood to warrant the extrapolation. Sperling and other feminists also note a general interest among the anthropologists to relate gendered behavior and gender relations they attributed to savannah baboons to human behavior and social structure. The anthropologists emphasized similarities between male dominance in baboon groups and men’s dominance over women, and similarities in what they described as “divisions in labor by sex” in the two species. Males, they maintained, provide for and protect females and offspring; females take primary responsibility for the care of offspring. In addition, feminists point out that anthropologists used their studies of savannah baboons to hypothesize about “the origins of ‘the family’”—an entity, feminists argue, that was described in ways deeply informed by gender stereotypes, and social beliefs and values common in Western societies in the 1960s and 1970s (Sperling 1991: 7; see also Fedigan 1992, 2001). The accounts of behavior and social dynamics among savannah baboons also emphasized what anthropologists described as “male aggression,” another “trait” they attributed to men, and related to evolutionary selection pressures (Sperling 1991). But, feminists argued, the data anthropologists reported about savannah baboons was not substantiated by other studies of captive baboons, or by studies of baboons in the wild undertaken at other sites (Rowell 1974). During the same period, extensive, long-term studies were undertaken of chimpanzees’ behaviors and social organization in the Gombe Reserve in Tanzania, and they yielded a rich body of data. (The chimpanzees studied were “ordinary” chimpanzees, one of two chimpanzee species, the other being bonobos.) According to Sperling, the data were often incorporated into structural-functionalist models that emphasized male dominance and aggression, and other purported gender differences in behavior (Sperling 1991: 7). But feminist primatologists and historians of science point to significant differences between the social dynamics involving gender reported by observers of savannah baboons and those reported by observers of chimpanzees at the Gombe Reserve. The data reported at the reserve indicated that mother-infant relations are as central to group social dynamics as male dominance. In contrast to the relative lack of detailed attention to female behavior characterizing the study of savannah baboons, researchers at the Gombe Reserve did devote attention to female behavior. And they reported that mother-offspring relationships were highly complex, and involve far more than gestation and lactation. They also described social relations among chimpanzees as being less hierarchical and more flexible than those anthropologists reported to be characteristic of savannah baboons

250

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

(Sperling 1991: 70). But the emphasis anthropologists placed on male dominance and aggression received more attention, as the social dynamics of chimpanzees at the reserve also included them, and were taken as evidence supporting “the primate pattern” noted above. Feminist primatologists criticized the lack of attention to aspects of the Gombe Reserve data that did not fit the account of that pattern. They also criticized the priority given to the kinds of mating systems in primate groups that seemed to fit with structuralist-functionalist models of primate social structure that emphasized male dominance. They cited examples that indicate that primate species exhibit a variety of mating and parenting behaviors: some had been observed to be monogamous, while others were observed to be polygynous (groups in which individuals mate with more than one member of the opposite sex, including groups in which females routinely mate with more than one male) (Altmann 1980 and Hrdy 1986). In more general terms, feminists argue that the accounts of social dynamics and behavior involving many nonhuman primates in the mid-twentieth century were informed by androcentric assumptions and were often anthropomorphic. They also criticize the assumption of biological determinism that, they argue, informed such studies, which assumed that the features of primate life they emphasized were “adaptations” (Fedigan 1982; Zihlman 1978). Finally, feminists argue that empirically adequate accounts of nonhuman primate behaviors and social dynamics would include attention to and knowledge about female primates: in particular, their contributions to the social dynamics of their groups beyond those involving reproduction (Altmann 1980; Fedigan 1982 and Hrdy 1977, 1986). They argued that new questions warranted attention: “Are there primate species in which females are dominant over males?” “Do some primate groups include female dominance hierarchies?” “Do the females of the species being studied form alliances with other females, and if so, why and how?” “Do such alliances have an impact on the social dynamics of the group, including on male behavior?” “Are all female primates ‘passive reproductive resources for males,’ or do some female primates actively solicit sex?” “Do they use such solicitations to manipulate males to promote their own reproductive success?” “Do the females of some primate species choose to mate with more than one partner?” (Haraway 1989 and Hrdy 1986). In more general terms, feminist primatologists asked what might we learn about the social dynamics of a primate species or group if we sought to find out “how things look from a female’s perspective,” rather than emphasizing those of, or at least those attributed to, males (Altmann 1980; Hrdy 1986, and Lancaster 1973).



Feminist Philosophies of Science

251

Jeanne Altmann was one of the primatologists who chose to study females, and “to take ‘the female point of view’ as part of [a] feminist approach to primatology” (Fedigan 2001: 49). Altmann worked for several years in a longterm study of the Amboseli savannah baboons. Researchers engaged in this intensive study collected data about social behavior, demography, and ecology; and they constructed mathematical models to deal with each baboon and the relationships between them. Altmann was able to study the data collected before she joined the research team using a computerized data set located at the University of Chicago (Altmann 1980). In an interview with primatologist Donna Haraway, Altmann notes that she initially wanted to avoid studying female primates—in particular, the relationships between female baboons and their offspring. (This interview is detailed in Haraway 1989.) She reported that she was worried that this research focus would be regarded as demonstrating a nonobjective “empathy” with her research subjects. In addition, she noted that in the 1970s, for a scientist to acknowledge that her research was in part informed by feminism would be viewed to be deeply problematic, as feminism was viewed as a purely political perspective and, as such, inappropriately brought to bear on science. Yet, Altmann stated, eventually her own “self-identity—as a scientist, feminist, and mother”—led her to focus on female baboons. “Increasingly,” according to Altmann, “it was screaming at me. These are the most interesting individuals; [interactions between baboon mothers and offspring] have the most evolutionary impact; this is where the ecological pressures are” (Altmann as quoted in Haraway, 1989, p. 312). Altmann’s field reports described baboon mothers as engaging in what she described as “juggling” between competing priorities and doing several things at once. In 1980, she drew parallels between such competing priorities and those facing “dual-career” women, who like herself are mothers and have careers (Altmann 1980). Altmann also noted in her interview with Haraway that her studies of adult female baboons did not include the category “child care” because she could not find a way to separate females’ activities in ways that would call for it (interview Haraway 1989: 313). In 1980, she wrote that her observations indicated that female baboons engage in “budgeting” the time devoted to many activities, and that their interactions with juveniles as well as female and male members of their troop were key factors in the group’s social dynamics (Altmann 1980). Of budgeting, she told Haraway, “You could call it budgeting or something else. . . . The issue is hierarchy of demands and the immediate consequences of these demands. What is and is not flexible in one’s life is to me terribly fascinating,

252

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

terribly important biologically, and also important for my experience as a human being, a woman, a mother” (Haraway 1989: 314). Altmann also reported significant interactions between adult males and infants among the baboons she studied, noting that females developed special relationships with some males who would go on to protect them from other baboons (Altmann 1980). As feminist primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy describes Altmann’s findings, “Infants, then, are often the focal-point of elaborate malefemale-infant relationships, relationships that are often initiated by the females themselves” (Hrdy 1986: 20). Further breaking with the emphasis on male-centered analyses of baboon social dynamics, Altmann argued that the “high drama” characterizing encounters and relationships between male baboons, once the primary focus of anthropologists, is not nearly as important to the social dynamics of baboon groups as are the “micropractices” of females (Altmann 1980). Hrdy has written articles and books based on her studies of hanuman langurs, rhesus monkeys, and other primates (Hrdy 1977, 1986, and 2009). She, too, has focused on female primates. As with Altmann’s observations of female savannah baboons, Hrdy’s findings stand in stark contrast to those once thought to be representative of the “primate pattern” that emphasized male dominance, and described females as sexually coy and subordinate. In 1986, for example, Hrdy described the results of her and others’ studies of female primates as indicating that a polyandrous component [the term is used here to refer to a female with more than one established mate] is at the core of the breeding systems of most troop-dwelling primates: females mate with many males, each of whom may contribute a little bit toward the survival of offspring. Barbary macaques produce the most extreme example . . . but the very well-studied savannah baboons also yield a similar, if more moderate pattern. (Hrdy 1986: 125)

Hrdy noted several ways in which female langurs manipulate males. They can (and Hrdy found this to also be the case in some other primate species) bring about cyclical estrus or conceal estrus to promote their reproductive success. Hrdy also reported that, contrary to a common hypothesis that dominant males enjoy the most sexual access to females, female langurs often solicit nondominant males. They do so, she observed, when they leave their natal group to temporarily join an all-male band and mate with its members; when a female “for reasons unknown to anyone” simply becomes interested in the resident male of a neighboring troop; and when males from a nomadic all-male band temporarily join the females (Hrdy 1986: 126).



Feminist Philosophies of Science

253

Hrdy describes “the manipulation hypothesis” she proposes this way, “females were more political, males more nurturing (or at least not neutral), than some earlier versions of sexual selection theory would lead us to suppose” (Hrdy 1986: 129). And she argues that this hypothesis leads to questions previously unasked. Assuming that primate males do indeed remember the identity of past consorts and that they respond differently to the offspring of familiar and unfamiliar females, females would derive obvious benefits from mating with more than one male. A researcher with this model in mind has quite different expectations about female behavior than one expecting females to save themselves in order to mate with the best available male. The resulting research questions will be very different. (Hrdy 1986: 134)

It is also important to note that “the manipulation hypothesis” Hrdy used to explain aspects of female langur behavior was just one of six hypotheses that emerged in the 1980s to explain female primate behavior that contradicted aspects of “the primate pattern” anthropologists proposed in the 1960s and 1970s.3

5 Conclusion The case studies just summarized, and again they are representative of many others involving feminist engagements with specific hypotheses and research programs, certainly appear to support several general arguments feminists offer that were summarized at the beginning of the discussion. We begin by discussing how they do. But, some of these arguments are controversial, and we go on to consider criticisms of them. They reveal some fundamental disagreements about the nature of science and of scientific reasoning. The cases we have discussed indicate that, contrary to charges leveled by their critics, feminists who engage in the philosophy of science do not embrace relativism—the view that all hypotheses and theories are equally justified or unjustified. Nor, the cases make clear, do feminists view their engagements with science as lending any degree of plausibility to that view. In these cases, feminists consistently appeal to evidence, and to scientific norms such as empirical adequacy, in their critiques of hypotheses, methods, and background assumptions, and when they propose alternatives to one or more of these things. It is also clear that the feminist scientists and science scholars whose arguments we have considered are not interested in “undermining science,” as some of their

254

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

critics charge. To the contrary, feminists who engage in the philosophy of science view their critiques and the alternatives they propose as contributing to more empirically warranted hypotheses, methods, and background assumptions. The case studies also seem to support feminists’ arguments for the contextual and social nature of science, and in two ways. First, the feminist critiques of hypotheses we have considered indicate relationships between specific social and scientific contexts, on the one hand, and the directions and content of scientific theorizing, on the other hand. The critiques identify the presence and consequences of androcentrism, and unquestioned assumptions about gender that are often informed by gender stereotypes, gendered metaphors, and/or evaluatively thick concepts. Second, as our discussion of developmental biology and primatology indicate, feminist philosophers of science credit the recognition of such problems to the emergence and presence of feminist perspectives within science. If feminists are correct (but we will see this is a matter of some controversy), this further supports arguments for the contextual and social nature of science. Both in terms of its emergence in the larger social context and in science, feminism is a historically and culturally specific phenomenon. And the work of those who engage in feminist philosophies of science is deeply informed by that of others in the research tradition. The case studies also challenge the longstanding assumption that good science is always “value-free.” In the critiques of research in developmental biology and primatology that we have considered, feminists argued that, although androcentrism and unwarranted assumptions about gender informed the research and hypotheses in question, they were not cases of bad science. In each case, scientists did appeal to what was recognized as evidence, and their hypotheses were in keeping with the research priorities, and accepted methods and hypotheses, in these fields. Thus, feminists argue, good science can be, and in cases like these, was informed by social values. Crediting feminist perspectives with advances within these and other sciences also challenges the ideal of value-free science. Obviously, feminism is a position that embraces social and political values. But as noted at the outset of this chapter, some of the arguments just summarized are controversial. Arguably, the most significant disagreement dividing feminist scientists and science scholars, and scientists and science scholars critical of their arguments, is whether feminism led to the changes in approaches to gender that came about in fields such as developmental biology and primatology, among others. Two lines of argument challenging the proposed



Feminist Philosophies of Science

255

relationships between feminism and such changes are common. One maintains that it was a coincidence that changes in approaches to gender came about at the same time as individuals influenced by feminism entered science. Another maintains that the changes resulted from science’s tendency to “self-correct” and so again were unrelated to feminism (cited in Fedigan 2001, and Gilbert and Rader 2001). Focusing on some of the changes that occurred in primatology in relation to gender, Hrdy finds the “coincidence” and the “self-correcting” arguments unconvincing. I seriously question whether it could have been just chance or historical sequence that caused a small group of primatologists in the 1960s, who happened to be mostly male, to focus on male-male competition and on the numbers of matings a male achieved, while a subsequent group of researchers, including many women (beginning in the 1970s) started to shift the focus to female behaviors having long-term consequences for the fates of infants. (Hrdy 1986: 126)

By noting two different groups of researchers, Hrdy challenges both arguments. The anthropologists in the 1960s who focused on males, and emphasized the importance of male dominance and male aggression, did not in fact change their approaches to gender. They did not call for attention to female primates, argue that scrutinizing background assumptions about gender was important, did not argue against imposing gender stereotypes on nonhuman primates, and so forth. These phenomena, as Hrdy notes, only occurred when a later generation of scientists, who were women and/or influenced to some degree by feminism, entered the field. And we have noted evidence that supports Hrdy’s argument. We have read about Jeanne Altmann’s account of how feminism was important to her decision to study female savannah baboons and to observe behaviors not observed by previous generations of primatologists. Hrdy offers similar arguments about her own research and what it revealed about gender relations in several primate species that challenged earlier accounts of the behaviors of female primates (Hrdy 1986). These arguments are representative of those offered by feminists in other areas of biology that maintain feminism had an important impact on their research priorities, questions, observations, and hypotheses, as well as on their critiques of accepted methods, assumptions, and hypotheses in their fields (Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1985, and Fedigan 2001, to name just some). In general, feminist scientists and science scholars offer an affirmative response to questions about whether feminism has changed research approaches and methods in their fields, while also noting that more changes are

256

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

needed (Fedigan 2001 in terms of primatology, and Gowaty 2003 in terms of evolutionary biology). However, as Fedigan discusses in terms of such changes in primatology, and Scott F. Gilbert and Karen A. Rader discuss in terms of changes in developmental biology, many other scientists in these fields who recognize the changes feminists cite that involve gender deny that the changes are in any way related to feminism. Rather, they contend, the changes that have come about were motivated by scientists’ interest in doing good science. In addition, as Fedigan and Gilbert and Rader note, many of these scientists regard feminism as “outside of science” and thus irrelevant to scientific practice and/or as “purely political” and thus incompatible with good science. The disagreement just noted is obviously multilayered. It involves assumptions about relationships between values and science, and between science and the larger social contexts in which it is undertaken—in other words, it involves some of the more important issues raised in and by feminist engagements with science. Although we will certainly not settle these issues here, the question of whether there are relationships between feminism and changes in how some biological sciences approach gender is worthy of further attention on the part of scientists and science scholars. The issues that underlie this disagreement carry significant implications for understandings of the nature of science and of scientific theorizing.

Notes 1 In this chapter, I discuss or mention the work of individual scientists, philosophers of science, and historians of science who engage in feminist philosophy of science. But the general themes and approaches I attribute to feminist philosophies of science inform the analyses of many others, including philosophers Carla Fehr, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, and Elisabeth Potter among others; feminist scientists Ruth Hubbard, Evelyn Fox Keller, Emily Martin, and others; and feminist historians of science Carolyn Merchant and Margaret Rossiter, among others. Relevantly recent collections of essays devoted to feminist science scholarship include Creager, Lunbeck, and Schiebinger (2001), Mayberry, Submarinan and Weadel (2001), and Nelson and Wylie (2004). 2 Feminist engagements with primatology are extensive. Works that provide overviews of them include Fedigan (2001) and Small (1984). We focus on three hypotheses, one that dominated studies of gorillas and one species of chimpanzees (so-called



Feminist Philosophies of Science

257

ordinary chimpanzees) in the 1960s and 1970s; and two advanced in later decades by feminist primatologists that challenged the earlier hypothesis and constituted alternatives to it. 3 We have focused on the research and hypotheses of only two of many feminist primatologists. The collection Female Primates: Studies by Women Primatologists edited by Meredith Small provides details about many studies undertaken by women primatologists, including feminists (Small 1984).

References Altmann, Jeanne (1980), Baboon Mothers and Infants, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, Elisabeth A. (2004), “The Use of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument with Lessons from a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce,” in Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Alison Wylie (eds.), Hypatia Special Issue on Feminist Science Studies, 1–24, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barash, David (1979), The Whisperings Within, New York: Harper & Row. Bleier, Ruth (1984), Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women, New York: Pergamon Press. Creager, Angela N., Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger (eds.) (2001), Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. DeVore, Irven and Sheldon Washburn (1963), “Baboon Ecology and Human Evolution,” in F. C. Howell and F. Bourliere (eds.), African Ecology and Human Evolution, 335–67, Chicago: Aldine Press. Douglas, Heather (2000), “Inductive Risk and Values in Science,” Philosophy of Science 67 (4): 559–79. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (1985), Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men, New York: Basic Books. Fedigan, Linda M. (1982), Primate Paradigm: Sex Roles and Social Bonds, Fountain Valley: Eden Press. Fedigan, Linda M. (1992), Primate Paradigm: Sex Roles and Social Bonds, 2nd ed., with new introduction, University of Chicago Press. Fedigan, Linda M. (2001), “The Paradox of Feminist Primatology: The Goddess Discipline?” in Angela N. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger (eds), Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, 46–72, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gilbert, Scott F. (2014), Developmental Biology, 10th ed., Sunderland, MA: Sinaeur Associations

258

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Gilbert, Scott F. and Karen A. Rader (2001), “Revisiting Women, Gender, and Feminism in Developmental Biology,” in Angela N. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger (eds.), Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gowaty, Patricia A. (2003), “Sexual Nature: How Feminism Changed Evolutionary Biology,” Signs 28 (3): 901–21. Hanson, Norwood R. (1958), Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Haraway, Donna (1989), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York: Routledge. Harding, Sandra (1986), The Science Question in Feminism, New York: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives, New York: Cornell University Press Hempel, Carl (1996), Philosophy of Natural Science, New York: Prentice Hall. Hrdy, Sarah B. (1977), The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hrdy, Sarah B. (1986), “Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female,” in R. Bleier (ed.), Feminist Approaches to Science, 131–59, New York: Pergamon Press. Hrdy, Sarah B. (2009), Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Understanding, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lancaster, Jane (1973), “In Praise of the Achieving Female Monkey,” in Psychology Today, September, 20–36. Longino, Helen E. (1990), Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen E., and Ruth Doell (1983), “Body, Bias, and Behavior: A Comparative Analysis of Reasoning in Two Areas of Biological Science,” Signs 9: 2. Martin, Emily (1991), “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16: 485–501. Mayberry, Maralee, Banu Submarinan, and Lisa Weadel (eds.) (2001), Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation, Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Merton, Robert K. (1968), Social Theory and Social Structure, 2nd ed., New York: Free Press. Nelson, Lynn H. (1990), From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Nelson, Lynn H. (2017), Biology and Feminism: A Philosophical Introduction, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Lynn H., and Alison Wylie (eds.) (2004), Hypatia, Special Issue on Feminist Science Studies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.



Feminist Philosophies of Science

259

Quine, Willard Van Orman (1966), “Posits and Reality,” in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 223–41, New York: Random House. Rowell, T. E. (1974), “The Concept of Dominance,” Behavioural Biology 11. Sayers, Janet (1982), Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Perspectives, New York: Routledge. Schatten, Gerald and Heide Schatten (1983), “The Energetic Egg,” Sciences 23. Schiebinger, Londa (1999), Has Feminism Changed Science? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Small, M. F. (ed.) (1984), Female Primates: Studies by Women Primatologists, New York: Alan R. Liss, Inc. Sperling, Susan (1991), “Baboons with Briefcases: Feminism, Functionalism, and Sociobiology in the Evolution of Primate Gender,” Signs 17: 1. van Fraassen, Bas (1980), The Scientific Image, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, Edward O. (1975), Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wylie, Alison (2003), “Why Standpoint Matters,” in R. Figueroa and S. Harding (eds.), Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, New York: Routledge. Zihlman, Adrienne (1978), “Women in Human Evolution, Part 11: Subsistence and Organization Among Early Hominids,” Signs4: 4–20.

14

Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue Deborah K. Heikes

Often overlooked in discussions of modern philosophy are the deep and abiding epistemic roots of exclusion. One reason for this is the reputation of the Enlightenment as an age of universal rights and equality. This reputation encouraged early feminists such as Wollstonecraft and Mill to advocate modern methods of argument and justification as a means to obtain moral and epistemic equality. More recently, however, these methods have come to be associated with disenfranchisement, inequality, exclusion, colonialism, and slavery. Kant, one of the era’s most influential moral theorists, asserts both the absolute worth of all moral beings and the inequality of some humans. In a statement surely intended to make his derogatory attitudes toward women sound slightly less derogatory, Kant says, “I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles, and I hope by that not to offend, for these are also extremely rare in the male” (1960: 81). Yet his message is quite clear: because women fail to reason in the right sort of way, equality belongs literally to men—but not all men. Even for men, the capacity for principles is extremely rare. Being black, for example, is “clear proof ” of a deficiency of reason (Kant 1960: 113). Something about the modern methods defended by Mill and Wollstonecraft create an epistemic and moral landscape that, far from defending the dignity of all humans, deliberately and explicitly excludes women and non-white people from any talk of moral and political rights. Such exclusions are, as I argue, grounded in central epistemological and moral commitments. To take seriously the need for greater equality and justice requires not simply understanding and undermining these commitments; it also requires finding alternate grounds for moral agency and obligation. I begin by tracing the grounds for Kant’s exclusion of women and most men from moral agency, exclusions which emerge from Humean ways of thinking that are neither incidental nor accidental. As the moderns shift their attention



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

261

away from the external world and toward ideas in the mind, they encounter a problem: how do we avoid the very real epistemic risk of subjectivism? To counter the tendency toward subjectivism, philosophers like Hume and Kant come to deliberately exclude the difference presented by being non-male or nonwhite. After all, if all epistemic and moral agents reason in precisely the same way, knowledge can avoid becoming relative to knowers. Those who are believed to reason differently cannot be epistemically or morally allowed to count. As influential as this requirement to adopt a specific partiality is, the mere identification of it is, in itself, not all that useful for overcoming oppression, especially since the foundations of modernism are hardly live options for us. But destabilizing these foundations comes at a cost. We may live in a world wary of metanarratives, but abandoning modern methods will not assure that people are treated fairly, justly, equally—a point not lost on contemporary philosophers. John Rawls, who is hardly an outspoken critic of modernism, recognizes the limitations of Kant’s metaphysical grounding of moral concepts and offers an alternative conception. His account of justice avoids some of the obvious problems with modern accounts, but because he is not sensitive to the ways in which Kantian grounds demand a narrow conception of agency, some of the limitations of modern moral concepts bleed into a Rawlsian view. The legacy of Kant, as carried forward in Rawls, highlights the lingering problems with modern grounds of morality. In Section 2 of this chapter, I consider these difficulties. Finally, whatever the difficulties, quintessentially modern concepts—for example, justice, equality, dignity—appear necessary to arguments against sexism, racism, colonialism, slavery, and so on. In other words, Wollstonecraft and Mill were onto something. Yet, appeal to such concepts can leave philosophers concerned with justice in a bind. On the one hand, the widespread failure of philosophical foundations seems to leave us with little more than cultural relativism. On the other hand, cultural relativism is a poor starting point to discuss claims of justice for not every person nor every culture shares a commitment to treating others with respect and dignity. Of course, those of us concerned with justice do believe that, among rival perspectives, frameworks that more widely distribute epistemic and moral authority are to be preferred, but we must be able to defend the advantages of perspectives committed to pursuing meaningful moral and epistemic equality. That is, if we are to adequately defend the reality of oppression and the desirability of inclusion, norms need to go deeper than simple cultural agreement. On the other hand, human equality

262

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and universal rights, especially the right to self-determination, may not be worth defending if it entails, as the moderns believe, defending the rights of only a privileged few. Fortunately, retaining rationality and morality need not entail modern grounds—or modern exclusions. Because meanings derive from practices that change, our use of reason and of moral concepts are malleable. When we reflect upon our practices, in particular, the practices surrounding our use of “reasonableness,” we can indeed find a middle ground between absolute and arbitrary value. Reasonableness offers a more substantive, contextually determined understanding of what it is to believe and act correctly.

1  Modernism’s moral failings By Enlightenment’s end, philosophers come to understand the gaps and blind spots produced by limiting ourselves to the contents of our own minds and to the powers of reason that we can observe. Hume recognizes and accepts that reason cannot answer all our epistemic questions, but Kant refuses to accede to the limits imposed by a strict empiricism. What Hume needs—and what Kant knows cannot be empirically obtained—are universalizable principles. For example, when it comes to induction, Hume states that “regular conjunction has been universally acknowledged among mankind, and has never been the subject of dispute” (1975: 88, my emphasis). Similarly, in the case of morality, he claims that “it is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same in its principles and operations” (1975: 83, my emphasis). Finally, in the case of aesthetics, he maintains that what “we call delicacy of taste . . . [employs] general rules of beauty” (1964: 273, my emphasis). Even if he is not entitled to them on empirical grounds, Hume surely recognizes the consequences of abandoning general rules. To avoid leaving reason unfettered, he considers those like himself and, voilà, discovers “universal acknowledgment.” Of course, Kant believes empiricism ill-positioned to defend sweeping assertions of regular, uniform, universal, general rules.1 He also understands that such rules provide grounds for evaluating rationality, especially the rationality of those who fail to live up to the rules. In this, Kant simply follows Hume. Take, for instance, Hume’s denigration of non-whites. He finds them lacking in civilization and deficient in mind.2 Only whites are civilized. Only whites are able to “preserve . . . [their minds] free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

263

enter into . . . [their] consideration but the very object which is submitted to his examination” (1964: 276, emphasis in original). Only whites are appropriately sensitive to general rules of beauty, and, thus, only whites (and only some whites) obtain a delicacy of taste. Yet, since taste produces sentiments of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue, delicacy of taste is closely connected to morality (Hume 1975: 294). If those “naturally inferior to whites” fail to demonstrate mastery of correct sentiment, they may also demonstrate a failure of moral agency. These lessons are not lost on Kant, who is well aware of Mr. Hume’s challenge “to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents” (Kant 1960: 110–11).3 Rather than disagree, Kant finds a more theoretically consistent means to demonstrate how the move to regular, uniform, universal, general rules excludes nonmales and non-whites from epistemic and moral agency—and, consequently, from the domain of equality and justice. His horror at empiricism’s epistemic incompleteness motivates Kant to establish a transcendental, metaphysically necessary ground for much of Hume’s epistemology—and for his racism. Kant paints “the celebrated Hume” as “one of those geographers of human reason who have imagined that they have sufficiently disposed of all such questions [of the totality of our knowledge] by setting them outside the horizon of human reason” (1929: A760/B788). But, for Kant, simply dismissing questions concerning the totality and unity of knowledge fails to explain the regularity and necessity of human cognition. To have any empirical knowledge at all, says Kant, we must believe all the bits of sensory experience are ultimately connected. But, of course, Humean empiricism cannot do this, nor can it explain how to get an “ought” from an “is.” It cannot explain, that is, what Kant calls the ground of unity for the realms of nature and freedom. Hume shows unity can never be found in experience. As a result, Kant believes we must assume it. But not any old assumption will work. We need an assumption that will allow the empirical realm to connect to the moral one, and to achieve this unity, Kant places at the heart of his architectonic the concept of purposiveness. Purposiveness allows for the regularity of the natural world, for the possibility of action within the moral world, and for our ability to understand both these worlds.4 As Kant says, this systematic unity of ends in this world of intelligences—a world which is indeed, as mere nature, a sensible world only, but which, as a system of freedom, can be entitled an intelligible, that is a moral world (regnum gratiae)—leads inevitably also to the purposive unity of all things [die zweckmäßige Einheit aller Dinge], which constitute this great whole, in accordance with universal laws of

264

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

nature (just as the former unity is in accordance with universal and necessary laws of morality), and thus unites the practical with the speculative reason. (1929: A816/B844)

Kant may be less than sensitive to the context of moral action, but he does fully grasp that it must be possible for us to act morally. As a result, he tells us that nature must be able to conform to the ends required by the laws of freedom; otherwise, we could have no assurance that moral ends could ever be achieved—and what would be the point of that? (Kant 2001: 176). In this necessary connection of material nature and moral nature lies the metaphysical essentialism that escaped Hume. But, the unity provided via purposiveness comes at a high cost for the men and women who fail to achieve rationality. When it comes to race, Kant starts with a simple claim: racial differences among humans do exist. Now, as with nature more broadly considered, organized beings are “a system of final causes” (Kant 2013: 189), which means that insofar as nature is governed by teleological laws, the differences among races are anything but accidental.5 And since Kant wishes “to specify natural causes in those cases where we cannot become aware of any purposes” (Kant 2000: 14), he is interested in articulating the final cause of racial difference.6 That this cause cannot be found empirically is far from surprising since teleological laws ultimately transcend experience. Nevertheless, Kant “discovers” a metaphysical ground for race (Kant 2013: 189). This is precisely why it is possible to base a man’s intelligence on his skin color (Kant 1960: 111, 113). This is also why purposiveness impacts moral agency. A metaphysical account of race does not directly besmirch the character of women, but in the same text in which Kant states, “So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man [i.e., Negro and white], and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color” (Kant 1960: 111), he makes several derogatory remarks about women’s intellectual capacities, all of which are designed to demonstrate a lesser capacity to reason.7 Surely the most telling statement is his belief that “the fair sex is [in]capable of principles” (Kant 1960: 81). Anyone who knows anything about Kant’s ethics knows that moral agency and moral worth stem from the ability to act according to principles. That women are incapable of principles has a real moral consequence, and given Kant’s extensive arguments concerning how differences among humans are purposively and teleologically governed (Kant 2013: 190–92), his attitude toward women is not likely to be any less essentialist than his attitude toward blacks. Because heritable differences, like sex and race, are purposive, anyone



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

265

non-male and non-white becomes essentially unable to achieve rationality as fully as can white men. This divorce of humanity from rationality is a decisive shift in philosophical thinking. With Kant, moral worth is suddenly no longer linked to being human. With Kant, to possess moral standing is not simply to be human but to act autonomously according to principles one gives oneself. But since all women and some men are lacking in principles, rationality escapes everyone but white males—and all because the moderns must defend reason’s ability to formulate universal principles.8 If those who supposedly reason differently—that is, women and non-white males—were allowed to provide norms for correct reasoning, philosophers might very well have to allow that knowledge is different when reason proceeds differently. The path of least resistance for the moderns is to limit the domain of reason, and, hence, the domain of epistemic and moral agency. The result is a theoretically grounded and largely invisible commitment to the inequality of many men and all women.

2  Rawls and the overturning of modernism Only recently have philosophers recognized modernism’s exclusionary tone or sought to understand its foundations. The fault lies not simply with philosophers’ willingness to overlook sexism and racism. It also lies in how difficult biases are to see from within. To be committed to any part of the Enlightenment project is to remain blind to at least some aspects of modernism. Case in point, John Rawls and his theory of justice. Rawls is explicit about his commitment to a Kantianstyled autonomy, but he is equally explicit about rejecting “claims to universal truth, or claims about the essential nature and identity of persons” (Rawls 1985: 223) He understands that in our postmodern world a universalist ethic is no longer allowed modern grounds. As a result, he seeks alternative grounds for the rational choices of autonomous agents. 9 Unfortunately, the limitations of modernism don’t just magically go away. To appeal to autonomy is to appeal to that very same conception which excludes those who fail to reason in the “right” sort of way. While justice as fairness may be concerned with “society as a system of fair social cooperation between free and equal persons” (Rawls 1985: 229), not everyone counts as a free and equal person, even for Rawls. Rawls may reject the explicit sexism and racism of his predecessors, but he still perpetuates narrowly understood and historically problematic constraints on how we ought to reason.

266

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Rawlsian justice as fairness invokes two of the most significant concepts in deontological ethics, although it does so without articulating a priori universal principles or metaphysically determined subjects. Instead, the original position hypothesizes a group of interchangeable moral agents. These agents legitimate principles of justice, not on a priori grounds, but because their choice is made while each is ignorant of his “place in society, his class position or social status, . . . his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like” (Rawls 1971: 12). This approach preserves the interchangeability of rational agents in consenting to and legitimating the contract while allowing for a difference of individual interests. This approach also acknowledges diversity, but it does so by denying agents knowledge of what their particular interests are. Critics often find this starting point hopeful but still too dismissive of difference.10 The problem is that the original position limits what counts as appropriate reasoning. Rawls himself admits this, saying that “the parties in the initial situation . . . [are to be thought of as] as not taking an interest in one another’s interests” (1971: 13). While disinterestedness may initially appear unproblematic, it works against inclusion in a couple of ways. First, by excluding the possibility that one will concern oneself with another’s interests, Rawls has constrained and partially predetermined what counts as the “right” sort of choice of principle. Michael Sandel is especially sensitive to this sort of limitation because he fears it excludes the possibility of “what we might call ‘intersubjective’ or ‘intrasubjective’ forms of self-understanding, ways of conceiving the subject that do not assume its bounds to be given in advance” (1982: 62). Rawls may say he is distancing himself from a metaphysical conception of the subject, but Sandel thinks otherwise, claiming that a Rawlsian self is “an antecedently individuated subject, standing always at a certain distance from the interests it has,” which, in turn, puts “the self beyond the reach of experience, . . . [makes] it invulnerable, . . . [and fixes] its identity once and for all” (Sandel 1982: 62). Selves behind the veil of ignorance have identities of a certain sort, and that identity is, like the Kantian one, free of specific empirical commitments and individual values. Second, Susan Moller Okin notes a difficulty with Rawls’s Kantian heritage, although she is quite willing to defend his position when it is freed of its Kantian constraints. She notes that “those in the original position cannot think from the position of nobody (as Rawls’s desire for simplicity might suggest); they must think from the position of everybody” (1989: 244, emphasis in original). Now, this request to “think from the position of everybody” can be interpreted in different ways.



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

267

On one interpretation, this requirement can lead to inclusion for it will require a “strong empathy and preparedness to listen carefully to the very different points of view of others” (1989: 245). But this interpretation is not the only one available. On an alternative interpretation, “everyone” is not literally everyone, at which point the same explicit limitations on rational agency begin to emerge. The latter interpretation is not easily dismissed. When Rawls shifts to discussing the notion of reasonableness, the connection to Kant becomes explicit as do the limitations concerning who gets to count as a chooser of principles of justice. Reasonable and rational people are, says Rawls, “normally the unit of responsibility in political and social life” (1993: 50). This is a distinction explicitly tied to Kantian thinking. Says Rawls: The distinction between the reasonable and the rational goes back, I believe, to Kant: it is expressed in his distinction between the categorical and the hypothetical imperative. . . . The first represents pure practical reason, the second represents empirical practical reason. For the purposes of a political conception of justice, I give the reasonable a more restricted sense and associate it, first, with the willingness to recognize the burdens of judgment and to accept their consequences. . . . Knowing that people are reasonable where others are concerned, we know that they are willing to govern their conduct by a principle from which they and others can reason in common; and reasonable people take into account the consequences of their actions on others’ well-being. (1993: 48–49n1, my emphasis)

On first glance, the parallel between the reasonable and rational/the hypothetical and categorical appears a straightforward contrast. After all, whatever it is we mean by “reasonable” (or by “hypothetical”), the concept has more substantive content than mere rationality (or than a categorical imperative). Reasonableness demands one believe or act in a way that is appropriate within a specific situation. It demands we be willing to accept the consequences of judgment. Rawls continues, however, by adding that reasonable people “govern their conduct by a principle from which they and others can reason in common” (1993: 49n1). That is, reasonable people share in certain hypothetical imperatives which are grounded in a shared capacity to reason. But for Kant, this capacity is not shared by those lacking in maleness or whiteness. Is this any different for Rawls? Who is actually party to the commonality of imperatives? Who exactly consents to the principles of justice? Ultimately, the legitimacy of the principles depends on the assurance that only certain people, namely, those who accept the constraint of disinterest, are

268

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

allowed to choose them. Yet, this generates an another concern with inclusion. To assume the constraint of disinterest, Rawls engages in a small bit of question begging: legitimate choosers behind the veil must have a prior commitment to liberalism. Rawls writes: Justice as fairness is intended as a political conception of justice for a democratic society, it tries to draw solely upon basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime and the public traditions of their interpretation. Justice as fairness is a political conception in part because it starts from within a certain political tradition. (Rawls 1985: 225, my emphasis)

A preexisting commitment to liberalism is surely not the worst commitment one can have. As Marilyn Friedman argues, this is not inherently problematic. Nevertheless, it excludes those who reject it, which warrants asking if such exclusions from the legitimation pool are done for good or bad reasons. In some cases, we appear to have good grounds for exclusion. For example, people who want to dominate others would not be in the best position to choose principles of justice. People who lie outside the norms of race and sex do not seem to thereby possess any qualities relevant to disallowing their membership in a legitimation pool. To Rawls’s credit these are precisely the sorts of exclusions and inclusions to which he claims to be committed. Friedman concludes, then, that “no overt or covert gender bias is built into his [Rawls’s] conception” (2000: 26). Yet even if she is correct, Rawls’s view is not fully absolved of complicity with the biases of Kant. We should ask, as does Friedman, who are the unreasonable? What is their fate? Because he seeks greater tolerance and cooperation, Rawls finds unreasonable those who fail to be committed to fundamental principles of a liberal society. Somewhat circularly, however, these fundamental principles are precisely those which typically define reasonability, for example, to be concerned to seek fair terms of social cooperation and to expect that people will disagree about fundamental matters of religion, morality, or philosophy. Persons are reasonable “when . . . they are ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given assurances that others will likewise do so” (Rawls 1993: 49). When persons are not willing to do this, they become unreasonable—and being unreasonable has consequences. To reject reasonable doctrines, to be unwilling to propose and abide by fair terms of cooperation, is to risk losing one’s basic rights and freedoms, and it is certainly to lose one’s autonomy insofar as one is removed from the pool of people whose assent legitimates the political system (Friedman 2000: 22–23).



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

269

Unfortunately, this approach follows Kant in assigning agency to those who reason according to certain principles. A necessary condition on Rawlsian rational choosers is that they accept conditions specified in advance of that choice. More to the point, reason and reasonableness remain something to be achieved, in this case by agreeing to “fair terms of cooperation.” But, again, we can ask: what makes terms fair? Even if Rawls’s goal is a greater respect for diversity, justice as fairness may be closed off for some. This is especially true for those who experience oppression and whose embedded and embodied lives appear to prohibit them from the requisite impartial commitment to cooperation—never mind that cooperation for those in a less advantageous social position can often perpetuate a lack of equality. Some of the embodied and concrete conditions of our lives, conditions which are deemed irrelevant to foundational choices concerning the principles of justice, can affect whether or not a Rawlsian system will count us as autonomous agents capable of choosing principles in the first place. This issue is addressed by Nicholas Burbules, who says: No one can be expected to be reasonable in entirely unreasonable circumstances; and a corollary of this insight is that the characterization of “unreasonableness” is often more a critique of social circumstances rather than a criticism of persons. Contexts in which people are discouraged from careful deliberation and reflection; where dubious beliefs, values, tastes, and manners are enforced through strong social or institutional coercion; where hasty or overly simplistic choices are pressed upon persons; where there are few opportunities for able contexts, by which I mean that they are both the consequence of poorlyconsidered and oppressive social choices, and that they are likely to result in unreasonable thoughts and actions by persons within them. These circumstances are rampant in our society. (1995: 88–89, emphasis in original)

In all fairness to Rawls, his emphasis is on the reasonable person being moved by the idea of reciprocity. As such, he is opposed to enforcing values, tastes, and manners through any form of coercion. But, we can ask: reciprocity with or for whom? He claims that “Insofar as we are reasonable, we are ready to work out the framework for the public social world, a framework it is reasonable to expect everyone to endorse and act on, provided others can be relied on to do the same” (Rawls 1993: 53–54). Rawls does not require us to accept all views and thus secure the assent of everyone; we need only address reasonable views and the reasonable people who hold them. The problem, as Friedman notes, is that “people might be unreasonable because they have grown up under unjust

270

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

institutions” (Friedman 2000: 18), and this should not be ignored. Even Rawls notes that the fact of pluralism is different from the fact of reasonable pluralism, which implies only some pluralism counts (Rawls 1993: 63–64). This should give us pause. Historically, those taken to be less than reasonable—or, in the case of women, downright unreasonable—are rarely those who have the most advantaged position in society. Instead, non-male and non-white persons have remained disadvantaged in the granting of liberal rights and liberties—and for reasons that are far from accidental. Despite such theoretical exclusions, Rawls, to his credit, offers an understanding of reasonableness that entails a substantive movement away from modernism’s a priori universalism and its explicit racism and sexism. He also offers a more inclusive account of justice than his modern predecessors. His deliberative rationality allows for desires, wants, and ends to function as inescapable factors in choosing a course of action, and this allows him to be sensitive to personal circumstances and one’s own conception of the good (Rawls 1971: 416). Rawls understands, in a way that seems to escape Kant, that even if the justification of principles must rely on choices of abstract reasoners, the content of morality in our lived experience is inescapably particular. The difficulty for Rawls is his explicit dependence on a Kantian conception of autonomy. In much the same way as Kant, Rawlsian reasoners must conform to a preconception of what it is to reason properly. The necessity of being committed to the values and goals of a liberal society excludes the so-called unreasonable. And the people most likely to be deemed unreasonable, even when reacting quite reasonably given their circumstances, are women of all varieties and non-white men. As a result, Rawls’s appeal to reasonableness, which remains grounded in a modern understanding of autonomy, threatens to carry forward modern biases, if only implicitly. What we need is a means for openly deliberating about ends in a way that allows both for difference and for normative evaluations of difference. Some people are indeed unreasonable. But this should not be an a priori designation.

3  Non-modern grounds This tension between universality and particularity, between sameness and difference, extends much further than Rawls. Seyla Benhabib, for example, defends universalism, by which she means the very modern “principle that all human beings, by virtue of their humanity, are entitled to moral respect from



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

271

others, and that such universal moral respect minimally entails the entitlement of individuals to basic human, civil, and political rights” (Benhabib 1994: 173). Yet, she also holds the very non-modern view that “the subjects of reason are finite, embodied and fragile creatures” (Benhabib 1992: 5). Similarly, Emmanuel Eze, who himself seeks a postcolonial historical rationality, asks an obvious question—and gives a telling answer. “Why defend modernity and its irreversible process in the contexts of a history in Africa?” His answer? “I do so in the name of morality and justice” (Eze 2008: 248). Of course, the “modernity” that Eze defends, like the “universalism” Benhabib defends, is not one the moderns would themselves endorse. For Eze, reason functions as “a practical response to the difficult condition of thought in the world, and of experience in history” (2008: 21). This pragmatic focus on everyday and very ordinary reasoning is hardly a modern way of thinking. In fact, Eze explicitly appeals to non-Cartesian philosophers such as Dewey, Rorty, Wittgenstein, and Foucault. Nevertheless, he tells us “it is pointless to reject the idea that humanity is shared across cultures” (Eze 2001: 203). Yet, not just humanity is shared across cultures; moral and epistemic agency is also shared. And as I have argued, modernism offers no basis for wider claims to agency and no basis for seeking a unity within diversity. If we are to move beyond culturally determined urgings and to “argue and agree, and even secure agreements about difference, on any range of issues that matter to individuals and communities” (Eze 2008: 249), we must seek a non-modern source. What Eze calls “a bridge over the breach” between the diversity and the unities of experience needs to find other grounds. As Benhabib and Eze suggest, narrowness, exclusion, and oppression are not problems with rationality as much as they are problems which emerge from a particular, decidedly modern conception of rationality. But the dilemma facing our post-Cartesian world is fundamentally no different than the dilemma facing Kant: if there are no universally shared and stable epistemic structures, how is it that we can transcend difference and its seeming result, cultural relativism? For the moderns, resolving the dilemma was simple: restrict the acquisition of reason to those who share the requisite epistemic structures. For us, the situation is much more complicated. The seeming synonymy of “reason” with “Cartesian reason”—and the seeming synonymy of “Cartesian reason” with “domination, oppression, repression, patriarchy, violence, totality, and totalitarianism” (Bernstein 1986: 187)—has motivated widespread rejections of rationality. The problem is, the loss of rationality makes normativity difficult to maintain. Fortunately, we need not accept that reason has a particular essence or that the

272

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

moderns truly capture this essence. Other practices surround rationality. Other practices are available to us. One of the more prominent alternatives to modern theories of rationality is the one emphasized by Rawls—being reasonable. While Rawls has a rather narrow understanding of what it is to be reasonable, the concept has a much broader, less liberalistic, more open-ended use among philosophers who explicitly reject Cartesianism’s emphasis on introspection, indefensible epistemic foundations, and the dichotomy of mind and world.11 For instance, Burbules, who understands reason as an enacted and imperfect social process, describes the reasonable person more broadly as one “who wants to make sense, wants to be fair to alternative points of view, wants to be careful and prudent in the adoption of important positions in life, is willing to admit when he or she has made a mistake, and so on” (1995: 86). He also claims that reasonableness “reflects a tolerance for uncertainty, imperfection, and incompleteness as the existential conditions of human thought and action” (Burbules 1995: 94). Reasonableness involves all this, while also requiring us to be attentive to the situated, embedded contexts in which we use our reason. Very little about reasonableness allows for abstract procedures or for mechanical rules of inquiry—which can make frustrating attempts to find the unity, and hence the normativity, within the diversity of reasonableness. This problem is by no means new. In developing his account of virtue, Aristotle tells us that “there is a standard . . . , being in accordance with the right rule. But such a statement, though true, is by no means clear” (Aristotle 1941: 1138b21–25). More needs to be said, and for Aristotle that more involves understanding that rules may be followed strictly or slackly, depending on circumstance. It also involves recognizing that virtue occupies a sort of middle ground between universal principles and concrete activities, participating in both to some extent. The division between these activities corresponds to a division among the parts of the soul that grasp rational principles, “one by which we contemplate the kind of things whose originative causes are invariable, and one by which we contemplate variable things” (Aristotle 1941: 1139a8–9). He calls the first scientific, the second calculative. The first set of principles are necessary and universal; the second set are the subject of deliberation. But surely necessary and universal principles lie beyond what our postmodern sensibilities will allow. We do not allow ourselves final ends, eternal essences, or metanarratives. Even someone as philosophically conservative as Robert Nozick sees this. He takes reason to be an evolutionary adaptation with “a delimited purpose and function. It was selected for and designed to work in tandem with



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

273

enduring facts that held during the period of human evolution, whether or not people could rationally demonstrate these facts” (1994: 176). This approach entails some surprising results. Most significantly, it is thoroughly committed to the inclusion of the specific, particular ends about which rational agents deliberate and then choose. So central are these ends to rationality that Nozick argues that to exclude them is to open “the door to despotic requirements, externally imposed” (Nozick 1994: 176). Put simply, if we follow in the footsteps of the moderns and offer a highly abstract, highly methodological account of reason, we risk becoming epistemological despots.12 More concretely, if we follow Kant or Rawls and operate with a predetermined notion of some purposively regulative principle, some preestablished understanding of appropriate political commitments, we threaten to make rational agency unachievable for those who do not easily fit within that structure. Another, probably less surprising, result is that the evolutionary approach to reason allows us both relatively open and relatively stable ends. On this view, the ends we autonomously choose are chosen within a world of stable facts that are largely beyond our control. This allows for an understanding of ends much like the one Aristotle provides. Because we can specify the stable material, biological, social, and cultural conditions under which various faculties like reason develop, we can say something meaningful about the normative constraints that reasonable persons must follow. When we consider these conditions, we find the Aristotelian distinction between variable and invariable principles, even if our version lacks necessity and transcendence. Put simply, evolutionary accounts of rationality allow for ends of our own choosing, about which we can deliberate, and ends necessary for our survival, which are thereby less open to choice and to deliberation. And the way they avoid imposing despotic requirements is by accepting that reason always operates contextually. Rationality involves what Heidegger might call our dwelling in the world. In one example, Heidegger discusses a peasant farmhouse in the Black Forest. The house is ordered into a simple oneness which, “placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights” (Heidegger 1977: 338). Building and dwelling are integrated into an existing environment, not directed toward procedurally guided understanding. The ends we pursue when we build and dwell, as well as the ways in which we pursue these ends, are governed by facts, some of which we can deliberate about, some of which we cannot. Some ways

274

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

of building our houses will be reasonable; others will not. But which is which cannot be determined in advance of knowing the landscape, available building materials and resources, typical weather conditions, cultural expectations, and so on. Just as noticeably, these activities recognize that our lives involve experience and incessant practice. We must act reasonably within the environment in which we find ourselves, not according to some preestablished set of principles. It may seem that abandoning final causes or ultimate purposes will leave us unable to offer a theory of substantive rationality. Yet this deficiency is only a seeming one. It is possible to say how things ought to proceed, even if we cannot say this is the only way they should proceed. It is, as Audi says, true that “we do not build the world from within. We build within from the world” (2001: 92). The result is a diversity that is subject to normativity. Yet none of this tells us anything specific about the epistemology of reasonableness. It does not tell us what constitutes grounds for believing or acting reasonably. It does not tell us who counts as a reasonable person. Nor does it offer much guidance in how to employ moral concepts to determine what the just or fair action is. It does not tell us why we should value justice or act fairly or treat people with basic equality. It doesn’t even tell us what these things are. Of course, given that reasonableness is often offered in response to modern, procedural accounts of reason, this lack of specificity may not be all that surprising. Overcoming past errors and exclusions means allowing room for epistemic and moral agency to be exercised differently. But the concept of reasonableness might still prove exclusionary for those in unreasonable contexts, particularly when those who possess the epistemic authority to define “reasonableness” are often the ones blind to the limits of others’ social situations. The question, then, is how reasonableness handles more exclusionary—and often unreasonable—contexts. As I have argued, whatever it is to be reasonable, the concept cannot be linked to one, and only one, way of living life or of evaluating possible patterns of living. After all, what is reasonable in one circumstance may be quite unreasonable in another. This makes it impossible to determine in advance what reasonableness is or should be; it also makes it epistemically incumbent upon the reasonable person that she consider context when evaluating the beliefs and behaviors of others. In other words, context makes all the difference. Being reasonable demands we be epistemically responsible for understanding others’ circumstances. Consider the parallel case of virtue. Aristotle holds the virtuous person responsible for deliberating well or poorly concerning both beliefs and actions (Aristotle 1941: 1111a2–1113a14). If we are virtuous, we cannot act in



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

275

ignorance but must understand the relevant circumstances and know that they are relevant. One may occasionally be ignorant of “what he is doing, what or whom he is acting on, and sometimes also what . . . he is doing it with, and to what end . . . , and how he is doing it . . . ,” but no virtuous person could be ignorant of all of this (Aristotle 1941: 1111a4–7). Anyone whose failures were that widespread would hardly be considered virtuous. Similarly, anyone who fails to consider the social situatedness of claims to knowledge and the context in which actions occur would hardly be considered reasonable. The circumstances rampant in our society in which “people are discouraged from careful deliberation and reflection; where dubious beliefs, values, tastes, and manners are enforced through strong social or institutional coercion; where hasty or overly simplistic choices are pressed upon persons; where there are few opportunities for able contexts” (Burbules 1995: 88); these circumstances should be a matter of concern for the reasonable person. They are also circumstances we can articulate and about which we can deliberate. We can ask ourselves what is reasonableness even if the context is itself unreasonable. These provide specific constraints, if not on the question of what-it-is-to-be-something, at least on the question of what-it-is-to-function-well-in-this-world. And there are facts about what it is to function well, even in unreasonable contexts. When those who have the power to determine reasonableness and unreasonableness fail to consider how the advantage of their social situation affects such judgments or actions, the result is an unreasonable epistemology. Of course, not all beliefs and behaviors are reasonable. This is where we need to learn how to evaluate beliefs and actions in a way that allows normative discriminations. Some perspectives are ones that we will find reasonable—as in the case of those marginalized, for example, as a result of their race or sex. Some perspectives are ones we will find unreasonable—as in the case of those who wish to oppress others. But which are reasonable and which are unreasonable cannot simply be a matter of how “one’s social situation enables and sets limits on what one can know” (Rawls 1993: 54–55). After all, this is precisely the blindness for which we fault the moderns: they could not see a world beyond their own social situation. If our contingent histories offer some necessary condition for recognizing certain types of justificatory evidence, reasonableness must account for our ability to access and assess that evidence. One means of addressing the possibility of access to and assessment of epistemic warrants comes from what John McDowell has called “second nature.” When we say something is second nature, we refer to habits that are so ingrained as to appear instinctive. Yet, they are not instinctive. Rather, we acquire them

276

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

when we learn to actualize the “potentialities that belong to a normal human organism” (McDowell 1994: 84). And when we acquire a habit to the extent that it becomes second nature, we also come to be capable of recognizing reasons that may not be evident to someone who has yet to develop that habit. This sort of understanding produces what Laura Ruetsche calls second nature warrant (Ruetsche 2004: 88). Unlike more traditional epistemic warrants in which cognitive achievements are governed by conformity to universal rules, second nature warrant allows that some legitimate epistemic warrants are more readily accessible to agents immersed in contingent social histories. One potential problem with this view is that epistemic warrants may be inaccessible to some people, which could lead to a certain epistemic incommensurability and to a failure of warrant for important sorts of claims concerning justice and oppression. Of course, Ruetsche recognizes this potential difficulty. Along with Rebecca Kukla, she says: If our ability to perceive facts is a second nature rational capacity, then there is no prima facie reason to think that we share it in all of its specific details. An agent’s contingent history of observational situations and learned responses will inflect her understanding of standard conditions, and in turn the content of her concepts. Different people with different epistemic histories may thus have different perceptual capacities, in which case the reasons these capacities make available would fail the traditionalist’s invariance test. (Kukla and Ruetsche 2002: 401, emphasis in original)

Such recognition of epistemic difference is laudable. It avoids the sorts of exclusions created by modernism. Yet it can appear to make inaccessible the epistemological warrants of others. If some reasons are, in principle, unavailable to the reasonable person, reasonableness not only fails to allow for diversity but also leaves us with only rhetorical persuasiveness with which to argue for justice, equality, and fairness. Yet, the great advantage of second nature warrant is that it need not entail that second natures are inaccessible to those who fail to occupy the relevant social position. Second natures are acquired. And while it is surely impractical to believe that we are each capable of acquiring every relevant second nature, it is certainly practical to expect the reasonable person be sensitive to all available evidence, including evidence that, by all appearances, is available to those with second natures we ourselves do not share. We can, however, still acknowledge and defer to this evidence, as we do in the case of turning to experts like doctors, lawyers, electricians, and plumbers.



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

277

In other words, our contingent social histories may not allow us to fully immerse ourselves in the practices of others with different histories, but we can seek out the evidence available within those other practices, however sensitive to social situations it is. For instance, I once mentioned to my male colleagues that hiring a second woman could radically alter the culture of our department. My male colleagues were curious about my remark and, to their credit, were interested to know why I thought this. Even so, I could never fully explain to them my experience. What we can easily explain to others who share our experiences is sometimes very difficult to explain to those who do not. But difficult does not mean impossible. Men who are willing to be fair to women’s point of view or who are willing to be careful in the adoption of important views can come to understand a great deal about the experience of women. And, as I have argued, since reasonable people should want to be fair to other points of view and careful in the adoption of important views, they are thus obligated to seek out this evidence and be willing to accept the testimony of others who occupy different contingent social histories. Reasonableness does not obligate us to acquire every second nature, but it does obligate us to seek out and to be sensitive to evidence that may be available to others. Because second natures are acquired rather than being innate, such warrants remain somewhat accessible, even if we will not always have ready access to such warrant. This is the point at which the respect for diversity merges with epistemic requirements to seek common ground. Until we attempt to understand the justificatory practices of those with different social histories, we are not epistemically permitted to evaluate the rationality of those who share those practices. Conversely, when, after careful consideration, those warrants continue to escape us, we then have grounds for evaluating the reasonableness of those practices and those who engage in them. At that point it becomes possible to state not simply how practices differ but how they differ in terms of ends and means within a world of stable facts, some of which will be relatively invariant and some of which will be a matter of deliberation. Practices that fail to lead to their stated, deliberated upon ends or that fail to lead to shared human needs such as shelter or the respect of others, these practices can be shown to be deficient. Practices that appear to engage in what Kant views as fetishes and idolatry may be trifling or unreasonable—or they may just be different. Knowing the difference entails abandoning the despotic requirements of reason and instead understanding the warrants available within those contexts.

278

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Notes 1 For further arguments on this point, see Lind (1994: 51–67). Also see Heikes (2016). 2 For Hume’s remarks concerning civilization, see Hume (1758: 125n). For his remarks on mental deficiencies see Hume (1975: 20). 3 For the original, see Hume (1975: 20). 4 See Kant (1929: A686-87/B714-15, A651/B679, and A681/B709). 5 Kant writes: “Because purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit] and fitness [Angemessenheit] are to be found in this [racial variety among humans], too, . . . that can be no work of chance” (2013: 178). 6 In explaining race, Kant says, “Where comes to an end and we have to begin with material forces we have personally invented according to unheard of laws incapable of proof, we are already beyond natural science” (2013: 189). 7 Among these comments are: “laborious learning or painful pondering . . . destroy the merits that are proper to [women]” (Kant 1960: 78); women’s “philosophy is not to reason, but to sense” (Kant 1960: 79); women know “nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation!” (Kant 1960: 81). 8 For more on this, see Mills (2002: 15–16). 9 Michael Sandel contends that Rawls is indeed committed to a Kantian metaphysics. See Sandel (1982: 119–22). I will briefly address this argument. However, the argument is discussed in more depth by Amy Gutmann (1985: 310–14). 10 Among feminists, Okin is especially sensitive to both the limitations and advantages of Rawls’s account of justice. While she does defend Rawls’s account insofar as it actually acknowledges the role of empathy and of imagining oneself in the place of others as significant features of moral development, she also believes that his dependence on Kant creates genuine difficulties for his ability to include women within his account of justice, especially since this heritage fundamentally excludes considerations of empathy and benevolence when formulating principles of justice. See Okin (1989: 231–237). 11 See especially Audi (2001: 149–53); Burbules (1995: 85–90); Siegel (1996: 101–10); Toulmin (2003: 16–28); Taylor (1982: 105). Closely related to this expanded conception of reason is the idea of rationality as a second nature, which can be found in Kukla and Ruetsche (2002: 389–418), Ruetsche (2004: 73–101, 2006: 80–95). 12 In a move critical of the heritage of Cartesian reason, Nozick says: “Philosophers who write about reasoning tend to concentrate upon an exceedingly narrow range of thinking as the sole legitimate mode of reasoning” (1994: 164).



Reasonableness as an Epistemic Virtue

279

References Aristotle (1941), “Nicomachean Ethics,” in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, 928–1112, New York: Random House. Audi, Robert (2001), The Architecture of Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benhabib, Seyla (1992), Situating the Self, New York: Routledge. Benhabib, Seyla (1994), “In Defense of Universalism—Yet Again!: A Response to Critics of Situating the Self,” New German Critique, 62: 173–89. Bernstein, Richard J. (1986), “The Rage Against Reason,” Philosophy and Literature, 10: 186–210. Burbules, Nicholas C. (1995), “Reasonable Doubt: Toward a Postmodern Defense of Reason as an Educational Aim,” in W. Kohli (ed.), Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education, 82–102, New York: Routledge. Eze, Emmanuel C. (2001), Achieving Our Humanity: the Idea of the Postracial Future, New York: Routledge. Eze, Emmanuel C. (2008), On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Friedman, Milton (2000), “John Rawls and the Political Coercion of Unreasonable People,” in V. Davion and C. Wolf (eds.), The Idea of Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls, 16–33, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Gutmann, Amy (1985), “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (3): 308–22. Heidegger, Martin (1977), “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in D. F. Krell (ed.), Basic Writings, 319–40, New York: Harper and Row. Heikes, Deborah K. (2016), Rationality, Representation, and Race, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hume, David (1758), “Of National Characters,” in D. Hume (ed.), Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 119–29, London: A. Miller. Hume, David (1975), Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, David (1964), “Of the Standard of Taste,” in D. Hume, T. H. Green, and T. H. Grose (eds.), Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, vol. 1, 266–86, Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen. Kant, Immanuel (1929), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kant, Immanuel (1960), Observations On the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. J. T. Goldthwait, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kant, Immanuel (2000), “Of the Different Human Races,” in R. Bernasconi and T. L. Lott (eds.), The Idea of Race, 8–22, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Kant, Immanuel (2001), Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

280

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Kant, Immanuel (2013), “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy,” in J. M. Mikklesen (ed.), Kant and the Concept of Race, 169–94, Albany: SUNY Press. Kukla, Rebecca, and Laura Ruetsche. (2002), “Contingent Natures and Virtuous Knowers: Could Epistemology Be Gendered?,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (3): 389–418. Lind, Marcia (1994), “Indians, Savages, Peasants, and Women,” in B. Bar On (ed.), Modern Engenderings, 51–67, Albany: SUNY Press. McDowell, John (1994), Mind and World, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Mills, Charles W. (2002), “Defending the Radical Enlightenment,” Social Philosophy Today 18: 9–29. Nozick, Robert (1994), The Nature of Rationality, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Okin, Susan M. (1989), “Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice,” Ethics 99 (2): 229–49. Rawls, John (1971), A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John (1985), “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 14 (3): 223–51. Rawls, John (1993), Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Ruetsche, Laura (2004), “Virtue and Contingent History: Possibilities for Feminist Epistemology,” Hypatia 19 (1): 73–101. Ruetsche, Laura (2006), “Objectivity and Perspective in Empirical Knowledge,” Episteme, 3 (1–2): 80–95. Sandel, Michael (1982), Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Siegel, H. (1996), Rationality Redeemed?: Further Dialogues On an Educational Ideal, New York: Routledge. Taylor, Charles (1982), “Rationality,” in M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, 87–105, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Toulmin, Stephen (2003), Return to Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

15

Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy: Potentially the Closest of Allies Janet A. Kourany

Science has traditionally been billed as our foremost producer of knowledge. For more than a decade now, however, science has also been billed as an important producer of ignorance. Indeed, historian of science Robert Proctor has coined a new term “agnotology” to refer to the study of ignorance, a new area of enquiry, and it turns out that much of the ignorance studied in this new area is produced by science (see, for example, Proctor and Schiebinger 2008; Gross and McGoey 2015). The examples are numerous. Whether it be global warming or the health effects of smoking or of environmental pollutants, the relation of processed foods to high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes or the safety and efficacy of prescription drugs, in each case the public is confused, uninformed, or in some other way ignorant, and in each case the ignorance has been (to use Proctor’s phrase) “made, maintained, and manipulated” by science—by an increasingly politicized and commercialized science. According to this new approach, ignorance is far more complex than previously thought. Ignorance is not just the void that precedes knowledge or the privation that results when attention focuses elsewhere. It is also—in fact, it is especially—something socially constructed: the confusion produced, for example, when special interests block access to information or even create misinformation. Thus, Proctor has written about the tobacco industry and the techniques it used in the past and continues to use to produce doubt in the public regarding the health risks of smoking (2011). Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have revealed how a small group of politically conservative scientists worked behind the scenes to stall public recognition of such problems as acid rain, the ozone hole, and global warming (2010). Investigative reporter Michael Moss has exposed the elaborate methods food scientists have developed to con

282

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

the public into preferring foods packed with salt, sugar, and fat over healthier fare (2013). And so on. And this is just the beginning. Ignorance as “active construct” (or “strategic ploy”) is only one type of ignorance on the research agenda of agnotology. Proctor has distinguished two other types of ignorance also produced by science: ignorance as “passive construct” (“lost realm” or “selective choice”), the kind of ignorance that is the unintended by-product of choices made in the research process (2008: 7–8); and ignorance as “virtuous”—when “not knowing” is accepted in research as a consequence of adopting certain values (20–23). All these conceptualizations of ignorance sharply diverge from the way ignorance is understood within traditional epistemology and philosophy of science. In what follows I will first sketch out the traditional philosophic conception of ignorance and then compare it with these new agnotological conceptions (Section 1). As we shall see these new agnotological conceptions are quite antithetical to the traditional philosophic conception. I will then apply these new agnotological conceptions to a practical issue: the ignorance of women still produced by much of scientific research (Section 2). More specifically, I will show how the agnotological conceptions help us to recognize the invisibility of women in mainstream science. I will also show how these agnotological conceptions might help us deal with this invisibility (Section 3).

1  Alternative conceptions of ignorance 1.1  The traditional philosophic conception Start with the understanding of ignorance provided by philosophy. At least in modern times philosophy has provided a very expansive conception of ignorance. Human ignorance, of course, refers to what humans fail to know, and for much of the modern philosophical tradition this ignorance has been thought to be, or at least it has been feared to be, nearly boundless. Epistemology in the past, for example, very much followed in the footsteps of Descartes, and much of it still does, but while Descartes never thought that his evil demon had gotten the better of him, his followers have certainly thought otherwise. Indeed, neither Descartes nor any of the epistemologists after him has ever been granted a clear victory over the kinds of skeptical doubts raised by Descartes, and New York University epistemologist Peter Unger, in his now classic and highly influential book Ignorance (1975, 2002), has argued with great cogency that no one ever will



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

283

be granted that victory. According to Unger, in fact, no one knows anything at all, and hence no one will ever be justified or reasonable in believing anything at all as well. Knowledge and rationality are simply not to be had. The story from traditional philosophy of science has been similar. There, Hume has been the hero rather than Descartes, and Hume’s problem of induction and later what might be called the problem of abduction (or inference to the best explanation) has taken the place of Descartes’s demon. And although scientific realists have tried frightfully hard to justify scientists’ claims to know in the face of these and related challenges, once again none has finally been granted the prize. As a result, some of the most learned figures in philosophy of science, such as Karl Popper, have candidly admitted that scientific ignorance is our fate: neither theories nor even basic statements (accepted by convention) are ever justified (see, for example, Popper 1959, 1963). And even when the learned are not quite that candid, the result seems the same. Think, for example, of Thomas Kuhn (1962), for whom the march of science is a movement away from primitive beginnings but not toward anything at all—certainly not toward any fixed end set by nature. Or think of Bas van Fraassen (1980), for whom induction but not abduction is reasonable. For him, therefore, observation statements and empirical laws are knowable, but theories are not, even though for him observation statements and empirical laws are theory laden with those same unknowable theories. So, prominent traditions in both epistemology and philosophy of science have emphasized the paucity of human knowledge and the vastness of human ignorance. Of course, there have always been problems with these stories. For one thing, their standards for knowledge have been unreasonably high, involving as they do what Dewey would call a misguided quest for certainty. Perhaps because of this, no one has ever really believed these stories even with all the arguments given in their defense. At least no one has ever acted as though they did. Unger, for example, after his book was written, continued to give his talks and publish his papers and teach his classes even though he claimed to know nothing at all. And Popper, we dare say, never worried over the consequences of doing the things he did even though he claimed to have no grounds for any particular expectations. And this points up the fact that there has never been an appropriate response to the traditional stories. At least these stories never called for any response, never demanded any remedy for the ignorance they described. How could they, when their arguments called into question even the bodies that would have been needed for a response. No matter. The upshot is

284

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

that knowledge, for epistemologists and philosophers of science, has seemed a difficult achievement, perhaps an impossible achievement, but at any rate one that needs to be explained, to be justified, while ignorance is perfectly natural.

1.2  The new agnotological conceptions a. Ignorance as active construct Agnotologists seem to be offering the very opposite story. According to this new story, knowledge is frequently what is natural, and ignorance is frequently what needs to be explained. Think, for example, of the tobacco study of Proctor, and the global warming study of Oreskes and Conway. Cigarettes are surely harmful; that is uncontroversial—in fact, it has been uncontroversial for more than fifty years. They have been linked not only to cancer but also to heart disease and strokes and emphysema and diabetes and a host of other diseases. And they kill six million people per year, more than all the world’s infectious diseases combined. Proctor calls them the deadliest artifacts in the history of human civilization. Yet, the belief continues to be widespread that smoking (especially “light” or “ultra light” or filter or hand-rolled cigarettes) is safe enough to be acceptable at least for a while, that it is an “adult choice” that connotes freedom and independence and sophistication, that it is a wonderfully relaxing pastime. And so, cigarettes continue to be the most widely used drug in the world, with six trillion cigarettes sold every year (Proctor 2011). Global warming has also been uncontroversial for years. If no measures are taken to deal with it, the rise in global surface temperature could be as high as 11 degrees Fahrenheit during this century, and the longer we wait to deal with it, the worse the outcome will be (IPCC 2007; EPA 2017). Yet, a significant part of the general public and even some in the highest leadership positions continue to doubt that global warming is occurring. According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in February, March, and August of 2014, for example, only 61 percent of Americans believe global warming is occurring, and only 40 percent believe it is human caused (Motel 2014). And in other countries the situation is even worse. Indeed, a 2007–08 Gallup Poll that surveyed people in 128 countries found that over a third of the world’s population has never even heard of global warming (Pelham 2009). As a result, serious action has been delayed. With all the information readily available about the hazards of smoking and the dangers of global warming, what needs explaining here is the enduring ignorance of so many in the face of all this information.



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

285

For agnotologists, then, unlike for epistemologists and philosophers of science, knowledge is frequently what would be natural, and ignorance is frequently what needs to be explained. What’s more, agnotologists go on to explain that ignorance, and their explanations tend to centrally involve science. In his 2011 book Golden Holocaust, for example, Proctor explains how in the 1950s, when the evidence for the link between smoking and lung cancer had become overwhelming, the tobacco industry opted to “fight science with science” in order to forestall regulation and protect profits. The industry devised a set of strategies called by Proctor the “tobacco strategies” to do this, strategies that included funding decoy research to distract from critical questions, thereby “jamming the scientific airwaves”; organizing “friendly research” for publication in popular magazines; establishing scientific front organizations; producing divergent interpretations of evidence regarding the health effects of smoking and even misinterpretations and suppression of such evidence; forever calling for more research and more evidence and setting standards for proof so high that nothing could ever satisfy them; and exploiting or actually producing divergent expert opinion (see also Michaels 2008). In addition, Proctor’s earlier book Cancer Wars (1995) explains how trade associations were later organized to pursue some of the same strategies to shield still other industries from regulation and loss of profits— trade associations such as the Polystyrene Packaging Council, the Fertilizer Institute, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the National Dairy Council, and the American Meat Institute. Other books that have appeared since Cancer Wars have produced additional details regarding the methods these industries have developed to produce ignorance in the public. For example, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013), by Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Michael Moss, explains the strategies the food industry (many of whose companies are owned by tobacco giants R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris) has used to manipulate the public into ever less healthy food choices to generate ever more profits for the industry. For their part, Oreskes and Conway, in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, explain how four distinguished scientists—Fred Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University; Robert Jastrow, founding director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies; William Nierenberg, past director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and Fred Singer, first director of the National Weather Satellite Center and founder of the Science and Environment Policy Project in his home state of Virginia—adopted the same tobacco strategies to produce doubt and confusion in the American public

286

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

regarding not only global warming but also other serious problems such as acid rain and the ozone hole. In each case they worked against a strong consensus within the international scientific community by such tactics as misrepresenting, suppressing, or attacking the results of scientific studies that supported the consensus positions; lodging personal attacks against scientists whose research was central to the development of the consensus positions; defending competing, but weaker, positions than the ones accepted; and in general acting to create the impression that controversy still surrounds issues that the international scientific community considers settled. This time the motivation, Oreskes and Conway tell us, was not so much the safeguarding of profits as an anti-regulation, marketfundamentalist set of political commitments. Still, the activities of Seitz and the others were backed by major conservative think tanks that were, in turn, backed by the US fossil fuel industry, particularly ExxonMobil. The upshot is that science has been a central player in the production of the public’s ignorance even while it has been a central player in the production of the knowledge that the public is lacking. What’s more, it has been very difficult—for the public and even sometimes for the experts—to distinguish when science is producing the one and when it is producing the other. For although agnotologists accept (indeed, presuppose) that science produces knowledge—the knowledge of the harms caused by smoking, for example, or the knowledge of global climate change, or the knowledge of the elements of a healthy diet—agnotologists have largely failed to explain what constitutes these results of science as knowledge. Oreskes and Conway, for example, have portrayed science’s peer-review system and the mechanisms it employs to generate scientific consensus as hallmarks of the production of genuine knowledge. At the same time, Proctor has challenged this account, emphasizing how economic and political interests have helped to shape these mechanisms—emphasizing how, for example, the tobacco industry has organized conferences, established journals, supported certain lines of research while criticizing or even suppressing other lines of research, and so on. As a result, these peer-review mechanisms are as involved with the production of ignorance as they are with the production of knowledge. Ironically, Oreskes and Conway have also challenged their account of knowledge with their many examples of how such tobacco industry strategies have been put to use in a variety of other, non-tobacco-related contexts. Meanwhile, none of these individuals has offered a more adequate account of scientific knowledge, even though the distinction between such knowledge and the socially constructed ignorance on which they focus is central to their project. Of course, what constitutes knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is just what philosophy has traditionally attempted to



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

287

explain. If it has so often failed in the attempt, that may be because its methods of analysis have largely lacked the constraints on philosophical imaginings that real-life, socially important questions about knowledge and ignorance provide. But these constraints are just what the questions of agnotology now provide. In short, the way to achieve success in both enterprises—in the knowledge-focused enquiries of philosophy, epistemology and philosophy of science, as well as in the ignorance-focused enquiries of agnotology—may be to combine the resources and needs of both into a new, more inclusive area of enquiry that adequately deals with knowledge and ignorance (agnoepistemology?). b. Ignorance as passive construct As stated at the outset, however, active construction is not the only way in which science produces ignorance. Proctor also calls our attention to science’s passive construction of ignorance, that is, to the ignorance that scientists produce as an unintended by-product of their research. As he puts it, “inquiry is always selective” and research not selected at any particular time “is not just research delayed”; it may be research lost forever (2008: 7). Unfortunately, Proctor does not specify the various ways in which such selective ignorance might come about, but I offer the following four possibilities. First, ignorance might result from the composition of a scientific community. Think, for example, of the knowledge that was lost to anthropology from such traditional contributors as travelers, merchants, soldiers, missionaries, and local intelligentsia when these “amateurs” were excluded from anthropology in the process of its professionalization. Similar losses have accompanied the professionalization of other scientific disciplines as well. Or think of the knowledge that is now being lost through many governments’ current constraints on permissible international scientific activities and collaborations and even permissible foreign graduate and postdoctoral science students. This type of passively constructed ignorance might be called community-based ignorance. Second, ignorance might result from the way a community’s research enquiry is focused. Treating AIDS as simply a biomedical problem (of how to deal with the AIDS virus) rather than, more comprehensively, as a public-health problem (of how to deal with those suffering from HIV/AIDS), for example, left hidden for decades the socioeconomic, cultural, and globalization aspects of the AIDS epidemic and, as a result, precluded a timely solution to the AIDs epidemic (Kourany 2010: 121–22). Similarly, the continuing focus in health research on disease management and biochemical processes leaves hidden how health and disease are produced by people’s daily lives, access to medical care, economic

288

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

standing, and relations to their community, and thus blocks important avenues of disease prevention (see, for example, Krieger and Fee 1996). Such passively constructed ignorance might be called focus-generated ignorance. Third, ignorance might result from the conceptual framework with which scientists operate. For example, historians and philosophers of science as well as scientists have detailed the confusions that continue to arise among laypeople and even among scientists themselves from a system of concepts that derives from the late nineteenth century, a system of concepts that includes nature, nurture, gene, environment, heritability, and inheritance. Foremost among the confusions is the idea that nature and nurture are separable and opposed, leading to the so-called nature-nurture controversy and endless questions regarding the roles played by genes and the environment in determining individual traits and behavior. The result has been incoherence on many fronts (see, for example, Keller 2010). Such passively constructed ignorance might be called frameworkcentered ignorance. And fourth, ignorance might result from the methodology scientists use. For example, scientists generally fail to replicate their own or other scientists’ research studies (Baker 2016). The reasons for this failure to replicate are various. Replication studies are not normally viewed as major contributions to their fields; hence they receive less funding and less attention from both scientists and the media. What’s more, they are harder to publish since journals prefer original research to replications of previous research. And they take time and resources away from other projects that reflect scientists’ own original research ideas. So there has been little incentive to do replications. The problem is that the demonstrated reproducibility of research findings is supposed to be an essential part of the scientific method. Moreover, recent attempts to now replicate previous studies have tended to fail. In psychology, for example, only about one-third to one-half of original findings have been observed in recent replication studies (Open Science Collaboration 2015; Baker 2015). All this has precipitated a “replication crisis” in science, especially in psychology and medicine. The upshot is that many results that have long been accepted as valid have now been called into question. This type of passively constructed ignorance might be called methodology-created ignorance. c. Ignorance as virtuous There are, then, multiple forms of passively constructed ignorance in science, Proctor’s second type of socially constructed ignorance—probably many more than I have offered above. And there are also multiple forms of Proctor’s third



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

289

type of socially constructed ignorance, what Proctor calls “virtuous ignorance.” This is the ignorance that results when “not knowing” is deliberately accepted in research as a consequence of adopting certain values. Such ignorance arises, Proctor suggests, ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

when knowledge would be gotten by improper means, for example, involving serious risks to human or animal subjects; or when knowledge would compromise the right to privacy, for example, in the absence of informed consent; or when knowledge would be too harmful or dangerous to pursue, such as the know-how involved with certain kinds of biological or chemical weapons; or when knowledge might be biased in some way, for example, because of a conflict of interest stemming from the funding of the research, or when knowledge might be unacceptable in some other way, for example, because of the goals of its funders; or when knowledge would concern research objects of illegitimate provenance, such as archaeological objects that have been stolen from their original cultural setting.

Virtuous ignorance arises in science, according to Proctor, under all these conditions. And this is just the beginning. As Proctor says, “Access to all kinds of information is limited . . . for more reasons than the moon has craters” (2008: 23). Of course, ignorance does not always arise under these conditions. Sometimes scientists are unwilling to give up the possibility of knowledge even though one or more of these conditions are satisfied, and much controversy can surround such cases. Take the second condition above, for example—the right to privacy. Researchers—archaeologists and paleopathologists and medical historians and others—have broken into ancient tombs, subjected the mummies and other items contained therein to DNA testing, carbon dating, and other modes of analysis, and finally sent the whole business off to museums for the further edification of the public. All this clearly violates the right to privacy of the persons who once inhabited the mummified bodies, persons who had taken great pains to guard against just these kinds of intrusion. Yet, researchers say that such investigations yield invaluable historical and medical information, so that public benefits in these cases far outweigh individual privacy rights (see, for example, Dobbs 2010). Still many disagree, especially when the same arguments are made with respect to the ancient burial sites of native peoples (see, for example, the controversy regarding Kennewick Man reported in Custred 2000 and its final resolution reported in Tribes 2017).

290

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Or take the fourth condition above, the possibility of bias. In 2013 The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) and other journals published by the BMJ Group ceased the publication of research funded in whole or in part by the tobacco industry. This move followed similar bans that had already been adopted—in 1995 by the journals published by The American Thoracic Society, for example, and in 2010 by the PLoS Medicine journals (Knight and Rattan 2013). Said The BMJ editorial announcing the change in policy: There is a “growing body of evidence that biases and research misconduct are often impossible to detect, and that the source of funding can influence the outcomes of studies in invisible ways . . . . Medical journals exist for the purpose of advancing knowledge that can be used to promote health and reduce disease . . . . The tobacco industry, far from advancing knowledge, has used research to deliberately produce ignorance and to advance its ultimate goal of selling its deadly products while shoring up its damaged legitimacy” (Godlee et al. 2014: 2). But a series of “rapid responses” by readers argued against this stand. For example, one scientist said that, if all trial data are made available to counteract any possible selection bias, then it is the responsibility of publishers to present the data and the responsibility of readers to interpret them. A second scientist said that “evidence is evidence and suppressing valid data simply because of who financially supported the research cannot be right.” A third scientist said that “much research funded by the tobacco industry is indeed flawed and unworthy of publication . . . , but surely such research should be rejected because of its flaws, rather than who funded it?” And there were other scientists’ critical responses as well. All these scientists argued against the suppression of data even when they may be biased. And interestingly enough, that was exactly the position The BMJ had officially defended earlier (in 2003). Comparable controversies have surrounded the other conditions given above. While ethical values surely constrain scientists’ pursuit of knowledge, their operation is more fraught and less consistent than the above list suggests.

2  Ignorance of women 2.1  Actively constructed ignorance of women It is understandable that Proctor would have devoted so much more attention to ignorance as active construct than to the other forms of ignorance he distinguished. After all, the deliberate production of ignorance to sell



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

291

such deadly products as cigarettes or to confuse the public regarding such momentous issues as global warming is egregious. Compared to this, ignorance as passive construct seems utterly benign, even though it too can have harmful consequences. Indeed, ignorance as passive construct, unlike the active variety, just happens, unintended, as a result of methodological or other kinds of decisions during research. And most of it is utterly benign. What’s more, in the cases that are not—that have the kinds of harmful consequences illustrated in Section 1, for example—many of these cases of ignorance happen for perfectly understandable reasons (think of the reasons for not replicating experiments, for example). Finally, as was pointed out in Section 1, virtuous ignorance, the third of Proctor’s three kinds of constructed ignorance, may occur far less frequently than initially supposed, and when it does it too is utterly benign—indeed, a good thing, virtuous! So, as I said, it is understandable that ignorance as active construct should have claimed the lion’s share of Proctor’s attention. When we turn to the subject of women, however, this conclusion is turned on its head. True, the active construction of ignorance is alarming here too. The images of women in advertising, for example, are completely unreal, the result of cosmetics, airbrushing, digital manipulation, and other methods of distortion. But despite the fact that most women recognize this, at least to some extent, these images still affect women’s views of themselves, creating in women a false sense of inadequacy. As a result, women buy the cosmetics and clothing, the diet aids and exercise programs, even the chemical procedures and surgeries they are persuaded they need to help them feel satisfied with themselves. And, of course, all this is damaging to women. Even so, and even adding in all the other ways in which false images of women are actively promoted—think of what goes on in popular films and television programs and popular music and articles in women’s magazines and the toys and games promoted for girls—even adding in all these, the damage produced by such active ignorance construction pales in comparison to the damage produced by the passive ignorance construction regarding women to be found in science. For here, the authority of science stands behind the distortions, the distortions are not widely recognized, and the distortions have been going on for centuries. If we recount the four ways in which ignorance can be passively constructed in science, this time noting how they apply to women, all this will become clear.

292

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

2.2  Passively constructed ignorance of women a. Community-based ignorance Start with the first form of passive ignorance construction described in Section 1, the ignorance that results from the composition of a scientific community. Women have always engaged in science even from its very beginning. In ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece, for example, many women worked as physicians and surgeons, while others worked as mathematicians and astronomers. We have information, as well, about women chemist/chemical engineers in the perfume industry in Babylon (Tapputi-Belatekallim), and women botanists (Artemisia of Caria), and women physicist/philosophers (Arete of Cyrene), and women marine zoologists (Pythias of Assos). And, of course, we know of many prominent women scientists in the Middle Ages (such as Hildegard of Bingen) as well as the modern era (see, for example, Alic 1986; Kass-Simon, Farnes, and Nash 1990; Ogilvie, Harvey, and Rossiter 2014 for information about these and other women scientists). At various times and places in history, however, and especially during and after the scientific revolution, women were closed out of science or at least pushed very much to the sidelines. And the consequence was the loss of the knowledge they had achieved as well as the knowledge they might have achieved. Consider the health sciences, for example. Women, as midwives, held a monopoly over birthing information and procedures as well as other kinds of information and practices related to reproduction and women’s health care until the seventeenth century and regularly made use of hundreds of contraceptive and abortion methods, both medicinal and mechanical in nature. But all that changed by the time men consolidated their hold over what became known as the professions of obstetrics and gynecology. According to feminist historian of science Londa Schiebinger, “modern medicine did not achieve a knowledge of fertility control comparable to that practiced by women in early modern Europe until the last third of the nineteenth century” (1989: 111). And as for the women who had once possessed and applied such knowledge in their own lives, for them the loss was even greater. With the demise of the midwife and rise of the male expert, women had more children and understood less about it than they ever had before. Of course, nowadays women are able to enter any field of science. Yet, they still face a variety of obstacles not faced by their male counterparts (such as less lab space, fewer students, less grant money, less recognition of their work, slower promotions, more committee assignments, and sexual harassment). As a



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

293

result, women have yet to occupy very many of the more powerful positions in science and, frequently, even very many of the ordinary positions as well. And so scientific research—its focus, its concepts, and even its methods—continues to cater very much to men’s needs and interests and to ignore the needs and interests of women. b. Focus-generated ignorance Consider, for example, the historical sciences—the his-story sciences. More specifically, consider archaeology, a field in which, traditionally, the search for origins and pivotal developments in human evolution defines the “big” questions. It is this search, in fact, that allows archaeologists to structure their discipline and make their sometime-stirring pronouncements about human nature and human society when presenting the results of their research. Until the 1990s, however, what archaeologists recognized as the “hallmarks” of human evolution—tools, fire, hunting, food storage, language, agriculture, metallurgy— had all been associated with men. “We have had, it seems, little problem in attributing a great deal of the archaeological record to men (the more salient stone tools, the hunting of big game, the making of ‘art,’ the development of power politics, the building of pyramids and mounds, the invention of writing by priests or temple accountants, domesticating gourds in order to have them available for shamans’ rattles, etc.)” (2008: 49). At the same time, feminist archaeologist Margaret Conkey continues, archaeologists have had little problem leaving out of the archaeological record what might easily, even stereotypically, have involved the experiences and contributions of women, such as midwifery and mothering practices, the socialization and gendering of children, sexual activities and relationships, and the social negotiations surrounding death, burial, and inheritance, topics that also hold enormous importance for the evolution of humans. As a result of this mode of representation of the past, this persistent association of men with the great turning points of human evolution, man as active, instrumental (as in man the toolmaker), man as provider, man as innovator, man as quintessentially human, has been made to seem natural, inevitable. At the same time, woman as outside the domain of innovation and control, woman as not active (i.e., passive), and less than quintessentially human has been made to seem natural and inevitable as well, and thus capable of explaining (and justifying) the gender inequalities we still find today (Conkey and Williams 1991).

294

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

With the influx of women students into archaeology in the 1970s and 1980s, all this began to change by the 1990s. Women archaeologists challenged the old origins stories—such as the “man the toolmaker” story—as resting on assumptions about the division of labor between the sexes applicable only quite recently and only in European and American cultures. At the same time they worked to include women in these stories as active participants—for example, as active developers of pottery, an invention of major historical significance, and as active domesticators whose agricultural feats provided the staples of ancient diets. Most important, women archaeologists opened up new questions for research such as how tools were used in activities other than big-game hunting (the traditional tool question in archaeology): they asked how tools were used in food preparation and leatherworking and grain harvesting and woodworking, they asked what early people usually ate, and what the economic and cultural goals of tool-making were. And they asked other new questions as well, questions that equally explore men’s activities as well as women’s (see, for example, Conkey 2003 and 2008 and Wylie and Nelson 2007 for descriptions of some of this new work). Of course, much ongoing work still needs to be done to transform the old gender messages of the field. c. Framework-centered ignorance Contrast the case of archaeology, in which “women will form the future majority of workers” (Lazar et al. 2014), with economics (Bateman 2015, Flaherty 2016) and political science (McMurtrie 2013), in which men still clearly dominate. The problem in these fields is not only that enquiry has focused on the activities and accomplishments of men (as was the case in archaeology), but also that—in the words of feminist economist Julie Nelson—the conceptual framework designed to pursue this enquiry “has been socially constructed to conform to a particular image of masculinity” (1996b: 24). Start with economics (see, for what follows, Waring 1992, 1997; Ferber and Nelson 1993, 2003; Nelson 1996a, 1996b; Estin 2005). The central concept in current mainstream economics (“neoclassical” economics) is that of “the market,” a place where agents with stable preferences interact for the purposes of exchange. These agents may be individual persons or collectives of various kinds, such as corporations, labor unions, and governments. The agents, in either case, exchange goods or services, with money facilitating the transactions. And the tool of choice for analyzing these transactions is mathematics. Indeed, high status is assigned in economics to formal mathematical models of these transactions.

Book.indd 312

29-Jun-22 06:55:41



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

295

What makes this conceptual framework “conform to a particular image of masculinity” is that the agents, even the collective agents such as corporations and labor unions, are assumed to act just like men: to be unfailingly rational, autonomous, and self-interested. That is, they are assumed to act the way men are expected to act by our current norms of masculinity, in contrast to the emotional, social, other-directed way women are expected to act by our current norms of femininity. Moreover, these agents’ activities—their exchanges of goods and services—are understood to be part of the public sphere, facilitated, as they are, by money and described in the language of mathematics. And this sharply contrasts with all those exchanges of goods and services in the private sphere that women are expected to engage in, the ones facilitated by emotional attachments rather than money and for which a kind of description more subjective than the language of mathematics is thought to be appropriate. The most definitive way the conceptual framework of current mainstream economics shows itself to conform to an image of masculinity, however, is that it so successfully produces ignorance of women. Take women’s activities in the family. Since the focus in mainstream economics is on the “public” sphere, “private” collectives such as the family tend to receive scant attention. And since the prototype for economic agents is individual persons, and masculine persons at that, when families are attended to, they are most commonly treated as if they were individuals themselves, with all their internal workings a “black box.” Or they are treated as if they had a dominant “head” who makes all the decisions in accordance with “his” own (perhaps altruistic) preferences. Either way of treating the family, of course, leaves women invisible as agents in their own right in the family. More recently, however, families have been treated by some economists as (cooperative or noncooperative) collective decision-making partnerships. But since, here as elsewhere in mainstream economics, the focus is on simplified mathematical models portraying the interactions of rational, autonomous agents, these collective decision-making partnerships end by being models of marital couples. Children, not yet fully rational, certainly not autonomous, and threatening to the tractability of the models, are either conceptualized as “consumption goods” or not conceptualized at all. Left invisible, therefore, are women in the family as caregivers, as agents who historically have borne the bulk of the responsibility for the nurturance and education of children and the care of the sick and elderly. The upshot is that women’s needs and priorities as well as their contributions in families are left invisible.

296

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

The scene in political science is similar. Here the central concept—in both descriptive and normative enquiry—is power, “the abilities of social agents to affect the world in some way or other” (Isaac 2004: 54), though this concept is interpreted in different ways by different theorists. The four main modes of interpretation currently available are the voluntarist conception stemming from the social contract tradition, the hermeneutic conception stemming from German phenomenology, the structuralist conception stemming from the work of Marx and Durkheim, and the more recent poststructuralist conception stemming from the work of Michel Foucault. Each of these interpretative frameworks offers not only an elaboration of the concept of power but also a conception of human nature and the nature of social life. And yet, each, in the process, manages to produce ignorance of women. Perhaps the most egregious of the four is the voluntarist conception. Initially put forward by Hobbes, this conception ties power to the voluntary intentions and strategies of individuals who seek to promote their own interests. And since the obstacles to be overcome frequently include the wills of other individuals, the voluntarist conception of power has been construed within political science as the capacity to get others to do what they would not otherwise do. What is involved in the modern conception, according to political scientist Jeffrey Isaac, is still well described by Hobbes and Hume, because their formulations make explicit what is only implicit in more recent accounts: that the voluntarist conception of power presupposes an atomistic view of social relations and a Humean account of causation. That is, individuals are envisioned rather like the atoms of a gas, and the scarce resources within their social world are envisioned rather like the confined space of the container that houses the gas. Hence, the conflicts experienced by individuals, that is, the collisions of the atoms. Power, here, is nothing more than empirical causation interpreted a la Hume: the ability simply to alter the path of another. Understood in this way, the voluntarist conceptual framework within political science, no less than the neoclassical conceptual framework within economics, exemplifies Nelson’s “image of masculinity.” For again, individuals are portrayed as autonomous and self-interested, again they are portrayed as behaving in the ways men are expected to behave, and again the resources of the framework fail abysmally to provide an account of women. The recent work of feminist political scientists has begun to document this last point. For example, recent investigations comparing the legislative and leadership styles of men and women, explains feminist political scientist Mary Hawkesworth, suggest that

Book.indd 314

29-Jun-22 06:55:41

Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

297

“women pursue cooperative legislative strategies while men prefer competitive, zero-sum tactics; and women are more oriented toward consensus, preferring less hierarchical, more participatory, and more collaborative approaches than their male counterparts.” These and other results cannot be conceptualized within the “model of ‘abstract masculinity’” offered by the voluntarist conceptual framework (2005: 145). d. Methodology-created ignorance Biomedical research provides yet another important illustration of the ways science has produced ignorance of women. For not only has biomedical research focused on (middle- and upper-class white) men and not only has it constructed a conceptual framework that has ignored women, it has also utilized a male-centered methodology (see, for what follows, Rosser 1994; Weisman and Cassard 1994; Gura 1995; Mann 1995; Meinert 1995; Sherman, Temple, and Merkatz 1995; Schiebinger 1999, Schiebinger et al. 2014; Women’s Heart Foundation 2014; Mazure and Jones 2015; Reuters 2017). Until 1993— when Congress passed the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act that mandated the inclusion of women and minority men in NIH-funded, US medical research—females tended to be neglected in both basic and clinical research. Three of the more egregious areas of neglect were heart disease, AIDS, and breast cancer research—despite the fact that heart disease was the leading cause of death among women, AIDS was increasing more rapidly among women than among the members of any other group, and breast cancer had for years been the most frequently occurring cancer in women. The result was that these diseases were often not detected in women—often not even suspected—and not properly managed when they were detected. Consider just heart disease. Slightly more than one out of every two women in the United States will die from cardiovascular illnesses. In fact, since 1984 more women than men have died each year from heart disease, and the gap between men’s and women’s survival continues to widen. Yet until the 1990s, heart disease was defined as a men’s disease and studied primarily in white, middle-aged, middle-class men. The large, well-publicized, well-funded studies of the past are illustrative: the Physicians’ Health Study, whose results were published in 1989, examined the effect of low-dose aspirin therapy on the risk of heart attack in 22,071 male physicians; the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT), whose results were published in 1990, examined the impact of losing weight, giving up smoking, and lowering cholesterol levels on the risk of

Book.indd 315

29-Jun-22 06:55:41

298

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

heart attack in 12,866 men; the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, whose results were also published in 1990, examined the relationship between coffee consumption and heart disease in 45,589 men. And these studies were no exceptions: in a 1992 Journal of the American Medical Association analysis of all clinical trials of medications used to treat acute heart attack published in English-language journals between 1960 and 1991, for example, it was found that fewer than 20 percent of the subjects were women. The consequences of that neglect of women were profound. Since women were not researched along with the men, it was not discovered for years that women differed from men in symptoms, patterns of disease development, and reactions to treatment. As a result, heart disease in women was often not detected, and it was often not even suspected. What’s more, it was not properly managed when it was detected. Drug treatments were a particularly glaring example. Drugs that were beneficial to many men caused problems in many women. For example, some clot-dissolving drugs used to treat heart attacks in men caused bleeding problems in women, and some standard drugs used to treat high blood pressure tended to lower men’s mortality from heart attack while they raised women’s mortality. What’s more, the dosage of drugs commonly prescribed for men was often not suitable for women. Some drugs (such as antidepressants) varied in their effects over the course of the menstrual cycle, while others (such as acetaminophen, an ingredient in many pain relievers) were eliminated in women at slower rates than in men. Studying only, or primarily, men resulted in failures to prescribe appropriate kinds and doses of drugs for women as well as, of course, failures to offer other treatments (cardiac catheterization, coronary angioplasty, angiography, artery bypass surgery) at appropriate times. And it resulted in women’s limited access to experimental therapies. Of course, all this was to be rectified in 1993 with the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act. But as it turns out, the Revitalization Act had serious limitations. For one thing, it did not apply to early-phase medical studies. In consequence, most basic research with animal models continues to focus on male animals and exclude females, most studies at the tissue and cellular levels either fail to report the donor sexes of the materials studied or report that they are male, and early-phase clinical trials (i.e., Phase I and II trials) don’t always include women. Even in the case of the medical studies to which the Revitalization Act does apply (i.e., Phase III clinical trials), women remain under-enrolled relative to their representation in the patient population. In fact, women still comprise only 24 percent of the participants in all heart-related studies. As a result of these limitations, medicine may still be failing to develop



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

299

drugs and other therapies that work only in women, and medicine may still be failing to gain other important information about women. Meanwhile, the effects of the pre-1993 exclusions still linger. For example, women consume roughly 80 percent of the pharmaceuticals used in the United States, but they are still frequently prescribed drugs and dosages devised for men’s conditions and average weights and metabolisms. As a result, adverse reactions to drugs occur twice as often in women as in men. “The net effect of gender bias in medical research and education is that women suffer unnecessarily and die . . . . Not only are drugs developed for men potentially dangerous for women; drugs potentially beneficial to women may [have been] eliminated in early testing because the test group [did] not include women” (Schiebinger 1999: 115).

2.3  Virtuous ignorance of women Of course, women are not always cast in the shadows by the particular topics, concepts, and methods scientists adopt in their research. Often, in fact, women share the spotlight along with the men. But too often, in these cases, men function as the standard against which the women are judged, and the women are found wanting. This is especially true in psychology. There it is regularly reported that women lack men’s self-confidence and self-esteem and that women are not as ambitious as men. Never is it reported, for example, that men lack women’s modesty and humility, that men are more pretentious, more full of themselves, and more focused on their own success. Moreover, it is always asked whether women are as smart or as gifted for scientific endeavors as men. It is never asked whether men are as smart or as gifted for scientific endeavors as women—whether, for example, men scientists would do as well as women scientists do now if the men had to deal with the socialization, discrimination, stereotype threat, family needs, and other problems with which the women scientists regularly deal. So the knowledge of women that results from such enquiries, like the ignorance of women that results from the other enquiries already described, still undercuts the prospects of women while it supports the prospects of men. Take the treatment of women’s intellectual capacity as an example. For centuries it has been claimed that women are intellectually inferior to men, and for centuries the basis for such inferiority has been sought in biology. In the seventeenth century, women’s brains were claimed to be too “cold” and “soft” to sustain rigorous thought. In the late eighteenth century, the female cranial cavity was claimed to be too small to hold a powerful brain. In the late nineteenth

300

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

century, the exercise of women’s brains was claimed to be damaging to women’s reproductive health—was claimed, in fact, to shrivel women’s ovaries. In the twentieth century, the lesser “lateralization” (hemispheric specialization) of women’s brains compared with men’s was claimed to make women inferior in visuospatial skills (including mathematical skills) (Schiebinger 1989; FaustoSterling 1992, 2000). And now, in the twenty-first century, the claims continue: that women’s brains are smaller than men’s brains, even correcting for differences of body mass; that women’s brains have less white matter; that women’s brains have less focused cortical activity (lower “neural efficiency”); that women’s brains have lower cortical processing speed (lower conduction velocity in their white matter’s axons); and so on. And once again, these differences are being linked to differences in intellectual capacity: that people with smaller brains have lower IQ test scores; that less focused cortical activity is associated with lower intellectual performance; that lower cortical processing speed is associated with lower working-memory performance, which is correlated with lower “fluid intelligence” scores; and so on (see Hamilton 2008 for more details). At the same time, much attention now focuses on the mappings of brain activity produced by brain imaging, particularly fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging), and the differences in “emotional intelligence” these disclose. But once again, the “male brain,” the “systemizer” brain, comes out on top—is the more scientific brain, the more innovative brain, the more leadership-oriented brain, the more potentially “elite” brain, than the “female brain,” the “empathizer” brain (Karafyllis and Ulshofer 2008). And, this is just a peek at the history of psychological claims about women’s intellectual inferiority. The claims include not only these about the structure and functioning of women’s brains, but also claims about women’s hormones, and women’s psychological propensities, and women’s genetic endowment, and women’s  evolutionary past—how all these are connected to intellectual inferiority—and the claims go back in history at least to Aristotle and his observation that women are literally misbegotten men, barely rational at all. Of course, there are problems with many of the studies used to support these claims: they fail to report findings of no sex differences (“nonsignificant” findings); they fail to report the effect size of sex differences they do find; they fail to include replication samples to back up their initial findings; they assume a biological basis in the absence of biological data or cross-cultural data; and so on (Halpern 2012). No matter. Sweeping conclusions regarding female deficits are drawn nonetheless. And although the claims of intellectual inferiority continue

Book.indd 318

29-Jun-22 06:55:41



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

301

to be contested and corrected, they also continue to be made, and the endless succession of claims and counterclaims both feeds on and helps to sustain the centuries-old stereotype of intellectual inferiority associated with women. Meanwhile, the effects are profound. For example, studies have documented the harm done to women and girls by the publication of scientific claims suggesting an innate female deficit in mathematics (see, for example, Steele 1997; Spencer, Steele, and Quinn 1999; and Dar-Nimrod and Heine 2006). Reports one of the researchers involved in these studies, social/personality psychologist Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia: “As our research demonstrates, just hearing about that sort of idea”—that female under-achievement in mathematics is due to genetic factors rather than social factors—“is enough to negatively affect women’s performance, and reproduce the stereotype that is out there” (quoted in Ceci and Williams 2010: 221). Nevertheless, the research investigating women’s intellectual capacity still continues. Should such research be discontinued? Feminist biologists, psychologists, and medical researchers have been doing a heroic job of damage control— emphasizing that, with few exceptions (such as the ability to do threedimensional mental rotation), the cognitive differences between men and women that have actually been established are exceedingly slight (this includes mathematics performance and verbal skills); that none of these differences prevents women from successfully engaging in all the scientific and other activities that men successfully engage in; that the environmental context of women’s intellectual labors, with its socialization pressures and biases and stereotypes and still-limited opportunities and mentoring, has far more to do with any gender gap in achievement than women’s biology; that child care and other family responsibilities not equally shared by men also get in the way of women’s achievement; and so on (see, for example, among the biologists and medical researchers, Anne Fausto-Sterling 1992, Cordelia Fine 2010, and Rebecca Jordan-Young 2010 and, among the psychologists, Virginia Valian 1998, Melissa Hines 2004, and Diane Halpern 2012; for an up-to-date review of the literature, see Hyde 2014). But some scientists, men as well as women, are moving beyond damage control. They are asking why cognitive differences between women and men continue to command so much attention when much larger, more significant cognitive differences between other groups command relatively little attention and when ways to effectively deal with all these differences also command relatively little attention. “For instance,” feminist psychologist Melissa Hines explains, “math and science achievement in students in the United States lags far

302

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

behind that in many other countries that are generally viewed as less developed, and these differences are far larger than sex differences in performance. This deficiency among U.S. students extends even to those considered to be the best in the country. In regard to these students, the American author of a recent multinational report notes ‘our best students in mathematics and science are simply not ‘world class.’” (Hines 2004: 223). So, why aren’t these cognitive group differences, or a myriad of other cognitive group differences at least as pressing, occupying center stage instead of cognitive gender differences? In fact, why are cognitive gender differences still being researched even after centuries of such research have turned up so little in the way of practically significant, verifiable differences? Neuroscientist Steven Rose has an answer: sexism. “In a society in which racism and sexism were absent, the questions of whether whites or men are more or less intelligent than blacks or women would not merely be meaningless— they would not even be asked” (2009: 788). What Rose is advocating, in short, is virtuous ignorance regarding cognitive gender differences. But few scientists are willing to cease these researches.

3  Knowledge of women It was pointed out in Section 1 that agnotology lacks an account of scientific knowledge even though its exposures of the ignorance produced by science presuppose such an account. Unfortunately, the examples of ignorance construction presented in Section 2 have not rectified this deficiency. Still, these examples have helped to flesh out the ways science constructs ignorance—at least the ignorance of women. And since ignorance is the absence of knowledge, further reflection on these examples of ignorance construction should provide some suggestion of what the missing account of scientific knowledge—or, at least, the missing account of scientific knowledge of women—might look like. Actually, I think three such suggestions can be gleaned from these examples. a. The important interconnections of knowledge and ignorance in science What the terrain of both Sections 1 and 2 teaches us is that the scientific production of ignorance is inevitable. Each decision to pursue some particular research problem using some particular methodology and some particular conceptual framework means not pursuing other possibilities. So, even when it is successful or at least partially successful, that pursuit produces ignorance as well as knowledge. What is crucial, however, is the relative importance of the



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

303

knowledge and ignorance produced and, ultimately, the pattern of knowledge and ignorance that emerges over time by many such research pursuits. This is shown by the examples considered in Section 2. The archaeological accounts that celebrate the prehistoric achievements of men while they leave invisible the prehistoric achievements of women support, and are in turn supported by, the neoclassical economics accounts and the voluntarist political science accounts that render invisible women’s economic and political activities and agency, and all these accounts, in turn, support and are supported by the psychological accounts that actually consider women but portray them as intellectually inferior to men. What’s more, this interlocking pattern of knowledge and ignorance of women, because it suggests that women are worth less than men, also supports a medical science that privileges the needs of men while it ignores, underserves, and even promotes ignorance of the needs of women. In short, the knowledge and ignorance produced by these sciences work together to form a multiply distorted and multiply harmful picture of women. This means that the significance of any instance of knowledge or ignorance in science must be judged not only in terms of its epistemic and social characteristics and effects but also in terms of its relations to other instances of knowledge and ignorance. b. The crucial role of values in the shaping of scientific knowledge and ignorance What drives the decisions to pursue particular research problems in particular ways are values, both epistemic and social. Agnotologists such as Proctor focus so much attention on the active construction of ignorance because, in the cases they take up, these values are so unacceptable. They include social values such as the privileging of economic gain over the health of the public and epistemic values such as the taking of liberties with the gathering and reporting of data. The examples of Section 2, however, show that equally unacceptable epistemic and social values regularly drive the passive constructions of ignorance in large parts of science and even drive the failures to promote virtuous ignorance in science. Given the important roles played in these examples by feminist scientists, the examples suggest that feminist values in particular are crucial to the production of knowledge about women. c. The importance of diversity in the communities that produce scientific knowledge The examples of ignorance construction presented in Section 2 also suggest that women are crucial to the production of knowledge about women. For

304

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

these examples tend to point up the differences between the more adequate understandings of women offered by women scientists and women critics of science and the inadequate understandings of women—indeed, the misunderstandings—offered by male scientists before the contributions of the women were made. Of course, not all women scientists have made these kinds of path-breaking contributions, and not all men scientists have not. There have been women scientists whose work was indistinguishable from that of the men, women scientists whose work was just as biased and limited as that of the men. At the same time, there have been men scientists who have done the same kinds of groundbreaking critical and constructive work done by the women and, certainly, men scientists who have done other kinds of groundbreaking critical and constructive work. Still, the noteworthy pattern of achievement of women scientists described in Section 2 remains. Of course, the women scientists whose work was described in the examples of Section 2 hardly achieved what they did single-handedly. The changes in science they brought about drew upon many resources: a broad-based women’s movement and the fundamental changes in attitudes toward women and their place in society and the professions that this movement achieved; a related women’s health movement and the legislation that mandated gender- and racerelated changes in medicine; the institutionalization of academic research on gender together with the interdisciplinary collaborations that this made possible; strong lobbies on issues of public concern, such as breast cancer; and so on. But most of these resources were also provided by women. Two points, therefore, are relevant here. The first concerns the talent pool available to science. Making use of the entire pool of talent—women as well as men—in the makeup of a scientific community has to raise the probability that the output of that community will be more adequate. So the opening up of science to previously untapped resources surely figures in the examples of Section 2. The second point concerns the situatedness of knowledge. As feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science have long emphasized, scientists are persons situated in particular social/cultural (gender, racial/ ethnic, class, sexual orientation, etc.) as well as spatial-temporal locations. As a result, scientists conduct their research from particular—and different—spatialtemporal-social/cultural vantage points, and these can have a decided effect on the nature of that research. Though scientists might be trained in comparable ways and might even use comparable research methods, neither the training nor the methods can be guaranteed to screen out these differences in vantage points from which scientists approach their research. So, the vantage points of



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

305

the women scientists considered in Section 2—the histories and interests and values and sensitivities they incorporated—doubtless provided these women with a heightened sensitivity to the kinds of conceptual, methodological, and other problems described in Section 2, problems to which the male scientists of the time were oblivious. What all this suggests is that an adequate account of the production of scientific knowledge will have to emphasize the need for diversity in the community that creates the knowledge, a diversity achieved, first, by the inclusion of scientists from different social locations and, second, by the democratization of their research practice, that is, by the inclusion of their so-called subjects of research as collaborators in the production of that research. These three suggestions hardly constitute agnotology’s missing account of scientific knowledge. But at least they may form a start.

References Alic, Margaret (1986), Hypatia’s Heritage : A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century, Boston: Beacon Press. Baker, Monya (2015), “Over Half of Psychology Studies Fail Reproducibility Test,” Nature. Available online: https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychologystudies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248 (accessed July 30, 2017). Baker, Monya (2016), “1,500 Scientists Lift the Lid on Reproducibility,” Nature 533 (7604). Available online: http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lidon-reproducibility-1.19970 (accessed July 30, 2017). Bateman, Victoria (2015), “We Need a Sexual Revolution in Economics,” The Guardian, June 2. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/ 2015/jun/02/we-need-a-sexual-revolution-in-economics (accessed July 30, 2017). Ceci, Stephen and Wendy M. Williams (2010), The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls, New York: Oxford University Press. Conkey, Margaret W. (2003), “Has Feminism Changed Archaeology?,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 867–80. Conkey, Margaret W. (2008), “One Thing Leads to Another: Gendering Research in Archaeology,” in Londa Schiebinger (ed.), Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering, 43–64, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Conkey, Margaret W., and Sarah H. Williams (1991), “Original Narratives: The Political Economy of Gender in Archaeology,” in Micaela di Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, 102–39, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

306

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Custred, Glynn (2000), “The Forbidden Discovery of Kennewick Man,” Academic Questions (Summer): 12–30. Dar-Nimrod, Ilan and Steven J. Heine. (2006), “Exposure to Scientific Theories Affects Women’s Math Performance,” Science 314 (5798), October 20: 435. Dobbs, David (2010), “Do Mummies Have a Right to Privacy?,” Wired, November 2. Available online: https://www.wired.com/2010/11/do-mummies-have-a-right-toprivacy/ (accessed July 30, 2017). EPA (2017), “Future of Climate Change.” Available online: https://www.epa.gov/ climate-change-science/future-climate-change#Temperature (accessed March 7, 2017). Estin, Ann Laquer (2005), “Can Families Be Efficient? A Feminist Appraisal,” in Martha Albertson Fineman and Terence Dougherty (eds.), Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus: Gender, Law, and Society, 423–49, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (1992), Myths of Gender, 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000), Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, New York: Basic Books. Ferber, Marianne A. and Julie A. Nelson, (eds.) (1993), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Ferber, Marianne A., and Julie A. Nelson, eds. (2003), Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Fine, Cordelia (2010), Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, New York: W.W. Norton. Flaherty, Colleen (2016), “Tenure, Women, and Economics,” Inside Higher Ed (December 14). Available online: https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2016/12/14/new-study-finds-gender-gaps-tenure-rates-and-career-pathseconomics (accessed July 30, 2017). Godlee, Fiona, Ruth Malone, Adam Timmis, Catherine Otto, Andrew Bush, Ian Pavord, and Trish Groves (2014), “Journal Policy on Research Funded by the Tobacco Industry,” Heart 2014 100 (1): 2–3, originally published online October 15, 2013, doi:10.1136/heartjnl-2013-204531. Gross, Matthias and Linsey McGoey, eds. (2015), Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, London and New York: Routledge. Gura, Trisha (1995), “Estrogen: Key Player in Heart Disease Among Women,” Science 269 (5225): 771–73. Halpern, Diane (2012), Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, 4th ed., New York: Taylor and Francis. Hamilton, Colin (2008), Cognition and Sex Differences, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hawkesworth, Mary (2005), “Engendering Political Science: An Immodest Proposal,” Politics & Gender 1 (1): 141–56. Hines, Melissa (2004), Brain Gender, New York: Oxford University Press. Hyde, Janet Shibley. (2014), “Gender Similarities and Differences,” The Annual Review of Psychology 65: 373–98.

Book.indd 324

29-Jun-22 06:55:42



Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

307

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2007), “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report,” IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007. Available online: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/main.html (accessed April 15, 2016). Isaac, Jeffrey (2004), “Conceptions of Power,” in Mary Hawkesworth and Maurice Kogan (eds.), Encyclopedia of Government and Politics, vol. 1, 2nd ed., 54–66, London and New York: Routledge. Jordan-Young, Rebecca M. (2010), Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Karafyllis, Nicole C., and Gotlind Ulshofer (2008), Sexualized Brains: Scientific Modeling of Emotional Intelligence from a Cultural Perspective, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kass-Simon, Gabriele, Patricia Farnes, and Deborah Nash, eds. (1990), Women of Science : Righting the Record, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox (2010), The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Knight, Isabelle, and Reema Rattan (2013), “Medical Journals Refuse to Publish Tobacco-Funded Research,” The Conversation (October 15). Available online: https://theconversation.com/medical-journals-refuse-to-publish-tobacco-fundedresearch-19201 (accessed July 30, 2017). Kourany, Janet (2010), Philosophy of Science after Feminism, New York: Oxford University Press. Krieger, Nancy, and Elizabeth Fee, eds. (1996), “Man-Made Medicine and Women’s Health: The Biopolitics of Sex/Gender and Race/Ethnicity,” in Kary L. Moss (ed.), Man-Made Medicine: Women’s Health, Public Policy, and Reform, 15–35, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kuhn, Thomas (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lazar, Irena, Tina Kompare, Heleen van Londen, and Tine Schenk (2014), “The Archaeologist of the Future Is Likely to Be a Woman: Age and Gender Patterns in European Archaeology,” Archaeologies 10 (3): 257–80. Mann, Charles (1995), “Women’s Health Research Blossoms,” Science 269 (5225): 766–70. Mazure, Carolyn, and Daniel Jones (2015), “Twenty Years and Still Counting: Including Women as Participants and Studying Sex and Gender in Biomedical Research,” BMC Women’s Health 15 (94) doi: 10.1186/s12905-015-0251-9 Available online: https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4624369/ (accessed July 30, 2017). Meinert, Curtis L. (1995), “The Inclusion of Women in Clinical Trials,” Science 269 (5225): 795–96. McMurtrie, Beth (2013), “Political Science Is Rife with Gender Bias, Scholars Find,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (August 30). Available online: http://www.chronicle. com/article/Political-Science-Is-Rife-With/141319 (accessed July 30, 2017).

308

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Michaels, David (2008), “Manufactured Uncertainty, Contested Science and the Protection of the Public’s Health and Environment,” in Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, 90–107, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moss, Michael (2013), Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, New York: Random House. Motel, Seth (2014), “Polls Show Most Americans Believe in Climate Change, But Give It Low Priority,” FACTANK, September 23, Pew Research Center. Available online: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/23/most-americans-believe-inclimate-change-but-give-it-low-priority/ (accessed March 8, 2016). Nelson, Julie A. (1996a), Feminism, Objectivity and Economics, London and New York: Routledge. Nelson, Julie A. (1996b), “The Masculine Mindset of Economic Analysis,” Chronicle of Higher Education 42 (42): B3. Ogilvie, Marilyn, Joy Harvey, and Margaret Rossiter (2014), The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives From Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century, New York: Routledge. Open Science Collaboration (2015), “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” Science 349 (6251) doi: 10.1126/science.aac4716. Oreskes, Naomi, and Eric M. Conway (2010), Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York: Bloomsbury Press. Pelham, Brett W. (2009), “Awareness, Opinions about Global Warming Vary Worldwide,” Gallup World, April 22. Available online: http://www.gallup.com/ poll/117772/Awareness-Opinions-Global-Warming-Vary-Worldwide.aspx (accessed April 15, 2016). Popper, Karl (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson. Popper, Karl (1963), Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London: Routledge. Proctor, Robert (1995), Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know about Cancer, New York: Basic Books. Proctor, Robert (2008), “Agnotology. A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study),” in Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, 1–33, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Proctor, Robert (2011), Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, Berkeley: University of California Press. Proctor, Robert and Londa L. Schiebinger (2008), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Reuters. (2017), “Gender Equality in Medical Research Long Overdue, Study Finds,” Fortune, June 26. Available online: http://fortune.com/2017/06/26/sexual-biasmedical-research/ (accessed July 30, 2017).

Agnotology, Feminism, and Philosophy

309

Rose, Steven (2009), “Darwin 200: Should Scientists Study Race and IQ? No: Science and Society Do Not Benefit,” Nature 457 (7231): 786–88. Rosser, Sue (1994), Women’s Health—Missing from U.S. Medicine, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Schiebinger, Londa (1989), The Mind Has No Sex?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schiebinger, Londa (1999), Has Feminism Changed Science?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schiebinger, Londa et al. (2014), “Designing Health and Biomedical Research,” Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, and Engineering, Project at http:// genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/methods/health.html Sherman, Linda Ann, Robert Temple, and Ruth B. Merkatz (1995), “Women in Clinical Trials: An FDA Perspective,” Science 269 (5225): 793–95. Spencer, Steven J., Claude M. Steele, and Diane M. Quinn (1999), “Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35: 4–28. Steele, Claude M. (1997), “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance,” American Psychologist 52 (6): 613–29. “Tribes Lay Remains of Kennewick Man to Rest” (2017), The Spokesman-Review (February 20). Available online: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/feb/20/ tribes-lay-remains-of-kennewick-man-to-rest/ (accessed July 30, 2017). Unger, Peter (1975, 2002), Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valian, Virginia (1998), Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Van Fraassen, Bas (1980), The Scientific Image, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waring, Marilyn J. (1992), “Economics,” in Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender (eds.), The Knowledge Explosion, 303–09, New York and London: Teachers College Press. Waring, Marilyn J. (1997), Three Masquerades: Essays on Equity, Work, and Hu(man) Rights, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Weisman, Carol S., and Sandra D. Cassard (1994), “Health Consequences of Exclusion or Underrepresentation of Women in Clinical Studies (I),” in Anna C. Mastroianni, Ruth Faden, and Daniel Federman (eds.), Women and Health Research, vol. 2, 35–40, Washington DC: National Academy Press. Women’s Heart Foundation (2014), “Women and Heart Disease Facts.” Available online: http://www.womensheart.org/content/heartdisease/heart_disease_facts.asp (accessed February 23, 2015). Wylie, Alison, and Lynn Hankinson Nelson (2007), “Coming to Terms with the Values of Science: Insights from Feminist Science Studies Scholarship,” in Harold Kincaid, John Dupre, and Alison Wylie (eds.), Value-Free Science?: Ideals and Illusions, 58–86, New York: Oxford University Press.

Book.indd 327

29-Jun-22 06:55:42

16

Say Her Name: Maladjusted Epistemic Salience in the Fight against Anti-Black Police Brutality Ayanna De’Vante Spencer

1 Introduction Patrice Cullors, Opal Tomenti, and Alicia Garza started the Black Lives Matter (BLM) campaign to highlight the murder of Trayvon Martin in Stanford, Florida.1 Organizers across the United States are galvanized around cases of anti-black police brutality and over policing. BLM highlights a number of racist policing practices ranging from deadly chokeholds and lack of medical care after arrest to stop-and-frisk policies and military-grade police equipment.2 The BLM movement spawned a national conversation on the intersection of racism and US policing practices. While many in the black community knew about racist policing even before, BLM brought evidence/knowledge of the epidemic to a national audience and invigorated civic engagement against police brutality. Further, although many now know the names of black men and boy victims few know the names of black women and girl victims of police brutality (Crenshaw et al. 2015)3 Names like Rekia Boyd, Penny Proud, Aiyanna Stanley Jones, and Islan Nettles skim national newspapers and garner less public civic engagement.4 This erasure also includes minimal coverage of the victims of rapist cop Daniel Holtzclaw and the most violent year for black trans women (Williams 2015). The erasure of black women and girls’ experiences of state violence via police brutality is the focus of this chapter.   Analysis of the erasure of police violence against black women and girls in the United States and movements to make visible said violence can illuminate an important relationship between affectability imbalance and epistemic oppression. In “Curious Disappearances: Affectability Imbalances and Process-



Say Her Name

311

Based Invisibility,” Kristie Dotson and Marita Gilbert define affectability imbalance “in public narratives as a discrepant range of narrative impacts that follows from and causes disempowerment” (2014: 874). Analyzing the civic engagement responses to the murders of Rekia Boyd and Islan Nettles, I seek to demonstrate a relationship between affectability imbalance and epistemic violence. I argue that if resentment and community-specific civic engagement responses track rifts/breaks in community norms for just treatment, then a raced-gender disparity in the said responses is an indication of an affectability imbalance across communities. This affectability imbalance corresponds with what I posit is maladjusted epistemic salience (MES). MES refers to breaks in an epistemic community’s salience-making structure such that knowledge of a subcategory and/or intersection of categories is relegated to the margins as irrelevant. I contend that MES is a form of epistemic oppression when knowledge claims of marginalized communities are inequitably marked as non-salient for knowledge production. In the context of US police brutality, the resulting epistemic oppression means black (cis and trans) women’s experiences, testimonies, and knowledge are relegated to the margins of civic regard. I pen this chapter to analyze a contemporary problem of erasure in the context of the United States; thus reference to the state refers to the United States as a state and all of its agents. State violence in this chapter refers to violence perpetuated by the United States and any of its agents. Police brutality includes all forms of abuse, neglect, misconduct, and more enacted by US police officers whether on or off duty. I also reference anti-black police brutality to acknowledge that while my focus is violence targeted at black people in the United States, it is only one racialized form of police brutality. Police brutality is disproportionally targeted at various marginalized social groups that intersect in complex ways. Hence, analysis of police brutality and state violence in this chapter considers the interlocking systems of racism, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy.

2  Resentment as tracking wrongs The BLM movement includes a number of tactics used to demand that US government officials are held accountable for their malicious acts of violence and to address general racial bias endemic to state violence. The movement also calls all people to bear witness to historic anti-black violence of the state in the form of police brutality. This is a call to action to address anti-black police brutality, but also a call to understand what anti-black police brutality entails

312

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and know when it is happening. In other words, BLM activists are demanding that folks recognize that anti-black police brutality is a systemic problem, not a one-off event. It is important, then, to a conversation on a social justice issue that one analyze some of the tools we have to recognize wrongs in the world. In “Resentment and Assurance,” Margaret Walker details resentment as a type of reactionary anger prompted by a perceived harm or loss committed by an offender contrary to community norms (2004). While there are various types of resentment, offenses are instances of rule or norm breaking. Walker writes “resentment is often enough prompted by rule breaking, norm violating, or simply behavior seen as ‘out of bounds,’ even without evident profit to the violator or harm or expense to others; call these offense” (2014: 151). As members of a sociopolitical community with guiding norms for coexistence, people expect to be treated according to those norms of respect for other community members. Resentment, then, arises from offenses against normative behavior when expectations for proper behavior and mutual respect are broken. This is the case when the broken norm is one the offended person values. One may feel resentment for a wrong that they directly or indirectly experience as well as those against another. Walker further asserts that resentment signals a call for recognition of an untrustworthy situation. The offended feels outside the scope/protection of the community norms; hence recognition of the wrong or break in norms is significant as a corrective to re-establish the norm and the offended within the scope of the community’s protection via said norm(s). Additionally, trust that community norms will be respected is broken which produces uncertainty for the offended. This uncertainty flows from unrecognized resentment as one’s sense of trust in community norms waivers.

3  Resentment of an oppressive state While Walker provides an excellent account of resentment structure, she leaves significant space to theorize about resentment against institutions, systems, states, and other non-person entities along with resentment and marginality of social groups within a community. As this chapter is focused on anti-black police brutality in the United States, I advance a conception of resentment of an oppressive state. Building on Walker’s conception of resentment, resentment of an oppressive state tracks violations of standards for just treatment of state members. One may feel resentment following a personal violation or having been the witness of a violation against another. Resentment of the oppressive



Say Her Name

313

state corresponds with resentment of a particular person, but is a response to a given state and state action(s). Different from Walker’s account of community norms for individual-to-individual resentment, state resentment extends beyond violations of community norms.5 State resentment may track a negative response to the state itself or norms and rules for state action. Hence, state resentment includes one’s resentment of the existence of the state itself, the state’s policies, state action, state actors, and so forth. Resentment of the state itself follows from one’s views about an oppressive state, the role of a state, authority of a state, and so forth. Resentment of a state’s policies, action, or actors is still aimed at the state, but follows from views about the particular policy, action, or state representative. Individuals endued with the authority of the state and functioning in the capacity of their state duties can be subject to state resentment. Some will link the actions of the person with their relationship to the state and not solely with the person as an individual actor, as in the resentment cases in Walker. Moreover, norms for interactions between the state and its members are contextualized by the given state actor. One might expect different norms for interacting with public librarians than with the state’s military force. Further, there are explicit laws and policies (sometimes subject to change) that come to bear with more authority and obligation than norms. A break from explicit state law or policy is more than a perceived rift in norms, but a direct violation of regulating rules. On the other side, one can also see adherence to a state policy as objectionable and resent it. Resentment of a state, then, is tracking an institutional critique of the state. The possible resulting call for recognition and signal of untrustworthiness is directed at the state, most often through calls for accountability of state actors. The claim that unrecognized resentment threatens one’s sense of trust in community norms is important to a discussion on state violence against black people and resentment. One’s resentment of the oppressive state, if unrecognized, is likely a signal that one is beginning (or continuing) to question their trust in the state. One’s resentment of the state can be an emotion provoked by a perceived violation of standards for state treatment and protection. We have expectations of the role of the state and its duty to perform political tasks in the interests of all of its people. These expectations or standards include fair and equitable treatment, fair adjudication, protection of our person and property, and so forth. The full list of expectations or standards one has for the state may vary between persons and thus there are additional violations which may trigger resentment of the state for some.

314

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

As instruments of the state, police officers who commit police brutality are functioning with the authority of the state and thus their actions can be linked to state action. Furthermore, these so-called rogue officers are not an anomaly; rather the police force maintains a culture of racist-sexist-xenophobic violence which allows for police violence. Police brutality is a norm permitted by the state. Additionally, even if one disagrees that resentment of police is resentment of the state, one cannot deny that many folks resent the state for the perceived relationship the police have to the state. It is this resentment of state violence as enacted by state police that is discussed below.   In the context of the United States, there are a wide range of encounters with the police that people are likely to feel resentment for. These encounters are characterized by the perceived rift in community standards/expectations for police action. The perceived violation, x, can be understood as “x occurs when S feels x action of the police violates standards S believes the police should uphold.” One can argue that a state’s laws are community standards and expectations for the state codified but institutionalized oppression complicates congruence between state laws and folks’ standards for state action and treatment. The larger US community would generally agree that the police function to serve and protect and should do so without bias. However, Jane Crow and Jim Crow legalize the over policing, brutalization, and general discrimination of black people under the racist guise that they are dangerous (Davis 2003).6 Thus, general community standards for police action are not easily equated to standards set by the law. Incongruence of standards across communities and governing bodies is an important nuance to Walker’s account. Norms or standards in a given community impact which violations folks track as such. This is evident in cases of police brutality against black women and girls.

4  Say Her Name: Islan Nettles and Rekia Boyd Incongruence in responses to US anti-black police brutality against black women and girls exists at multiple levels. While the BLM movement has brought public attention to violent racist policing and murder of black people, the public narrative highlights black men and boys while erasing black women and girl victims (Alter 2015; Crenshaw et al. 2015; Dalton 2015 and Holland 2015). Black women and girls are killed, raped, and sexually assaulted by police officers, but their stories remain on the margins of public discussions despite the fact that black women are leading the movement. Further, the Say Her Name campaign



Say Her Name

315

seeks to raise visibility and advocate for black women and girl victims of police brutality, but knowledge about black women and girl victims has not garnered attention equivalent to their male counterparts (Clark 2016). The Trans Women of Color Collective is at the forefront of illuminating the murder of black trans women at the hands of US police and others, though the names of black trans women are rarely said in the public discourse on BLM.7 The unequal community responses to the murders of Rekia Boyd and Islan Nettles exemplify a raced-gender disparity in civic engagement for violence against black women and girls.8 The murder of Islan Nettles has not garnered the civic engagement responses of her black cis-heterosexual male victim counterparts. A 21-year-old black trans woman, Nettles was a New York–based fashion designer out with friends when James Dixon began his street harassment or cat-calling. When Dixon’s friends laughed at his attraction to trans women with transphobic “jokes,” Dixon attacked Nettles in front of a police station resulting in fatal head injuries (Rankin 2016 and McKinley Jr. 2016). The police mishandled the investigation with no detective called to the hospital where Nettles lay in a coma and no hate crime charge was filed. Nettles death marked the twenty-second trans murder in 2015, double the murders of 2014 (Wang 2016). While small vigils and rallies were held for Islan Nettles, she has not received the national civic engagement of her black heterosexual cis male counterparts. Her name is left out of BLM chants, and even major feminist groups and national LGBTQIA groups are not calling for justice (Fuscarino 2016). Similarly, major organizations are inequitable in their attention to the murder of Rekia Boyd. Chicago officer Dante Sevin shot 22-year-old Rekia Boyd after making a wrong turn in his car. The off-duty officer saw a group of black friends hanging out and assumed one of the black men in the group took out a gun when Sevin attempted to correct his driving error. Sevin’s racial profiling prompted his fear and panic-induced mistake of a phone for a gun. Shooting wildly into the group of friends gathered, Sevin shot and killed Boyd, an innocent bystander (Sweeney 2015). The civic engagement for Boyd’s murder is peculiar. Her story is highlighted by Chicago BLM organizers, her brother spoke out on Democracy Now, and Assata’s Daughters cite her murder in the #ByeAnita campaign (Kaba 2016). But her story and name remain on the margins of the public narrative on police brutality and prompt less civic engagement. Thousands of people flooded the streets of New York for Eric Gardner, but only nearly one hundred folks protested in Chicago for Rekia Boyd. Only nearly a hundred folks protested for Boyd in New York. In the same city, New York City, fewer people are committed to protesting police brutality when the victim is a woman (Foster 2015).

316

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

The gendered disparity in these cases illuminates that even when folks are tracking a particular violation/wrong, they can leave out black women victims. Further, black women and girl victims garner less uptake in public narratives and prompt less civic engagement than their male counterparts. And consideration of the tireless work of black women organizers to make the stories of black women and girl victims salient to larger communities is significant. The inability to gain comparable traction given to black male–centered civic engagement and knowledge dissemination, while using similar tactics, suggests a deep issue. I will suggest there is a relationship between current affectability structures and epistemic salience that fails black women and girls.

5  Affectability imbalance and tracking violations In “Curious Disappearances: Affectability Imbalances and Process-Based Invisibility,” Kristie Dotson and Marita Gilbert argue that affectability imbalances have three imbricated conditions: “(1) compromised, complex social identities, (2) maladjusted webs of reciprocity, and (3) the failure to appreciate basic affectability” (2014: 874). Complex social identities reference that people are members of multiple communities with hermeneutic impact such that one’s identity is readable in a given social landscape. Webs of reciprocity refer to the “active sharing and meeting of needs” (876). Disempowerment is reflected in webs of reciprocity as disregarded communities’ needs are neglected/invisible and villainized communities’ needs are rendered unimportant. Last, basic affectability is to acknowledge “that we are beings who variously affect and are affected by others” (879). Using the case of Nafissatou Diallo, Dotson and Gilbert powerfully argue that when these three conditions fail, affectability imbalance and process-based invisibilities ensue. Diallo’s sexual assault at the hands of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s (former director of the International Monetary Fund) was dismissed after her public demonization via her social identity as a black immigrant woman and villainization of her needs as a survivor (881). She disappears from public narratives as a result. The curious disappearances Dotson and Gilbert highlight in the article cohere with the disappearance of black women and girl victims from the anti-black police brutality public narrative.   While Walker argues that resentment follows rifts in a given community’s norms, there are multiple concurrent community norms to consider as folks can/do occupy numerous overlapping communities. Disaggregation of communities and their norms is crucial to highlight which violations affect



Say Her Name

317

community members. The disparity in responses to US police brutality across communities best illustrates this point. While testimony and other forms of evidence exists to corroborate a connection between racism and US policing, few white Americans track police brutality against black people as a violation of norms for just treatment (Cooper 2015). Many remain unaffected by testimony and video evidence of violence against black people at the hands of the police. This counters the large number of African Americans who do track anti-black police brutality as a violation of standards for just treatment. Both groups are members of one large group, but there is a split along subgroup membership lines on which violations one tracks as such. Importantly, incongruence may also exist within a group (or groups) as noted in the cases of Rekia Boyd and Islan Nettles. In these instances, one tracks violations within a discriminatory, narrow scope. Imagine that violations are four red apples of different sizes on a table. When prompted to count the red apples, you report three red apples. The fourth apple is unaccounted for despite its being a red apple. The invisible apple illustrates the precarious disappearance of populations affected by violations folks otherwise track. The category of violations is the same, but while one should equally track these violations, one does not. The disappearance of black women and girl victims of police brutality in public narratives across communities indicates a gendered disparity in which violations are tracked, or salient for communities. Importantly, this is the ability to track a violation against another and be affected by the witness of a violated other. If community norms frame which violations are tracked, as Walker argues, then the gendered elision of groups demonstrates that given social arrangements and one’s situatedness in given communities weighs on what/which violations they track and/or have an affective impact. Thus, this expanded notion of resentment, which considers disaggregation of communities and their norms, helps illuminate unequal civic/political engagement. Calls for recognition of violations committed by the state may take many forms. Civic engagement around state violence, in particular, reveals public, collective calls for recognition. Thus, the racial and gendered disparity in civic engagement in the police brutality examples proves that a community’s norms can be imbued with racism, heteropatriarchy, and other oppressive ideologies. The tendency to evade/inability to track violations against another group is in itself a norm. It is a behavior replicated throughout a community of folks. Hence, the norms a community operates with are not always the model Walker describes as “justly authoritative for common life” (2004: 146). The norms themselves may contribute to making violations against other groups invisible.

318

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Hence, while the inability to track and be affected by a violation against another is an individual limitation, it is but an effect of a larger system by which the norms of a whole community are ineffectively tracking an intra-group. A community’s difficulty with tracking violations against other groups in this way points to an affectability imbalance. Importantly, this affectability imbalance has implications for knowledge dissemination and production within and across epistemic communities.

6  Maladjusted epistemic salience The invisibility of black women and girls in the public narrative on anti-black police brutality is indicative of an affectability imbalance, as well as MES. MES refers to breaks in an epistemic community’s salience-making structure such that it tracks X as knowable, except when Xc is a subcategory of some category X that is neglected, though X of various sorts is salient for the given epistemic community. The ability to track and make salient X is facilitated by the distinct salience-making mechanisms and epistemic resources in the epistemic community. Serious difficulty or an inability to track and/or make salient Xc indicates the limitations and ineffectiveness of the epistemic community’s salience-making system. While every epistemic community may ineffectively track some category, MES is distinct in that the community otherwise tracks or marks this category as salient except in a precarious instance. Consider again the four different-sized red apples example. The four red apples are various sizes and thus different, but “red apples” are a salient category. As a community where red apples are epistemically salient, we claim to know red apples as a category and produce knowledge about red apples. When prompted to describe what we know about the red apples before us, however, we only detail three of the apples. Further, when questioned about the fourth apple, we give reasons why it is different from the rest and/or attempt to include the fourth apple as a marginal add-on. The latter maintains the salient core examples of red apples are the three originally described, but the fourth is marginalized. The fourth apple is an instance of Xc as we neglect to mark this fourth apple as saliently included in category X. It is also the case that even when this erasure is pointed out, one struggles to make it salient for others in the community. The salience of the fourth apple is suppressed by virtue of the salience-making structure of the community; it’s maladjusted. While we fail to know the fourth apple in the example, we have salience-making tools in our epistemic



Say Her Name

319

community that (a) should have helped us track the fourth apple and (b) should now help us make the fourth apple visible. This is a structural problem, given the epistemic salience mechanism for the community facilitates what is marked as non-salient—thus marginal or insignificant. MES, then, is the salience structure that ill assists making the fourth apple, or Xc, salient to know. Knowledge production of some given category X is affected by MES in an epistemic community. The non-salient Xc constitutes a lacuna such that it is beyond the scope of engagement. Folks are inattentive to knowledge of Xc, and the given salience mechanism presents an obstacle to make Xc salient to know. This means there is a gap in knowledge production of X as it exists as Xc. One can claim to know the larger category of X without knowledge of Xc because it is deemed outside the relevant scope of knowledge of X. In other words, as Xc is marginalized and/or made invisible, knowledge of X does not require knowing Xc. The epistemic community, then, functions such that knowledge production of X is adequate with the exclusion of Xc. MES entails structural lacunas in knowledge production.

7  Maladjusted epistemic salience as structural The historic inattention and limited uptake of knowledge about and from marginalized social groups suggests that power dynamics are significant for which populations’ knowledge claims fall out of dominant epistemic salience schemas. Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. provides necessary critical analysis of salience and situatedness in “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance” (Pohlhaus 2012). She explains: “the right standards for knowing the world well will be determined by what is salient in the experienced world itself, and what is salient in the experienced world itself will depend upon situatedness: what do I/we need to know (or care to know) and why?” (2012: 718). The process by which the situated knower answers these questions involves employing shared epistemic resources such as “language, concepts, and criteria” (2012: 718). Shared epistemic resources vary across situated groups such that they illuminate and disappear various aspects of the world. Dominantly situated knowers wield epistemic resources tailored to dominant situatedness. A refusal to recognize epistemic tools of marginally situated peoples, Pohlhaus Jr argues, is willful hermeneutical ignorance. Maintaining dominant epistemic resources makes invisible the experiences of marginalized peoples. This is important for the larger goal of this chapter.

320

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.’s analysis of salience as it relates to her term “willful hermeneutical ignorance” offers a lot to an account of MES. As salience schemas are directly connected to an epistemic community’s epistemic resources, a dominant epistemic community has a dominant epistemic salience schema. The group’s epistemic resources guide or filter “what is salient in the experienced world itself ” (Pohlhaus 2012: 718). As a dominant salience schema, it incongruently disadvantages and nullifies marginalized peoples’ knowledge claims as non-salient. Nondominant peoples’ knowledge claims fall out of a dominant salience schema because salience is structured by dominant epistemic resources. Epistemic salience structured for dominantly situated knowers privileges experiences and claims of the dominantly situated. In other words, the schema frames “what I/we need to know” through dominant epistemic resources such that marginalized knowers’ claims/experiences are erased as non-salient. MES occurs within dominant epistemic salience schemas of a marginalized community. While dominant epistemic salience schemas involve maintaining dominant epistemic resources that filter salience as mis-aligned with nondominant schemas, MES involves an intra-schema problem. MES is an intra-schema lapse in salience and salience-making for some marginalized experience, Xc. Again, the category X is salient within the dominant salience schema, except when Xc is the case. The non-salient marginalized experience falls out of the schema. Cases of this sort are perhaps best explained in context of dominance within marginality. Imagine an epistemic community that has tools to account for “misogyny” as a category and one where “misogyny” is salient. Also imagine an epistemic community that has tools to account for “anti-black racism” as a category and where “anti-black racism” is salient. MES exists in these communities when instances of misogyny and anti-black racism as experienced by an intra-group are not tracked as salient. This follows from the structure of the epistemic salience schema of the given epistemic community. MES privileges and disadvantages different social groups within the community. This means there are unequal opportunities for knowledge from marginalized members of a social group to gain uptake. In other words, MES is a non-accidental limit on uptake for intra-marginalized communities’ contributions to knowledge production as dominant epistemic resources within the marginalized community constrain uptake. The difficulty with which marginalized knowers are met is gradient; thus I do not posit that it is impossible to garner uptake—though it may often be very difficult. The unequal constraints and/or access to mechanisms to make some X salient, however, constitute



Say Her Name

321

epistemic oppression. Kristie Dotson explains that epistemic oppression “refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production” (Dotson 2014: 115). Thus, I contend that MES is a form of epistemic oppression when knowledge claims of intra-marginalized communities are inequitably marked as non-salient for knowledge production. The difficulty to make black women and girl victims of police assault salient is a particularly pernicious instance of MES.

8  Maladjusted epistemic salience for black women and girls While the battle to make police violence against black men and boys known as the crime it is continues, black (cis and trans) women and girl victims remain largely unknown and unacknowledged—even by those who know US policing is fundamentally anti-black. Efforts to counter this trend have not garnered significant uptake such that the public narrative is inclusive of black women and girls. Again, this is the case despite fierce efforts of the Trans Women of Color Collective and Say Her Name campaigns, which have both engaged in similar tactics to make visible violence against black men and boys such as social media dissemination of knowledge and forms of civil disobedience. Importantly, while we continue to fight to make black women and girls visible, the Say Her Name hashtag, meant to raise visibility, is transformed into #sayhisname and #saytheirnames without increased visibility of say her name.9 Further, it is difficult to research the names and cases of black women and girl victims of police brutality as a data desert exists.10 In other words, there are multiple obstacles to knowledge production and uptake on black women and girl victims. As argued, the affectability imbalance and MES persistent in the public narrative on police brutality indicate that available tools to make black women and girls intelligible across communities are largely ineffective. Moreover, the difficulty to make black women and girls more salient to discussions on police brutality and affect others such that they track police brutality as a violation/ wrong are interrelated. Resentment, as a salience tracking emotion/tool, is failing to make black women salient subjects when many consider anti-black police brutality. The dominant available political framework for black racial justice centers black men and boys which positions black women and girls’ experiences as peripheral, irrelevant, secondary, and unknowable. Additionally, even when folks acknowledge police violence enacted on black women, they often see it as an anomaly or require recognition of violence against black men

322

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

as a precondition for addressing the violence against black women. Getting to understand black women’s brutalization through that of black men makes a false equivalency that obscures the intersections of sexual violence, transphobia, heteropatriarchy, and so forth that black women victims face. This derivative acknowledgment of black women’s experiences through the narrative of black cis-gender heterosexual victims maintains the centrality of black men and periphery of black women. Moreover, there are a number of maneuvers and defeaters available to discredit, overdetermine, and/or misunderstand black women’s experiences of police brutality. Once news of rapist cop Daniel Holtzclaw hit public attention, many questioned the characters of the assaulted women and one girl based on unconfirmed reports of criminal activity and sexual deviancy (Williams 2015). Hence, even when confronted with knowledge/testimony about black women’s brutalization, many do not change their doxastic attitude about black women as victims of police brutality. The credibility deficit underwriting similar examples only explains part of the curious disappearance of black women and girls’ stories. When black women share testimony of police brutality against black men and boys and get uptake (i.e., women organizers of BLM and Mothers of the Movement), their credibility as knowers is granted. The credibility deficient, then, is contextual to the content of the testimony and not exclusively the function of a prejudice against black women as knowers. On the other side, when credibility is granted to black woman’s testimony of police brutality against black women and girls, we still have a maladjusted salience problem. The testimony has little uptake. Thus, the epistemic problems make it extremely difficult to achieve an account that posits a change in a community’s value system and thus a change in affective structure. Additionally, one may argue that my analysis unjustly limits who could be a knower of black women’s experiences of police brutality. There are folks who can, and have, witnessed the brutal beating, rape, murder, and sexual harassment of black women at the hands of police officers, who are not black women. Admittedly, this group of folks has knowledge on the experiences of the police brutality that black women face, but there are two important points to consider. First, some of these folks are taken as knowers unlike many black women. Black men who report on these experiences in predominantly black spaces, for instance, are often seen as credible sources of information on black women and still garner little uptake for black women and girl victims. Second, relying on non-black women as experts on the experiences of black women is a bad precedent. It is a way to ignore black women’s agency and authority on their own



Say Her Name

323

experiences. Deferring to other people to report on black women’s experiences is a way to compromise black women’s full participation in knowledge production as knowers. Affirming black women and girls’ epistemic agency is important. It is not a coincidence that in the poorly televised case of rapist cop Daniel Holtzclaw, a victim stated “I didn’t think anyone would believe me . . . I’m a black female” (Williams 2015).

9 Objections There are three main objections to this piece to consider. First, one might suggest that there are different affective activators that motivate people to action such that my analysis is too limited. Different aesthetic mediums can draw out emotions and call attention to political topics in ways other mediums cannot. One can argue that current tactics fail to elicit the desired affective responses for black women and girls. Hence, there is a problem with how (or with what tools) one seeks to elicit affect responses, not the affective structure itself. It could also be the case that few people are aware of cases of police brutality against black women and girls so it is difficult to make claims about general affectability. This chapter takes resentment as one entry point to discuss affectability structures and resentment is not exhaustive of all possible affect tracking emotive “tools.” As a type of anger that tracks “offenses” or “wrongs,” however, resentment is especially important to analyze the connection between affectability and civic engagement for a political movement. Thus, while not exhaustive, the limitation of resentment as an emotive tracker of wrongs exposes at least one obstacle to motivate regard for black women and girl victims of police brutality. Further, the different affective triggers argument entails that current affective mediums fail black women and girls such that something uncommon is necessary. This may be the case and I support diverse mediums to address affectability imbalances for black women and girls. The problem still remains, however, that current affective structures are poorly tracking wrongs against black women and girls. The affective objection also ignores the fact that despite a variety of mediums and tactics used to make police brutality against black women and girls visible, there is still limited uptake of these cases. Moreover, the “if more people knew, there would be a different affective story” argument is curtailed by the epistemic constraints on knowledge production and uptake for these cases. MES is an epistemic obstacle in this case as discussed in the above section. It is also the

324

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

case that epistemic salience alone will not solve the affectability imbalance. There are sociopolitical factors to also consider that influence how we attend to different complex identities, their needs in webs of reciprocity, and their basic effectiveness. Affectability imbalance and MES trouble simple solutions to the erasure of black women and girls. Second, one may argue that MES is implied in general epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice literature given analysis of the ways knowers and epistemological structures are inattentive to/ignorant of large lacunas. MES is a subtle distinction to the current literature, however. MES exists within an epistemic salience structure that otherwise tracks and makes salient some category. This category, X as I use in the chapter, is not a lacuna because it is a salient category for the epistemic community. There is a lacuna within the larger salient category, though, that I name Xc. Borrowing Jose Medina’s language in Epistemologies of Resistance, MES is an insensitivity within a sensitivity (Medina 2013). A community may be attentive to manifestations of misogyny, except when it is in the form of misogynoir. Similarly, a community may be attentive to anti-black racism, except as it exists unique to black (cis and trans) women and girls, and black gender-nonconforming folks. MES adds to the literature, then, as a way to conceptualize how lacunas may exist even when there is salient attentiveness to an otherwise marginalized experience. Lastly, some argue that the erasure and/or marginalization of cases of police brutality against black women and girls may be overturned in due time so it is unfair to posit there is a larger problem. Folks suggest that as police brutality against black men and boys took time (and strategic political action) to garner public uptake so too will state violence against black women and girls. While the chapter highlights erasure of black women and girls in a US-specific contemporary movement, black women and girls’ erasure in social movements and public discourse is historic. As many document, the US women’s movement and the black civil rights movements did not significantly attend to the lived experience of black women and girls as crucial to the causes (Kuumba 2001). Similar to the current BLM movement, this is the case despite the fact that black women are at the forefront of organizing efforts for justice and liberation of black people and women. Moreover, few cite Marsha P. Johnson, the black trans woman that spurred the US gay rights movement at the Stonewall Riots (King 2015). Hence, the time argument is historically flawed. There is a historical and structural disappearance of black women and girls’ narratives such that time alone is not certain to fix.



Say Her Name

325

10  Concluding remarks The disappearance of black women and girls’ narratives from the national discussion on police brutality highlights a number of important nuances to philosophical theories as explored in this chapter. This includes an expanded notion of resentment to capture resentment against a state, considering disaggregated communities to analyze inter-community norms, affectability imbalance as connected to epistemic oppression, and more. Social movements reveal and teach us a lot about the application and limits of our philosophic ideas. Further, I utilize analytic philosophy as a tool to think through this important issue because it is helpful to make conceptual distinctions to investigate social justice issues. Conceptual distinctions can highlight underlying systems at play, illuminate gaps and connections, tease out complex nuances, and more. In this chapter, I emphasize that there are interlocking affective structures and epistemological systems of salience that contribute to the erasure of black women and girls. The continued invisibility of black cis and trans women and girls is non-accidental; it is a product of complex intersections of racism, sexism, and heteropatriarchy. The curious disappearance of black women and girls is not just a matter of a lack of knowledge, but unequal social reciprocity and MES that brackets the testimonies and needs of black women and girls as ultimately marginal or irrelevant. In this chapter I seek to demonstrate a relationship between affectability imbalance and epistemic oppression. Analysis of the erasure of police violence against black women and girls in the United States and movements to make visible said violence illuminates this important relationship between affectability imbalance and epistemic oppression. In particular, the chapter details the civic engagement responses to the murders of Rekia Boyd and Islan Nettles to draw out how affective and epistemic structures bear on the erasure of racedgender state violence. I argue that if resentment and community-specific civic engagement responses track rifts/breaks in community norms for just treatment, then a raced-gender disparity in said responses is an indication of an affectability imbalance across communities. This affectability imbalance corresponds with what I posit is MES. MES refers to breaks in an epistemic community’s salience-making structure such that it tracks some general issue X, except some category Xc. I further contend that MES is a form of epistemic oppression when knowledge claims of marginalized communities are inequitably marked as non-salient in knowledge production. In the context of US police brutality, the resulting epistemic oppression means black (cis and trans) women’s experiences, testimonies, and knowledge are relegated to the margins of civic regard.

326

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Notes 1 A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement-http://blacklivesmatter.com/ herstory/. 2 It is important that we disaggregate black men and black boys as to not erase the childhood/age of many of the young boys brutalized by officers. I will do the same for black women and girls by not using “Black women” to refer to both populations. Additionally, my use of “Black women” should be read as including black cis and trans women even where I do not add the adjectives. 3 See note 2. 4 See Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams, Andrea Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris. “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women”; New York, NY: African American Policy Forum, 2015. 5 I use state resentment as a shorthand for resentment of an oppressive state. 6 While many are familiar with Jim Crow laws, Pauli Murray introduced the term “Jane Crow” to illuminate the raced-gender disparity encoded in postReconstruction Era. See Murray, Pauli, and Eastwood, Mary O. (1965). Jane Crow and the Law. The George Washington Law Review, 34(2), 232–56. 7 See TransWomen of Color Collective: http://www.twocc.us/uncategorized/ remembering-islan-nettles-and-all-transgender-victims-of-hate-crimes/. 8 I see civic engagement as any form of raising awareness, critiquing sociopolitical events, and/or making political demands in a public forum. Public forums exist virtually via the internet and in person, that is, the creation of a hashtag on some form of social media or picketing on a sidewalk before a police station. 9 I note the expansion and remixes of the Say Her Name hashtag to point out that the language of the hashtag garners attention without increased attention for black women and girl victims. I am not claiming the new hashtags are bad, just noting the continued invisibility of black women and girls. 10 I borrow the term “data desert” from conversations with Kristie Dotson.

References Abbey-Lambertz, Kate (2016), “These 15 Black Women Were Killed During Police Encounters. Their Lives Matter, Too,” Huffington Post, May 26. Available online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/13/black-womens-lives-matter-policeshootings_n_6644276.html (accessed July 25, 2017). Alter, Charlotte (2015). “Sandra Bland’s Not the First Black Woman to Experience Police Violence.” TIME 2015. Published electronically July 22, 2015.



Say Her Name

327

Clark, Meredith (2016), “Coverage of Black Female Victims of Police Brutality Falls Short: Column,” USA Today, April 23. Available online: https://www.usatoday. com/story/opinion/policing/spotlight/2016/04/22/police-violence-womenmedia/83044372/ (accessed July 25, 2017). Cooper, Brittney (2015), “Black Death Has Become a Cultural Spectacle: Why the Walter Scott Tragedy Won’t Change White America’s Mind,” Salon, April 8. Available online: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/08/black_death_has_become_a_cultural_ spectacle_why_the_walter_scott_tragedy_wont_change_white_americas_mind/ (accessed July 25, 2017). Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams, Andrea Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris (2015), Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women, New York, NY: African American Policy Forum. Dalton, DeronD (2015), “Remember the Black Women Who Died from Police Brutality,” Medium, May 25. Available online: https://medium.com/ blksocialjournalist/remember-the-black-women-who-died-from-police-brutalitye492a64d7be3 (accessed July 25, 2017). Davis, Angela Y. (2003), Are Prisons Obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Dotson, Kristie (2014), “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” Social Epistemology 28 (2): 115–38. Dotson, Kristie, and Marita Gilbert (2014), “Curious Disappearances: Affectability Imbalances and Process-Based Invisibility,” Hypatia 29 (4): 873–88. Foster, Kimberly (2015), “No One Showed up to March for Rekia Boyd Last Night,” For Harriet, April 23. Available online: http://theculture.forharriet.com/2015/04/no-oneshowed-up-to-rally-for-rekia.html#axzz4nrDR6j4e (accessed July 25, 2017). Fuscarino, Christian (2016), “Islan Nettles, Murder and the Shameful (Non-)Response of Lgbs,” Huffington Post, February 2. Available online: http://www.huffingtonpost. com/christian-fuscarino/islan-nettles-murder-and-the-shameful-non-response-oflgbs_b_4310858.html (accessed July 25, 2017). Holland, Jessie J. (2015), “Police Brutality against Black Women Comes into National Spotlight,” Huffington Post, November 1. Available online: http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/police-brutality-against-black-women-comesintonational-spotlight_us_5634b4e9e4b0c66bae5ca657 Kaba, Mariame (2016), “Four Years since a Chicago Police Officer Killed Rekia Boyd, Justice Still Hasn’t Been Served,” In These Times, March 21. Available online: http:// inthesetimes.com/article/18989/four-years-since-the-shooting-of-rekia-boyd (accessed July 25, 2017). King, Jamilah (2015), “Meet the Trans Women of Color Who Helped Put Stonewall on the Map,” MIC, June 25, 2015. Available online: https://mic.com/articles/121256/ meet-marsha-p-johnson-and-sylvia-rivera-transgender-stonewall-veterans#. AyPAKQSr6 (accessed July 25, 2017).

328

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Kuumba, M. Bahati (2001), “Gender and Social Movements” in Judith Howard, Barbara Risman and Joey Sprague (eds.), The Gender Lens, 80–84, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. McKinley Jr., James C. (2016), “Man’s Confession in Transgender Woman’s Death Is Admissible, Judge Rules,” The New York Times, April 2. Available online: https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/nyregion/mans-confession-in-transgender-womansdeath-is-admissible-judge-rules.html (accessed July 25, 2017). Medina, Jose (2013), The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, Pauli, and Mary O. Eastwood (1965). “Jane Crow and the Law,” The George Washington Law Review 34 (2): 232–56. Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr. (2012), “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance,” Hypatia 27 (4): 715–35. Rankin, Kenrya (2016), “James Dixon to Serve 12 Years for Killing Islan Nettles,” Colorlines, April 20. Available online: http://www.colorlines.com/articles/jamesdixon-serve-12-years-killing-islan-nettles (accessed July 25, 2017). Sweeney, Annie (2015), “Inside the Failed Prosecution of Chicago Detective Dante Servin,” Chicago Tribune, July 3. Available online: http://www.chicagotribune.com/ news/ct-dante-servin-acquittal-met-20150626-story.html (accessed July 25, 2017). Walker, Margaret Urban (2004), “Resentment and Assurance,” in Cheshire Calhoun (ed.), Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers, 145–60, New York: Oxford University Press. Wang, Yanan (2016), “The Islan Nettles Killing: What the Trial Means to a Transgender Community Anxious for a Reckoning,” The Washington Post, April 4. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/04/theislan-nettles-killing-what-the-trial-means-to-a-transgender-community-anxiousfor-a-reckoning/?utm_term=.be825b2a4fc9 (accessed July 25, 2017). Williams, Mary Elizabeth (2015), “The Heartbreaking Truth About Daniel Holtzclaw’s Rape Convictions: ‘I Didn’t Think Anyone Would Believe Me. I’m a Black Female,’” Salon, December 11. Available online: mhttp://www.salon.com/2015/12/11/the_ heartbreaking_truth_about_daniel_holtzclaws_rape_convictions_i_didnt_think_ anyone_would_believe_me_im_a_black_female/ (accessed July 25, 2017).

17

The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality Rachel Elizabeth Fraser

Ceasing to be loyal to something or someone is a separation; and ceasing to love. — Marilyn Frye Contra Plato, philosophers are sometimes indebted to poets; for it was Adrienne Rich, poet as well as theorist, who gave us the idea of and our phrase for “compulsory heterosexuality” (1980: 631–60). If heterosexuality is a particular pattern of desire, compulsory heterosexuality is a social system, which regulates desire, punishing those who violate its norms.1 More carefully, we might say the following: heterosexuality, for women, is a stable pattern of romantic and/ or sexual attachment to men, in the absence of any corresponding pattern of attachment to women, genderqueer, or nonbinary people.2 Stable patterns can become unstable: to be heterosexual at 21 does not mean being heterosexual forever. (Put differently, sexual orientation is fluid.) Compulsory heterosexuality is a social system which regulates sexual desire and romantic attachment: it mandates heterosexuality and punishes, penalizes, or renders invisible those who violate its norms. The social system constituting compulsory heterosexuality will typically be a cluster of related and interlocking social institutions, cultural assumptions, and ideologies which, to varying degrees, presuppose and mandate heterosexuality. Paradigm cases of culprit institutions and ideologies include the institution of heterosexual marriage, tax systems which privilege heterosexual couples, cultural assumptions and ideologies which privilege penile-vaginal penetrative sex, and laws or norms making it difficult for single people or couples who do not fit the heterosexual paradigm to adopt children.

330

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

My interest in this chapter is in the epistemic structures associated with the system of compulsory heterosexuality, in particular, the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality structures our mental lives, and the epistemic costs women face when entering into heterosexual relationships. My starting point will be with a paper of Charles Mills, in which he considers the ethics—and in doing so, charts the epistemological dynamics—of sexual and romantic relationships between black men and white women. I will show that Mills’s arguments can be used as a map, or scaffold, to construct structurally similar arguments against (certain) heterosexual relationships. Doing so will allow us to pick out and diagnose important epistemic structures embedded in the institution of compulsory heterosexuality. This project can be thought of as an attempt to integrate into analytic feminism some important insights associated with queer feminism and queer theory. More tentatively, the project might be read as indebted to, or as a contribution to, the tradition of separatism—sometimes called lesbian separatism—in feminist thought. Separatism is an oft-reviled, oft-ridiculed strand in feminist thought; but like almost all political positions, it comes in weaker and stronger varieties, as well as having a “bundle” character, sheafing together multiple intersecting commitments. Marilyn Frye captures this shifty character with the observation that “separation is . . . separation of various sorts or modes from men and from institutions, relationships, roles and activities which are male-defined, maledominated and operating for the benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilege” (1983: 96). In its strongest varieties, separatism demands that feminists cut themselves off from all contact with men. Such incarnations of separatism have been criticized for being exclusionary, making demands which only rich white women are in a position to meet. For example, the black feminist lesbian group the Combahee River Collective notes: “Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race . . .” (1982: 16). In a similarly critical spirit, the feminist theorist McCandless (1980) writes: The richer you are, the less you generally have to acknowledge those you depend upon. Money can buy you a great deal of distance. Given enough of it, it is even possible never lay eyes upon a man. It’s a wonderful luxury, having control over who you lay eyes on, but let’s face it: most women’s daily survival still involves face-to-face contact with men whether they like it or not. It seems to me that



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

331

for this reason alone, criticizing women who associate with men not only tends to be counterproductive; it borders on blaming the victim. (quoted in hooks, 2000: 77)

bell hooks concurs with McCandless, noting that most women simply do not have the option of withdrawing from relationships with men, given “their economic interdependence” (2000: 77). Weaker varieties of separatism are more narrowly focused, demanding not wholesale withdrawal from relations with men, but a withdrawal from romantic and sexual relationships with them. But even so weakened, separatism remains vulnerable to hooks’s critique: women’s sexual relationships with men and women’s economic dependence on men are tightly imbricated. My own interest is in a highly “watered-down” version of separatism, which is best thought of as a disposition to be attentive to the ways in which sexual and romantic relationships with men may prove costly—ethically, politically, or epistemically—to women. Importantly, given that the roles played by such relationships can covary with (for instance) race and class position, such attentiveness may yield very different results depending on which subset of women we are attending to.3 I will now discuss a few terminological points. Throughout the chapter, I will be appealing to the ideas of patriarchy and white supremacy. Each of these ideas has a rich intellectual tradition behind it, different strands of which have put the terms to work in different ways, with different (if often overlapping) aims. But this is not a work of intellectual history; as such, I do not mean to attempt a genealogy. Rather, I will say how the terms are being used for the purposes of this chapter. By “patriarchy,” I mean a social structure in which men as a class systematically dominate women, and other non-men (children, nonbinary people). By “white supremacy,” I mean a social structure  in which white people as a class systematically dominate non-white people. The mechanisms used to achieve these forms of systematic domination may vary considerably, and will often draw on both the formal legal apparatus of the state and more informal cultural scripts and norms. These two social structures interact with each other, and with the third system of compulsory heterosexuality, in highly complex ways, creating epistemic perspectives and social identities which are by no means straightforward functions of the systems as modeled in isolation. Insofar as this chapter, in the interest of tractability, treats these three social systems as relatively discrete, it will invariably fail to fully capture the structure of social reality. But we must start somewhere.

332

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

1  Mills: “Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women?” Charles Mills’s begins his paper on the ethics of (certain) interracial relationships with the following observation, “It is a measure of the continuing social distance between the races that the average white liberal, I am sure, would automatically assume that only a racist could think that the answer to this question is anything but an obvious ‘No!’” (1994: 131). Mills’s paper is over twenty years old, but his observation, I think, remains true, and the philosophical reflections it prompts are still both startling and fresh. Mills’s interest is in the claim that black men ought not to be sexually and romantically involved with white women; his project, to articulate and critically examine— rather than to vindicate—arguments in its favor. These arguments, he notes, may be unfamiliar to a white academic audience, but they are not “new”: he is, he suggests, translating arguments which are extant in black communities into a particular philosophical lexicon. He ends up articulating six different arguments. My project is to argue that two of Mills’s ventriloquized arguments—the arguments, after all, are not, in any straightforward sense, his own—for the ethical fraughtness of black men’s sexual and romantic involvement with white women also work as arguments for the charged character of intraracial heterosexual relationships. These arguments, it turns out, have a distinctively epistemic flavor, or important epistemic strands. Four of Mills’s arguments can be bracketed for our purposes. First, there is “the racial purification argument” (regrettably easy to fill in for oneself); second, the “racial caution argument” has it that “black-on-white relationships unnecessarily infuriate whites. So since such unions stir up great passion, and are not a necessary component of the struggle, they should be eschewed” (1994: 137). A third argument—the racial demographics argument—tells us that the structure of the traditional American race/gender status hierarchy goes “white men, white women, black men, black women” (1994: 141). This “low prestige” means that black women have not generally been sought out as “respectable” romantic partners either by white or by non-white men; thus, if, as Mills puts it, “eligible black men differentially seek non-black, particularly white, women, then things will be made even worse for black women” (1994: 141). Fourth, Mills canvases the “child argument,” which appeals to the difficulties which mixed-race children may face. Mills is not much taken with any one of these four arguments, so let us move on to the two arguments I want to dwell on here, which Mills calls, respectively, the questionable motivations argument and the racial solidarity argument.



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

333

1.1  The questionable motivations argument The questionable motivations argument turns on a series of claims about the structure and opacity of desire. When I say that desires are opaque, I mean that we are not always in a position to know about our desires. This claim ought not to be confused with the claim that we have, or can have unconscious desires.4 That a particular desire is part of my conscious life—that is to say, that a given desire has a qualitative or phenomenal character—is not to say that I am invariably in a position to know anything much about that desire. And I might have a fairly good epistemic grip on the doings of my unconscious, insofar as I can, in a more or less regimented fashion, form and test hypotheses about my unconscious states. The opacity of desire can take various forms; I will survey three here. First, we tend to think that unconscious desires—if we admit of them at all—can remain unknown, indefinitely, under any description. But conscious desires, we tend to think, may be known under one description but not others, as when I know that there is something I want to eat, but cannot say what. Second, we can also desire things for themselves, or desire them instrumentally. Someone who loathes coffee but desperately wants to stay awake will desire coffee instrumentally, someone who loves the taste and feel of coffee may desire it for itself as well. This distinction makes more room for opacity: we might be mistaken about whether we desire something merely instrumentally, or for itself. Third, we also desire things under particular guises. Emily, who has never known her father, desperately desires to meet him. But Emily does not desire to meet Mr. Snell the mediocre geography teacher, even if Mr. Snell happens to be her father. (We might say, in such a case, that Mr. Snell is such that, unbeknownst to her, Emily desires to meet him, and that Emily desires to meet Mr. Snell under the guise of a desire to meet her father.) Correspondingly, we might desire a particular object or state of affairs under different guises, but only know of our desires under one of them—Emily might desire both to meet her father and to meet the man who hurt her mother, but only know of the desire under the first guise. Now, some ways of representing our desires to ourselves “fit” or integrate more easily with the rest of our mental lives; representing my desires to myself in this way, rather than that, may allow me to retain a sense of psychic unity. Take Emily: a desire to meet her father may be easily integrated with her other desires—the desire to feel loved and embedded in a comforting, normative familial structure. A desire to meet the man who hurt her mother does not so easily cohere or mesh with this other network of desire and does not easily hang

334

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

together with a desire for stable familial embedding, but insofar as it encodes conflict between her mother and father, pulls against such unity. Failures to notice or know our desires can be more or less innocuous: not all the goings-on of our mind are transparent to us. Some failures to know our desires may well be unavoidable, a consequence of the bare metaphysical and epistemic structure of the mind. Some patterns of desire might be difficult to recognize because they fail to “make sense” socially, as when a woman in a society in which motherhood is a strongly entrenched norm struggles to make sense of, or to represent to herself in any coherent way, her preference to not have children. Other failures to know may be a consequence of our own failings: inattentiveness, laziness, or lack of imagination. Such habits of thought may be encouraged or facilitated by our social position—for some of us, inattentiveness is easier to get away with than it is for others, and so easier to slip into as habit. As Scheman (2012) points out, we are taught not to see the subtle ways in which those who are socially dominant extract, from others, the labor of noticing, remembering, and interpreting. But ignorance of our own desires need not always be, straightforwardly, a failure: sometimes, refusing to know one’s desires can be useful, and thus constitute a kind of achievement. If, for instance, one faces tremendous social sanctions for ambitious behavior, things may be easier, in some ways, if one succeeds in forgetting, or in never quite noticing in the first place, that one has a desperate desire for success and status. And so it can be with failures to know our desires under particular guises: desires may be socially acceptable under one guise, but not under another. Contrast two social climbers: one, Becky, straightforwardly desires social status, and knows this, whereas the other, Lizzie, also desires social status but is self-deceived: she knows perfectly well that she desperately wants to marry the dashing and handsome Mr. Darcy, but she fails to know that she also desires the great wealth and social position that this will bring. Her desire for status is masked by a (genuine) desire for romantic love which allows her desire for status to be negotiated in a form which is both socially acceptable, and which does not jar with her own self-image. Where the desire for romantic love with Mr. Darcy is produced (perhaps partially) by the desire for status—Mr. Darcy is romantically desirable insofar as he is a means of securing social status—we might say that the first desire is “routed through” the second.5 The unacceptable desire creates a (more) acceptable proxy or counterpart, which then allows the initial desire to be both concealed and pursued and negotiated.6 Of course, in this example, routing exploits desires which are more socially acceptable than the routed desire; but this need not be so. Routing need only exploit a desire whose content can more easily be acknowledged by the agent, and this “greater ease” may be a product of any



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

335

number of things: capacity for integration into the agent’s other network of desires, the desire’s consonance with the agent’s sense of themselves, and so on. Enough background—back to Mills. Mills’s questionable motivations argument turns on the insight that, under conditions of patriarchy and white supremacy, black men’s sexual desire for white women can become a mask and route for other desires—in particular, he suggests, desires for revenge, and desires for social status. Importantly, my project here is not to adjudicate as to the plausibility of Mills’s claims as to the role and character of sexual desire for white women. I don’t take my own epistemic position (as a white woman) to be up to the job—fairly obviously, Mills’s insight into the lives and psyches of black men outstrips my own, and by no small amount. My concern is with the ways in which Mills’s argument is suggestive of a bolder conclusion than any he countenances, concerning the ethics of heterosexual relationships generally. With this caveat in mind, let us examine the detail of Mills’s argument: The idea here (though this will not usually be said out loud, or at least within earshot of whites) is that marriage to, or sometimes just sex with, a white woman (or, better, many white women), is an appropriate form of revenge, conscious or unconscious, upon white men. This is linked, obviously, to acceptance of a sexist framework in which male combat, here interracial, takes place in part across the terrain of the female body, so that masculinity and honor are fused with ability to appropriate the woman. (1994: 145) White women are then a kind of prize who can both affirm one’s self-esteem, and help to provide an entree (at least in liberal circles) to the still largely white world of status and power of the upper echelons of society. Bluntly, a white woman on your arm shows that you have made it. (1994: 147)

Mills’s idea is not that insofar as a desire masks or routes a desire for revenge or for status, it is no longer genuinely sexual—he does not hold our racist culture “separate and apart from our desiring selves,” as Sharon Holland (2012: 9) puts it.7 Rather, Mills recognizes that sexual desires can be produced in a variety of different ways, and put to multiple different purposes. He stresses that sexuality is shaped, trammeled, and “distorted” by patriarchy and white supremacy. Insofar as relations of domination and subordination are themselves found or made erotic—as they are, by and large, under patriarchal conditions—a desire for status or revenge can easily incorporate or acquire a sexual element or gilding, which can then serve as a kind of “alibi” for the underlying desire. Mills marshals these insights as to the structure and opacity of desire into dual conclusions: where sexual desire for white women acquires this “route and

336

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

mask” character, white women become instrumentalized, and black women, insofar as they are systematically overlooked as sexual and romantic partners, systematically disadvantaged. But, these two prongs of the conclusion behave differently when the dialectic is further extended. In contexts in which white women are more sought after as sexual and romantic partners, black women are systematically disadvantaged regardless of how this differential is created and maintained. We might be convinced that a diagnosis of sexual desire for white women as route and mask is fanciful, and yet be quite sure that black women are systematically disadvantaged insofar as they are systematically overlooked as sexual and romantic partners. By contrast, the conclusion that white women are instrumentalized depends more intimately on Mills’s background account of the desire—its production and trammeling—getting something right. Now, clearly, Mills does not want to say that all black men who desire white women are routing or masking other desires. But he is tempted by the thought that, if we take seriously the opacity of our mental lives, it may well be rather difficult for any individual to be sure of the causes and role of his own desires. There may, he says, be something ethically troubling in pursuing sexual or romantic relationships while unable to rule out their being instrumentalizing. Thus, Mills’s argument comes with two crucial epistemic layers: the complex, epistemically inflected structure of masks and routes can serve to conceal the workings of our desires; and the general opacity of the mind is such that it may be very difficult for anyone to be sure that their own psyche is not so constituted. It is striking that Mills’s questionable motivations argument is remarkably similar to certain “classic” feminist separatist arguments. The thought that sexual desire for white women routes and masks desire for social status is remarkably similar to the feminist and queer theoretical insight that male sexual desire for women can both route and mask desires to dominate both women and other men. But before unpacking that line of thought further, let us look at Mills’s “racial solidarity” argument.

1.2  The Racial Solidarity argument The racial solidarity argument centers on claims regarding white socialization under conditions of white supremacy: Whites . . . are born as fairly plastic entities who will both be shaped by, and in turn shape, a particular sociocultural environment. But it will be pointed out that their socialization in a white-supremacist society makes them ineluctably



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

337

beneficiaries and perpetrators of the system of oppression responsible for keeping blacks down, so that they are all, or mostly (claims of differing strength can be made), the enemy, whether through active policy or passive complicity. Even if they seem to show good faith, the entering of a social “whiteness” into their personal identity means that they will never, or only very rarely . . . be able to overcome their conditioning: sooner or later, their “true colors” [sic] are going to come out . . . They will naturally be less sensitive to its [society’s] racist character, and more reluctant to confront the radical changes that have to be made to bring about a truly just society. (1994: 138–39)

The argument can be given a gloss which makes the connection between class and race particularly salient. Those black men who marry white women, says Mills, are more often successful black men; such unions “usually lead to a departure from the black world of the elite who (at least on some theories) are precisely the most potentially threatening to the status quo, and their entry into an immensely seductive white world of wealth, comfort and glamour where black problems, e.g., the misery of the inner cities, will gradually seem more and more remote” (1994: 139). In this incarnation, Mills’s argument tacitly draws on the thought, most thoroughly developed by standpoint theorists, that one’s social position affects how the world looks to you, and will thus in turn influence one’s commitments and projects. If the world looks profoundly and inveterately unjust from one’s social position, one is more likely to be inclined to struggle to change it than if the world looks basically OK. Mills argues—or ventriloquizes an argument—that because marriage to white women alters black men’s social position, it will correspondingly alter their epistemic perspective, and generally in such a way as to conceal, rather than reveal the workings of racism.8 Mills’s response (or one of his responses) to the “racial solidarity” argument is to question its “crucial empirical premise that whites cannot ever purge themselves of a whiteness committed to racial supremacy”: People can resist and overcome their socialization, proving by their deeds that they are committed to eradicating racism. For those white women who are naive about the pervasiveness of racism, even among their own family and friends, embarking on an interracial relationship may actually have a salutary cognitive effect, the latter’s hostile response awakening her to realities to which she would otherwise have been blind. (1994: 140)

How plausible one finds this flipped narrative tack of Mills’s will, I think, depend, on one’s analysis of white supremacy and ideology.9 Suppose, for example, you think white ignorance—white people’s systematic ignorance, typically facilitated

338

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

or produced by their social position, concerning the lives, both contemporary and historical, of people of color—is a foundational component of white supremacy. That is, suppose you think white people’s affective investment in their own whiteness depends upon their white ignorance. If this is your view, then Mills’s flipped narrative strategy will look pretty appealing: by undermining white ignorance, interracial relationships can lessen affective investment in whiteness. If, on the other hand, you think white ignorance is produced by, rather than founded upon, an affective investment in whiteness, or that affective investment in whiteness flows directly from the same facts about social position which produce white ignorance, then Mills’s argument will look less appealing. Similarly, if you think white ignorance is highly resilient, even to sustained and intimate contact with non-white people, one will be more doubtful that interracial relationships will play a role in dismantling white ignorance, rather than merely acting as a site for its exercise. And “salutary cognitive effects,” to be worth celebrating, require more than just the displacement of ignorance with knowledge—there is, after all, quite a gap between knowing and caring; to be salutary, the cognitive effects of an interracial relationship would have to include novel not only knowledge but also new patterns of affective investment and new habits of attention. The main epistemological interest of the solidarity argument lies both in the standpoint of theoretical assumptions of the argument itself (shifts in social position can mean bad shifts in epistemic perspective) and in Mills’s retort to it (shifts in epistemic position can mean good shifts in epistemic perspective). Once again, it is remarkable how similar Mills’s argument from solidarity is to arguments found in the feminist separatist tradition. But Mills does not mention this structural similarity, or, indeed, mention political lesbianism at all. (Indeed, he says very little about romantic or sexual relationships that are not between men and women.) In the next section, I will look in more detail at how we might use Mills’s arguments as a kind of scaffold for arguments with a feminist separatist flavor.

2  Mills as feminist separatist: The questionable motivations argument, reinterpreted Feminists have long argued that socialization under patriarchy cultivates desires for dominance, power, and control and trammels and sculpts sexuality in such a way as to eroticize relations of domination and subordination. Just as Mills



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

339

argues that black male sexual desire for white women can be read as routing and masking desire for revenge or social status, male heterosexual desire for women can be read as routing and masking desire for power and status. Similarly, we might think that women’s heterosexual desire for men routes and/or masks a desire for access, however patchy and precarious, to patriarchal power and protection. In our present terminology, male socialization knits together the guises of sexual desire, and the guises of power and dominance, allowing the one to be routed through and masked by the other. Now, unjust social systems have a tendency to present themselves (particularly to those embedded within them) not as systems of domination, but as politically neutral arrangements which flow from our untutored natures. Thus sexual desire, which appears to us precisely as natural and untutored, serves as an ideal mask for the desire to dominate, allowing a desire which, unmasked, would be coded as political (having to do with the exercise and distribution of power) to be negotiated, pursued, and integrated into a mental whole, free of any such normatively loaded coding. Sexual desire is first made in the image of domination, and then into its alibi. These processes of desire—sculpting, so often appealed to by feminist theorists—can sometimes sound like deeply mysterious forces. But, they are perfectly comprehensible and quotidian. One way to see this is to focus upon the role interpretation plays in our mental lives. Our mental lives per se tend to be highly disordered and patchy, filled with fleeting impressions, indistinct wants and inclinations, more or less vivid. As Crane (2016) has recently made vivid, from the first—personal perspective, when we introspect, we do more than simply “cast down beams of light” which reveal, without altering, what was there all along. We interpret ourselves, impose a structure on our mental lives, often by weaving narratives, and thus render ourselves more intelligible. But, such processes of interpretation and narrativizing do not “leave everything as it is”; rather, they alter our psychic raw materials. Some parts of our mental lives will become more highly regimented, more prominent, and more central to our core narratives. That is, interpretation is a productive process. Importantly, though, the resources we draw upon in these processes of interpretation will often be communal conceptual resources, better fitted to regimenting and making intelligible some raw materials than others. We will draw on collectively maintained social scripts and socially embedded narrative forms; insofar as we rely on these, the effect of interpretation will be to “imprint” these socially dominant scripts and narratives on our own mental lives. Insofar as the dominant social scripts for and narratives of male sexual desire for women have conquest and domination as an organizing motif, processes of self-interpretation will tend

340

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

to organize sexual desire in such a way that it shares these motifs, as well as to erotically infuse the motifs of conquest and domination, allowing the two desire structures to form a complex interlocking system, in which each is infused with the character of the other.10 Once we admit that relations of domination and subordination per se are eroticized, we might be tempted to think that male desire for power over other males is colored by this eroticism. But, under conditions of compulsory heterosexuality, a homosexual erotic cannot easily become a mask for such homosocially directed desire for domination. Instead, Sedgwick (2015) argues, desires for power over other men are “deflected” onto women: men’s relations with women become complex analogic structures for the mediation of maledirected attitudes and desires, and women themselves become vehicles for the expression of tensions between men. Thus, insofar as the considerations put forward by Mills suggest that black male desire for white women may have an instrumentalizing character, it appears that male desire for women per se may share in this instrumentalizing character.

2.1  The solidarity argument reinterpreted Consider the ease with which one might transfigure Mills’s solidarity argument into an argument for feminist separatism: Men . . . are born as fairly plastic entities who will both be shaped by, and in turn shape, a particular sociocultural environment. But it will be pointed out that their socialization in a male-supremacist society makes them ineluctably beneficiaries and perpetrators of the system of oppression responsible for keeping women down, so that they are all, or mostly (claims of differing strength can be made), the enemy, whether through active policy or passive complicity. Even if they seem to show good faith, the entering of a social “maleness” into their personal identity means that they will never, or only very rarely . . . be able to overcome their conditioning: sooner or later, their “true colours” are going to come out . . . They will naturally be less sensitive to its [society’s] sexist character, and more reluctant [than women] to confront the radical changes that have to be made to bring about a truly just society.

It is less easy to recast Mills’s more class-centered version of the solidarity argument, but some of its key insights can be recuperated: being in a heterosexual relationship marks a woman as compliant with compulsory heterosexuality, and affords her some small protection, insofar as she is nested within patriarchal structures. If, as seems likely, it is women who do not conform to the dictates



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

341

of patriarchy—for example, by remaining single, celibate, or by living lives patterned by homosexual, bisexual, or pansexual desires—who are best able to perceive its workings and its injustice, then women who enter into heterosexual relationships will become less attuned to the stark injustices of patriarchy that remain obvious to her less compliant sisters. One can similarly imagine a tweaked version of Mills’s response: entering into relationships with women may have a salutary cognitive effect on men, rendering them sensitive to misogyny in ways that they were previously oblivious to. But, however plausible one finds this flipped narrative as a response to Mills’s version of the solidarity argument, one should, I think, find it a good deal less plausible as a response to my augmented version. For sexual and romantic relationships play different, if overlapping, roles with respect to the production of gendered and racialized social categories and identities. Some feminists— Andrea Dworkin foremost among them—have argued that intercourse (and so, correspondingly, sexual and romantic contact built up around a norm of intercourse) plays a distinctive and unique role in feminist politics. On Dworkin’s (2007) picture, women as a class are defined or constituted as those who are there to be penetrated; men as a class are defined as those who are there to do the penetrating. And it ought to be clear that insofar as intercourse is a practice which produces gender difference, it is a practice which maintains male supremacy: male supremacy clearly depends on and presupposes the existence of a gender difference.11 Dworkin holds that intercourse plays no similarly constitutive role for other social groups—while intercourse may be a way in which one group (say, whites) dominates and terrorizes an oppressed group (say, non-white people) it is not part of the process whereby these groups are actually socially constructed. It is not, for example, the case that what it is to be non-white is to be marked as “made for” penetration. I am inclined to think that Dworkin is wrong about this, and that racial, as well as gender categories, are produced by practices of intercourse. Feminists of color have long stressed that black women’s sexualities are constructed differently from those of white women: Dworkin may be right that all women are “for penetration”; for white women, this status is ameliorated, however slightly, because they can also be marked as “pure” and “virginal.” Also, they have often, historically, been marked for “protection” from black men. Black women, by contrast, are denied these meanings—they are construed as hypersexual, hyper available, and marked as “for penetration” by both white and black men. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, it is precisely the denial of these meanings to black women that facilitates and mediates white women’s access to them: “Black ‘whores’ make White ‘virgins’ possible. This race/gender

342

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

nexus fostered a situation whereby White men could then differentiate between the sexualized woman-as-body who is dominated and ‘screwed’ and the asexual woman-as-pure-spirit who is idealized and brought home to mother” (2002: 145). Thus, the social rules about who gets to penetrate who are more complex than Dworkin supposes. They construct black and white women differently, and as such, look to be involved in producing racial as well as gender categories, giving us white as well as male supremacy. Nevertheless, there is some sense in which sexual/romantic relationships between black men and white women run counter to the scripts of white supremacy.12 But, there simply is not an analogous sense in which sexual/romantic relationships between cis men and women per se disrupt patriarchal scripts. Particular relationships may be disruptive in virtue of other identities the participants have; and participants may subvert, resist, or play with patriarchal norms within the context of romantic and sexual relationships. (Although feminists may disagree vehemently about how easy it is to queer or scramble such norms and meanings.) Because sexual/romantic relationships between men and women lack any intrinsically “disruptive” aspect, I think the kinds of epistemic possibilities Mills suggests for sexual/ romantic relationships between black men and white women—“embarking on an interracial relationship may actually have a salutary cognitive effect”—don’t translate well. We can sharpen this contrast by looking in some more detail at the epistemic and affective dynamics charted closely by Sally Haslanger, reflecting on her own experience as a white woman adopting black children: Begin with the body. Although adoptive parents do not have a biological connection to the bodies of their children, like most (at least female) parents, adoptive parents of infants are intimately involved in the physical being of their baby. Parents learn to read the needs and desires of the baby from cries, facial expressions, body language, and in some cases it is as if the patterns of the child’s hunger and fatigue are programmed into your own body. You know when to expect hunger; and when they are a little older, you know when to suggest that they use the potty or take a nap . . . The constant attentiveness to the other’s body trains one to read it: one is cued to respond to it. But importantly, as a parent, one comes to love it. The child and future adult to which one will have some person-to-person relationship is not there yet, and so parental love often takes the form of a delight in the body of the infant—its shape, movements, warmth, and so on. (2012: 287)

Haslanger conceives of our embodied, somatic status as central to our affective and ethical orientation to the world: our own imaginings of our bodies



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

343

guide us as we navigate social spaces, the (imagined) bodies of others—their gendered and racialized features—mediate our connections to them, cueing our dispositions to judge and to feel, to initiate and prolong reciprocal contact. The bodies we imagine for ourselves are, as Moira Gatens puts it, communal, ongoing creations—“developed, learnt, connected to the body image of others . . . not static” (quoted in Haslanger 2012: 287). Haslanger gives us a narrative in which, through the process (“playful and loving”) of parenting a black infant, one’s own imaginary body becomes confused, and, importantly, “becomes racially confused” (2012: 287). The close, embodied, and affectively laden process of caring for a black infant disrupts and displaces Haslanger’s previously relatively stable, largely unconscious sense of herself as inhabiting a white body. In a closely related process, the parenting of a black child also functions to disrupt Haslanger’s “racial social geography.” For one’s sense of oneself as a white body typically comes packaged with its own “micro geography”—an imagined map of social space, and a cluster of internalized norms for its navigation. Here, Haslanger draws on Mills: social space is racialized—there are black spaces and white spaces, and more or less tightly policed norms and penalties for moving in spaces which do not “match” one’s race. For Mills, the smallest packets of social space are “the microspace[s] of the body itself,” which mark black and white space at their most concentrated and highly policed (1999: 51). Mills argues that “in the United States, from the epoch of slavery and Jim crow to the modern period of formal liberty but continuing racism, the physical interactions between whites and blacks are carefully regulated by a shifting racial etiquette” (1990: 52). This racial etiquette takes on different forms, but it consistently mandates forms of separation, and specifically, the separation of black and white bodies, and the spaces they occupy. This maintenance of boundaries may be enforced at the highly granular, interpersonal level (how close to you do I stand?) as well as via differing imagined mappings of social space (Where feels like home? Where is marked as safe?). The paths one habitually takes through space will carve out customary grooves or pathways, and generate particular fields of familiarity and strangeness. These fields, generated by habit, loop back to inform differing imaginary geographies and often with the effect of making norms of interpersonal separation appear natural. Haslanger uses this framework of the racial micro geography to articulate her experience: adopting of a black infant altered not just her sense of her own white body, but redrew her entire social map: For example, I can find many changes in my physical presence among others: whose faces do I first notice in a group? With whom do I make eye contact? Next

344

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

to whom do I sit? How close do I stand to others in conversation? Whom do I touch in an affectionate greeting? These questions have different answers than they used to. I am physically at home among African Americans in a way I was not before. (2012: 288)

Haslanger is writing about parent-child relationships, not romantic or sexual relationships between adults. But the somatic reconfigurations and the re-drawings of racial geography that Haslanger recounts, could, perhaps, be prompted by other intimate relationships. (Of course, they might not be. But as Haslanger is careful to note, not all white parents who adopt black children experience the sorts of shifts that she did.) But the dynamics Haslanger charts seem tightly bound to the ways in which somatic and social distance, and dictates of separation, are important features of contemporary white supremacy. I do not think analogous forms of somatic and social distance play anything like a similar role in contemporary patriarchy, in which men’s perpetual access (sexual and emotional) is an important and relentless theme. Let’s take this last thought more slowly: Haslanger recounts that her experiences of embodied intimacy with her black children scrambled her sense of herself as inhabiting a white body. Compare this experience to that of a man’s sexual and romantic intimacy with a woman, and the effects such intimacy might have on his (we might suppose) relative sense of himself as inhabiting a male body. Is it natural to think that experiences comparable to Haslanger’s experience of disorientation and destabilization typically attend men’s sexual encounters with women? Surely not. If anything, it is natural to think the opposite. Under conditions of compulsory heterosexuality, the performance of masculinity practically requires sexual contact with women: a man is never quite so male in our imaginations as when he is penetrating a woman.13 Thus, rather than scrambling a man’s otherwise stable sense of himself as inhabiting a male body, sexual contact will reinscribe and affirm their already stable sense of themselves as male-bodied creatures. Second, it would certainly be right to say that our microgeographies are gendered as well as racialized: some spaces are densely masculine, others, highly feminized. As in the racial case, there are complex networks of norms governing traffic between these spaces, which operate at multiple levels. But whereas in the racial case, these norms fall into a pattern of separation, in the case of gender, the pattern is not one of separation but of asymmetric access. First, at the interpersonal level, women are routinely subjected to, or at risk of, unwanted male contact: a spectrum of intrusive behaviors ranging from rape



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

345

and sexual violence at one extreme to the casual erosion of women’s boundaries, or “personal space” at another. The modes of embodiment associated with men and women exhibit related asymmetries: Iris Marion Young contrasts the ways in which men “stretch out” into the space around them “uniting” their bodies with their surroundings, with the comportment more typical of women, in which they move, inhibited, through a tightly circumscribed packet of space: “A space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond” (1980: 143). Second, the threat of sexual violence shapes women’s imaginary mappings of their social world: feminist geographers have charted women’s “geographies of fear,” and the ways in which spatial distributions of fear channel women’s use of public space—women “develop individual mental maps of places where they fear assault as a product of their past experience of space and secondary information” (Valentine 1989: 386).14 Thus women’s imaginary representations of space encode (albeit often in a highly distorted form) these conditions of asymmetric access, in which men are “systematically positioned to interfere in the sexual lives of women and girls, with impunity” (Einspahr 2010: 4). Third, spaces coded as feminine (think the domestic sphere) are typically spaces in which men can intervene, and over which they have substantial control, whereas, as Beard puts it, “the shared metaphors we use of female access to power—knocking on the door, storming the citadel, smashing the glass ceiling, or just giving them a leg up—underline female exteriority” (2017: 11). We must be careful here: it would clearly be wrong to think that patterns of asymmetric access do not also characterize racialized geographies. Our social world is patterned by white access and entitlement to black bodies and spaces; white bodies and spaces remain closed off to people of color. Consider, for example, the ways in which (at one end of a spectrum) white people presume to touch black women’s hair (see hooks 1989; Robinson 2016) and (at the other) the ways in which racialized policing renders people of color systematically vulnerable to interference, violence, and death. (One might also appeal to the ways in which carceral institutions—prisons, border control—work to systematically undermine the bodily privacy and autonomy of those racialized as non-white.) The contrast is not, then, between gendered geographies which encode asymmetric access and racialized geographies, which do not, but between gendered geographies in which the central, dominant pattern is one of asymmetric access, and racialized geographies in which patterns of separation and asymmetric access are overlaid and intertwined. The take-home point, for our purposes, is that the norms and scripts governing heterosexual relationships

346

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

are very much of a piece with their background geography. As sites for the extraction of feminine-coded sexual and emotional forms of labor, rather than being microrealms of sociability in which the norms jar with those of their social backdrop, for the most part, they seamlessly blend into the broader social landscape. Thus, rather than typically prompting a redrawing of one’s social map, then, heterosexual relationships look more likely to entrench those maps which are already in place. The different roles played by somatic intimacy with respect to gendered, as opposed to racialized, microgeographies mean we should be far less optimistic about the “salutary cognitive effects” of heterosexual relationships than we are about the putative salutary cognitive effects of interracial relationships. We can put the point slightly differently. Some parts of our lives are more densely mapped than others; experiences or forms of life which take us into unmapped domains come with distinctive epistemic possibilities: straying into unmapped territory shows us the limitations of our existing social cartographies, and requires at least some re-mapping. Heterosexual relationships represent one of the more densely mapped regions of social life; as such, they lack the disruptive potential associated with unmapped regions.

2.2  Some complications We have traversed a good deal of ground; let us take stock. I have argued that we can extract arguments with a feminist separatist flavor from Mills’s philosophical reflections. Some might be inclined to think that they result in a reductio of Mills’s canvassed arguments. Such a response would, in my view, be an error: we ought not to treat the innocuousness of our present practices, even those we reflectively value, as a data point when doing social philosophy. But, nor should we regard these arguments as telling us much about how women should live their lives. I have no interest in telling other women how they ought to live, and I would issue any recommendation to withdraw from romantic and sexual contact with men only on pain of monstrous hypocrisy. Besides, the brush strokes I have been painting in have been much too hasty and broad to furnish anyone with anything like an instruction manual—for that, we would need a good deal more detail, more careful strokes, and a substantially enriched picture of social reality. A great many social identities have been skipped over here, and real agents desire patterns are almost invariably more complex, and come replete with more tensions and more dappled genealogies, than the characters philosophers use to people their arguments. In particular, I have not attended to the important ways in which heterosexual relationships in which both partners are non-white may



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

347

function very differently to those in which both partners are white. It is to these differences that I now turn. Hazel Carby notes that white feminist treatments of the family have been inattentive to the ways in which “the black family has functioned as a prime source of resistance to oppression” urging that “we need to recognize that during slavery, periods of colonialism, and under the present authoritarian state, the black family has been a site of political and cultural resistance to racism” (1996: 64). Much of what Carby says about the black family may also hold true of non-familial heterosexual relationships between people of color—they may function as a site of solidarity or struggle against racial oppression, in ways that relationships between white men and women do not (see Simpson 2013). If this is right, then the social roles played by heterosexual relationships between black men and women will come apart in important ways from those played by heterosexual relationships in which both parties are white. This difference in social role may mean a difference in epistemic dynamics. For example, Audre Lorde argues that black men and black women’s shared experiences of racism can cultivate distinctive dispositions, including, as I read her, epistemic dispositions, which allow for forms of mutual vulnerability not accessible to their white counterparts: When a people share a common oppression, certain kinds of skills and joint defenses are developed . . . When you come into conflict over other existing differences, there is a deep vulnerability to each other which is desperate and very deep. And that is what happens between black men and women because we have certain weapons we have perfected together that white women and men have not shared. (1981: 728)

It would be a mistake, though, to read Lorde as arguing that this shared vulnerability is a straightforward good. Sharing a common oppression, she goes on to say, also means having “additional weapons against each other . . . forged them in secret together against a common enemy.” That is, the presence of complex variables within black heterosexual relationships which have no clear analogue in their white equivalents brings distinctive risks as well as distinctive possibilities. But let us dwell, briefly, on some of these distinctive possibilities. In her study of love between black people, hooks suggests that racial oppression may function, in part, by systematically imbuing black people—and, in particular, black women—with a sense of themselves as unlovable, unworthy of desire, or incapable of loving (hooks 2001). In such contexts, heterosexual relationships may be peculiarly well placed to restore or create a sense of oneself as worthy

348

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

of concern, desire, or tenderness. To return to the language used above, where the scripts and maps which guide our desiring selves encode women of color as unlovable or undesirable, heterosexual relationships may prove epistemically productive, not because such relationships fail to count as “densely mapped” social terrain, but because said relationships offer women a way to self-fashion identities in which they know themselves to be the proper subjects of love and desire. One might, of course, doubt that heterosexual relationships have any special role to play here. One might think that what matters, really, is the experience of oneself as lovable and loving, and maintain that there is no special connection between heterosexual relationships and such experiences. But while in some sense such a claim is clearly correct—for some people, heterosexual relationships play no part at all in developing their sense of who they are—there is another sense in which it appears misguided. After all, heterosexual relationships constitute a privileged “relationship kind”: they are (I think, unjustly) central to the communally maintained narratives that guide our self-interpretations, and to our complex social identities. But as such, they have a special affective authority: a distinctive capacity to guide and organize our sense of who we are. This affective authority—which relationships like friendship lack—means that heterosexual relationships offer sense-making resources which other forms of relationship do not, not because of anything intrinsic to heterosexual relationships, but because of the social significance attached to them. But, because heterosexual relationships tend to play an organizing role with respect to our lives and commitments which other relationships do not, they are more readily used as sites for self-fashioning projects than their less socially lauded counterparts. Under conditions of white supremacy, then, heterosexual relationships between non-white people may have a privileged role to play in generating important forms of self-knowledge: knowledge of the self as lovable and careworthy.

3  Conclusion and outlook We began with Charles Mills, and a suite of arguments as to the ethics of black men’s sexual and romantic engagement with white women. Two of Mills’s arguments caught our eye: first, the argument from questionable motivations, and second, the argument from racial solidarity. Both run—more or less obviously— on epistemic machinery: one has the opacity of desire as a moving part, the other, claims with a standpoint-epistemological flavor. The care, precision, and



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

349

insight on show in Mills’s paper offer the oft-mocked feminist separatist—or perhaps her more dilute sister—the prospect of a moderate rehabilitation. For there are remarkable similarities between the sorts of appeals made by Mills, and those made by the beleaguered separatist. The Millisian separatist can, I suggest, present the following twin diagnoses of compulsory heterosexuality, and of the relationships it births. First—drawing on the questionable motivations argument—compulsory heterosexuality colludes with patriarchy to mold sexuality and sexual desire in such a way as to “channel” or “route” desires for power, dominance, and social position through male heterosexuality, and then acts to transform that so-molded sexual desire into a mask for those very desires. This masking process acts to conceal the politically loaded character of desires for power and status, as well as helping to conceal the injustice of the patriarchal gender system which those desires, and actions informed by those desires, help to entrench. The materials for a particular mode of self-deception are thus revealed as socially encoded; sufficiently ubiquitous, this mode of self-deception is able to reproduce itself, by prompting the maintenance of the very conditions which give rise to it. Second—here drawing on the racial solidarity argument—insofar as social position affects one’s epistemic perspective, compulsory heterosexuality makes for a system in which the epistemic perspective of women is altered by their entry into heterosexual relationships, and plausibly in such a way as to obscure the workings of patriarchy. Nor can we expect that heterosexual relationships have anything like a salutary cognitive effect on their male participants, given the ways, charted above, in which the norms and microgeographies of heterosexual relationships are flush with those of the social reality in which they are embedded. I ended the chapter with talk of “complications.” A Millisian separatist worthy of her namesake will be mindful of the sketchy, partial, and preliminary character of her diagnosis, and will not mistake it for a dictat. For the map drawn here has a large scale, and comes with the scantiness of detail—and, the blank spaces—that such scales so often imply. This closing metaphor—philosophy-ascartography—is an old one, and, given the chequered histories of both, a fitting one. I hope this chapter has cast more light than shade.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Daniel James for helpful discussion and comments.

350

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Notes 1 For a more involved philosophical treatment of sexual orientation, see Dembroff (2016). 2 Throughout the chapter, when I say “women” I mean both cis women and trans women. 3 Thanks to Daniel James for discussion on this point. 4 Mills himself makes rather heavy use of the conscious/unconscious distinction. My own sense is that such a distinction comes with such a jumble of philosophical baggage that it is best avoided. 5 The phrase “routed through” is borrowed from Eve Sedgwick (1990). 6 This is not meant as a serious analysis of Pride and Prejudice, but rather by way of a playful contrast with Vanity Fair. 7 In a similar spirit, in The Erotic Life of Racism, Holland traces the ways in which the erotic has been “disarticulated” from racist practices within queer and feminist discourse, arguing that an understanding of the erotic as operating autonomously and in isolation from wider cultural practices became central to queer politics in the twentieth century, and that this way of construing the erotic was “to the detriment of critical antiracist practice.” 8 Of course, one might doubt the claim that the shifts in social position which accompany marriage to a white woman will typically act to conceal the workings of racism, rather than to reveal their workings afresh. For example, in Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out, Chris’ romantic relationship with a white woman serves to render terrifyingly explicit the previously submerged racist dynamics in their relationship. 9 For discussions of white ignorance, see Sullivan and Tuana (eds., 2007) and Milazzo (2016). 10 For many men who are themselves structurally oppressed, a desire for power and dominance can only really be satisfied in any systematic way via their relations with women. As Federici (2012) puts it, the housewife is created in order to “service the male worker physically, emotionally, and sexually . . . patch up his ego when it is crushed by the work and the social relations (which are social relations of loneliness) that capital has reserved for him.” 11 See Jenkins, this volume, for a longer discussion of Dworkin’s philosophy of sex. 12 This, of course, is not enough to show that such relationships are politically desirable, all things considered. 13 Note that I am not supposing that all men have penises—not all penetration is penile penetration. Nor am I supposing that all men have an “otherwise stable” sense of themselves as inhabiting a male body—many men may lack any such stable sense. It is worth saying a little, explicitly, about how this argument might



The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality

351

play out differently depending on whether our focus is on cis, rather than on trans men. The position of trans men within patriarchy is complex—at least some trans men acquire some male privileges, their social position is generally highly precarious in a sufficiently dramatic and systematic way that it would seem at best ham-fisted to assimilate the romantic and sexual relationships trans men have with women to the relationships romantic and sexual relationships cis men have with women. Nevertheless, insofar as some trans men have a stable and robust sense of themselves as men, of inhabiting a male body, and are experienced by others as readily legible as male, their experiences will align with those of many cis men in some important ways. 14 Valentine notes that, for white women, these maps are often filtered through racist assumptions.

References Beard, Mary (2017), “Women In Power,” London Review of Books 39 (6): 9–14. Carby, Hazel V. (1996), “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in H. A. Jr Baker, M. Diawara, and R. H. Lindeborg (eds.), Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, 61–86, London: The University of Chicago Press. Collins, P. H. (2002), Black Feminist Thought, London: Routledge. The Combahee River Collective (1982), “Black Feminist Statement,” in G. T. Hull, P. B. Scott and B. Smith (eds.), But Some of Us Are Brave, 13–22, New York: The Feminist Press at The City of New York. Crane, Tim (2016), “The Unity of The Unconscious,” https://www.aristoteliansociety. org.uk/pdf/crane.pdf. Dembroff, Robin (2016), “What Is Sexual Orientation?” Philosophers’ Imprint 16 (3): 1–27. Dworkin, Andrea (2007), Intercourse, New York: Basic Books. Einspahr, Jennifer (2010), “Structural Domination and Structural Freedom: A Feminist Perspective,” Feminist Review 94: 1–19. Federici, Silvia (2012), Revolution at Point Zero, Oakland: PM Press. Frye, Marilyn (1983), The Politics of Reality, New York: The Crossing Press. Haslanger, Sally (2012), Resisting Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holland, Sharon P. (2012), The Erotic Life of Racism, Durham and London: Duke University Press. hooks, b. (1989), “From Black is a Woman’s Colour,” Callaloo 39: 382–88. hooks, b. (2000), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, London: South End Books. hooks, b. (2001), Salvation, New York: Harper Collins. Jenkins, Katharine “Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin,” This volume.

352

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Lorde, Audre, and Adrienne Rich (1981), “Interview with Audre Lorde,” Signs 6 (4): 713–36. McCandless, Cathy (1980), “Some Thoughts About Racism, Classism, and Separatism,” in J. Gibbs and S. Bennett (eds.) Top Ranking, 105–55, New York: Come! Unity Press. Milazzo, Marzia (2016), “On White Ignorance, White Shame, and Other Pitfalls in Critical Philosophy of Race,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 33 (4), doi:http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/japp.12230 Mills, Charles (1994), “Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women?,” Journal of Social Philosophy 25 (s1): 131–53. Mills, Charles (1999), The Racial Contract, London: Cornell University Press. Rich, Adriene (1980), “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” Signs 5 (4): 631–60. Robinson, Phoebe (2016), You Can’t Touch My Hair, New York: Penguin. Scheman, Naomi (2012), Shifting Ground, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1990), The Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2015), Between Men, New York: Columbia University Press. Simpson, Anika M. (2013), “Black Philosophy and The Erotic,” The Black Scholar 43 (4): 74–79, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5816/blackscholar.43.4.0074. Sullivan, Shannon, and Tuana Nancy, eds. (2007), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, New York: State University of New York Press. Valentine, Gill (1989), “The Geography of Women’s Fear,” Area 21 (4): 385–90. Young, Iris M. (1980), “Throwing Like A Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” Human Studies 3 (2): 137–56.

Part Four

Value Theory

354

18

Introduction to Feminist Value Theory Amanda Roth and Pieranna Garavaso

1  What is value theory? Value theory is the area of philosophy in which feminist philosophers have worked most promptly and most extensively. By the expression “value theory,” we mean to refer to work in ethics and political philosophy.1 Within ethics it is common to distinguish between normative ethics, applied ethics, metaethics, and moral psychology. Normative ethical theories aim at offering a standard of morally appropriate and inappropriate conduct, from which general moral principles might be specified. Applied ethics employs philosophical reasoning and methods—and often general normative principles—in addressing specific controversial moral and social issues. Metaethics investigates the nature of morality and moral concepts with a focus on semantic, ontological, and epistemological issues. Moral psychology involves the study of moral reasoning, emotion, and motivation. Finally, political philosophy is regarded as a separate subfield distinct from all of these areas of ethics, yet as we will see later in this introduction, feminist work in these areas has challenged some of the assumed distinctions between these subfields. Feminist philosophers have produced original work in all of these areas. These various areas of value theory and of ethics specifically will be represented to varying degrees through the chapters included in this book. As already pointed out, the book does not aim at presenting an exhaustive survey of all analytic feminist production in the area of value theory but only at offering exemplary discussions on a selected set of topics. In this introduction, first we draw a brief history of the development of feminist ethics generally speaking and then outline a theoretical characterization of feminist ethics. The last two sections contain brief outlines of the major

356

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

debates in feminist political philosophy and applied ethics as useful background to the essays collected in this section of the companion. In light of the above breakdown of areas of value theory, what is feminist ethics exactly? As feminists working in value theory have made contributions in all areas of ethics and value theory, feminist ethics is not a branch of ethics (or value theory more generally) but rather an approach to ethics (or value theory). As a first attempt at a description, then, we might say that feminist ethics refers to a body of philosophical work that is grounded on acknowledging the oppression of women and on understanding gender as an axis of systemic inequality; furthermore, this body of work takes up both old and new questions in ethics and value theory. We return to this topic in more detail in Section 3, where we offer a more developed conception of what feminist ethics is and what it has accomplished. First, though, we turn our attention to the history of feminist ethics—where did the notion of bringing a feminist perspective to bear on philosophical issues in value theory come from?

2  The origins of feminist ethics The origin of feminist ethics can largely be traced back to the care-based critique of dominant approaches to moral philosophy that developed outside of analytic work. This critique was expressed most explicitly in Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development and Nel Nodding’s Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics, both published in the early to mid-1980s. Gilligan, a professor of developmental psychology, rejected the results of Lawrence Kohlberg’s empirically based research on the stages of moral development. Kohlberg proposed a six-stage ranking of moral development and argued that at the highest levels of development in moral judgment humans grasp universal moral principles, which transcend legal or institutional authority and contractual thinking. In her book, Gilligan points out how “in the research from which Kohlberg derives his theory, females simply do not exist” as Kohlberg’s results were based on an empirical study of the development of moral judgment in eighty-four boys from childhood to adulthood (Gilligan 1982: 18). In contrast, Gilligan’s In a Different Voice is based on three empirical studies: (1) the college student study, in which the subjects were selected at random; (2) the abortion decision study in which twenty-nine women were interviewed;



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

357

and (3) the rights and responsibility study in which the number of male and female subjects was equal (Gilligan 1982: 2–3). When Gilligan proposed Heinz’s moral dilemma—a dilemma devised by Kohlberg in which a devoted husband is faced with the prospect of having to steal a drug necessary to save his severely ill wife from a greedy pharmacist—to Amy and Jake, two sixth-grade children participating in the rights and responsibilities studies, she found that Jake employed a justice-orientation, demonstrating the beginnings of a “principled conception of justice that Kohlberg equates with moral maturity” to resolve the dilemma (Gilligan 1982: 27). In contrast, Amy focused on the relationships between the husband, the pharmacist, and the wife and the consequences of any action on such relationships, at times seeming “unsure and evasive,” frustrating the interviewer, and demonstrating a “stunted” moral development according to Kohlberg’s stages (Gilligan 1982: 26–32). Similarly, in the abortion decision study, Gilligan pointed out that often the women subjects focused their attention on the relationships between the persons affected by their decision and did not merely apply a universal rule to choose what to do. According to Gilligan, these studies provide evidence for revising Kohlberg’s levels of moral development. Gilligan’s “different voice” could be heard in some responses to Heinz’s dilemma, as in the case of Amy and Jake, but it was ignored and buried within Kohlberg’s work. This voice expressed an ethics of care, in which maintaining relationships and taking context into consideration are prioritized in contrast to the application of universal rules that governs justice-based frameworks. Gilligan and others suggested that to the extent that dominant accounts of moral development and ethics, such as utilitarianism or Kantian ethics, are guided by rules grounded in principles of justice, they ignore a distinctively gendered voice, which is grounded in the notion of care. The conclusion of this work is that the dominant accounts of morality are male biased. If justice-based approaches that totally ignore care are deficient and gendered, what would a satisfactory approach to ethics look like? Ought care and justice perspectives be integrated with one another? Or could a satisfactory account focus primarily on care alone? Noddings puts forth an account promoting the latter possibility. In contrast to traditional justice-based moral frameworks, she argues that relations between persons, rather than individuals, are ontologically basic; for Noddings “caring” refers to both a particular kind of reciprocal (but not necessarily equal) relation—between the carer and the cared-for—and to moral virtue (1986: xiii–xvi, 5–6). Noddings’s approach echoes Gilligan’s notion of a

358

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

“different voice” in stressing potential gender differences when it comes to moral thinking as well as the historical ignoring of “‘feminine’ . . . mode[s] of existence” (1986: xvi, 2, 96). One ongoing question raised both by Noddings’s and Gilligan’s work is about the relation between feminine approaches to ethics—that is, those associated with women’s traditional ways of being, which emphasize caring in particular—and feminist ethics, which implies a focus on overcoming the unjust social subordination of women (see Section 2).2 Gilligan’s and Nodding’s work can largely be credited with launching the development of feminist ethics as we know it today by motivating scholarly interest in a set of questions about women’s experiences and thinking, the relation between women’s ways of being and feminism, and male-bias in scholarly work. However, important reservations about moving to a wholly or primarily care-based theory have also carried weight. Some philosophers question whether care might actually undermine many aspects of justice since care demands partiality to those with whom one has relations, yet many pressing immoralities in our world, for example, the imbalance between the distribution of vital resources between wealthy and developing countries, have to do with those with whom we have few if any relational ties (Noddings 2002). Moreover in emphasizing care as gendered, care-based feminist approaches threaten to entrench problematic attitudes about intrinsic gender difference by encouraging essentialized thinking about women’s association with care. Inasmuch as femininity and women’s ways of thinking are themselves constructed through an oppressive gender structure, we ought to be hesitant to validate them anymore than we might validate masculinity and men’s ways of thinking (Hoagland 1991; Hampton 1993). Finally, the empirical claim of the existence of a different voice and the correlation between gender and care have been questioned in various contexts and often have come up short (Antony 2012; Rooney 2001; Tong 1993). In fact, Gilligan herself later abandoned the strong claim that women and girls had a different voice when it comes to moral reasoning, in favor of a weaker view according to which the care perspective is only associated with women and girls (Gilligan and Atanucci 1988). Despite the controversy over care-based ethics, in the past few decades there has remained a significant emphasis on care as a value within feminist theory; for instance, some psychoanalytic and materialist feminist approaches have tied women’s difference to the gendered nature of the family and psychosexual development of women’s roles providing most caregiving labor (Chodorow 1978; Hartsock 1983). Others have looked to the mother-child relationship



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

359

(Ruddick 1989; Virginia Held 1987) or a more general dependency relation (Kittay 1999) as a paradigm for ethical and political thinking. While some theorists continue to defend care ethics as an independent approach to morality, many others have employed concerns about care and dependency to criticize and revise mainstream justice-oriented moral and political theories (Nussbaum 2000; Kittay 1999; Brake 2012).

3  The theoretical foundations of feminist ethics In 1991, after acknowledging wide differences among feminist projects to eliminate male biases in ethics, Alison Jaggar identified the following two assumptions as shared by all feminist approaches to ethics: (1) “the subordination of women is wrong”; and (2) “the moral experience of women should be treated as respectfully as the moral experience of men” (Jaggar 1991: 95, 97–98). By stating these necessary conditions for a feminist ethics,3 Jaggar usefully characterizes two distinctive theoretical features of a feminist ethical theory. Notice that moral theories bound by these presuppositions will reject traditional stands on women’s inferiority and acknowledge that experiences that are most common among women, such as childbirth, child-rearing, or sexual exploitation, are morally relevant concerns. Thus, the assumptions identified by Jaggar naturally lead to the two main areas of development in feminist ethics, that is, (1) the criticism of traditional moral theories for failing to acknowledge the equality of men and women as moral agents and (2) the attention to concerns and experiences, more commonly linked to the social contexts of women’s lives, only recently recognized as morally relevant. More than twenty years after Jaggar’s characterization, Rosemary Tong and Nancy Williams, in their entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, define feminist ethics as “an attempt to revise, reformulate, or rethink traditional ethics to the extent it depreciates or devalues women’s moral experience” (Summer 2016). This definition still echoes the two necessary conditions identified by Jaggar. Tong and Williams go on to detail different ways in which feminists have approached widely known ethical views proposed by philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel who portrayed women as less rational than men and hence less capable moral subjects. Feminist readings of these traditional texts have led to revisions and reformulations of those theories.4

360

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Thus, feminist ethics can be described as an area of ethics devoted to both (1) the critical discussion of traditional ethics with particular attention to the effects of social discriminations due to gender, race, sex, and other systems of social discrimination, and (2) the discovery of new areas of moral relevance linked to the experiences of women and other underrepresented groups of humans and even nonhuman animals. The most obvious examples of areas of moral relevance connected to the experiences of women are abortion, pornography, and sexual harassment. It was precisely the discovery of these new domains and topics of moral relevance that led to the realization that the more traditional approaches to ethical reasoning—especially those tightly connected with universal and impersonal rules of justice—were not adequately addressing the concerns raised by relations of a more intimate nature such as the link between an expectant mother and a fetus or between parents and children. To avoid any misunderstanding, let us point out that most feminist philosophers do not claim that these new domains or topics of moral relevance are of sole interest to women. There is no essential link between the experience of caring for others, whether children or elders, and the sex or the gender of those who provide care. Sara Ruddick’s work is exemplary on this point: it is the activity of rearing, nurturing, and taking care of another that fosters the pacifist attitude, not the sex or the gender of those who provide care (1989). The historical fact that a higher number of women than men have taken care of others makes women better placed in pointing out the moral significance and challenge of caring activities. Tracing the development of feminist ethics from the first more fully developed discussions published in the early 1990s to essays published in 2010 gives a striking portrait of the fecundity of this area of research. In 1991, Alison Jaggar expresses surprise at the unexpected success of a conference entitled “Feminist Explorations in Feminist Ethics” and points out “a remarkable lack of consensus about future directions for feminist ethics and an even more remarkable lack of self-conscious reflection as to just what feminist ethics was” (1991: 78). In 2010, Samantha Brennan reiterated the persistent “wide variety of approaches to ethics [that] fall under the description ‘feminist ethics’” (2010: 514). Brennan characterizes feminist ethics by two features: content and method. Twenty years after Jaggar’s characterization, the discovery of the moral significance of experiences linked to reproduction, sexual harassment, sexual objectification and violence, is still seen as distinctive of feminist ethics alongside the criticism of traditional moral theories for failing to recognize the moral significance of these human experiences. Hence, feminist ethics is still crucially defined by the



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

361

nature of its content. The second core feature that Brennan identifies concerns the tools used in building a moral theory, that is, a method that forces us to take into account a variety of perspectives and relationships. Here we can see more clearly the legacy of the ethics of care as an alternative to an ethics of justice that spurred the beginning of feminist ethics, as traditional tools for the construction of moral theories—such as the notions of a wholly autonomous agent or of individualistic rights and freedoms—are transformed by distinctively relational features. Closing the loop of this transformation, these enriched concepts naturally lead back to the discussion of the moral significance of relationships that were not traditionally discussed in mainstream moral theories, such as family or local community relations.

4  Feminist ethics and political philosophy The connection between ethics and political philosophy is especially significant once we take on a feminist perspective, that is, a point of view attentive to social discrimination, and this connection is repeatedly stressed by many feminist philosophers. Jaggar points out “the inseparability of feminist ethics from feminist politics” and argues that feminist ethics must be “extensions rather than alternatives to feminist political theories” (1991: 100, 98). In 1991, Jaggar laments the “whiteness” of feminist ethics; nineteen years later, Brennan points out the “global” dimension of the topics discussed in feminist ethics; the feminist focus on small-scale human relations does not signify a feminist neglect of broader political relations. Far from saying that only or mostly the private realm is morally significant, feminist ethicists should be understood as claiming that the political and public are morally relevant just as much as the private is and, literally, on the same basis, that is, on the basis of our relations to others. This is the root of the futility of separating feminist ethics from feminist political theory (Brennan 2010: 517). Brennan’s view is widely shared among feminist philosophers. In 2001, Margaret Urban Walker stated, “Feminist ethics is inevitably, and fundamentally, a discourse about morality and power” (2001: 4). Walker rejects an ideal conception of morality that transcends empirical matters; in contrast she defends a naturalistic approach to ethics that sees the empirical role of power in human relations as crucial to the determination of their ethical valence. Even feminist philosophers who do not share one such distinctive conception of the relation

362

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

between morality and political power as Walker’s deny the separation between the private and public spheres of human lives, and for that reason alone develop ethical and political theories that are closely tied. Claudia Card states: I always found it hard to draw lines between ethics and political philosophy. . . . Political philosophy traditionally studies norms governing power relationships among members of nation-states and between or among nation-states themselves. The notion of sovereignty within a geographical area is crucial to the idea of a state. . . . Sovereignty in sexual politics pertains to our bodies, not to geographical territories. . . . Thus, oppressive sexual politics sets the stage for ethical inquiries into character, interpersonal relationships, emotional response, and choice in persistently stressful, damaging contexts. (1991: 5)

The links between ethics and political philosophy are intrinsic to feminist ethics for the interrelationships between moral subjects and objects, for example, between people in privileged and people in subordinate social positions, are of crucial moral relevance. By bringing to the fore the ethical significance of power relations, feminist ethicists effectively reject the legitimacy of doing ethics by considering individuals in isolation of the social and political contexts within which our relationships to other people develop. Once the repercussions of power relations are factored into our moral discussion, it becomes impossible to separate so-called ethical considerations from political considerations; this is undoubtedly one of the most influential outcomes of a feminist approach to ethical debate. Given that value theory comprises the areas in which feminist philosophers have been most productive, it makes sense to ask why this is the case. Samantha Brennan mentions at least two reasons (2003: viii–ix). First, the great majority of women who earn a PhD in philosophy would identify themselves as feminist; this fact by itself does not mean that all these new philosophers will regard ethics as their main area of research, but for those who do work in ethics, their interest and support for feminism is likely to affect their philosophical work. For those who do not work in ethics, we would add to Brennan’s point, since being a feminist philosopher requires the acknowledgment and condemnation of social subordination and the commitment to find strategies to actively end it—again following Callahan’s necessary conditions—there is a moral commitment against the subordination of women and other groups plausibly affecting one’s overall philosophical outlook. Second, Brennan argues, the abovementioned review and criticism of traditionally misogynist philosophical views have produced a great amount of work and the new areas of moral reflection created by the work



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

363

of feminist ethicists have enriched, revitalized, and broadened the debates in moral philosophy. Feminist ethics has changed since its beginning and reached well beyond the mere criticism of traditional moral theories by establishing strong connections with political philosophy (Brennan 2010: 523). In the next section, we look more closely at another core feature of feminist ethics, that is, its broad engagement with specific and applied areas of moral debate.

5  Applied ethics Without claiming that the distinction between theoretical and applied ethics is easy to define with full precision, we like Marilyn Friedman and Angela Bolte’s attempt at one such definition: “Applied ethics [is] an area of ethical study that has the aim of determining what to do regarding specific types of morally controversial situations, rather than of solving more abstract problems of moral theory” (2007: 84). This is the first field of ethics in which feminist philosophers have made major contributions, both to areas that are inseparable from gender and sexuality—abortion, pornography, reproductive issues—and to subtopics in which the relevance of gender and sexuality is more subtle—non-reproduction areas of bioethics and the environment/animals, among countless others. These contributions have generally taken one of two forms: (a) intervening in an ongoing philosophical debate, but altering its terms by introducing new major ideas, questions, or concerns or (b) bringing up entirely new areas of thought. In bioethics, the relevance of gender and sexuality is most obvious when it comes to ethical issues related to reproduction, sexuality, and women’s health. Indeed, unsurprisingly, reproductive technologies and abortion are bioethical issues that have received sustained attention from analytic feminist philosophers (Purdy 1989; Allen 1990; Anderson 1990; Satz 1992; Parks 2010; Bailey 2011). But feminist work in bioethics goes well beyond these “obvious” topics, to which gender issues are overtly relevant. For instance, Hilde Lindemann Nelson traces the development of feminist bioethics from the early 1990s, suggesting that, “[t] he primary contribution of feminism to bioethics is to note how imbalances of power in the sex-gender system play themselves out in medical practice and in the theory surrounding that practice” (2000: 493–94); she points to issues ranging from anorexia nervosa to autonomy and patient decision-making to caregiving for patients.5 Though she celebrates these accomplishments, Lindemann Nelson

364

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

also indicates disappointment that feminist work has not gone further and suggests that a broader approach to bioethical theory would be an apt future aim for feminist bioethicists (2000: 494). She rightly suggests, in fact, that the preoccupation with women’s bodies, and especially women’s reproductive health, leaves in place too many of the practices, institutions, and assumptions of a sex-gender system that is biased in favor of men and thus configures women as not only different, but deviant; this reinforces the idea that women present a special social problem, but that men’s role in society is somehow normal and unproblematic. (2000: 495)

Lindemann Nelson’s contribution can be seen as a successful example of the (a) approach mentioned above, that is, as an intervention in an ongoing philosophical debate that also alters its terms by introducing new major ideas, questions, or concerns. Feminist work in bioethics has continued to both deepen existing debates and expand to more varied topics in the past decade and a half since Lindemann Nelson’s paper. The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, which we believe to be the only scholarly journal wholly dedicated to feminist bioethics, was established in 2007. Work published in this venue has covered ethical considerations regarding a wide range of issues including LGBTQ reproduction, research on pregnant women, transnational surrogacy, infertility, opt-out organ donation, care-workers, mental health, disability and reproduction, palliation, and more. Abortion is perhaps a special topic in feminist bioethics, inasmuch as it bridges mainstream philosophical work in metaphysics, that is, concerning the notion of a person, feminist moral and political theory, and bioethics. The debate on abortion is also a clear example of the type (a) contribution to debates in applied ethics, that is, intervening in an ongoing philosophical debate, but altering its terms by introducing new major ideas, questions, or concerns. For instance, while much of the best-known philosophical work on abortion focuses primarily on fetal status and the associated morality of killing—in some cases taking little to no account of women’s situation and bodily autonomy (Marquis 1989)—early feminist work (Thomson 1971; Warren 1973) made a point to take women’s bodily autonomy very seriously.6 Further feminist work has also questioned the nature of autonomy in supporting the relational nature of the self: arguing that fetal status cannot be decided independently of the pregnant woman (Sherwin 1991).



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

365

The philosophy of sex and especially the topic of pornography has been another fruitful area for analytical feminist contributions and a good example of the type (b) feminist contributions to applied ethics by bringing up entirely new areas for philosophical discussion, particularly in the case of the development of the very notion of “sexual harassment” as well as feminist thought on sexual violence more generally.7 One area within sexuality and sexual violence in which feminist work has been very productive is pornography. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance, passed in a number of cities in the 1980s, but eventually struck down by courts, prompted philosophical interest in pornography as a feminist issue and the question of censorship (Dworkin, R. 1985, 1993). A number of analytic feminist philosophers argued that pornography both causes harm and constitutes harm in silencing and subordinating women (MacKinnon 1987; Langton 1990; Langton and West 1999), while other feminists have opposed such critiques and have defended the value of (at least some) pornography (see Cornell’s 2000 collection for a diversity of feminist perspectives). More recently, A. W. Eaton (2007) has offered a modified anti-pornography argument which targets only “inegalitarian pornography,” that is, exempting certain depictions of consensual violence, and employs an epidemiological model in analogizing the way in which inegalitarian pornography causes harm to the way in which, for example, cigarettes cause health problems. A final area of applied ethics that has benefited greatly from feminist work in bringing new topics and new concerns to philosophical reflection is environmental and animal ethics. Ecofeminist philosophers have argued that there are powerful historical, symbolic, and pragmatic links between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of the animal and natural world (Adams 1990; Warren 1990; Adams and Gruen 2014), though others push against the idea of such connections (Dixon 1996). Many themes discussed above reemerge in feminist approaches in this area; for instance, some feminist philosophers appeal to the ethics of care as a foundation for their approach to animals (Gruen 2015) and others offer relational accounts of nonhuman animal moral status, familiar from feminist accounts of abortion and the fetus (Anderson 2004). In addition, feminist work on animal ethics highlights the political nature of feminist ethics, as the discussion around animal treatment has been intentionally and insightfully connected with the explicitly political, for example, regarding the relations between developed and developing countries (Lucas 2005).

366

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

6  An overview of the essays As noted above, the rise of the ethics of care refocused philosophers’ attention from the notion of an isolated moral agent to the web of relationships within which we make our ethical decisions. This shift has required a readjustment in the notion of autonomy as the principal feature of ethical agents and source of moral responsibility. In her chapter “Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority,” Andrea Westlund focuses on the normative authority we ascribe to agents who are, or whom we believe to be, self-governing agents. Following Catriona Mackenzie’s acknowledgment that to recognize a person’s autonomy we need to appreciate each person’s interests in living their life in harmony with their conception of the good, Westlund proposes a new notion of autonomy as sovereign practical authority in contrast with the more widely accepted notion of self-governance. In agreement with the principal features of feminist ethics, Westlund stresses the relational character of sovereign practical authority and argues for a meaningful conceptual link between the relational character of both self-governance and her new conception of autonomy. Westlund’s contribution provides a fitting example of an original development of a core ethical notion— autonomy—that exhibits stronger attention to the social dimensions relevant to moral agents’ lives. In “(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status,” Amanda Roth discusses abortion with two main aims. The first aim is to identify the characteristics that make a feminist account of abortion feminist; these characteristics are (1) keeping the pregnant subject at the center; (2) maintaining the focus on women’s actual lives and experiences; and (3) granting some moral standing for the fetus (and not only at the very late stages of pregnancy). These three proposed main features of a feminist treatment of abortion guide the development of a contrast between feminist and mainstream literature on abortion. Roth’s second aim is to further develop the discussion of the third above feature of feminist accounts of abortion, that is, the moral standing of fetuses. Roth points out two main trends in feminist approaches to the establishment of a moral standing for the fetus: relationality and gradualism, or the view that the status of the fetus gradually develops in connection with their physical and psychological development. Roth defends the view that gradualism is the preferable approach. The so-called end-of-life period or decision is an area of expanding interest for contemporary ethicists as medical ways of prolonging life have broadened the areas of decision-making for patients and their families. Hilde Lindemann



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

367

discusses a practice that has gained broad support in the last few decades. This is the designation of a proxy as the agent of decision on our behalf if and when we become incapacitated to make decisions regarding the care we want or do not want to receive at the end of life. The designation of a proxy is supported by many as the best way to respect wishes and values of the incapacitated subject. Lindemann applies a feminist critique to this view and argues that an excessive concern with reproducing the “correct” content, that is, the decision that the now incapacitated agent might have made, ends up giving us an unfaithful representation of the subject’s agency. Counterfactual considerations are important but need to be balanced by the changing identity of the deteriorating subject. Lindemann proposes that those who compose the community within which this person’s life developed and had a meaning should be the ones making these final decisions as they are the ones who also contribute to produce and maintain the identity of the incapacitated patients; they are now the repositories of who those patients truly are. Lindemann’s discussion ties together many themes in feminist and analytic philosophy such as the ethics of care, Harry Frankfurt’s thesis that the ability to make second-order volitions is a necessary condition for personhood, and the conception of the self as relational and dependent on a community of people, rather than wholly autonomous and individualistic. The next chapter is the last one devoted to a topic in applied ethics. Adam Hosein’s “What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?” starts from a careful discussion of different potential accounts of sex stereotyping and of what makes this type of stereotyping morally objectionable. One distinctive feature of Hosein’s discussion is the explicit attention to the methodology of this endeavor as Hosein proposes a requirement for an adequate definition of sex stereotyping, namely its adequacy for moral and political appraisal. Hosein’s overall purpose is to defend a pluralist account of sex stereotyping that is capable of both including a number of distinct phenomena as falling under that description and being a suitable tool for moral and political appraisal. The next two chapters in this part share a common starting point: they are both written by two feminist scholars whose work is grounded in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and they exemplify how the views of a classical and central figure in Western philosophy can serve as a springboard for feminists to develop original and broadly inclusive theories. In “Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics,” Helga Varden contributes several useful resources for feminist

368

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

scholarship. Varden first provides a short overview of Kant’s statements about women. Secondly, she presents a rich and detailed historical recording of the many women Kantian scholars who have been or are active in this area of scholarship; it is indeed surprising to see how many these scholars are. The third and last section of this chapter identifies four themes discussed by women Kantian scholars: (a) Kant and women; (b) Kant and embodiment: sexual activity, sexual objectification, abortion, and sexual violence; (c) Kant and care relations: marriage, dependents, and servants; and (d) Kant and systemic injustice: poverty, prostitution, and oppression. Varden’s chapter is an invaluable source of both insights into and useful references to the broad field of feminist studies on Kant. Carol Hay’s “Resisting Oppression Revisited” builds and further develops the position for which Hay argued in her book Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppression (2013). Kant’s views on self-respect are the starting point for Hay’s defense of the duty of the oppressed to resist oppression. After recapitulating the argument developed in her book, Hay first connects her work with the views of other philosophers who have defended the duty to resist oppression such as John Rawls and Karen Jones. The second half of this chapter is devoted to replying to two main objections raised against Hay’s views. The first objection states that there is no obligation to resist oppression as the reasons given for this obligation fail, that is, the claim that oppression may destroy the oppressed party’s rational capacities is overstated: almost never does oppression wholly destroy rational capacities. The second objection states that the project of supporting resistance against oppression is a political rather than a moral project. Hay’s response to the first objection exemplifies the attention that a feminist ethical approach devotes to real-life situations and the second validates the inclusive position of feminist ethics toward the borderlines between ethics and political philosophy. With a natural segue, the last two chapters in this section and in the book exemplify the tight connection between feminist ethics and political philosophy most explicitly. The first of these chapters, Angie Pepper’s “Women and Global Injustice: Institutionalism, Capabilities, or Care,” starts by defending the claim that there is no hope of addressing issues of global justice without paying attention to gender inequality and oppression. In her chapter, Pepper critically examines three rival theories of global justice, that is, Thomas Pogge’s institutional globalism, a global ethics of care, and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. The first goal of this examination is to show



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

369

how an analytic feminist approach to global injustice promotes a more effective critique of these theories and their strengths and weaknesses. The second goal is to argue for the thesis that a version of the capabilities approach is more promising than the other two approaches; the essay concludes by mentioning the need for the capabilities approach to find satisfactory answers to some important objections. “Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism: Reconceptualizing the Contested Relationship,” by Ranjoo Herr, aptly concludes Part 3, on value theory, and this collection of chapters with a wide-ranging discussion of the concepts of feminism, nationalism, transnationalism, and their contested relationships. Indeed while transnationalism has often been regarded as a natural ally for feminism, just as often nationalism and feminism have been considered mutually inimical. Herr aims at providing greater clarity on the relationships between these three notions; each concept is discussed in light of its historical development both as a sociopolitical movement and as a theoretical content. Against the widespread tendency of contemporary feminisms to support transnationalism and condemn nationalism, this essay provides a defense of nationalism as a relevant and progressive force in opposing transnational capitalism and engendering the feminist goal of cross-cultural gender justice.

7  For further readings Friedman, Marilyn and Angela Bolte (2007), “Ethics and Feminism,” in Alcoff, Linda. and Eva F. Kittay, eds., The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, 81–101, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. This informative and wide-ranging introduction to the development and core topics in feminist ethics can be useful both to readers searching for a quick roadmap of the field and to readers looking for readings that can provide deeper understanding of specific debates. Brennan, Samantha (2010), “Feminist Ethics,” in John Skorupski (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Ethics, 514–25. New York and London: Routledge. In this accessible introduction to feminist ethics, Brennan points out that feminist ethics can be characterized in two ways: either by topic and by a critical approach to traditional ethics, which have not usually paid much attention to moral issues arising from the life contexts of women, or by method, namely by

370

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

paying particular attention to moral practice and political context. The article contains an overview of many themes in feminist ethics showing how they constitute elaboration and extension of classical themes, such as the notion of rights. Finally, it concludes with a brief section on future directions in feminist ethics. Tong, Rosemarie and Williams, Nancy, “Feminist Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Available online: This entry provides a useful historical background to feminist approaches to ethics. It also provides an outline of the ethics of care, a detailed description of different political and ecological strands of feminist ethics, and finally a section outlining feminist views informed by existentialist, psychoanalytic, postmodern, and third-wave approaches. McAfee, Noëlle, “Feminist Political Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online:

This article will be useful to anyone interested in learning about the historical context of and contemporary developments in feminist political philosophy. The author discusses different approaches and debates including liberal feminism, radical, socialist, and Marxist feminisms, difference and diversity feminisms, and performative feminisms. Diane Jeske (2002), “Feminism, Friendship, and Philosophy,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy supplementary Volume 28, 63–82. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press. This article explores different understandings of feminist ethics, which are approached in connection with the discussion of the nature of intimate relationships. Jeske provides a unique classification and characterization of the following five types of feminist ethics: (1) feminist methodological generalism; (2) feminist methodological pluralism; (3) feminist reflective equilibrium; (4) feminist moral psychology; (5) metaethical feminism. Samantha Brennan “Recent Work in Feminist Ethics,” Ethics 104 (4): 1999. This article provides a critical discussion of work in feminist ethics up until the late 1990s, emphasizing ongoing controversies within feminist ethics regarding accounting for women’s moral experience, rights and relationality, moral character and responsibility, and contractualism. The final third of



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

371

the paper takes up the issue of abortion with in-depth discussion of feminist alternatives to mainstream accounts of abortion by Katheryn Pyne Addelson, Susan Sherwin, and Laurie Shrage. Watson, Lori (2010), “Pornography,” Philosophy Compass 5: 535–50. Watson offers a helpful overview of the major philosophical positions on the pornography debate, including the obscenity approach as well as conservative, liberal, and feminist approaches, with significant attention to the latter and especially the question of whether and how pornography harms women.

Notes 1 Although it is legitimately considered part of value theory, for space limitations we do not discuss any aesthetics in this book. 2 For a more extended discussion of the meaning of the term “feminist,” see Chapter 1, especially Section 1.2, where we provide Joan Callahan’s necessary conditions for a theory or a political movement to be feminist. 3 Notice how the first necessary condition listed by Jaggar can be regarded as logically implying the first of Challahan’s four conditions that were mentioned in the introduction to this book and that are necessary for a theory or a political movement to be feminist, that is, the acknowledgment of the subordination of women. It can also be argued that Jaggar’s first condition provides a strong motivation for the remaining conditions listed by Callahan, as the knowledge that a state of affairs is wrong may motivate one to understand its origins (Callahan’s second necessary condition), to oppose it (Callahan’s activism condition), and to find strategies to oppose it (last of Callahan’s conditions). See Section 1.2 in Chapter 1. 4 For a significant accomplishment in the discussion and revision of canonical philosophical figures, see the Re-reading the Canon Series, edited by Nancy Tuana, which have been published by Pennsylvania State University beginning in 1994. 5 In her discussion, Nelson cites Bordo (1993), Purdy (1996), Sherwin (1992), Kittay (1999), Tong (1997), Wendell (1996), and Wolf (1996). 6 For a response to Marquis, see Cudd (1990). 7 Two chapters in this book focus on salient philosophical features of sex, that is, Jenkin’s “Who’s Afraid of Andrea Dworkin? Feminism and the Analytic Philosophy of Sex” and Fraser’s “The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality.” Because of their overall approach, these chapters were included in the metaphysics and epistemology parts of this book, respectively, although their contents may have also plausibly fit in the part on value theory.

372

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

References Adams, Carol (1990), The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, New York: Continuum International. Adams, Carol, and Lori Gruen (2014), Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections With Other Animals & The Earth, New York: Bloomsbury Allen, Anita L. (1990), “Surrogacy, Slavery, and the Ownership of Life,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 13: 142–44. Anderson, Elizabeth (1990), “Is Women’s Labor a Commodity?,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 19 (1): 71–92. Anderson, Elizabeth (2004), “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life,” in Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum (eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, 277–98, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Antony, Louise (2012), “Different Voices or Perfect Storm: Why are There So Few Women in Philosophy?” Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3): 227–55. Bailey, Alison (2011), “Reconceiving Surrogacy: Toward a Reproductive Justice Account of Indian Surrogacy,” Hypatia 26 (4): 715–41. Brake, Elizabeth (2012), Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bordo, Susan (1993), Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Brennan, Samantha, ed. (2003), Feminist Moral Philosophy, Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, Canadian J of P supplementary volume 28. Card, Claudia (1991), Feminist Ethics, Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. Chodorow, Nancy (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cornell, Drucilla (2000), Feminism and Pornography, New York: Oxford University Press. Cudd, Ann E. (1990), “Sensationalized Philosophy: A Reply to Marquis’s ‘Why Abortion is Immoral,’” Journal of Philosophy, 87 (5): 262–64. Dixon, Beth (1996), “The Feminist Connection between Women and Animals,” Environmental Ethics 18 (Summer): 181–94. Dworkin, Ronald (1985), A Matter of Principle, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dworkin, Ronald (1993), “Women and Pornography,” The New York Review of Books 21 (October): 36–42. Eaton, Anne W. (2007), “A Sensible Antiporn Feminism,” Ethics 117: 674–715. Gilligan, Carol (1982), In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, Carol, and Jane Atanucci (1988), “Two Moral Orientations: Gender Differences and Similarities,” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 34: 223–37. Gruen, Lori (2015), Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals, New York: Lantern Press.



Introduction to Feminist Value Theory

373

Hartsock, Nancy (1983), “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, 283–310, Dordrecht: Reidel/ Kluver. Hampton, Jean (1993), “Feminist Contractarianism,” in Louise Anthony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own, 227–55, Boulder, CO: Westview. Hay, Carol (2013), Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppression, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Held, Virginia (1987), “Non-Contractual Society: A Feminist View,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17 (Suppl. 1): 111–37. Hoagland, Sarah L. (1991), “Some Thoughts About Caring,” in Claudia Card (ed.), Feminist Ethics, 246–63, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Jaggar, Alison M. (1991), “Feminist Ethics: Projects, Problems, Prospects,” in Claudia Card (ed.), Feminist Ethics, 78–104, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Kittay, Eva Feder (1999), Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, New York: Routledge. Langton, Rae (1990), “Whose Right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (4): 311–59. Langton, Rae, and Caroline West (1999), “Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (3): 303–19. Lindemann Nelson, Hilde (2000), “Feminist Bioethics: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going,” Metaphilosophy 31: 492–508. Lucas, Sheri (2005), “A Defense of the Feminist-Vegetarian Connection,” Hypatia 20, 1 (Winter): 150–77. MacKinnon, Catharine (1987), Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marquis, Don (1989), “Why Abortion is Immoral,” Journal of Philosophy 86 (1): 183–202. Noddings, Nel (1986), Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley: University of California Press. Noddings, Nel (2002), Starting At Home: Caring and Social Policy, Berkeley: University of California Press. Nussbaum, Martha (2000), “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 74 (2): 47–79. Parks, Jennifer A. (2010), “Care Ethics and the Global Practice of Commercial Surrogacy,” Bioethics 24 (7): 333–40. Purdy, Laura (1989), “Surrogate Mothering: Exploitation or Empowerment?” Bioethics 3 (1): 18–34. Purdy, Laura (1996), Reproducing Persons: Issues in Feminist Bioethics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

374

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Rooney, Phyllis (2001), “Gender and Moral Reasoning Revisited: Reengaging Feminist Psychology,” in Peggy DesAutels and Joanne Waught (ed.), Feminist Doing Ethics, 153–66, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Ruddick, Sara (1989), Maternal Thinking, Boston: Beacon Press. Satz, Debra (1992), “Markets in Women’s Reproductive Labor,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 21 (2): 107–31. Sherwin, Susan (1991), “Abortion Through a Feminist Ethics Lens,” Dialogue 30 (3): 327–42. Sherwin, Susan (1992), No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics & Health Care, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Thomson, Judith Jarvis (1971), “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1): 47–66. Tong, Rosemarie (1993), Feminine and Feminist Ethics, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co. Tong, Rosemarie, ed. (1996), “Feminist Approaches to Bioethics,” Journal of Clinical Ethics 7: 1–4. Tong, Rosemarie, and Nancy Williams (Summer 2016), “Feminist Ethics,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/feminism-ethics/ Walker, Margaret U. (2001), “Seeing Power in Morality: A Proposal for Feminist Naturalism in Ethics,” in Peggy DesAutels and Joanne Waugh (eds.), Feminists Doing Ethics, 3–14, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Warren, Mary Anne (1973), “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” Monist 57 (1): 43–61. Warren, Karen J. (1990), “The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism,” Environmental Ethics 12 (Summer): 126–46. Wendell, Susan (1996), The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, New York: Routlege. Wolf, Susan, ed. (1996), Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction, New York: Oxford University Press.

19

Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority1 Andrea C. Westlund

Feminist approaches to autonomy have, in recent years, been quite heavily focused on the moral psychology of self-governance. That is to say, they have been focused largely on questions about what it is for the motives, reasons, or values on which one acts to count as one’s own in some nontrivial, normatively significant sense.2 It is not surprising that this question has attracted feminist interest. Socialization into oppressive practices, the development of adaptive preferences, and the internalization of self-undermining attitudes all seem likely to compromise an agent’s relationship to her motives, reasons, and values in an intuitively important way.3 Feminist philosophers have developed rich and widely varying accounts of how such conditions bear on autonomous agency, accounts that rely in turn on different underlying conceptions of the capacities and characteristics of self-governing agents. What they tend to share, however, is the view that self-governance is a relational capacity—at the very least causally, in the sense that the capacities and competencies that one must exercise in autonomous choice and action can only be developed in and through relationships with other agents, but perhaps also constitutively, in the sense that what makes a choice or action one’s own cannot be explained without reference to some form of relationality.4 Feminist philosophers have, collectively, made a distinctive contribution to the wider literature on autonomy by developing these ideas, and also by identifying various respects in which oppressive social commitments may undermine or compromise some of the relational preconditions for autonomous agency. Implicit, in this work, is the conviction that something of considerable normative significance is at stake in the concept of self-governance. This conviction is a reasonable one. The ability to identify the subset of motives, reasons, and values that count as an agent’s own is, plausibly, important for a

376

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

variety of reasons. Knowing when and to what extent the agent’s choices and actions express or reflect her own point of view or “practical identity” may, for example, make a difference to assessments of responsibility, and may condition the reactive attitudes involved in responses to perceived wrongdoing. But, these responsibility-related concerns are not all that is at stake. The importance we place on self-governance and the “ownership” of choice and action seems also to be deeply rooted in a conception of how autonomous individuals ought to relate to one another—and, in particular, in a concern to avoid and protect against unwarranted paternalistic intervention. As Catriona Mackenzie puts it, “to respect autonomy is to respect each person’s interests in living her life in accordance with her own conception of the good” (Mackenzie 2008: 512). Mackenzie rightly points out that the normative requirement to respect this interest seems to be underpinned by the presumption that autonomy, in the sense of self-governance, confers normative authority on the agent’s choices (Mackenzie 2008: 512). In other words, we treat the choices of a self-governed agent as having a special status—as imposing certain constraints on acceptable ways of interacting with or attempting to influence the one who makes them. In this chapter, I follow Mackenzie’s lead in focusing on the normative authority we attribute to self-governing agents (or to agents we presume to be self-governing), and in exploring the relational dimensions of this authority. In Section 1, I identify a conception of autonomy as sovereign practical authority and distinguish it from the more commonly discussed conception of autonomy as self-governance. I suggest that, on any reasonable conception of our lives as socially embedded agents, sovereign practical authority must function as a shared system of norms for interaction. Within this system, an individual’s authority over her own choices and actions may be shared with, transferred to, or withheld from others through the exercise of normative powers (or moral powers) that affect how others are permitted or required to treat one another. My central claim, introduced in Section 2, is that the normative powers through which agents exercise and negotiate the limits of sovereign practical authority are themselves relational powers, powers whose successful exercise depends in part on the mutual recognition of agents as those who have an equal basic authority to exercise such powers in the first place. Drawing on feminist speech act analyses of silencing and subordination, I develop this claim by examining failures of uptake and the implications of such failures for personal autonomy in the sense of practical authority. Finally, in Section 3, I suggest that, despite being distinct conceptions of autonomy, there is an important conceptual



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

377

connection between the relationality of self-governance and the relationality of practical authority. I accept and attempt to vindicate a version of the commonly held idea that agents’ practical or normative authority over their choices is grounded in the capacity for self-governance.

1  Autonomy as sovereign practical authority The kind of authority on which I focus, in this chapter, is specifically practical authority (as opposed to epistemic authority), or in other words, authority to settle the question of what to do (rather than authority regarding what to believe). To have sovereign practical authority over one’s choices is for one’s choices, ultimately, to be up to one to make, and not up to anyone else to make. Autonomy understood as sovereign practical authority includes the idea that persons have certain autonomy rights that protect a sphere of choice for the agent. It is these autonomy rights, rather than the capacity for self-governance per se, that are most directly violated by acts of coercion, manipulation, and other forms of wrongful interference with an agent’s choices.5 The concept of sovereign practical authority is no doubt closely linked to the concept of self-governance. Once again, as Mackenzie points out, it is commonly presumed that it is self-governance that confers normative authority on an agent’s choices, thereby grounding the requirement of respect for those choices. Nonetheless, self-governance and practical authority are somewhat different ideas. To put it colloquially, practical authority is a jurisdictional matter: who is “in charge,” and how are permissible modes of interaction shaped by the exercise of the powers associated with this status? Self-governance, as I understand it, is instead an executive matter, concerning the question of agential control or determination of action: under what circumstances does a choice or action count, in the fullest sense, as the agent’s own doing? Under what circumstances does an action count as determined by the agent, him or herself? One might say that, whereas autonomy as practical authority (autonomyPA) concerns the agent’s authority over her choices and actions, autonomy as self-governance (autonomySG) concerns the authority of a choice or action to “speak for” or represent the agent. With this basic distinction in place, we can go on to trace out several other differences between autonomySG and autonomyPA. Self-governance, it seems to me, is something that one does, whereas practical authority is something that one

378

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

has. Self-governance is something one can achieve to different degrees, and that one may achieve more fully within some domains than others. It is notable that it is an achievement, period. Practical authority, or the authority to make one’s own choices, seems to me to be something one either has or does not have—a normative status that has certain implications for one’s relations with others regardless of how well one actually does along the dimension of self-governance. Moreover, it seems to me that one might actually be self-governing even if not recognized as such, while actually having practical authority over one’s choices and actions is, in a way that I’ll try to cash out in this chapter, directly sensitive to others’ recognition and uptake. I’ll argue that sovereign practical authority over choice and action, as an aspect of autonomy, is relational in different ways from self-governance of choice and action. Maintaining a protected sphere of choice for the agent, as implied by the idea of autonomy rights, requires maintaining a sphere of sovereign decisionmaking authority that normally excludes the exercise of decision-making authority by others. AutonomyPA might therefore seem an unlikely candidate for significant relationality. However, the very idea of a right—in particular, the idea of a “claim right,” in the sense associated with legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld (1919)—is relational in a straightforward but important sense. A claim right exists when and only when a certain kind of relationship exists between two (or more) parties, a relationship in which one party has standing to require or demand certain treatment or behavior from the others, and the others have duty to the first to comply. What individual agents have the standing to claim or “demand” of one another, in this Hohfeldian sense, is embedded in a shared system of social, legal, and moral norms, the shape of which may itself be subject to collective (re-) interpretation and negotiation. On the Hohfeldian system, an agent has a liberty or “privilege” right when they have no duty not to perform the action in question. The idea that individual agents enjoy a sphere of sovereign practical authority may seem to be most closely associated with this latter sort of right—that is, with the idea of privilege rights—but the ways in which we actually exercise practical authority involve a complex mix of the two. AutonomousPA agents routinely and collectively shift and reshape spheres of privilege, and enter into relationships involving claim rights and directed duties, by exercising powers to change the normative features of their situation. They may share their practical authority with one another by consenting to or inviting others’ involvement in their choices. They may seek advice from one another, they may deliberate jointly with one another, and they may sometimes even defer or cede authority over certain



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

379

choices to others. Certainly, the fact that practical authority may be shared and transferred opens up opportunities for, and vulnerabilities to, abuse. But absolute independence from others in the exercise of practical authority is both unrealistic (indeed, fantastical) and undesirable. The share-ability of practical authority overall seems to support rather than undermine the agential interest in living their lives in accordance with their own conceptions of the good. After all, individual conceptions of the good are socially shaped and, more substantively, often (if not always) involve the sharing of certain domains of authority with others. In the next section, I develop these ideas through the elaboration of the idea of a normative power, on which I’ve drawn here.

2  Normative powers: Some examples The idea of a normative power arises with considerable frequency in recent philosophical discussions of communicative acts such as commanding, consenting, promising, forgiving, and requesting.6 But what is a normative power?7 According to Gary Watson, a normative power is a power to “create and rescind normative requirements at will” (Watson 2009: 155). Seana Shiffrin, similarly, describes the exercise of such powers as involving the “generation of morally significant relations merely through the expression of the will to do so” (Shiffrin 2008: 500). I take it that relations are morally significant if they involve some configuration of normative requirements, and that these two definitions are thus functionally equivalent. Though he does not offer a definition, Owens (2006: 73) uses the term “moral power” in a very similar way, and so does Alice MacLachlan in her recent paper on forgiveness (MacLachlan 2009). So how are normative powers, thus conceived, related to autonomy as sovereign practical authority? I will approach this question through a consideration of promising. Both Shiffrin and Owens defend a “normative powers” account of promising, or in other words, an account on which making a promise is an exercise of a normative power. Shiffrin builds her case for promising via a comparison with consent, which she takes to be a simpler case. Interestingly, her argument turns on a conception of autonomy rights and of what powers any recognizably autonomous agent must have to engage in desirable and valuable relationships with others. Two of her examples are as follows: when you consent to physical examination by a doctor, you transform something that would have been a violation into something that is not. Likewise, when you give a worker permission to enter your house or apartment, you transform something that

380

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

would have been a trespass into something that is permitted. In each case, a permission is generated simply through a communicative act in which the agent expresses her will to generate that permission. Having generated a permission, moreover, there are new requirements on the agent herself—she must not, Shiffrin points out, raise certain kinds of complaints and must notify the other if she wishes to revoke the permission. Shiffrin takes our power to generate requirements and permissions to be grounded in our autonomy. Any reasonable conception of autonomy and associated rights, she argues, must include the ability to transfer permissions and take on new requirements in this way. Absent this power, we simply couldn’t lead the kinds of lives we in fact lead, and want to lead, in concert with other agents. Owens, similarly, argues that the power to change the moral situation between agents by expressing the will to do so is grounded in our “authority interest”— the interest we have in being able to shift authority to others or accept authority over others in particular situations (Owens 2006). The key idea, once again, is that in the absence of such powers, our agency would be so severely limited as to be unrecognizable to us. Both Shiffrin and Owens argue that promising is best understood as a transfer of practical authority to the promisee—upon accepting a promise, it is now up to the promisee whether to hold the promiser to the promise or release her. The promiser has voluntarily taken on a new obligation and transferred the power of release to the promisee. Making a promise is one way in which an agent may reshape the sphere of sovereign authority associated with her autonomy. In making a promise the agent constrains herself by abdicating her ultimate “say-so” with respect to at least one decision: she is normatively bound to act as promised unless released, and she does not have the authority to release herself. I have argued elsewhere (Westlund 2013) that voluntary deference is another way in which the agent may reshape her sphere of practical authority: in deferring to others, we transfer deliberative authority to them over some decision or range of decisions and acquire certain new obligations in the process. (There are less benign forms of deference, which involve something less than a voluntary transfer of authority, but that is a subject for another time.) Other examples of exercising normative powers discussed in recent literature include the issuing of commands and the making of requests. MacLachlan, as noted above, argues that forgiving and withholding forgiveness both involve the exercise of what she calls a moral power. Other speech acts, such as that of refusal, function to deny permissions or reject overtures that would otherwise rework the fabric of reasons



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

381

and requirements that hold between the parties in question. The exercise of each of these various powers transforms normative relations in a unique way, so that they cannot all be given the same analysis. But the key point is that, in each case, normative relations are transformed or maintained through a (relatively simple) communicative act. It might seem odd that we should have such powers. How could mere forms of expression suffice to incur real normative consequences? David Hume famously compared the generation of voluntary obligations to “transubstantation or holy orders” and regarded it as a quite thoroughly mysterious operation (Hume 1978: 524). But is the idea that mere forms of expression should sometimes suffice to transform the normative landscape really any stranger than the idea that tokens of monetary value backed by nothing other than our economic practices should suffice to incur real monetary transactions and generate real financial obligations? I suggest that as social agents with practical authority, we operate in an economy of authority, exchanging and transferring reasons, permissions, and obligations through recognized, communicative “tokens.” These tokens are effective within the complex but, ultimately, non-mysterious social practices that have arisen to serve what Owens calls our “authority interests” (Owens 2006). The ability to exercise normative powers is socially grounded in several respects: First and most obviously, it requires that relevant social practices (an “economy of authority”) be in place. Participation in an economy of authority, secondly, requires skills that are socially inculcated, and sensitivity to social norms governing the expression of various intentions. Thirdly, successful participation in an economy of authority depends on others’ recognition of one’s relevant communicative acts as the sorts of acts they are intended to be. There are, in other words, important uptake conditions for the exercise of normative powers and, therefore, for the effective exercise of sovereign practical authority. This latter claim is perhaps best illustrated through an exploration of examples in which such uptake is absent. I turn to several such examples in the following section.

3  Violations, abuses, and failures of uptake There are many ways of violating the practical requirements that are generated or transformed through the exercise of normative powers. Some ordinary examples include failing to seek consent where it is required, disregarding

382

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

refusals, breaking a promise, disobeying a legitimate command. We commonly refer to such violations of a person’s sphere of sovereign authority as violations of autonomy. These are violations of normative requirements that already exist and have (normative) force in light of the agent’s recognized practical authority. In this section, however, I’ll argue that failures of uptake for the exercise of normative powers constitute something deeper than an autonomy violation. Such failures can undermine or compromise autonomyPA, in its authorityrelated dimension, leading to severe restrictions on or limitations of a person’s agency. I say that compromising or undermining autonomyPA is a deeper matter than violating it not because compromising or undermining always has more serious consequences—some violations have extremely severe consequences— but because they operate by interfering with the generation, transfer, or communication of normative requirements in the first place, and thus put in question the status of the agent as one with an authority interest (or sphere of sovereign authority). This failure of recognition delimits and constrains the agency of the affected party and also affects the possibility of seeking redress for wrongs, which might not after all be recognized as wrongs. Arguments about illocutionary disablement, as elaborated, for example, by Hornsby and Langton (1998), Langton (2009), and Maitra and McGowan (2010), are a prominent source of examples of ways in which lack of uptake can undermine the ability to exercise certain normative powers. These philosophers develop ideas present in the work of Catherine MacKinnon on pornography and rape, arguing that pornography, either causally or constitutively, silences women by systematically undermining women’s ability to communicate sexual refusal. On their accounts (which differ in detail but share the following key idea), the portrayal of sexuality and sexual “scripts” common in much pornography undermines the economy of sexual authority and perpetuates rape culture by undermining uptake conditions for women’s refusals. Silencing in this performative sense doesn’t create literal silence; women still speak. But it interferes with women’s ability successfully to perform acts of refusal, since it interferes with their ability to communicate the illocutionary intention to refuse (Maitra and McGowan 2010; McGowan et al. 2011). Importantly, the speech acts they may be unable to perform—refusals—are speech acts that are otherwise used to deny permissions, and exert the boundaries of one’s sovereign authority over one’s body.8 On the flip side, many third-wave and self-described sex-positive feminists are highly critical of second-wave feminists such as Catherine MacKinnon for propagating what is sometimes referred to as “victim feminism”—a form of



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

383

feminism that (allegedly) portrays women as though they were simply victims, and rather than as agents exercising wills of their own. The charge is not just that second-wave feminists overestimate the extent to which women have been victimized, but that their representation of women as victims has in some sense actually made or constructed women as victims, and in so doing, denied them their agency. These charges, though quite widespread, can be perplexing. After all, calling out the victimization of women doesn’t make them victims, and failing to call out the victimization of women won’t make that victimization go away. From a certain angle, it just seems like wishful thinking. But with the normative powers view of practical authority in hand (which, perhaps ironically, Catherine MacKinnon is at least partly responsible for introducing into feminist philosophy), I think we can arrive at an understanding of such charges that is coherent and worth taking seriously: certain depictions of women—as the defenseless prey of more powerful others, or as the “dupes of patriarchy” (to borrow a term from Narayan (2002))—might actually undermine uptake for certain expressions of women’s agency. To take a pertinent example, it might undermine women’s ability to express their sexuality in certain ways because those forms of expression can’t be read as anything but unwitting submission to male domination or the parroting of harmful gender norms. If this is right, then here, too, a lack of uptake undermines affected agents’ practical authority by delimiting the range of normative powers they can exercise. Viewing someone as a victim or dupe of patriarchy may undermine her ability to communicate meaningful consent to certain interactions, or to register certain preferences or desires (in, for example, dialogue with other feminists) in a way that will be taken seriously or as meriting respect. The above examples—concerning the ability to communicate refusal, on the one hand, and the ability to communicate meaningful consent, on the other— both concern forms of silencing: that is to say, they concern ways in which certain portrayals of women’s sexuality may systematically undermine uptake for or recognition of women’s illocutionary intentions. As such, these examples concern local compromises of autonomyPA and, more specifically, local compromises of sexual agency, which compromise agents’ ability successfully to exercise specific normative powers in specific contexts. A related but distinct phenomenon, also identified by MacKinnon and explored insightfully by Langton, seems to involve more global effects, which extend across a wider range of normative powers and a wider range of social contexts. According to MacKinnon and Langton, pornographic representations of women not only silence but also subordinate

384

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

women, by ranking them as lower than others. Langton compares pornography’s subordinating effects to the subordinating effects of hate speech: instances of racist or homophobic hate speech, she argues, are not “just words,” but are actually constitutively subordinating speech acts that rank members of targeted groups as lower and legitimate violent, humiliating, and/or discriminatory treatment of them (Langton 2009). Whether and when “mere” speech has the power to subordinate targeted individuals is a subtle question. In order to rank and subordinate, the speech acts in question must be backed by relevant forms of authority. In formal, institutional examples of subordinating speech (such as the articulation of laws and policies in apartheid era South Africa or the Jim Crow era in the American South) racist codes were backed by legal and institutional authority, and subordinated members of targeted groups with clear legal force. More informal instances of hate speech, and most instances of pornographic speech, are more complicated in this regard. Some argue that pornographers, for example, simply don’t have the authority needed for their illocutionary acts to constitute acts of subordination.9 It is not clear, however, why we should think that relevant forms of authority must be limited to legal or formal institutional authority. Young (1990) convincingly argues that oppression itself may occur, and effectively subordinate members of particular groups, without formal institutional or legal enforcement, through the operation of everyday norms and informal practices. Oppression may, in other words, be systemic and structural rather than the product of tyrannical actions of ruling authorities. Quite plausibly, informal but pervasive forms of race-, sex-, and gender-based privilege that arise out of systems of structural oppression endow some speakers’ down-grading speech acts with all the authority they need to count as constitutively subordinating, or at least as contributing to the subordination of less privileged others, even when they do not have official legal standing to pronounce on the status of others. Such speech acts might, in other words, be backed by cultural rather than legal or political authority. For the purposes of this chapter, however, all I am really committed to is the hypothetical claim that if a member of a targeted group is subordinated—either formally by law and social policy or informally by, for example, informal but systematic hate speech or pornographic speech—then this subordination will tend to compromise or undermine that individual’s sphere of practical authority. I will now attempt to explain why this is so. The mechanism by which subordination compromises practical authority is a little less clear than the mechanism at work in silencing. Being subordinated



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

385

doesn’t seem to correlate with the inability to perform a single, specific speech act, or to communicate a single specific illocutionary intention, such as refusal or consent. It is plausible, however, that even if illocutionary subordination doesn’t target any one normative power in particular, it compromises and diminishes practical authority in a more generalized way—rendering it less likely, for example, that subordinates will be “heard” and taken seriously as co-deliberators, coworkers, students, peers, romantic partners, or spouses. Consider, to take just one domain, ways in which subordination may affect agents’ ability to access or participate in the professional sphere. Research on implicit bias, for example, shows that the accomplishments of women or of members of underrepresented minorities tend to be regarded less favorably than the same accomplishments attributed to white men, and this may effectively undercut attempts by women and minority candidates to communicate their skills and qualifications.10 Research on conversational turn taking and interruption patterns similarly indicates that women are interrupted more often than are men, both by men and by other women, and that their contributions are less often taken up than the same contributions made by a man.11 These patterns suggest that women may be compromised in their attempts to participate in and influence collective decision-making, even when they formally have a place at the table. Though we may not be accustomed to thinking of these forms of professional participation as involving the exercise of normative powers, they quite clearly do: the power to command attention and respect, to make claims that call for a response, to put a proposal up for consideration, to initiate a decision, and so on. As Langton herself emphasizes, subordination also legitimates abuse, harassment, and violence against members of targeted groups, who, in virtue of the subordination, may not be seen (or at least fully appreciated) as having a legitimate claim against being treated in such a way. This compromises practical authority over the use and abuse of one’s body and person in a fairly intuitive way: if one cannot exclude or redress violence, harassment, and abuse, one hardly has effective practical authority over the ways in which one relates to and interacts with others. The fate of the character Augustus Townsend, in the novel The Known World by Edward P. Jones, starkly illustrates this point. Augustus has legally gained his freedom, but due to ongoing racial subordination, lacks fully effective practical authority over his body and life. His legal freedom does not protect him against being sold back into slavery, nor is there any effective redress for the violation of the law constituted by the illicit sale (Jones 2003). Examples could be multiplied, some having greater reach and greater impact than others. Failures of uptake might undermine an agent’s ability to exercise

386

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

normative powers at all, either across domains or within certain domains, and thus undermine personal sovereignty over choices and actions in a quite thorough-going way. In Henrik Ibsen’s classic play A Doll’s House, Torvald’s attitude toward his once-disgraced, then forgiven wife Nora exemplifies this sort of dynamic in the personal sphere: Torvald claims the responsibility to “serve as will and conscience” for them both (Ibsen 1992: 64) and to take all of Nora’s decisions in her place. Nora is relegated to a subordinate role in her marriage by Torvald’s failure to acknowledge her distinct personhood and decisionmaking authority, and she is thereby silenced in a relatively general way within the domestic sphere—a silencing that precipitates her infamous departure at the end of the play.

4  Toward a unified view of autonomy? I have distinguished, in this chapter, between two faces of autonomy as it is commonly understood: autonomy as self-governance of choice and action, and autonomy as practical authority over choice and action. One might hope, ultimately, to articulate a unified account of autonomy, on which these two faces, despite being distinct from one another, clearly hang together. I am optimistic that such a unified account is in the offing. So, what might be the relationship between autonomy understood as a sphere of practical authority, and autonomy understood as self-governance? To begin with, it is worth noting that both faces of autonomy are deeply relational, though in different ways. As noted earlier, accounts of autonomy as self-governance address the conditions under which desires, commitments, or choices have the authority to “speak for the agent” (or to count as expressions of her agency, as opposed to something that merely happens in and to her), while accounts of autonomy as practical authority concern the conditions under which an agent has the authority to speak for herself (where “speak” should be interpreted broadly to include the speech acts involved in individual and shared decision-making). I have focused in this chapter on the relationality of the latter, arguing that the exercise of practical authority depends on a relationally conditioned ability to exercise normative powers. In order effectively to exercise normative powers, I’ve argued, the agent’s illocutionary intentions must receive appropriate uptake from others—or, perhaps more accurately, uptake for her illocutionary intentions must not be systematically blocked or undermined.



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

387

We’ve seen how systematic lack of recognition for women’s sexual agency may undermine individual women’s bodily integrity and freedom of sexual expression. More generally speaking, we’ve also considered how lack of recognition for subordinated agents’ equal authority to “speak for themselves” may compromise their ability to shape and delimit the terms of others’ participation in their decision-making and action, as well as the terms of others’ access to their bodies, personal affects, and space. My claim thus far has been, in short, that the relationality of autonomy as a sphere of sovereign practical authority can be cashed out in terms of the relationality of the exercise of normative powers. As noted earlier, much ink has already been spilled on the relationality of the first face of autonomy, or in other words, on the relationality of self-governance. The literature has come to focus on two main conditions for self-governance of choice and action, namely, competence conditions and authenticity conditions. Competence conditions include having adequately developed cognitive, executive, emotional, and imaginative skills that are required to govern oneself, whereas authenticity conditions are those conditions required in order for a choice or preference to count as truly one’s own (which is often understood to mean something like “expressive of the agent’s self or identity”). Competence conditions are clearly relational in a causal sense: no human agent could plausibly develop (or maintain) all the rich agential and deliberative capacities involved in self-governance in a relational vacuum. Authenticity, in choice and action, is typically understood as a matter of choice and action flowing from, cohering with, or expressing the agent’s self or practical identity. The question of what distinguishes authentic from “alien” desires or values is often answered by appeal to attitudes that serve to make them the agent’s own, by rendering them internal to her identity or self. Paradigmatically, these are attitudes of reflective endorsement. Because such endorsement itself requires certain reflective capacities, authenticity is arguably causally relational for precisely the same reasons that competence conditions are relational: developmentally speaking, the emergence of required reflective capacities and self-relations undoubtedly depends not only on innate cognitive or emotional capacities but also on the cultivation of those capacities within relations of care. A number of feminist philosophers have argued that the satisfaction of competence and authenticity conditions (as articulated above) is not sufficient for autonomy in the sense of self-governance, and develop further necessary conditions having to do with dialogical answerability or mutual recognition (Benson 2005; Westlund 2003, 2009; Anderson and Honneth 2005).12 My own

388

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

way of developing such a condition begins with recognition that an agent may intuitively be “in the grips” of a desire that she wholeheartedly and (in a formal sense) reflectively endorses. Indeed, the imperviousness of her endorsement to justificatory challenge may be a sign of the extent to which she is gripped by the endorsement itself, rather than a sign that the endorsed desire is expressive of her agency. I suggest that a disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one’s desires (or, more generally, on one’s action-guiding commitments) marks the difference between being “gripped” by one’s desires or commitments and governing oneself in accordance with them. Briefly put, I take a disposition to hold oneself answerable—to treat oneself as one, selfrepresenting agent among others, who is ultimately responsible for answering to justificatory challenges to her action-guiding commitments—as a necessary condition for autonomy as self-governance. One theoretical advantage offered by a dialogical account of self-governance, such as the answerability-based account that I have just sketched out, is that it suggests an avenue for unifying the two faces of autonomy I’ve distinguished in this chapter. “Holding answerable,” after all, is itself a good candidate for treatment as a normative power. Holding someone—including oneself— answerable places her under a (normative) expectation that she respond, on her own behalf, to justificatory challenges to the commitments that guide her choices and actions. This involves the generation of normative requirements that are central to our responsibility practices. Indeed, holding answerable arguably has a very special place among normative powers. To hold someone answerable is to treat her as someone with a special kind of practical authority—the authority to answer for herself, to engage on her own behalf in the exchange of reasons. It is to regard and treat her as, ultimately, in a position of authority over (and of responsibility for) her action-guiding commitments, or in other words, over those commitments that guide her choices and actions and that figure, as such, in our account of autonomy as self-governance. Arguably, seeing someone as self-representing in this way, as a participant in the exchange of normative reasons in the first place, is a prerequisite to—or, better, already implied in—the treatment of her as having a sphere of sovereign practical authority over her choices. Not having the authority to answer for oneself may be taken to justify some forms of paternalism, or relations of trustee-ship, in which another agent is appointed or treated as the ultimate authority over what the agent in question may do or what treatment she may be allowed to undergo. The example of Nora and Torvald, in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House,



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

389

provides a clear example of a case in which lack of recognition for another’s answerability compromises practical authority. Torvald does not regard Nora as ultimately authorized to answer for herself, and takes it as his responsibility to deliberate and make decisions on her behalf. Nora demonstrates, through her actions and reactions to Torvald’s treatment, that she does take herself to be relevantly authorized—but so long as she remains in (an unrevised version of) her relationship with Torvald, her practical authority will be compromised by his lack of uptake for her attempted contributions to joint decision-making and action. In order to exercise the various normative powers implicit in her autonomy, and to enjoy a sphere of sovereign practical authority, she determines that she can do no other than separate herself from her relationship to him. Failure to treat oneself as answerable undermines one’s autonomy in the guise of self-governance.13 Not being recognized by others as answerable does not directly undermine self-governance, but it does put significant pressure on it. Systematic failures of uptake for one’s attempts to answer for oneself may well lead to the erosion of the capacities required for self-answerability, or prevent the full development of those capacities in the first place. Nonetheless, agents operating under adverse social conditions, like Nora in A Doll’s House, do sometimes manage to act in self-governed ways, even when they are not recognized as doing so. By contrast, not being recognized by others as having the power to hold oneself or others answerable does, quite clearly and directly, have the potential to undermine or compromise autonomy in the sense of practical authority. It directly compromises one’s ability to communicate one’s illocutionary intentions, and thus to effectively exercise various important normative powers: to grant permissions, refuse, consent, promise, request, demand, and (even) to defer where it serves one’s “authority interest” (Owens 2006) to do so.14 Without the ability effectively to exercise such powers, one cannot be said to enjoy a great deal of autonomy in the guise of sovereign practical authority. I propose, in sum, that autonomy as self-governance and autonomy as practical authority are conceptually connected through the concept of answerability: holding answerable, as a normative power, plays a special role in both and indeed links the two together as two distinct faces of one (internally complex) notion of autonomy. Further elaboration of this proposed connection between autonomy as self-governance and autonomy as practical authority will have to wait for another occasion. But, I hope to have laid the groundwork for such elaboration by isolating sovereign practical authority as a distinct face of autonomy, and showing how the effective exercise of practical authority relies upon conditions

390

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

that are themselves social and relational in nature. As numerous feminist philosophers have emphasized, it is theoretically and politically important to continue to center autonomy as a property of individuals, since many of the harms of oppression are harms perpetrated against individuals qua autonomous agents. But, the fact that (personal) autonomy is a property of individuals must not distract us from the important reality that it is a deeply relational property of individuals, and that oppression harms individuals in large part through its effects on the relationships in and through which we exercise our agency.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Pieranna Garavaso for her untiring editorial work and for her very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful for the valuable feedback I received from audiences at the 2016 meeting of the Society for Analytic Feminism, the 2017 annual meeting of the North American Society for Social Philosophy, and a joint meeting of the Northwestern University Practical Philosophy Workshop and Women in Philosophy in the Chicago Area in December of 2017. I’m particularly grateful to Aleksy Tarasenko-Struc for his detailed comments at the latter event. 2 Moral psychologists working on autonomy outside the feminist literature have shared this intense focus on self-governance, asking, for example, what it is for an agent to be identified with a motive or desire (Frankfurt 1988), or what gives a motive or desire the authority to “speak for” the agent (Bratman 2007). 3 See Stoljar (2013) for an excellent survey of feminist treatments of these concerns. 4 I discuss the different forms that relational accounts of autonomy may take at greater length in Westlund (2009). 5 Moral-psychological accounts of self-governance sometimes struggle with these intuitive violations, addressing them by adding seemingly ad hoc constraints on the autonomy of choice and action. For example, we are reluctant to call a coerced choice autonomous even when the agent’s decision to comply in the face of a credible threat is one that the agent has made deliberatively and reflectively and fully endorses, given the situation—so we say that not being coerced is also a condition of autonomy. I propose that these additions seem ad hoc, in the context of many discussions of self-governance, because they are actually connected to a different face of autonomous agency altogether, namely, that of practical authority. 6 See, for example, Enoch (2011), Owens (2006), Raz (1972), Shiffrin (2008), Watson (2009), MacLachlan (2009), Westlund (2013).



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

391

7 I acknowledge that the very idea of a normative power is somewhat controversial, but it is not the purpose of this chapter to defend the idea from the ground up. For better or worse, I take for granted that human agents can and do exercise such powers. 8 Some have objected to illocutionary accounts of silencing on the grounds that on such accounts, rapists’ responsibility for rape is mitigated. For a reply to this objection, see McGowan et al. (2011). 9 Judith Butler, for example, takes issue with Langton’s argument on this point in Excitable Speech (Butler 1997). 10 Many studies have shown these effects. For a concise and helpful overview, see Correll and Benard (2006). 11 See, for example, Hancock and Rubin (2014) and Karpowitz and Mendelberg (2015). 12 Catriona Mackenzie argues that these philosophers in fact point to a different dimension of autonomy, namely self-authorization, which is distinct from selfgovernance (Mackenzie 2014) but also, I think, distinct from the notion of practical authority that I develop here. 13 Again, if Mackenzie is right, this failure would mark a failure not of self-governance per se, but of the distinct dimension of autonomy to which she refers as selfauthorization (Mackenzie 2014). 14 I adopt the term “authority interest” from Owens, to refer to the interest we have in being able to shift authority to others or accept authority over others in particular situations (Owens 2006). For reasons articulated in the first section of this chapter, I see this authority interest as being intimately connected to the interest that socially embedded, socially constituted agents have in leading their lives in accordance with their own conceptions of the good.

References Anderson, Joel, and Axel Honneth (2005), “Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition, and Justice,” in John Christman and Joel Anderson (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, 127–49, New York: Cambridge University Press. Benson, Paul (2005), “Taking Ownership: Authority and Voice in Autonomous Agency,” in J. Christman and J. Anderson (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, 101–26, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bratman, Michael (2007), Structures of Agency, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge.

392

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Correll, Shelley J., and Stephen Benard (2006), “Gender and Racial Bias in Hiring,” Memorandum report for University of Pennsylvania (March 21: 2006). Enoch, David (2011), “Giving Practical Reasons,” Philosophers Imprint 11 (4): 1–42. Frankfurt, Harry (1988), The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hancock, Adrienne B., and Benjamin A. Rubin (2014), “Influence of Communication Partner’s Gender on Language,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34 (1): 46–64. Hohfeld, W. (1919), Fundamental Legal Conceptions, edited by Walter Wheeler Cook, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hornsby, Jennifer, and Rae Langton (1998), “Free Speech and Illocution,” Legal Theory. 4 (1): 21–37. Hume, David (1978), A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Original edition, 1740. Ibsen, Henrik (1992), A Doll’s House, New York: Dover Publications. Jones, Edward P. (2003), The Known World, New York: HarperCollins. Karpowitz, Christopher F., and Tali Mendelberg (2015), The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Langton, Rae (2009), “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” in Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, 25–64, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maitra, Ishani, and Mary Kate McGowan (2010), “Discussion: On Silencing, Rape, and Responsibility,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (1): 167–72. Mackenzie, Catriona (2008), “Relational Autonomy, Normative Authority, and Perfectionism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (4): 512–33. Mackenzie, Catriona (2014), “Three Dimensions of Autonomy: A Relational Analysis,” in Andrea Veltman and Mark Piper (eds.), Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. MacLachlan, Alice (2009), “Moral Powers and Forgiveable Evils,” in Kathryn Norlock and Andrea Veltman (eds.), Evil, Political Violence and Forgiveness: Essays in Honor of Claudia Card, 135–57, Lexington, KY: Rowman & Littlefield. McGowan, Mary Kate, Alexandra Adelman, Sara Helmers, and Jacqueline Stolzenberg (2011), “A Partial Defense of Illocutionary Silencing,” Hypatia 26 (1): 132–50. Narayan, Uma (2002), “Minds of Their Own: Choices, Autonomy, Cultural Practices, and Other Women,” in L. M. Antony and C. Witt. (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, 418–32, Cambridge, MA: Westview Press. Owens, David (2006), “A Simple Theory of Promising,” Philosophical Review 115 (1): 51–77. Raz, Joseph (1972), “Voluntary Obligations and Normative Powers II,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46: 59–102. Shiffrin, Seana (2008), “Promising, Intimate Relationships, and Conventionalism,” The Philosophical Review 117 (4): 481–524.



Relational Autonomy and Practical Authority

393

Stoljar, Natalie (2013), “Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online: https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/feminism-autonomy/. Watson, Gary (2009), “Promises, Reasons, Normative Powers,” in D. Sobel and S. Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westlund, Andrea (2003), “Selflessness and Responsibility for Self: Is Deference Compatible with Autonomy?” Philosophical Review 112: (4). Westlund, Andrea (2009), “Rethinking Relational Autonomy,” Hypatia 24 (4): 26–49. Westlund, Andrea (2013), “Deference as a Normative Power,” Philosophical Studies’ 166 (3): 455–74. Young, Iris Marion (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

20

(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status Amanda Roth

As an undergraduate my first experience with philosophy was a course on the morality of abortion. As a teenager who had found feminism a few years before, I was enlivened by the intellectual stimulation of college and the opportunity to study such a divisive social issue in a scholarly manner. In that course we studied the most famous philosophical discussions of abortion in a great deal of depth and very quickly I was hooked on philosophy. Meanwhile I was also actively engaged in feminist activism on campus, which included pro-choice activism around abortion. In both arenas, I found the landscape of values regarding abortion to be understood in similar terms; the moral and legal status of abortion, everyone seemed to agree, hinged on two and only two matters: the bodily autonomy of individuals1 and the personhood (or lack thereof) of fetuses. In hindsight, what is most striking to me about my early thinking politically and philosophically about abortion is both the utter lack of depth and my lack of exposure to the full array of philosophical perspectives on the topic. It would never have occurred to me then, for example, that a feminist approach to abortion might diverge from the typical liberal pro-choice account or that the philosophical focus on fetal personhood might fail miserably to capture the ethical complexity of what is involved in a typical pregnancy. Nor could I have predicted that my eventual attraction to specifically feminist perspectives on pregnancy and abortion would be made all the more salient given my own personal experience with pregnancy loss (Roth in press). It is with this background that I come to this chapter on specifically feminist views on abortion with two goals in mind. First, I offer an overview of what feminist accounts aim to do: what makes feminist philosophical approaches to abortion feminist and how feminist accounts are distinct from mainstream



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

395

approaches. Here I provide a taste of some of the most influential feminist work on abortion and the lines of argument within that literature. Second, I take up a particular controversy within the feminist identified literature that highlights the divergence between feminist-oriented work and mainstream work: the question of fetal status. I suggest that there are two major trends in feminist work on fetal status—relationality, according to which the meaning of pregnancy and standing of the fetus are determined solely by the relation between the pregnant individual and the fetus, and gradualism, according to which fetuses acquire graduated status over time as they physically and psychologically develop. In considering these competing approaches, I argue that gradualism is overall a stronger view than this version of relationality and I highlight the ways in which gradualism can achieve many of the appealing aspects of relationality without claiming that the fetus’s metaphysical/moral status is a relational matter.

1  What is feminist about feminist approaches to abortion? To begin, let us consider what a feminist approach to abortion is. One might naively assume that any position that justifies abortion is a feminist position— after all, isn’t defending abortion a major goal of feminism? But there are two problems here. First, at least some women who identify as feminists and who employ feminist values in their arguments and politics argue against the morality and legality of abortion across the board (Callahan 2001). While I believe that these arguments fail and that the values and politics taken up within these accounts are often problematically anti-feminist, this strand of thinking at least complicates the simple association of feminism with an unqualified defense of abortion.2 More importantly, while most feminists certainly support abortion, there is an open question of what exactly this support amounts to. One could defend abortion as an ethical matter, a constitutional matter, or a social and political matter. Distinct cases must be made in favor of each type of defense, and it is at least possible that a feminist approach might not defend abortion in all possible ways. Indeed, as I shall discuss below, much of the feminist literature on the topic makes room for some abortion decisions to be ethically vexing, even if abortion is unwaveringly defended legally and socially/politically. Second, not just any defense of abortion can be feminist, as some ways of defending abortion might contradict feminist values. Consider the hypothesis,

396

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

made known to the general public through the popular book Freakonomics, that the legalization of abortion in the United States was a major contributor to the fall in the crime rate in the 1990s (Donohue and Levitt 2001). Though controversial, if this hypothesis can be confirmed, it could undergird an argument for legalized abortion on the basis of concern for the public good. But this justification of abortion would be extremely concerning from a feminist point of view for a number of reasons: any independent concern about those facing unwanted pregnancies and the importance for women of the ability to control their reproduction are ignored; this makes the justification of abortion highly contingent on demographics; and such a justification conflicts with general feminist values inasmuch as it appears to recommend that some women—largely poor and often women of color—ought not to have children for the sake of the public good.3

1.1  The liberal “pro-choice” view A more plausible likely immediate contender for the feminist position on abortion is the mainstream US “pro-choice” movement, a decidedly liberal movement, both in terms of contemporary US partisan politics and the culture wars of the 1980s to the present, as well as in the philosophical foundations underlying the case it makes in favor of abortion rights. Traditionally, the movement has stressed the individualism and bodily autonomy of pregnant women, and at times has strategically bought into the rhetoric of privacy found in the Roe v. Wade decision (Saletan 2003; Smith 2005). This—combined with a denial of fetal status, or at least a tendency to want to avoid the question of the fetus’s status altogether (see Ludlow 2008a for discussion)—seems to have been the dominant political approach of the reproductive rights movement at least into the early 2000s. A parallel liberal approach to the morality and legality of abortion can be found within the early philosophical literature on the topic. Judith Thomson’s famous defense of abortion provides a clear philosophical analogue to “my body: my choice,” even citing in her paper women’s insistence in advocating for their right to abort that “this body is my body” (1971: 53). Thomson famously assumes a fetus is a person with a right to life and then shows that even so, abortion is morally permissible because a fetus has no right to use another’s body to stay alive (1971: 48–56). Thus, if one finds oneself kidnapped and hooked up to a famous violinist with failing kidneys who will die if unhooked before nine



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

397

months’ time, it is certainly true that the violinist has a right to life, but similarly certain (or so claims Thomson) that one does no wrong in unhooking oneself; the violinist, innocent though he might be, has no right to another’s body and so it is supererogatory to remain hooked up to him (Thomson 1971). Perhaps it would be indecent, Thomson admits, to abort in some circumstances, but still it remains true that even indecently aborting violates no right of the fetus, and thus it would be outrageous for the law to force one to keep the fetus alive (59–61). Call such a view the strong claim of bodily autonomy. Thomson’s defense is remarkable inasmuch as it has virtually nothing to say about fetal status, but the majority of philosophical defenses of abortion take the opposite approach, assuming that to vindicate abortion requires denying the moral status of fetuses. Work by Michael Tooley (1972), Peter Singer (2011), and Mary Anne Warren (1973), for instance, holds that fetuses are not sufficiently like “us” in terms of psychological capacities, and therefore fetuses do not have the moral standing of persons, and so abortion cannot be seriously immoral in the way that killing one of us is.4 If Thomson’s defense of abortion provides the philosophical analogue of “my body, my choice,” these accounts seem to parallel pro-choice slogans like “a clump of cells is not a baby.” The dominant liberal pro-choice view on abortion then can perhaps be understood as the marriage of these two strands of thought. The strong bodily autonomy claim ensures that one does not violate any right of the fetus by ending a pregnancy, and the denial of fetal personhood means that the death of the fetus is of little or no moral concern at all. This, I take it, is the everyday understanding of the feminist view of abortion, by everyday citizens, by activists opposing abortion, and in some cases, by activists defending access to abortion as well. Certainly, as a young philosopher and feminist activist, it was my own understanding of the moral and political landscape. Yet ever since the time of Roe, there has been a significant feminist opposition to this liberal pro-choice point of view. Justice Ginsburg (1985) and MacKinnon (1987) have both argued against the privacy-based constitutional analysis put forth in Roe and advocated for a gender equality analysis. More recently, many organizations known for their activism around abortion rights have altered course to endorse the reproductive justice framework; this framework—originally developed by women of color— emphasizes “the human right to have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (Sister Song). Of particular note here is the emphasis on the right to reproduce, a right that has never been in question for middle-class abled straight white women, but has routinely been

398

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

less than fully socially and legally recognized for disabled women, women of color, poor women, and queer people (Luna and Luker 2013; Smith 2005). Any identification of the claim of bodily autonomy combined with the denial of the moral status of the fetus as the feminist perspective then simply fails to recognize the diversity of feminist thought and activism.

1.2  What feminist philosophical accounts do The philosophical literature on abortion is often distinguished along “mainstream” and “feminist” lines, raising the following questions: What do feminist approaches to abortion do? How do they differ and improve upon mainstream accounts? And what is the boundary between mainstream and feminist literature within the philosophical work on abortion? Here I identify three very broad themes that help to capture what feminist approaches are and how they differ from mainstream approaches. Feminist approaches 1. keep pregnant individuals always central within the evaluation of the morality of abortion; 2. eschew gender neutrality and abstraction from the world as it is and women’s actual lives and experiences; 3. allow some kind of moral standing for the fetus (and not just at very late stages of gestation). In the rest of this section, I take up each of these themes in turn. I begin by explaining each difference between the two sets of literature, that is, mainstream and feminist literature on abortion, and explain the nature of the difference, that is, whether I am identifying a necessary condition or a general trend and whether the difference in question carves out a clear boundary or not. a. Keeping pregnant individuals central As (1) states, feminist approaches aim to keep central in their analysis of the ethics of abortion that those doing the gestating are agents in their own right, with interests, rights, and life plans of their own. This might seem so obvious a point that it is not worth mentioning, but in fact antiabortion discourse in the United States often seems to ignore the obvious by over-focusing on the fetus and by taking up questions of fetal “potentiality and personhood . . . as though in a vacuum” (Mackenzie 1992: 175). For a vivid example, consider Don Marquis’s



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

399

1989 paper, “Why Abortion Is Immoral” in which Marquis suggests that one aspect of what is seriously wrong with killing us—typical adult humans—is that doing so denies us a future of value. But killing fetuses has the same effect of denying a being a future of value and therefore, as it is generally seriously immoral to kill us, it is similarly wrong to kill fetuses; thus, abortion is immoral (Marquis 1989). However, as Ann Cudd (1990: 262) objects, Marquis’s argument reads “as if fetuses were things growing out in the garden, and the question of abortion were whether one may decide to till them under rather than let them come to fruition.” In fact, since fetuses exist only as part of and within the bodies of other individuals, fetuses are quite unlike us in the relevant way, and thus it cannot be concluded that since it is generally wrong to kill us, it is generally wrong to abort (ibid.). It is worth noting explicitly that not all mainstream philosophical work on abortion fails in this way. Judith Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” and Mary Anne Warren’s “The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” stand out on this point. Thomson (1971) and Warren (1973) each explicitly call attention to the rights and interests of the pregnant individual, stressing that merely establishing the fetus’s right to life or potential personhood does not thereby show abortion to be immoral, a point similar to Cudd’s.5 Thus (1) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an account of abortion to be feminist. Though I have as of yet only discussed one necessary condition of feminist work on abortion, an important objection is already lingering about the manner in which I distinguish feminist and other accounts of abortion. Notice that the contrast I am drawing is between “feminist” work and “mainstream” work, and that I have described Warren’s and Thomson’s work as mainstream. Surely there can be no doubt on this point—their pieces are contemporary classics, included in myriad anthologies and textbooks dealing with abortion and ever present on applied ethics syllabi. Yet if it is obvious that their work is mainstream and mainstream contrasts with feminist, then we must conclude that their accounts are not feminist accounts. But this seems puzzling. My own earlier discussion, for instance, took Thomson’s and Warren’s approaches to be philosophical counterpoints to popular feminist pro-choice positions. Moreover Warren’s “The Moral Significance of Birth” was published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia and has been reprinted in a volume on feminism and philosophy in the subsection on liberal feminist approaches (Tuana and Tong 1995). How could such work not count as feminist? And further, why accept that the relevant contrast in analyzing what makes some work feminist is between feminist work

400

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and mainstream work? This is to rule out at the outset the possibility of some work being both feminist and mainstream, a curious move that calls out for justification. b. Gender Perhaps the best way to respond to the objection raised above is to move to the second condition of an account of abortion being feminist—that it avoids gender neutrality and abstraction and instead focuses on women’s lives and experiences in the here and now. Immediately this condition seems to challenge the notion that Thomson and Warren obviously offer feminist accounts of abortion in that their accounts are both abstract and gender neutral. And yet, recall the important point just above that I myself referenced Thomson’s and Warren’s views as a kind of liberal feminism. What is going on here? Here I wish to lay out three ways we might think about drawing a contrast between feminist and “other” (here I use “other” as a placeholder) approaches to abortion: in terms of (a) the content of values and politics, (b) offering a critique (presumably of the dominant, or mainstream, approach), or (c) methodology. Some ways in which we refer to feminism in both everyday and academic contexts aim to focus attention on (a) the content of values and politics. Thus a professor might lament that though all of one’s students affirm most of the basic tenets of feminism, few students identify as feminists. In this context “feminist” is juxtaposed with a lack of feminist values/politics (or perhaps an affirmation of opposition to feminist values/politics). To be a feminist, we might say, is just to believe in, endorse, or otherwise exemplify feminist values. If this is the contrast we ought to be concerned with in conceptualizing feminist philosophical work on abortion, then surely Warren’s and Thomson’s papers count since they embody a liberal feminist perspective. On the other hand, we get a much different way of grouping feminist and “other” work if we take up contrast (b), in which we understand feminism to be offering a critique of dominant modes of thought. This way of making out the distinction seems to introduce some time-sensitivity. For instance, while supporting women’s suffrage was surely a feminist perspective a century ago, it would no longer make much sense to deem all who support the enfranchisement of women feminists. To make stark the difference between contrast (a) and contrast (b) we might imagine a hypothetical utopian future society in which all structural inequalities have been overcome and prejudice and discrimination based on social identity are no more. According to contrast (a) this society would be full of feminists and every individual would hold a feminist perspective—that is, they would all be committed to the full equality in all aspects of every member



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

401

of society and opposition to unjust structural inequalities of all kinds. Yet, on contrast (b) there would be no feminists and no feminist perspective in such a society since there is no room for a critique of dominant thought when dominant thought already opposes structural inequalities based on social identities like sex/ gender.6 Applied to the question what counts as a feminist account of abortion, we might say that in the early 1970s the “goal posts” were such that Thomson’s bodily integrity approach was well outside of mainstream philosophical thought regarding abortion and so was undeniably feminist at the time of its publication. But at least as far as the current philosophical literature goes Thomson’s points today are well within the mainstream, and so perhaps no longer can count as a critique of dominant thought exactly.7 Even contrast (b), however, does not quite get at an even deeper reason to resist identifying Thomson’s and Warren’s work as part of the feminist philosophical literature on abortion. Contrast (c) emphasizes that in the case of the abortion literature what is at issue is not only values and politics nor even critique of mainstream thought/practice, but also the notion of scholarship and especially the methods of pursuing scholarly work. Generally speaking, work across disciplines that is characterized as feminist scholarship today has in common the taking of gender (and other axes of inequality) as a lens by which to produce intellectual insights. For instance, inasmuch as women might have a “different voice” or women’s perspectives or ways of being have been historically ignored or devalued, beginning philosophy or theorizing with women’s lives and perspectives might be epistemically productive. Thus in scholarly contexts the categorization of work as “feminist” is often not just about the work’s expression of certain values or politics, but about the work’s method. I propose that we understand the question of what makes feminist accounts of abortion feminist (for the purposes of this chapter) in terms of contrast (c). This notion of feminist work, after all, is what seems to mark off contemporary feminist scholarship within various subfields of analytic philosophy—for example, feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, feminist metaphysics, and feminist ethics. Thus from here on out, we might understand “feminist philosophical accounts of abortion” as “feminist ethics approaches to abortion,” where feminist ethics denotes philosophical work that takes a focus on gender to be part of the method of moral philosophy. For instance, Alison Jaggar (2000) characterizes feminist ethics in terms of aiming at “including women in ethical theory” (perhaps in place of male-biased ethical theories) and taking women’s experience “as a paradigm for ethical theory.” Similarly, Samantha Brennan (1999: 860) accepts the latter aim, but in place of the former instead emphasizes

402

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

feminist ethicists’ goal of “achiev[ing] a theoretical understanding of women’s oppression with the purpose of providing a route to ending” it. Conceiving of feminist approaches to abortion in terms of feminist ethics does significant work in illuminating what is distinctive of such feminist approaches in relation to point (2) and helps explain why so many authors of feminist work on abortion have expressed dissatisfaction with accounts like Thomson’s and Warren’s, along with most other mainstream literature on the topic. What the mainstream literature has in common, after all, is a failure to aim at the goals identified by Jaggar and Brennan. Even as Warren and Thomson quite clearly engage with liberal feminist values in their discussions of bodily autonomy and personhood, neither appears particularly concerned with women’s experiences, nor with coming to understand the nature of women’s oppression. In fact, the moral arguments put forth by Thomson and Warren are largely (if not completely) gender neutral. Their arguments apply equally well to our actual situation—in which women are oppressed on the basis of their being socially marked as beings with (assumed) “female” reproductive capacities and in which the inability to control one’s reproduction is both a major cause of and a major result of such oppression—as to theoretically distant worlds, in which all humans are capable of both gestating and impregnating and gender oppression does not exist. But this is exactly what feminist methodology eschews—how can a proper defense of abortion make no reference to the situation of women in the oppressive gender system specific to our society here and now? Thus, (2), in referencing avoiding gender neutrality and abstraction, points to approaches that consider women’s perspectives and experiences, that treat gender as an axis of difference and inequality, and that consider inequality or oppression in the moral analysis of abortion. I am here characterizing (2) in a quite broad manner. This is an intentional attempt to capture the diversity of feminist philosophical work on abortion. I will here highlight a few of the main ways I see (2) at work in the feminist literature, though a thorough summary of these possibilities is impossible in a discussion of this length. These highlights include ●●

●●

●●

●●

equality defenses; emphasizing the concrete role abortion plays in women’s lives; drawing directly on women’s testimony regarding pregnancy, abortion, and reproductive loss; placing the discussion of abortion within a larger paradigm of feminist perspectives and values.



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

403

One of the clearest ways (2) is found in the feminist literature is in the equality defense of abortion. At the level of law, Justice Ginsburg (1985) and Catharine MacKinnon (1987) argue against basing the case for the right to abortion in liberty or privacy, and advocate an equality paradigm, focusing on the current inequality of women and what it would mean for women as a group if abortion were prohibited. Similarly, Alison Jaggar (1975) and Sally Markowitz (1990) have argued philosophically for grounding the moral case in favor of abortion in terms of the context of gender oppression. Markowitz, for instance, rejects the autonomy defense of abortion, and holds that even if a fetus is a person, the fact that women are oppressed on the basis of their sex/gender justifies abortion; given this background oppressive context, it would be an “impermissible sacrifice” to expect or force women to continue pregnancies for the sake of the fetus (1990: 7–10). Only in a context without gender oppression could the fact of fetal personhood lead to a moral expectation that women continue pregnancies. Another theme in the literature that represents (2) is connecting the moral evaluation of abortion to the concrete role pregnancy and abortion play in actual women’s lives. For example, discussions by Susan Sherwin (1991) and Catharine MacKinnon (1987) proceed quite differently than mainstream philosophical accounts; in the place of thought experiments and newly suggested principles, we find discussion of forced sex, male violence and control of women, single motherhood, and gendered poverty—common aspects of gender inequality that complicate women’s reproductive choices in everyday life. A related strand of feminist work emphasizes taking seriously women’s own testimony about reproductive experiences and choices. The attempt to represent women’s narratives of pregnancy and abortion, however, is complicated by questions about which women are to count—only those who are considering abortion, all pregnant women, all women (Brennan 1999: 882)—as well as by the fact of diversity among women. A related concern, as pointed out in endnote 1, is that not all of those who experience pregnancy, abortion, or childbirth are women in the first place. In the call for attention to women’s lived experience and narratives of pregnancy, loss, and abortion, there is a tension regarding to what extent this call is or ought to be a call for attention to experience and narratives of those who experience pregnancy, loss, and abortion, whatever their gender versus of those who are gendered as women. Moreover, the relation between women’s experiences/testimony and feminist philosophy and politics around abortion might turn out to be precarious. For instance, recent work has considered whether experiences of pregnancy loss

404

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and attitudes toward lost fetuses might challenge many philosophical defenses of abortion (Parsons 2010; Porter 2015; Roth in press). Some experiences of abortion—for example, being unsure about one’s choice, coming to regret terminating, or recognizing the fetus as a baby and grieving its death—appear to imply that fetuses have significant moral status, and so are strategically problematic for the reproductive rights movement (Ludlow 2008a, b). Finally, a quite different way in which feminist accounts display (2) is by situating the question of the ethics of abortion in a broader feminist ethical perspective. One approach of this sort that has led to more controversial conclusions regarding the ethics of abortion is taking up care-based feminism as Sidney Callahan (2001) and Shouten (2017) do. Care-based feminism can be traced back to the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan (1993) and philosopher Noddings (1984) and is often associated with the notion of women and girls having a distinct moral perspective that is based in care compared with the more traditional justice-oriented perspectives that have dominated the history of moral philosophy. Much of the work in feminist ethics has been influenced by care ethics, and many feminist critiques of traditional moral and political philosophy have pointed to a neglect and under-evaluation of women’s work in the form of caregiving for children, for instance. In this vein, both Callahan and Shouten take up the ethics of abortion by focusing on the fetus as a dependent—a vulnerable being in need of care—and both argue for an increased role of the community to provide for the social supports necessary to allow women to provide caregiving to fetuses. Both also conclude that, at least in some cases, women facing unwanted pregnancies have a moral duty to continue the pregnancy as a way of caring for the dependent fetus and thus meeting a central feminist value. To sum up, there are then quite different ways of taking up a specifically feminist perspective on abortion that rejects gender neutrality and/or takes seriously women’s real-life experiences with pregnancy. The views I have outlined here are only a small representative sample of the true diversity and depth of feminist views on this subject. c. The fetus Let me move then to the final aspect I wish to highlight about feminist views— their distinctive approach to fetal status as compared to most mainstream philosophical accounts. When it comes to the status of the fetus, philosophers have often leaned to the extremes. Those concluding that abortion is impermissible generally base their view on the notion that even pre-embryos



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

405

have moral status similar to us (Noonan 1970; Marquis 1989). Defenders of abortion, on the other hand, have often argued that fetuses have no moral status until some point after birth, and have even embraced infanticide as permissible in some circumstances (Tooley 1972; Warren 1973). More recent accounts are more moderate, emphasizing consciousness—which likely develops by about the third trimester—as the trait that divides fetuses with moral status from those without (McMahon 2002; Harman 2007, 1999).8 Some feminists have embraced the latter type of thought, holding that the notion of fetuses having full moral status—being persons, particularly under the law—is inherently incompatible with respecting pregnant individuals and recognizing their personhood: “There is room for only one person with full and equal rights inside a single human skin” (Warren 1989: 63, emphasis in original). Indeed, recognizing any value in the fetus at all can easily be thought to be playing into the hands of those who aim to restrict abortion. For this and related reasons, some feminist scholars and activists have preferred not to talk about the fetus at all (Ludlow 2008a: 30). Nonetheless other feminists have attempted to begin conversation among feminists acknowledging the potential moral status of (at least) some fetuses, in some pregnancies, at some points in gestation (Wolf 1995; Kissling 2004/5; Ludlow 2008a) and many feminist philosophers have followed suit. Within feminist philosophical approaches to abortion, there appear to be two main strands of thought that make room for fetuses having status prior to consciousness: gradualism and relationality. According to gradualism, the moral standing of the fetus increases gradually throughout pregnancy, as does the moral seriousness of abortion. This contrasts with the more typical philosophical accounts that point to a specific capacity— for example, consciousness—that distinguishes morally considerable fetuses from other fetuses. If consciousness does not develop until close to the third trimester, this might very well mean that fetuses in the early periviable period— still weeks away from consciousness—count for no more morally than a zygote. But gradualist Margaret Little (2008: 332) eschews such a perspective and insists that “even at early stages . . . developing human life has an important value worthy of respect; its status grows as it does, increasing . . . until, at some point late in pregnancy, the fetus is deserving of the very strong moral protection due newborns.” This view has the benefit of cohering well with everyday judgments of fetal moral status and abortion ethics, according to which later abortion is morally much more serious than early abortion (Shields 2011: 506–9; Little 2008: 332).9

406

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

On the other hand, relationality, which—as I have defined it at the beginning of this chapter—holds that the meaning of pregnancy and standing of the fetus are determined solely by the relation between the pregnant individual and the fetus, involves recognizing the diversity of experiences of pregnancy and prioritizing the pregnant person’s perspective on the pregnancy and fetus. Feminist accounts of pregnancy and abortion must be able to make sense of how the very same biological process of gestation is experienced in varied and even contradictory ways from person to person, pregnancy to pregnancy, or even moment to moment within a given pregnancy (Little 2008; Sherwin 1991). For relationalists of different stripes, the meaning of pregnancy, the nature of the gestational relationship, and/or the status of the fetus itself are determined by the pregnant individual alone.

2  Which feminist view of fetal status? One major motivation for both feminist relationality and feminist gradualism might be capturing something about the value of fetuses that is left out of mainstream defenses of abortion. Consider a question Rosalind Hursthouse (1991: 238) poses in response to views that deny fetal status for most if not all of gestation: If fetuses do not matter morally and abortion therefore is morally similar to an appendectomy, then why is pregnancy loss typically such a sad occurrence? How can the death of a being that is not morally considerable be grief-worthy? Notice the kind of pressure this question puts on mainstream accounts of fetal status—the notion that fetuses cannot matter morally until sentience, consciousness, or even birth or beyond seems quite hard to square with many women’s narratives of miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion. Little (2008: 33) and Layne (1997), for instance, appeal directly to the lack of coherence between women’s experiences of loss and abortion and mainstream accounts of fetal status in motivating their views. Obviously stillbirth is widely understood as a dreaded and terrible event, but very early miscarriages are also often met with grief (Porter 2015; Parsons 2010). And in some cases of abortion, women experience grief for the death of their fetus. For instance, Jeannie Ludlow (2008a: 43–46) writes about her experiences as a patient advocate meeting women obtaining second-trimester procedures who request baptism for their dead fetus, refer to it as a “baby,” or wish to see the body and say goodbye after the procedure. Similarly, some abortion providers indicate that, for them, the



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

407

mid- or late-pregnancy fetuses whose deaths they cause have value, and perhaps even are “babies” (Harris 2008; After Tiller). Thus responses to fetuses in the real world do not fall along the stark lines put forth in many mainstream accounts of fetal status, and it is here that both relationality and gradualism improve on such accounts. Little’s (2008: 342–43) gradualism, for instance, holds that all fetal life, even at the earliest stages, has value in a sense that demands “respect”; thus even early fetal death involves “the loss of a distinct life that had a good in at least the organismic sense and that was . . . on its way to becoming one of us.” Later fetuses have still more status, yet gradualism is not committed to reading the morality of abortion solely off of the moral status of the fetus. Rather, Little (2008: 343–46) suggests that overlaid on the trimester breakdown of fetal value are two further morally relevant concerns: the ever-moving line of viability and facts about the nature of pregnancy; both of these concerns are particularly relevant to gauging the degree of sacrifice involved in continuing a pregnancy that one would prefer to end, which must be part of the moral calculus regarding one’s obligation to the fetus. In the end Little takes these considerations as working together to lead to the conclusion that abortion is broadly permissible in the first trimester (though not a morally unserious act), justified only by compelling reasons in the third trimester as a “morally grave affair,” and something “in between” in the second trimester (332–33, 348). Thus, a feminist gradualist can explain much of the above testimony by acknowledging fetal value that increases with typical fetal development.10 Relationality can similarly offer an attractive response to Hursthouse’s challenge and account for the complexities of women’s actual experiences with pregnancy, loss, and abortion. Referencing relationality about pregnancy and the fetus, however, requires some care, as there are a variety of feminist views that count as relational on some description of relationality and not others. I suggest understanding relationality as breaking down into at least three distinct types. One can embrace relationality about (1) the gestational relationship, (2) what the pregnant individual owes the fetus, and (3) the moral status of the fetus itself. In the following discussion, I will refer to these understandings as relationality1, relationality2, and relationality3. Interestingly, Little herself offers perhaps the most obvious picture of relationality1 and relationality2 in her “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate,” where she understands abortion ethics as a form of relationship ethics. To claim that the gestational relationship itself is a relational matter is to

408

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

recognize the diversity in women’s experiences of pregnancy and understandings of the gestational relationship. As Little points out, some women feel from the start that they are in a special personal relationship with the growing fetus. They conceptualize themselves as a mother . . . . The structure of their psyche has already shifted . . . . For others, the sense of relationship grows, as most personal relationships do, slowly . . . . For other women, the relationship is never one of motherhood thickly construed: she is simply in a biological relationship with a germinating human organism. For still others, the sense of relationship shifts throughout pregnancy: a conception of motherhood is tried on, then dispatched, or arrives fully formed out of the blue. (1999: 310)

The way a woman experiences her pregnancy and the fetus in turn determines the shape of her duties toward the fetus. In much the same way that social (or raising) parents, who have a lived relation with their children, have parental obligations that mere gamete donors do not, the woman who experiences her pregnancy as a form of motherhood will have moral duties to her fetus that a woman experiencing pregnancy as an unwanted invasion does not (Little 1999: 306, 310). Little insists that “for the purposes of the woman’s integrity, her conception is determinative” (310, emphasis in original); after all, it is unclear how an “external or objective perspective” on the relationship is possible, since there is so “little to the relationship, other than the biological substrate and the woman’s experience and conception of it” (311). Little here embraces relationality1 and relationality2, in that she takes both the nature of the gestational relationship and the moral obligations of the pregnant woman to the fetus to depend on the woman’s perspective, but what about relationality3? Many discussions of relationality are more radical still, suggesting that what is determined relationally is not just the meaning of pregnancy or what the pregnant individual owes the fetus, but also the fetus’s moral status itself. Call this kind of relational perspective, relationality3. Sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman (1991: 5–6) offers a representative comment of this sort in her discussion of prenatal testing and termination: “To abort an accident is one thing. To abort your baby, even your very imperfect baby, is something else again. And that is equally true of two fetuses who are identical in size, in ounces, in ‘viability.’” Here Rothman implies that whether a given fetus is just an accident or is a “baby” is determined not by any facts about the fetus, but by the pregnant woman’s own perspective. Similarly, Layne (1997: 305–6) suggests that even quite early in pregnancy, fetuses can come to have moral status as “protopersons” inasmuch as



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

409

pregnant women begin to construct them as persons, while presumably fetuses that are not so constructed do not have any such value. Susan Sherwin (1991: 335–36) makes a similar point in terms of the social account of personhood, according to which a fetus is constructed as a person over time by other persons, namely the pregnant woman. She insists that “because of this inexorable biological reality [that fetuses exist only within and through women’s bodies and cannot be interacted with independently of the pregnant woman], she [the pregnant woman] bears a unique responsibility and privilege in determining her fetus’s place in the social scheme of things” (1991: 335). Sherwin concludes that “there is no absolute value that attaches to fetuses apart from their relational status” since “the value that women ascribe to individual fetuses varies dramatically from case to case” (1991: 335–36). Sherwin looks to be saying here that it is an individual’s ascription of status—nothing more and nothing less—that determines whether and how the fetus matters morally. Meanwhile, Catriona Mackenzie points to “moral guardianship” as the best way to flesh out relationality. When another member of the moral community takes on parental responsibility for the fetus, the fetus then “has moral significance by virtue of its relations with” that individual; “this provides some grounds for the foetus’ claims to nurture and care” (1992: 143).11 One major virtue of relational3 conceptions of fetal status is that they allow us to defend the morality of abortion without any pressure to ignore or downplay the large array of responses to pregnancy loss and abortion. Many— though certainly not all—women experience great grief upon losing a wanted pregnancy. Yet as Layne (1997) suggests, openly acknowledging this has been seen as problematic within some pro-choice circles inasmuch as it might be taken to imply that even the earliest fetuses have significant moral standing and thus call into question one major aspect of the typical liberal case in favor of abortion rights—denying the moral status of the fetus. But this conclusion can be avoided by appeal to relationality3. The average fetus grieved after a miscarriage might be virtually identical to a similarly aged aborted fetus in terms of psychological and physical development, yet be worlds apart in terms of how the pregnant woman feels about the fetus and how she has come to engage with it.12 Relationalty3 then can validate and make sense of grief for some fetuses without implying that the death of all fetuses with similar intrinsic traits is grief-worthy and without implying anything about the immorality of abortion generally.

410

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Yet, relationality3 is also likely to strike many readers as highly troubling in a way that relationality1 and relationality2 are not, inasmuch as it seems to make the status of any particular fetus radically subjective, by tying it to the pregnant woman’s own perspective on her relationship to the fetus and nothing else. This flies in the face of our usual understanding of moral status. As Little points out, it would be absurd to think, say, that an infant’s moral status is solely a matter of the parent’s perspective or their relations to the child (1999: 311). Isn’t relationality3 similarly worrisome in holding as much regarding fetuses, particularly if we consider full-term fetuses? Is a full-term fetus’s moral status really a matter of nothing but the pregnant individual’s perspective? This would mean that in atypical cases, such as denied pregnancies in which an individual is not consciously aware of gestating (Lundquist 2009), the full-term fetus would have no moral status at all. And this would be so even as embryos that are only days old might have significant moral status in newly discovered pregnancies in which one immediately begins to engage with what they understand to be a cherished future child. Can this really be how the moral status of embryos and fetuses works? But if this implication of relationality3 is both obvious and bordering on absurdity, why think that it is the view the above authors intend to put forth? Notice after all, that none of them describe their views in these explicit terms: all and only those fetuses that are engaged with or viewed in the right way by the pregnant woman have moral status. Nor do the authors discuss the full-term fetus case, which seems an immediate objection if they indeed have relationality3 in mind. Perhaps then the principle of charity requires that we question whether my interpretation here is reasonable. But if the authors in question aren’t advocating relationality3, what do they have in mind? One potentially more charitable interpretation is to take the claim about fetal status being a matter of the pregnant individual’s relationship with the fetus as a sufficient, but not necessary condition. This would mean that the pregnant person having the right sort of relation to the fetus is enough for the fetus to have moral status, but it is not the only ground of moral status; other grounds might include, say, psychological or physical development. If relationality3 posits only a sufficient condition in this way, then the denied pregnancy is no longer a problem—the full-term fetus which has in no way been engaged with by a pregnant individual might meet other sufficient conditions for moral status, such as having achieved a certain level of physical development such as being viable, being conscious, being pain-capable, and so forth. Could this be what the authors above intended?



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

411

In fact, this alternative interpretation in some ways does seem to capture what Mackenzie (1992) has in mind better than my original interpretation. She acknowledges that relationality is not the full story on fetal moral status: The moral position of the foetus changes over the course of pregnancy. At the early stages its moral standing is defined in relational terms, because it is a being with moral significance for the woman in whose body it develops and who acts as its moral guardian. As the foetus develops physically however its intrinsic moral significance increases. Its moral standing is less and less dependent on its relational properties with the woman in whose body it develops and more and more tied to its own intrinsic value. (146)

In other words, for Mackenzie relationality is just one ground of fetal status—one that is relevant particularly in the early part of pregnancy and which presumably plays no role by the very end of pregnancy.13 And yet while clearly Mackenzie is not suggesting that the right sort of relation to the pregnant woman is necessary for moral status, it doesn’t seem that the sufficient condition understanding of relationality3 is all that Mackenzie is putting forth either. For Mackenzie and other relationalists3, as for the gradualist, it seems that what is at issue is not whether fetuses have or do not have moral status—as if moral status were an all or nothing matter—but how much moral status fetuses have, and what claims on others they have in virtue of that status. In any case, the denied pregnancy case seems to be no problem for Mackenzie’s version of relationality3 if she allows that later fetuses have intrinsic moral value based on physical and/or psychological development; we might call this the weak version of relationality3. But are all proponents of relationality3 offering a view along these lines, according to which at least later fetuses have an intrinsic value that is independent from any facts about their relation with the pregnant individual? This seems doubtful: consider the ways in which Sherwin’s discussion seems to push against the idea that the typically appealed to grounds of moral status—physical and psychological development—in fact are a basis of moral status. First, she indicates strong opposition to the common idea that all that morally distinguishes the very late-term fetus and the very early newborn is “geography,” which cannot be the basis of a serious difference in moral status since “one can only view the distinction between being in or out of a woman’s womb as morally irrelevant if one discounts the perspective of the pregnant woman” (1991: 333). Given this quotation occurs under the section heading “The Fetus” and immediately after Sherwin lays out some major views on fetal status in the philosophical literature (331–32), I take it her point is about fetal status in itself, rather than merely

412

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

about what a woman owes to a fetus (which would only invoke relationality2 and in which case geography surely is morally relevant). Indeed, later in the paper Sherwin states more explicitly that she does not take the later fetus to have moral status similar to a newborn (336).14 More importantly, it seems that she also fully intends to claim that the pregnant woman’s perspective plays some role in determining the status of even the latest fetuses. Thus she states: “There is no absolute value that attaches to fetuses apart from their relational status determined in the context of their particular development” (336). This claim does not seem to make sense if Sherwin’s relationality3 were only a sufficient condition or if she—like Mackenzie—recognized physical or psychological development as other grounds of moral status at least at some points of gestation. Were that the case, then would there not be an absolute value that attaches to at least later fetuses? I conclude, then, that Sherwin at least does intend relationality3 under the more radical interpretation.15 Her view might then count as what Little calls “crude conventionalism,” (Little 1999: 311) according to which “the woman’s view of the fetus determines its metaphysical and normative status.” Or at least it seems to me that this is the most natural reading of Sherwin’s view. Call this the strong version of relationality3. Having characterized three different strands of relationality—and at least two different interpretations of relationality3—we can now assess the relationship between relationality and gradualism. It’s no surprise that relationality1 and relationality2 are perfectly compatible with gradualism; Little’s own account, after all, seems to involve all three elements. After all, she combines the following claims into one account: that fetal status gradually increases as physical and psychological development does through the course of gestation (gradualism), that the pregnant individual’s perspective determines the nature of the gestational relationship—whether it is a purely biological one or something more like a thick parental relationship (relationality1), and that the nature of that relationship then affects what the pregnant individual morally owes the fetus (relationality2). It is only relationality3, according to which the pregnant person’s perspective on and/or engagement with the fetus determines whether the fetus is morally considerable that seems to compete with gradualism. And even here it is Sherwin’s stronger version of relationality3 that is most obviously a direct competitor to gradualism.16



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

413

3  Gradualism or relationality3? It is worth noting that gradualism and even Sherwin’s stronger version of relationality3 will sometimes converge on a similar result when it comes to assessing the moral status of a given fetus in many usual cases of pregnancy. After all, we might assume that in the typical case the relationship between the pregnant individual and fetus develops and deepens in a gradual manner, such that a fetus is brought into personhood over an extended period. The physical development of the fetus by the second trimester—particularly its growing to a size that causes many pregnant women to “show” and that allows them to feel movement and increasingly experience the fetus as a separate being—might be thought particularly relevant on a relational account. But there are certainly limits to the amount of convergence between the two views as the denied pregnancy case demonstrates. Which view then is more plausible? The major appeal of relationality3 over gradualism, in my view, has to do with capturing a significant value in some early fetuses. Many women experiencing early pregnancy losses, after all, find the common pro-choice denial of any status to early fetuses—for example, “a clump of cells is not a baby”—does not cohere with their experience. Lindsey Porter (2015: 61–67) has argued that strong “person-denying” accounts of fetal status, which hold that fetuses at early points in gestation are outside of the scope of moral concern entirely, cannot make sense of grief after miscarriage, which is often expressed in the form of having lost an important “someone.” While a gradualist account minimizes any moral status of early fetuses, typically pointing to the physical development of the second trimester and then sentience as the major markers of increasing fetal status, relationality3 allows that early fetuses that are engaged within the right sort of way have significant moral status.17 This would presumably vindicate post-miscarriage grief in the form of taking a fetus to be a “someone” as Porter (2015) suggests.18 Any argument for gradualism over relationality3 will have to do some biting of a bullet here.19 On the other hand, at least three strengths of gradualism are worth highlighting. First, gradualism better fits our intuitions in atypical cases. I have already appealed to the case of denied, or unrecognized, pregnancies, in which case the stronger version of relationality3 appears committed to denying that the full-term fetus has any moral status, which I suspect strikes many readers as highly counterintuitive (as it strikes me). Moreover, some cases of the very earliest pregnancies might also raise trouble for relationalists3. Might a woman

414

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

undergoing in vitro fertilization, for instance, begin to relate in the relevant way with her embryo(s) before they have even been transferred to her uterus and, if so, does this mean that some blastocysts have significant moral status? Or could an individual who is experiencing an anembryonic pregnancy begin to bring what they believe to be an embryo, but is in fact an empty sac, into personhood such that it has moral status?20 Gradualism, which emphasizes the physicality of the fetus, as well as its eventual consciousness and other psychological capacities, avoids these counterintuitive implications. A second strength of gradualism also focuses on pregnancy loss. As I have argued elsewhere (Roth in press), while those with firsthand experience of loss and termination report a great range of experiences and responses, one major theme in such testimony involves a significant responsiveness to the physical development of the fetus. Stories of later loss, for instance, often emphasize the details of the fetal body and practices of mourning such losses often mimic some aspects of mourning for the death of infants—for example, keepsakes such as footprint or photos and the naming of the lost fetus—which appear highly unusual regarding losses in the first months of pregnancy.21 More surprising is that the views of some abortion providers similarly emphasize the physical development of the fetus as morally relevant. Provider Lisa Harris contrasts the first-trimester removal of “tissue,” with the second-trimester death of a “baby” (or baby-like fetus) and suggests that many providers of later terminations experience emotional or moral difficulties that are not seen in first-trimester providers (Harris 2008). Relationality3, according to which fetal status is based only on the pregnant individual’s relationship to the fetus, cannot easily account for why providers might respond so clearly to the physicality of the fetus rather than the pregnant individual’s own perspective on the pregnancy, which will vary greatly from person to person. Gradualism, on the other hand, directly explains provider testimony in holding that the physical development of the midpregnancy fetus is itself a ground of increased moral status (Little 2008: 343). A final strength of gradualism over relationality3 is that the former offers a more complete, if more complex, conception of the politics of second-trimester abortion. Gradualists and relationalists both can and do support access to second-trimester (and later) abortion. Yet there are abundant reasons for abortion supporters of every stripe to prefer earlier abortion to termination in the second trimester. Medical and surgical techniques in the first trimester are safer, easier, quicker, less invasive, and less expensive. Moreover, many women who terminate in the second trimester for nonmedical reasons might have preferred to terminate earlier, but are hindered by cost, restrictive laws,



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

415

geography, or inability to get time off of work (Harris 2008: 79). And, of course, the longer gestation continues, the more likely a woman is to begin to bring the fetus into personhood, and thus perhaps the more likely that termination becomes an emotionally difficult experience. What I want to point out here is that gradualism offers an additional reason to favor earlier rather than later abortion, over and above all of these concerns: because later fetuses matter morally in ways that early fetuses do not, regardless of how the pregnant individual has or has not engaged with the fetus. This might seem a dangerous admission in the political arena, likely to simply embolden opponents of abortion. Yet, such acknowledgment also provides the grounds for an important political point that is often lost in the culture war squabbling over abortion: inasmuch as opponents of abortion have been highly successful at making early abortion increasingly inaccessible, they are responsible for a much higher rate of later abortion than necessary, since without such obstacles, many later terminations would have occurred at an earlier point in pregnancy. Moreover, if the gradualist view is correct, causing the death of a fetus at those earlier points would have been of significantly less moral gravity. Thus gradualist supporters of abortion can object to antiabortion policies on at least one powerful ground that is not available to relationality3 proponents.22 Again, though I am arguing in favor of gradualism over relationality3, it is worth taking a step back and reminding readers that here I am discussing only one kind of relationality—the most radical sort, which makes the fetus’s status wholly dependent on the pregnant subject’s recognition and relations with the fetus. The more moderate forms of relationality about the pregnancy itself or what the pregnant person owes to the fetus are quite compatible with gradualism. My conclusion then is that Little’s gradualism achieves most of the best of relationality. Feminists thus ought to be both gradualists and relationalists, but at least the stronger version of relationality3 cannot be vindicated on this picture.

4 Conclusion I’ve tried in the latter part of this chapter to engage in a particular intra-feminist debate about the nature of fetal status and to provide some considerations in favor of two modest forms of relationality along with gradualism over a more radical form of relationality that is incompatible with gradualism. It is worth stepping back at this point, however, to return to the larger picture of feminist approaches to abortion.

416

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

The moral status of the fetus is just one question feminists have philosophically taken up or should take up in the future. Whether or not the case I have made above is convincing—that is, whatever we ought to say about the status of the fetus—many questions and alternative ways of approaching abortion as an ethical matter remain. I want to flag two such concerns for further philosophical consideration. First, one longstanding concern about the cultural debate over abortion has to do with an inappropriately large focus on the fetus. Many feminist scholars and activists have made the point that antiabortion rhetoric, images, and activism problematically eclipses pregnant woman in favor of the fetus. Could it be that some of the above ethical debate about fetal status engages in this tendency as well? I would point out in response that the various forms of relationality under discussion make it the case that a feminist discussion of the fetus just is a discussion of the pregnant individual as well, which is not the case in antiabortion rhetoric. But there is still a point worthy of reflection here. What does it mean that in this chapter on analytic feminist approaches to abortion, so much discussion has focused on the fetus? Does the point about worrisome political rhetoric, images, and activism carry over to the domain of ethics? What does it mean to do feminist ethics exactly when it comes to politically charged issues such as abortion and is the debate over gradualism and relationality one worth having from a feminist point of view? A second issue that deserves further philosophical attention is the extent to which a feminist approach to the ethics of abortion ought to focus on the situation of women versus a more inclusive understanding of who gets pregnant and undergoes abortion—many women indeed, but also people of all genders. Avoiding the conflation of biology and gender and the assumption of a gender binary is particularly difficult in discussion of abortion, however. After all, as emphasized throughout the above discussion, restriction of and opposition to abortion is part and parcel of the oppression of women in our society. Does the inclusion of the reality of trans and nonbinary individuals experiencing pregnancy and childbirth offer a potential challenge to feminist analyses of the relation between abortion and gender oppression? Ought feminist approaches to abortion be concerned, as I discuss above, with women’s experiences of abortion and pregnancy specifically? Or is what we are really after simply anyone’s narratives or experiences of abortion and pregnancy? Yet ought we be concerned that in moving to a non-gendered understanding of who gets pregnant and how they experience pregnancy and abortion, we will



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

417

make invisible potential differences in what pregnancy and abortion mean to individuals of different genders? I cannot even begin to answer these questions here, but it seems to me that there is much exciting analytic feminist work yet to be taken up in these veins.

Acknowledgments I thank Pieranna Garavaso and the audience at the 2016 Society for Analytical Feminism Conference for helpful comments, as well as Kathryn Norlock for specific discussion. All errors and misunderstandings, of course, remain my own.

Notes 1 Throughout the chapter I use a mix of terms to refer to gestating people, often either pregnant “individual” or pregnant “woman.” Terminology is fraught here inasmuch as the majority of those who can or will become pregnant are women and many threads of feminist politics have long held that control over reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion are a primary way that women are oppressed. Yet at the same time, pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion are not experiences specific to women given that some (trans) men as well as nonbinary individuals can and do become pregnant. 2 On the other hand, some feminists hold that the “debate” over abortion is itself a form of disrespect to women (Reader 132). On such a view, the so-called pro-life feminism would be dismissible out of hand. 3 See the literature on reproductive justice for the long history of state attempts to control and discourage reproduction among women of color (as well as poor women generally and disabled women): Roberts (1997), Luna and Luker (2013). 4 Note that these philosophical views, however, move significantly past what the mainstream pro-choice movement aims to conclude, in embracing infanticide as morally justified in at least some contexts. 5 Indeed, the fact that this point had been made in the very early literature on abortion makes Marquis’s failure to acknowledge it all the more philosophically (and politically) problematic. 6 Similarly, notice that Americans today do not speak of themselves as being slavery abolitionists or having abolitionist perspectives, even though of course Americans are virtually universally committed to American slavery having been a grave

418

7

8

9 10

11

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

injustice. Thus, we seem to conceptualize what it is to be an abolitionist or have an abolitionist perspective in terms of offering a critique of the mainstream, just as conception (b) conceives of feminism. One weakness of the analogies I draw worth noting is that while commitment to women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery is universal in our society today, Thomson’s ideas remain contentious within the philosophical literature. Thus, they might be mainstream in the sense of garnering significant attention and being highly influential, but they are far from universally embraced as true. Harman’s view is actually more complicated than I imply above. She allows that fetuses that will eventually come to be conscious have moral status throughout pregnancy, even prior to consciousness. But those fetuses that are aborted, miscarried, or stillborn prior to achieving consciousness never have moral status. See also Saad 2013 for public opinion polling data demonstrating the American public’s treatment of early and late abortion as morally disparate. One might wonder here about the terms “morally grave” and “serious,” which contrast with the more typical “permissible,” “impermissible,” and “obligatory” more common in the mainstream moral philosophy literature. In part the use of terms like “grave” and “serious” might be a response to some mainstream literature that characterizes abortion as not only permissible, but as needing no moral justification whatsoever (Harman 1999). Talk of abortion’s seriousness or gravity then might simply be responding to a different moral question than talk about permissibility or obligation. It is also true, however, that (some) feminist philosophers are less likely to focus on obligation and permissibility, which stems from a commitment to contextualization. This involves recognizing that the great diversity of situations women face in deciding whether to continue a pregnancy makes broad generalizations of little interest or use. One might connect this tendency to other aspects of feminist critique of mainstream ethics—for instance, the care-based critique of the rights/justice perspective (see Gilligan 1993). However, the need to move beyond focus on categories of obligation and rights can be found in some of the mainstream ethics literature as well (see Thomson’s 1971 discussion of decency as well as Hursthouse’s (1991) application of virtue ethics to the topic of abortion). One might question here the focus of relationalty3 conceptions on the pregnant individual alone and consider whether there is room for the relation of other individuals to the fetus to be relevant to its moral status—say the father in the case of an unwanted pregnancy or the putative adoptive or social parents in a case of adoption or surrogacy. Relationalists3 seem to deny this possibility by stressing the unique situation of the pregnant woman in terms of her physical intertwinement with the fetus and the inability of anyone else to interact with the fetus except through the pregnant woman (Sherwin 333–34). However, this is a point of at least



12

13

14

15 16

17

18 19 20

21

(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

419

potential contention worth further reflection. Thanks to the editor(s) for raising this point. Similarly, the diversity of women’s experience after abortion might be explained this way as well. Some women who abort have begun constructing the fetus as a person or taken some degree of parental responsibility for the fetus and others have not. Mackenzie does not clarify this point. Could it be that she would hold that even at full term, fetuses with the same intrinsic value could have slightly different degrees of moral status depending on how the women gestating them relate to them? The difference in status between newborns and fetuses largely has to do with the ability of newborns, but not fetuses, to engage in social relationships with a range of other individuals without the mediation of the pregnant woman’s body. As neither Layne nor Rothman are offering philosophical accounts of moral status, I leave their discussions aside here. What of Mackenzie’s weaker version of relationality3? Technically inasmuch as gradualism denies that the earliest fetuses have more than minimal status and Mackenzie’s view allows that early fetuses for whom the pregnant woman has taken parental responsibility have claims of care against both the pregnant woman and perhaps others as well, there remains an incompatibility (1992: 143). However, I will focus primarily on Sherwin’s view going forward inasmuch as the gulf between gradualism and relationality3 is starkest in that case. Here one might argue that a gradualist can account for the kind of status Porter has in mind that would vindicate post-miscarriage grief. Little, for instance, holds that all fetal life is “worthy of respect” (2008: 332), and further that miscarriage and abortion involve loss “of a distinct life that had a good in a least the organismic sense” (2008: 342). My own sense though is that this sort of status is so minimal as to fail to speak to Porter’s sense of the fetus being a “someone,” so I think there remains at least a partial bullet to bite. Of note though is that Porter herself rejects relational accounts of fetal moral status as solutions to this objection. I give some discussion to this point in Roth (in press) in response to Porter. Layne (1997: 305–06) seems to suggest that it is a strength of her social personhood view, a form of relationality3, that it can explain that “the protoperson” that a woman begins to construct even in the absence of an embryo is part of what she loses in the miscarriage. Yet if value here is understood in terms of moral status, this is a highly implausible account it seems—how can an empty sac, after all, be morally considerable? This holds true for some abortions as well. Jeannie Ludlow suggests that one argument in favor of the use of second-trimester D&X (or intact D&E), in which the fetus is removed intact through the cervix by compressing the skull, is that many women terminating at that point recognize the fetus as having value and wish

420

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

to mourn its death; this includes being able to see and hold its intact body (2008a: 40–41). 22 One might think that the relationalist can make a similar point, that the deaths of at least those fetuses that have been brought into personhood and are then terminated in the second trimester are morally regrettable. This is true enough, but the relationalist3 would still have to admit that since at least some fetuses in the second trimester will not have been so engaged with, those fetal deaths will not (in themselves) be of greater moral gravity than early fetal deaths, which significantly weakens the political point being made in response to antiabortion legislation.

References American College of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Amicus Curiae Brief, Gonzales v. Carhart September 2006. Available online: https://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/ default/files/documents/amicus-brief-ACOG.pdf Brennan, Samantha (1999), “Recent Work in Feminist Ethics,” Ethics 109 (1999): 858–93. Callahan, Sidney. (2001), “Abortion and the Sexual Agenda,” in R. Baird and S. Rosenbaum (eds.), The Ethics of Abortion, 3rd ed., 167–78, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Cudd, Ann (1990), “Sensationalized Philosophy: A Reply to Marquis’s ‘Why Abortion is Immoral,” Journal of Philosophy 87 (5): 262–64. Donahue, John, and Steven Levitt (2001), “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics CXVI (2): 379–420. Gilligan, Carol (1993), In a Different Voice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ginsburg, Ruth Bader (1985), “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade,” N.C.L. Rev. 63: 375–86. Harman, Elizabeth (1999), “Creation Ethics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 28: 310–24. Harman, Elizabeth (2007), “Sacred Mountains and Beloved Fetuses,” Philosophical Studies 133: 55–81. Harris, Lisa (2008), “Second Trimester Abortion Provision: Breaking the Silence and Changing the Discourse,” Reproductive Health Matters 16 Suppl.: 74–81. Hursthouse, Rosalind (1991), “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (3): 223–46. Jaggar, Alison (1975), “Abortion and a Woman’s Right to Decide,” in Robert Baker and Frank Elliston (eds.), Philosophy and Sex, 324–37, Buffalo: Prometheus Press. Jaggar, Alison (2000), “Feminist Ethics,” in Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, 348–74, Oxford: Blackwell. Kissling, Frances (2004/05), “Is There Life after Roe? How to Think about the Fetus,” Conscience 25 (3): 10–18.



(Feminist) Abortion Ethics and Fetal Moral Status

421

Layne, Linda. (1997), “Breaking the Silence: An Agenda for a Feminist Discourse of Pregnancy Loss,” Feminist Studies 23: 289–315. Little, Margaret (1999), “Abortion, Intimacy and the Duty to Gestate,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2: 295–312. Little, Margaret (2008), “Abortion and the Margins of Personhood,” Rutgers Law Journal 39: 331–48. Ludlow, Jeannie (2008a), “Sometimes It’s a Child and a Choice,” NWSA Journal 20: 26–50. Ludlow, Jeannie (2008b), “The Things We Cannot Say: Witnessing the Trauma-tization of Abortion in the United States,” WSQ 36: 28–41. Luna, Zakiya, and Kristin Luker (2013), “Reproductive Justice,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 9: 327–52. Lundquist, Caroline (2009), “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy,” Hypatia 23: 136–55. Mackenzie, Catriona (1992), “Abortion and Embodiment,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70: 136–55. MacKinnon, Catharine (1987), Feminism Unmodified: Discourses of Life and Law, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Markowitz, Sally (1990), “Abortion and Feminism,” Social Theory & Practice 16: 1–17. Marquis, Don (1989), “Why Abortion is Immoral,” Journal of Philosophy 86: 183–202. McMahon, Jeff (2002), The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noddings, Nel (1984), Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley: University of California Press. Noonan, J. (1970), The Morality of Abortion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parsons, Kate (2010), “Feminist Reflections on Miscarriage, in Light of Abortion,” IJFAB 3: 1–22. Porter, Lindsey (2015), “Miscarriage and Person-Denying,” Journal of Social Philosophy 46: 59–79. Reader, Soran (2008), “Abortion, Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority,” Hypatia 23: 132–49. Roberts, Dorothy (1997), Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, New York: Pantheon Books. Roth, Amanda (in press), “Experience as Evidence: Pregnancy Loss, Pragmatism, and Fetal Status.” Rothman, Barbara Katz (1993), The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Changes the Experience of Motherhood, New York: WW Norton & Co. Saad, Lydia (2013), “Majority of Americans Still Support Roe v. Wade Decision,” Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/160058/majority-americans-support-roe-wadedecision.aspx 1/22/13. Saletan, William (2003), Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, Berkeley: University of California Press.

422

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Sherwin, Susan (1991), “Abortion Through a Feminist Ethics Lens,” Dialogue 30: 327–42. Shields, Jon (2011), “Almost Human: Ambivalence in the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life Movements,” Critical Review 23: 495–515. Shouten, Gina (2017), “Fetuses, Orphans, and a Famous Violinist: On the Ethics and Politics of Abortion.” Social Theory and Practice 43: 637–65. Singer, Peter (2011), Practical Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sister Song, “Reproductive Justice,” http://sistersong.net/reproductive-justice/ Smith, Andrea (2005), “Beyond Pro-Choice Versus Pro-Life: Women of Color and Reproductive Justice,” NWSA Journal 17: 119–40. Thomson, Judith (1971), “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1: 47–66. Tooley, Michael (1972), “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12: 37–65. Tuana, Nancy, and Rosemarie Tong (1995), Feminism and Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application, Boulder: Westview Press. Warren, Mary Anne (1973), “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” Monist 57: 43–61. Warren, Mary Anne (1989), “The Moral Significance of Birth,” Hypatia 4 (3): 46–65. Wolf, Naomi (1995), “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic 26–35.

21

Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives Hilde Lindemann

When patients are not competent to make treatment decisions for themselves, widely shared moral and legal understandings direct their proxy decision makers to use substituted judgment, deciding the course of treatment on the basis of what the patient herself would choose. If the patient was never competent or her choices can’t be ascertained, the proxy is to do what’s in the patient’s best interests. In this chapter I subject these understandings to a feminist critique, arguing that the hidden assumptions behind them are dangerously misleading. I then propose a better way of making these decisions. Let’s begin by thinking about what happens when a patient appoints a proxy in advance of a serious illness. Then we’ll consider what a treatment decision actually amounts to, and why the many proxy accuracy studies that have been conducted since the 1990 passage of the Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA) don’t tell us anything important about proxy decision-making at all. After that, we’ll look at why so few patients even have living wills or proxy decision makers. And finally, we’ll see what all this has to do with an agentic feature of long-term intimate relationships.

1  The patient appoints a proxy Since the passage of the PSDA, any time you are admitted to a hospital or other care facility, the law requires the staff to tell you what legal mechanisms are at your disposal in the state where you live, for making the treatment decisions you would have made in the event that you can’t do this for yourself. In fact, many family doctors offer this information as well. Two such mechanisms are always available: the advance treatment directive and the proxy for health care. If you

424

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

decide you’d like to proceed, it’s not a bad idea to choose both, as then the proxy can use the advance treatment directive to guide her decisions (“Advance Care Planning” 1994). If, for example, the advance directive says, “In the event that I am unconscious and unable to make decisions for myself, I want everything done,” the proxy can interpret that to mean, “Don’t turn off the ventilator,” or, “Go ahead with the operation.” If, on the other hand, the advance directive says, “I wish to die a natural death,” the proxy knows you wouldn’t want to be tube fed if you are in the end stages of Alzheimer’s disease. So far, so good. But now we ask why the patient appointed you as proxy. Why not just let the professionals make these decisions? In a well-known article, Rebecca Dresser argues that if the patient appointed you to carry out her wishes based on what Ronald Dworkin calls her critical interests—“the hopes and aims that lend genuine meaning and coherence to our lives” (Dresser 1995: 33)— the choices she made then may no longer be in accord with her current best interests. She invokes Andrew Firlik’s Margot, the patient who suffers from a progressive dementia and creates the same picture day after day, “a drawing of four circles, in soft rosy colors, one inside the other” (Firlik 1991). He says she is perhaps the happiest person he has ever known. Yet, if she had made an advance directive to the effect that she would not want to be treated for any life-threatening medical condition she might now develop, or even that she would now want to be euthanized, Dresser worries that she might not have fully understood that dementia isn’t tragic and horrible to people who are treated well. Advance care planning, after all, can never take into account what the person’s life is actually like when she reaches the undesired state. In any case, Dresser argues, the Margot who made the directive may be so changed that she is now a new person, with no more connection to the old Margot than that between you and me, so her earlier choices would “lack the moral authority to control what happens to the dementia patient” (Dresser 1995: 35). For all these reasons, then, Dresser thinks the state should limit the scope of patients’ advance directives, as well as the choices family members may make on their behalf. Another point is relevant here. It’s sometimes objected that if a patient made an advance directive some time ago, it should be disregarded because the patient might have changed her mind in the meantime. Suppose the patient’s advance directive stated that if she were ever suffering from a progressive dementia, she wouldn’t want life-saving measures such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation or antibiotics for pneumonia, but now, like Margot, she is happily demented. In “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Harry Frankfurt argues



Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives

425

that the difference between a morally responsible person and a “wanton” is that persons don’t just have desires—they have desires about their desires that can move them to act (Frankfurt calls such a desire a second-order volition). That is, they can evaluate the things they want, decide whether they want to want them, and act accordingly. “Wantons,” by contrast, aren’t capable of making—or just don’t care to make—these evaluative judgments, so they simply act on whatever desires they happen to have (Frankfurt 1988). As Margot experiences dementia, it seems highly probable that, in Frankfurt’s terms, she is a wanton, no longer able to control her desire to reject life-saving measures by wanting not to have that desire. Because she isn’t free to choose which desires to act on, it makes no more sense to hold her responsible for her decisions than it does a drug addict, a toddler, or a chipmunk. It doesn’t take Frankfurt, though, to tell us that a woman with well-advanced Alzheimer’s disease is no longer morally responsible. The more interesting part of Frankfurt’s analysis is that it helps us see why we shouldn’t believe that Margot has just changed her mind about receiving life-saving treatment. Changing one’s mind, especially about something that involves a life-or-death commitment, is not simply a matter of now choosing Y when you previously chose X. You also have to repudiate X (Nelson 2009). And that is a second-order desire, because repudiation is a matter of not wanting to want something anymore. If this desire moves you to act, you’ve exercised your second-order volition. After a person is demented enough to lose her second-order volition, however, she is no longer in a position to repudiate her commitments—to say to herself that on reflection, she finds them less worthy than she previously did. If that’s right, then Margot probably isn’t capable of changing her mind. Her previously formed evaluative judgment still deserves respect, though, because in making it she defined herself morally: the story of her commitment to minimal end-of-life treatment played some kind of role in her identity. If her proxy decision maker now refuses life-saving treatment on Margot’s behalf, she may be doing her best to hold Margot in a facet of her identity that mattered to her all her adult life. Some bioethicists have questioned the authority of the family to make these decisions at all. For example, in discussing the Quinlan case, which established the precedent of allowing family members to be de facto proxy decision makers for the termination of life-sustaining treatment, Ezekiel Emanuel and Linda Emanuel note with indignation that “this court granted Karen Quinlan’s father authority to exercise her right to refuse medical care without any evidence that

426

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

she would have selected him” (Emanuel and Emanuel 1992). As they put it, even if family members know the patient better than anyone else, deciding what she would have wanted at the end of life is at best a complicated form of guesswork (more about this later). Furthermore, as an incompetent patient tends to be both a financial and emotional burden on the family, the proxy decision might well be biased toward what’s best for the family, not the patient. And anyhow, making life-or-death decisions is stressful, so family members may want to avoid taking responsibility for them. So they propose community-based guidelines for making these decisions, perhaps with legislative limitations on the kinds of decisions that may be made. Other bioethicists go even further. In a recent series of papers, Annette Rid and David Wendler lament: Patients frequently do not complete an advance directive, and they rarely discuss treatment preferences with their families or loved ones. As a result, it is often unclear which treatments the patient would want in the circumstances. Moreover, it is often unclear which course of treatment would best promote the clinical interests of incapacitated patients. In these cases, standard practice provides little guidance for how to treat incapacitated patients. (2014: 105)

They propose to address this problem with the use of a “Patient Preference Predictor” (PPP). “A PPP,” they contend, would predict which treatment option an incapacitated patient is most likely to prefer in the circumstances based on the patient’s own characteristics. This prediction would be informed by the results of empirical research on how individual characteristics are correlated with treatment preferences in different situations involving decisional incapacity. Preliminary data suggest that a PPP is likely to predict patients’ treatment preferences more accurately than surrogate decision makers. (Rid and Wendler 2014: 105)

They explain as follows: To create a PPP, it would be necessary to gather extensive empirical data on how individuals want to be treated in various situations involving decisional incapacity. Ideally, this would involve conducting a representative survey of competent adults living in a given region or country—for example, in the United States. The survey would collect information on sociodemographic factors (e.g., age, gender, education, religiousness), current physical, psychological and social functioning (e.g., perceived quality of life, social support), attitudes and values (e.g., valued life activities), and relevant personal experience (e.g., with medical



Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives

427

care or incapacitated patients). It would also present common treatment dilemmas regarding the care of incapacitated patients and elicit respondents’ considered treatment preferences in those situations. (Rid and Wendler 2014: 111–12)

Statistical analysis would then yield the factors that would predict the patient’s treatment preferences when incapacitated. “For example, if a 57-year-old married female with a college degree loses consciousness after head trauma, and her chance of recovery with the ability to reason, remember, and communicate is less than 1%, the model could be used to predict how the patient would want to be treated based on her individual characteristics and the given clinical situation” (Rid and Wendler 2014: 112). The PPP, they concede, couldn’t predict with 100 percent accuracy, but it would do a much better job than a proxy decision maker. Let’s tackle these objections one at a time. Dresser’s worry that competentMargot might have made choices against the best interests of incompetentMargo, and that incompetent-Margot may even be a different person, unrelated to her older self, seems to be based on the view that persons are punctate, freestanding dots unconnected from other persons and from their own past. But is that so? A feminist view of the matter would tend to favor an understanding of persons as essentially social, brought into personhood by other persons, who then hold them in personhood (Lindemann 2014). They are “second persons” (Baier 1985), made into persons by other persons who recognize and respond to the various ways they express themselves physically. It’s this crucial practice of recognition and response that allows us to participate in the human community, and when, as in the case of infants or people with dementia, the individual can’t be an active participant in the practice of personhood, then others can hold the person in that state by showing them the moral consideration due to persons. Because persons grow and change over time, the narrative tissue that represents their lives can only do so accurately if we let go of the stories that no longer depict the person and add new stories that do. It’s by means of these narrative understandings that we know how to treat them, because the identity-constituting stories set up normative expectations for how the person is supposed to act and how we are supposed to behave toward them. As we engage in this narratively driven recognition and response, we hold them not only in personhood but in their personal identities as well (Lindemann 2014). Persons, then, exist over time. Their lives can be represented by a narrative arc, or better yet, a dynamic comet’s tail of stories and story fragments that come into being and are sometimes sloughed off, that are bound up with other such comet’s tails

428

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and sometimes disentangle from them, and that attach to each of us as long as we live. So Margot is still the same person—she’s just in a new phase of her life right now, one in which she experiences dementia. If all this is correct, then when patients appoint proxies, they are likely to choose people with whom their lives are intertwined in long-term relationships— spouses and adult children—precisely because they are so intertwined. If they appoint someone else—a lawyer, say, or business partner—it’s likely that they do so because they don’t trust their family members to carry out their wishes, or because they aren’t on good terms with them. We don’t usually talk about this in the language I am employing here, but proxies are, generally speaking, people who hold patients well in their identity, and have likely been doing so for a long time. To hold well is to let go of the old stories that no longer depict the patient accurately, to replace them with better stories that do, and to care for the patient on the basis of those new stories. Margot’s proxy, if she has one, might well recognize that Margot still derives a good deal of pleasure from her life and make decisions for her accordingly. As for Emanuel and Emanuel’s worries about Mr. Quinlan’s authority to make decisions for his daughter, the thought that we are all second persons might prompt the further thought that deep and abiding connections with others—with one’s father, say—give rise to special responsibilities, one of which is to care for family members when they are ill. If, that is, we are all second persons, and indeed, our families initiated us into personhood in the first place and likely are still in strong relationships with us, then family members will have special responsibilities toward us when we are ill. But if one has such a responsibility, one must have the authority to carry it out. So perhaps Mr. Quinlan’s right to make even life-anddeath decisions for Karen is based not so much on what she would have wanted or her consent, as on the duties arising from their familial relationship. It’s certainly possible, as Emanuel and Emanuel further worry, that Mr. Quinlan’s decision-making might not be disinterested. He may have biases toward what’s best for the rest of the family, and these may include worries about bankruptcy if he continues to support his persistently vegetative daughter. But it’s his duty to care for his entire family and not just his daughter. An ethics of families can’t be as patient-centered as health care ethics requires professional care-givers to be. Besides, it’s not unknown for the sorts of communities Emanuel and Emanuel envision to exhibit biases too, which can be especially troublesome when community members aren’t the ones who end up having to deal with the fallout from an irresponsible decision. Suppose, for example, the community is



Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives

429

biased toward extending life as long as possible, and family caregivers have gone along with that. But then they see the patient suffering horribly and want to terminate life-sustaining treatment. It’s they, not the community as a whole, who have to deal with the patient’s—and their own—agony. And it’s worth bearing in mind that physicians are sometimes biased too. I once heard a neonatologist, who had just insisted on resuscitating a neonate born at 23 weeks over the parents’ objections, say that he could live with the results. But of course, he wouldn’t be the one living with them.

2  What’s a treatment decision? So let’s turn to Rid and Wendler’s proposal for a PPP. Here the physicians treat the patient in accordance with the PPP guidelines. While Emanuel and Emanuel’s local community of patients would presumably at least discuss each case individually and make an actual decision, Rid and Wendler’s physicians don’t make the treatment choices—the PPP’s algorithms tell them what to do and no choice enters into the matter at all. The individual is erased, as the PPP takes account only of demographic groups. What the PPP does is make predictions: guesses about what the patient would have chosen for herself had she been able to do so. But consider, a decision is quite different from a guess. For one thing, decisions involve intentionality. A person or group of people mean to make something happen and think through the steps that would be necessary to achieve their goal. Many “decisions” aren’t decisions at all—they are habits of action and rule-guided thought that don’t require a great deal of reflection. But life-and-death treatment decisions are another matter. Here we are, most of us on foreign ground, and we have no habits or rules to fall back on. Most of us, if we’re facing a dangerous operation and are competent to decide for ourselves whether to go through with it or refuse it, aren’t going to make a snap judgment. We’ll talk it over with our doctors, our spouses, grown children, close friends; take and reject advice; weigh the pros and cons; think about the consequences; worry about the effect of the decision not only on ourselves but on our loved ones. We’ll sleep on it. And after due consideration, trying to take all the relevant details into account (this is where consulting others is helpful, as they often see things we miss), we form a decision and begin to implement it. We do this for what Thomas Nagel calls agent-relative reasons: I am the one responsible, the onus rests on me (Nagel 1979).

430

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

A prediction, by contrast, is a matter of agent-neutral reasons. The thing is done, but not by my hand. I simply guessed, or hoped, or wished, but it wasn’t my responsibility and I formed no intentions in the matter. So the PPP cranks out an answer, but leaves the consequences to the patient and her family to deal with. In that respect it’s like Emanuel and Emanuel’s patient community groups, who don’t have to live with the consequences of their choices either. But at least with the community groups, an actual decision is made. While the PPP is only meant to offer statistical guidance as to the patient’s likely preference, it can’t actually tell us what this particular patient would have chosen, had she been in a position to do so. Why does agent-relativity matter? Because sometimes it’s terribly important that we bring something about by our own agency. If, for example, I pay someone else to take the physics exam for me, I am no longer the one being tested and the results say nothing about my grasp of physics. If (for some insane reason) I talk my best friend into standing in for me at my wedding, then when he says “I do,” he is my sweetheart’s lawfully wedded wife, not me. And if a computer cranked out the voter preferences in my state, based on such demographics as age, income, and level of education, and cast my ballot for me on that basis, I haven’t exercised my right to vote. This would seem to pose a pretty serious problem for the PPP (Lindemann and Nelson 2014).

3  What’s wrong with proxy accuracy studies? According to Rid and Wendler, the widespread assumption that the proxy’s authority derives from her intimate knowledge of the patient is quite incorrect, because proxies, in fact, have no such knowledge. The authors invoke the myriad proxy accuracy studies that have been conducted over the years as evidence for their claim: A review of the existing data, involving 19,526 paired patient-surrogate responses to hypothetical treatment scenarios, found that patient-designated and next-ofkin surrogates correctly predicted patients’ treatment choices only 68 percent of the time. Since most of the scenarios offered binary choices, random guessing would have been correct approximately 50 percent of the time. . . . Neither appointing one’s own surrogate nor discussing one’s treatment preferences with the surrogate improves the predictive accuracy of surrogate decision-makers. (Rid and Wendler 2010: 38)



Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives

431

So, since the proxies simply don’t know enough about the patients’ preferences to exercise substituted judgment, their authority as proxies can and should be questioned. But is this skepticism warranted? Proxy accuracy studies are conducted by asking some number of patient-proxy pairs to predict, independently of each other, what the patient would want in some hypothetical future scenario in which the patient is incompetent to make a decision. What we have here are not at all the conditions under which actual decisions are made. It is one thing to sit comfortably at home or in a research facility and, after no more than a few moments’ thought, to answer “treat” or “do not treat” to a question like this: You recently suffered a major stroke leaving you in a coma and unable to breathe without a machine. After a few months, the doctor determines that it is unlikely that you will come out of the coma. If your doctor had asked whether to try to revive you if your heart stopped beating in this situation, what would you have told the doctor to do? (Beland and Froman 1995)

It is quite another thing to have lived through those months at someone’s bedside, watching events unfold and knowing precisely what it is for the first wild hope of full recovery to flicker and fade until a doctor, extinguishing it altogether, asks you to decide what should be done now. Once again, what we have here are not decisions, but guesses as to what the patient would decide—and we don’t even have the patient’s decision to compare the guess with. But these studies miss the mark in another direction, as well, because they misunderstand what it is to know someone. In the ordinary sense of the phrase, “to know someone” is to know who they are. To repeat, we gain a sense of who someone is by means of the stories and fragments of stories that we weave around the things about the person—her acts, experiences, characteristics, commitments, roles, and relationships—that matter most to us. If, for example, the person is your mother, some of the stories by which you constitute her identity will be the socially shared narratives about mothers that circulate widely in your culture, and others will be stories of how she reared you, how you and she get on now that you are grown, the active interest she has lately taken in politics, the way she laughs at her own jokes, and so on. Your love for her will likely soften some of those stories so that they are not perfectly accurate depictions of her, and longstanding resentments or grudges could distort some of the stories in the opposite direction. But what this narrative activity amounts to is that you know her, having for better or worse lived out your life entwined with hers—indeed, because your lives are intertwined, some of the stories that

432

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

constitute her identity also constitute your own. That kind of knowledge naturally enough includes knowledge of some of her “values and preferences,” but there is no particular reason, unless perhaps she has been hospitalized often for the complaint that now renders her incapable, why you should have any better an idea than she would have had as to what sort of treatment is wisest here and now. She likely would have had to construct a decision; you will have to do the same.

4  Shared agency The richness of intimate ways of knowing others is relevant to another reason why proxy decision-making can’t simply be a matter of matching the patient’s guesses. What people value about making decisions is not only getting the outcome they choose, but getting the outcome because they choose it (Nelson 2003). What’s troubling about all the standard objections to proxies who are family members or other intimates, whether those of Dresser, Emanuel and Emanuel, or Rid and Wendler, is that they focus only on the content of the treatment decision; they miss the expression of our agency in bringing that content about. It might be thought that there is just no help for that—reproducing content is the best that can be done for people who have lost decision-making power. But I believe that something better is available. Carol Rovane has argued (1998) that persons are fundamentally agents who are responsive to reasons, and that the endurance of a person’s identity over time and change lies in the coherence of their reasons. The authority and importance imparted by the agentic dimension of our choices is a matter of where those choices come from—their relation to a set of beliefs and values, projects and processes whose harmonious interaction contributes to maintaining our unity as selves. People in bonded relationships have something more than a rich and detailed knowledge of the other: they may also have a sense of common purpose, a tacit awareness of being in this together, a mutual upholding of each other’s lives and selves in one way or another. At least at the ideal limit and sometimes, perhaps, even in practice, close family members may come to share what Rovane has called a “deliberative perspective”—a view of what is true and what is valuable, how valuable it is, and how those values are ordered—that has been generated and preserved by shared experience over time, and on which they draw in reflection and in choice. Even when that deliberative perspective is not shared so completely as to allow the surrogate to fully express the patient’s agency in her own deliberations and



Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives

433

decisions, family members may have a kind of access to the patient’s perspective that others are unlikely to enjoy. Their own deliberative strategies and view of the world may overlap in important ways with those of the patient. Alternatively, they may be able to bring the patient’s characteristic ways of thinking and choosing to bear on the decisions at hand, because they know those strategies and are familiar with the details of the worldview even if they don’t use them in their own lives. This is possible even under conditions of oppression. For example, a woman may be thoroughly under the thumb of patriarchy and her husband takes that to mean she is less entitled to familial resources than the men of the family are. She may believe this herself if her own consciousness is infiltrated by sexism, or she may be unwillingly oppressed. Here, though, that might not matter, as it’s perfectly possible that she and her husband love each other despite their relative positions in an unjust gender hierarchy. When a person shares the kind of bonds with others that allows her intimates to express something of her own agency, what might have mattered most to her is not so much what is decided as that her husband does the deciding. Dresser and company might well reply that this “possible source” of a person’s choices remains pretty rare: if such sharing of deliberative perspective were at all common, then we ought to see greater concordance among family members in test conditions. Further, the common incidence of shattered families, and of serious friction even within families that are intact, suggests that the kind of closeness that Rovane discusses remains at best the exception rather than the rule. I’m not much troubled by the first objection, on the conceptual and contextual grounds I’ve already outlined: the test conditions generate predictions, and these simply aren’t the same as decisions. The importance of this point might be more evident if we could determine the concordance of predictions and decisions about matters of this kind in the first-person case. Surely, people’s own responses surprise themselves often enough when they encounter in reality a choice they had only speculated about before. The second point of course I allow—how could I not? Indeed, it’s largely because family members fight, wash their hands of each other, and sometimes break apart that approximations to a shared deliberative perspective might be all that one would usually come across. Again, however, comparison with firstperson perspectives is useful: a fully rationally unified deliberative perspective within one person is not something you come across every day. Disharmony

434

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

within oneself is hardly a rare phenomenon. We aren’t always of one mind about what we think best to do, even when we focus solely on advancing our own interests. Nor do we always get along all that well with ourselves. Yet, even if my Rovane-inspired account were to be admitted, it could well be argued that the evidence is against me. The existing data indicate that the strong preference for family surrogates revealed in the literature is, contrary to my suggestion, largely based on the belief that family surrogates will decide as the patient would (Kelly, Rid, and Wendler 2012). Reproducing content, it seems, matters more to many people than sharing agency. I’m not so sure. There’s no reason to think that any of the studies Kelly, Rid, and Wendler draw on explicitly present an accessible description of the concept of shared agency to their respondents. Further, the significant sympathy several studies reveal for the idea that family proxies ought to have some degree of latitude in their choices suggests that the preference for intimates may have more complex sources than the studies can reflect. Finally, while some of the studies seem pretty explicit about the importance of reproducing content (Elliot and Olver 2007: “families best qualified to know patients’ wishes,” and Waters 2000 and 2001: “family knows preferences”), their characterization of other studies seem more open to interpretation. The reason for family preference in Terry et al. 1999, for example, is summarized as “trust in relationship,” and several studies by High (1988, 1990) are summarized as “trust family.” Most people, though, don’t have a formal advance directive or formally appointed proxy for health care. Since the passage of the PSDA, generally speaking, the figure for those who do hovers around 20 percent (Fagerlin 2002; Fagerlin and Schneider 2004). Even after an elaborate, double-blinded, controlled clinical trial was held to see if well-crafted interventions could increase this amount, it turned out that the answer was a resounding no (SUPPORT 1995). Now, this may be in part because people don’t like thinking about their own dying, or they may be reluctant to discuss it with their families or physicians, or perhaps they just have never gotten around to formalizing their wishes. But I suspect that many of us are simply exercising our agency by proxy. The physician Joanne Lynn gives a lovely description of what I mean in her well-known “Why I Don’t Have a Living Will.” She writes: Much of what people ordinarily take to be important in their other choices is shunned in the conventional living will and the process of writing it. There is little passion or pathos, only the clean, sterile, black and white of choices made and enforced. Perhaps that is not how some, or most, of us would choose to die,



Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives

435

if all choices were available. I, for example, would hope that my family would be emotional about the choices to be made, not simply concerned with the application of my advance directives to my situation. (1991: 103)

She goes on to wonder why our society wants people to be explicit and detailed only about life-sustaining treatment, rather than just trusting their family caregivers when the time comes. She goes on: I, and surely some other patients, prefer family choice over the opportunity to make our own choices in advance. The patient himself or herself may well judge the family’s efforts less harshly than he or she would judge his or her own decisions made in advance or by the professional caregivers. I have had a number of seriously ill patients say that their next of kin will attend to some choice if it comes up. When challenged with the possibility that the next of kin might decide in a way that was not what the patient would have chosen, the patient would kindly calm my concern with the observation that such an error would not be very important. (Lynn 1991: 103)

Like Lynn, I’d rather live with whatever my family decided, even if it wasn’t what I’d have chosen for myself, rather than “spare them” the responsibility for making that decision. It wouldn’t matter very much if they didn’t do it my way. What would matter enormously was that they were abiding with me, holding me in my identity as mother, partner, friend, taking care of me. What would matter is that they—and I—were exercising my agency this one final time.

Acknowledgments Jamie Lindemann Nelson has been thinking through these issues with me for so many years that it’s hard, at this point, to disentangle her ideas from my own. As always, I’m indebted to her. And many thanks also to Pieranna Garavaso, whose insightful comments made this a better chapter.

References “Advance Care Planning: Priorities for Ethical and Empirical Research,” (1994), Special Supplement, Hastings Center Report 24: (6). Baier, Annette (1985), “Theory and Reflective Practices,” in Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals, 207–27, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

436

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Beland, D. K., and R. D. Froman (1995), “Preliminary Validation of a Measure of Life Support Preferences,” Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship 27: 307–10. Dresser, Rebecca (1995), “Dworkin on Dementia: Elegant Theory, Questionable Policy,” Hastings Center Report 25 (6): 32–38. Eliott Jakin and Ian Oliver (2007), “Autonomy and the Family as (in) Appropriate Surrogates for DNR Decisions: A Qualitative Analysis of Dying Cancer Patients’ Talk,” Journal of Clinical Ethics 18 (3): 206. Emanuel, Ezekiel J., and Linda L. Emanuel (1992), “Proxy Decision Making for Incompetent Patients: An Ethical and Empirical Analysis,” JAMA 267 (5): 2067–71. Fagerlin, Angela, Peter H. Ditto, Nikki Ayers Hawkins, Carl Schneider, and William D. Smucker (2002), “The Use of Advance Directives in End-of-Life Decision Making: Problems and Possibilities,” American Behavioral Scientist 46 (2): 268–83. Fagerlin, A., and Carl Schneider (2004), “Enough. The Failure of the Living Will,” Hastings Center Report 34 (2): 30–42. Firlik, Andrew D. (1991), “Margo’s Logo,” JAMA 265: 201. Frankfurt, Harry (1988), “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in The Importance of What We Care About, 11–25, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. High, Dallas (1988), “All in the Family: Extended Autonomy and Expectations in Surrogate Health Care Decision Making,” Gerontologist 28: 46–51. High, Dallas (1990), “Who Will Make Health Care Decisions for Me When I Can’t?” Journal of Aging and Health 2: 291–309. Kelly, Brenna, Annette Rid, and David Wendler (2012), “Systematic Review: Individuals’ Goals for Surrogate Decision-Making,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 60 (5): 884–95. Lindemann, Hilde (2014), Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities, New York: Oxford University Press. Lindemann, Hilde, and James Lindemann Nelson (2014), “The Surrogate’s Authority,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (2): 161–68. Lynn, Joanne (1991), “Why I Don’t Have a Living Will,” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 19 (1–2): 101–04. Nagel, Thomas (1979), The Possibility of Altruism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nelson, James (2003), “Agency by Proxy,” in Hippocrates’s Maze: Ethical Explorations of the Medical Labyrinth, 29–51, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Nelson, James (2009), “Alzheimer’s Disease and Socially Extended Mentation,” Metaphilosophy 40 (3–4): 462–74. Rid, Annette, and David Wendler (2010), “Can We Improve Decision-Making for Incapacitated Patients?” Hastings Center Report 40 (5): 36–45. Rid, Annette, and David Wendler (2014), “Use of a Patient Preference Predictor to Help Make Medical Decisions for Incapacitated Patients,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39: 104–29. Rovane, Carol (1998), The Bounds of Agency, Princeton: Princeton University Press.



Feminist Approaches to Advance Directives

437

The SUPPORT principal investigators (1995), “A Controlled Trial to Improve Care for Seriously Ill Hospitalized Patients: The Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments (SUPPORT),” JAMA 274 (20): 1591–98. Terry, Peter Browne, Margaret Vettese, John Song, Jane Forman, Karen B. Haller, Deborah J. Miller, Rebecca Stallings, and Daniel P. Sulmasy (1999), “End-of-Life Decision Making: When Patients and Surrogates Disagree,” Journal of Clinical Ethics 10 (4): 286–93. Waters, Catherine M. (2000), “End-of-Life Care Directives among African Americans: Lessons Learned—A Need for Community-Centered Discussion and Education,” Journal of Community Health Nursing 17: 25–37. Waters, Catherine M. (2001), “Understanding and Supporting African Americans’ Perspectives of End-of-Life Care Planning and Decision Making,” Qualitative Health Research 11: 383–98.

22

What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It? Adam Omar Hosein

1 Introduction In this chapter I will discuss different ways of understanding what sex stereotyping is and some potential moral problems with such stereotyping. As we’ll see I think these two issues are closely connected. I’ll begin (Sections 2 and 3) with a survey of possible ways of understanding what sex stereotypes are. I’ll then explain (Section 4) the methodology I recommend for adjudicating between different understandings of sex stereotyping. Specifically, I will propose (following Lawrence Blum and others) that our account of the nature of sex stereotypes must be adequate for purposes of moral and political critique. With this methodology in mind, I will then argue (Section 5) that there are a number of different moral and political concerns in the vicinity and consider which forms of (putative) stereotyping produce these concerns. My thesis, which I will be able to explain more precisely in the next section, is that we should be pluralists about sex stereotyping: we should think that there are a number of different phenomena that should count. Before beginning, though, here are a few clarifications. First, I have said that my topic is “sex stereotyping” and I use that term for consistency with some of the existing literature, especially the legal literature. But unlike some theorists, I will not be making any sharp distinction here between “sex” and “gender,” and will use those two terms interchangeably depending on which seems more natural in the relevant context. Second, I will mainly confine myself to talking about stereotypes regarding men and women, but I do not mean to imply that there are no intersexed people, genderqueer people, and so on who are subject to sex/ gender stereotypes. There are certainly stereotypes specifically about members



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

439

of those sex/gender groups, and indeed especially damaging ones, but I think they deserve a more extensive and specialized treatment than I can give here. Also, as we’ll see, stereotypes about men and women can themselves be very significant for people who live outside of the gender binary or cisnormativity.

2  What is a sex stereotype?—some possibilities The concept of stereotyping, including sex stereotyping, is deployed in a very wide range of contexts. In everyday moral and political discussion people often raise concerns about whether, say, a political candidate is being stereotyped because of her gender. Sex stereotyping also plays an important role in legal doctrine and theory; for instance, it is often said that US anti-discrimination law (including equal protection law and Title VII employment discrimination law) includes an anti–sex stereotyping commitment (Case 2000). Stereotyping is a subject of academic scientific and social scientific inquiry. For instance, psychologists look at how sex stereotypes can be employed by individuals reading someone’s CV and cultural theorists look at, say, their role in media representations of men and women. The common thread that runs through these disparate uses is that sex stereotypes are associations of some kind between membership in a sex/gender group and other traits. But which kinds of association count as stereotypes? For our purposes three different distinctions will be important, each of which I will now explain. These distinctions, we’ll see, show that there are a number of decisions to be made about what to count as a stereotype.

2.1  Explicit versus implicit associations The first important distinction concerns the way in which a gender association features in an individual’s mind. More specifically, this distinction concerns whether the individual can (easily) become consciously aware that they hold the association. We can think of stereotypes as being explicit associations or implicit associations. a. Explicit associations People might associate sex groups with certain traits because they have consciously held (or hold readily consciously accessible) beliefs that draw together sex groups and these traits. More specifically they might accept certain

440

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

generalizations or beliefs that are general in form. For instance, they might hold generalizations about women and being nurturing. There are different kinds of generalization. We can distinguish the following kinds: i. Universal generalizations: These are beliefs about what an entire group is like. For instance, someone who said “All women are nurturing” would be asserting a belief that was universal in form. ii. Statistical generalizations: These are beliefs about what some proportion of a group is like. For instance, someone who said “Most women are nurturing” or “’87 percent of women are nurturing” would be asserting a statistical generalization. iii. Generic generalizations: Beliefs of this form are a little harder to define, but for our purposes it will suffice to say that a generic generalization is one that cannot be easily matched with an equivalent universal or statistical generalization.1 For instance, someone who said “Sea turtles are long-lived” would be asserting neither that all sea turtles live for a long time, nor even that most sea turtles live for a very long time. For, even if most sea turtles were in fact killed by poachers shortly after birth, it would still be true that sea turtles are long-lived. The generic generalization statement “Sea turtles are long-lived” seems to say something about the nature of sea turtles. There are also generic claims about gender: “women are nurturing” seems to express something about the nature of women as a kind, rather than just a statistical claim about how most women in fact behave. Within the realm of generalizations, we can also recognize two further distinct categories. First, there are descriptive generalizations, which concern the traits that, say, men in fact have (either universally, statistically, or in virtue of their nature). And, second, there are prescriptive generalizations, which concern the traits that men ought to have, in virtue of their gender. For instance, someone who thinks that men ought not to cry accepts a prescriptive generalization. b. Implicit associations. A second way in which people can associate gender with other traits is through implicit associations. Unlike the conscious beliefs that we have looked at so far, these are associations of which it is difficult to become consciously aware. For instance, even someone who does not consciously accept the claim that women are weak may all the same implicitly associate being a woman with lack of strength, and this association can affect their behavior—for instance, they might



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

441

give preference to a man to do their construction job—again without their being aware of this impact. Psychologists offer widely different accounts of the phenomenon of implicit association. On one view, for instance, implicit associations are like beliefs in that they represent the world as being a certain way; for instance, an implicit belief might involve connections between their representation of the kind man and the trait strength, for example. On another view, implicit associations lack representational content of this kind.2 Having seen the distinction between explicit and implicit associations, we must ask the following question: when we ask whether an individual holds a sex stereotype, are we asking about their explicit associations or their implicit associations or both?

2.2  Normative versus neutral approaches The second distinction we need to consider concerns the epistemic and moral status of the associations that an individual might hold. Two approaches to stereotyping are available: a. The normative approach According to this approach, whether an association counts as a stereotype depends in part on normative facts about that association. More specifically, for something to count as a stereotype it has to be not simply an association (of whatever kind) but an association that is defective in some way. One kind of defect might be a moral defect: perhaps the stereotype is such that it makes the person holding it blameworthy. A second kind of defect, which I will focus on, is an epistemic defect. For instance, if we are considering a conscious belief, one potential epistemic defect is being false and another potential epistemic defect is being unjustified. It is more difficult to think about potential epistemic defects in implicit associations. One problem is that, as we saw earlier, implicit associations may not be beliefs, in which case they may not be evaluable for truth or falsehood at all. A second problem is that since implicit associations are unconscious it is more difficult to evaluate whether they are justified, since justification is normally thought of as a matter of consciously responding to evidence in an appropriate manner. An important version of the normative approach is Lawrence Blum’s theory of stereotyping, on which stereotypes are defective in multiple respects, “Stereotypes are false or misleading associations between a group and an attribute

442

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

that are held by their subjects in a rigid manner, resistant to counterevidence” (2004: 288). b. The neutral approach The neutral approach denies that an association needs to be defective in any way to count as a stereotype. On this analysis, no epistemic or moral evaluation has to be carried out to determine whether someone holds a stereotype. Erin Beeghly has recently offered an important defense of this approach.3 On her view, “stereotypes play a special role in categorizing individuals and forming expectations about them. We can think of them either as concepts of social groups or as psychological items necessary for the formation and use of such concepts. Were we to express the content of our stereotypes, we would typically describe them in generic terms” (Beeghly 2015: 680). According to Beeghly, then, someone who says “Men are tall” can be taken to hold a stereotype about men, even if their association between men and tallness was formed through epistemically responsible behavior, is responsive to evidence, and so on. In summary, we must decide whether to adopt a narrower, normative approach to stereotyping that requires stereotypes to be defective in some respect, or a broader, neutral approach to stereotyping that allows even nondefective associations to count.

3  Individualist versus cultural approaches I have so far proceeded as if a stereotype is something that exists within the mind of a particular person. But a third distinction reminds us that there is another possibility. We can distinguish: a. The individualist approach On this approach (the one assumed so far), stereotypes are associations held by a particular person, whether explicit or implicit, whether epistemically defective or not. b. The cultural approach While psychologists tend to theorize about stereotypes at the level of particular individuals, people in several other fields, as Blum (2004) points out, tend to theorize about stereotypes as entities that form part of the structure of a whole culture. For instance, social scientists who study media might investigate the cultural trope that young women are less interested in sex than young men



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

443

not by surveying particular individuals but by considering whether that trope structures the way men and women are represented in Hollywood films (say, whether gay couples tend to be represented as more focused on sex than lesbian couples). On the cultural approach, as Blum points out, rather than simply being the aggregate of associations that individuals form out of their private experiences, stereotypes have a causal impact on how individuals experience the world in the first place and how they process that information. For instance, cultural stereotypes about sex might lead someone to treat a young woman who is interested in sex as an unrepresentative outlier rather than revising their beliefs about women in light of experiences with her. To have these effects, cultural stereotypes need to be somewhat stable over time, structuring individual experiences and interactions rather than immediately adapting to new evidence about gender. Putting all of this together we can say (following Blum) that on the cultural approach gender stereotypes are gender associations that generally i. are widely shared within a culture; ii. are relatively stable over time and resistant to change; iii. are accessible to people who don’t themselves endorse the stereotype; iv. shape individual perceptions of gender groups.4 Recent philosophical literature has often largely followed individualist psychology in its discussion of stereotypes. For instance, those who closely associate stereotyping with individual implicit bias follow this approach. But the distinction we have just considered raises the question of whether we should instead (or additionally) adopt the cultural approach.

4  What is a sex stereotype?—methodology What we have seen so far is that there are many different ways to think about what counts as a stereotype. We can think about stereotypes in individual or cultural terms. Within the individualistic approach there are many options: we must consider whether to include explicit or implicit associations (or both) and whether to adopt a normative or neutral approach. A relatively narrow approach to individual stereotypes might only count, say, defective generic beliefs or implicit associations, while a broader approach might also count statistical generalizations, and count them even if they are true and well founded.

444

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

How should we proceed? One option is to closely examine common usage to see which concept of stereotyping best fits. But this approach seems likely to fail. Sometimes in common usage people adopt a fairly narrow notion of a stereotype insisting that “No, they were not stereotyping, because men are on average stronger than women.” While on other occasions we adopt a broader usage, saying that a military force that excludes women from certain combat roles on those same grounds is deploying a stereotype, even if there are statistical differences between men and women’s strength. I see no reason to privilege the one aspect of common usage over any other. Another strategy is to defer to the concept of stereotyping employed by experts. But here too there is wide variation. As we saw earlier, different empirical disciplines use the concept of a stereotype quite differently. For instance, psychologists are much more likely to adopt an individualist approach, while scholars in, say, comparative ethnic studies are more likely to adopt a cultural approach to stereotyping. Here too I do not see any reason to privilege some empirical disciplines over others, treating their usage as definitive. How then can we proceed with conceptual analysis? We have seen, in the previous section, that the range of possible analyses is wide. How can we choose between these possibilities? Moving forward, I propose that we should consider which analysis would be most useful for moral and political purposes. This is the same approach that Blum (2004: footnotes 7, 18) adopts, and it fits with the more general strategy that Haslanger (2005) calls the “ameliorative project” in conceptual analysis. The ameliorative approach to conceptual analysis involves working out not how a concept is predominantly deployed in ordinary (or expert) usage, but what we need that concept for, and seeks to offer an analysis that will be most useful for that purpose. The ameliorative approach seems especially apt here since, first, as we’ve seen, other approaches, which focus on just capturing existing everyday/technical uses seem inconclusive. And second, stereotyping is already a concept that plays a central role in moral and political discourse. Given that the concept already plainly has this function, it seems worth asking under what conditions it would perform this function well. So let us ask: of the candidate analyses that we looked at in Section 2, which would be the most useful for purposes of moral and political evaluation? My answer, defended in the remainder of the chapter, is this. We should be pluralists about what counts as individual stereotyping: each of the possibilities that we’ve looked at can be morally problematic, for several different reasons, when deployed in action. And, we must also hang on to the concept of cultural



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

445

stereotyping (which has sometimes dropped out of the literature), because it plays a crucial role in explaining why individual stereotyping is problematic when it is.5

5  When and why is sex stereotyping wrongful/bad/unjust? I have said that we should seek an analysis of stereotyping that is best capable of serving our moral and political purposes. We need to think some more, then, about what exactly those moral and political purposes are. Specifically, we need to think about just what wrongs and injustices can be associated with stereotyping. In this section, I will show that there are several distinct moral problems with individual stereotyping. Along the way we will see that each of the various kinds (or potential kinds) of individual stereotype presented in Section 2 can be morally problematic. We will also see that typically to explain why these forms of individual stereotyping are problematic we must appeal to the idea of cultural stereotyping. Thus, my argument goes, if we want to capture all of the relevant moral/political concerns we will need to be pluralists about individual stereotyping and also retain the concept of cultural stereotyping. Some clarifications are needed before proceeding. First, I will assume (though not argue for here) the view that it is not wrong in itself to simply hold an individual stereotype.6 Moral concerns arise only when people deploy those stereotypes in action. I won’t give a precise definition here of what it is to deploy a stereotype, but intuitively there are numerous ways to do so. These include, for example, verbalizing the stereotype—for instance by asserting a generalization (of whatever kind)—making hiring decisions that reflect the stereotype, making public funding or custody decisions based on the stereotype, and so on. Second, I will assume that sex stereotyping includes associations based on a target’s actual sex or their perceived/ascribed sex. Thus, if a transgender man is (wrongly) perceived as a woman, and for this reason treated as incapable of doing certain jobs that are coded masculine, then, on my approach, he is subject to sex stereotypes about women. (This is, of course, compatible with this person also being subject to stereotypes about men and stereotypes specifically about trans* people.) Now for my central argument. The following are all, I submit, significant potential problems with acting on sex stereotypes.

446

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

5.1  Failures of respect and recognition On perhaps the most dominant account, offered by Blum (2004), the central wrong of stereotyping is a failure of respect. Blum argues that if we understand stereotyping as he proposes—as holding false or misleading associations in a manner that is resistant to counterevidence—then we can see that it essentially involves a failure of respect. Stereotyping in this manner involves a refusal to pay proper attention to what members of a stereotyped group are really like. For example, someone who believes that women are poor drivers might continue to believe this even though there is plenty of evidence available to him—on the road and through published statistics—that this is not the case. Someone who stereotypes persists in his false (or misleading) assumptions about members of a group—he assumes that individuals conform to characteristics they may not, and refuses to notice internal diversity within groups—even though he is well placed to see that those assumptions are false.7 This means that when someone acts on a sex stereotype, he disrespects members of the stereotyped group by treating them in ways that fail to respond to their full range of characteristics. I will grant here that Blum has identified an important wrong associated with stereotypes.8 If this was the sole or most important wrong associated with stereotyping, then we might be pushed toward adopting a strict conception of stereotypes as false or misleading associations held in a rigid manner. But as we will see, there are various other important wrongs (some of which Blum mentions) associated with stereotyping, and accounting for the full range of these wrongs requires adopting a pluralist view of stereotyping.

5.2  Carrying a demeaning message One way in which deploying a sex stereotype can be morally problematic is that it can communicate a demeaning message (Blum 2004: 278). For instance, an office manager who announces a hiring policy of only selecting attractive women, on the grounds that a woman’s role is partly to be visually appealing, would thereby communicate something demeaning toward female candidates for the job, and about women in general. When exactly does this problem of communicating a demeaning message arise? Generalizations of various kinds can carry a demeaning connotation when verbalized or used as a rationalization for behavior. In many cases the connotation attaches because of a related cultural stereotype (and in these cases does so whether or not the agent endorses the cultural stereotype).



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

447

Consider the following utterances: 1. “Women are naturally incapable of doing advanced mathematics.” 2. “The best mathematicians are male” (said by a male faculty member at a hiring meeting in the United States). 3. “The vast majority of living Fields Medal winners are male” (also said by a male faculty member at a hiring meeting in the United States). Each of these utterances seems to express something demeaning. (1) does so by simply asserting a demeaning assumption about women’s capacities (demeaning because that assumption is false, but also because it is connected to historical devaluation of women for their supposedly limited abilities to do mathematics, science, etc.). (2) and (3) do not simply assert something false. (3) asserts something true (the first female winner of the Fields Medal—a prestigious mathematics award— was Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014 and the award is given to several people every four years) and (2) plausibly has at least a reading on which it may also be true.9 On that reading, it asserts a statistical fact about the percentage of current top mathematicians who are male (which might be true, I’m not sure). Also the same, the described utterance of (2) and (3) seems to connote something demeaning. Specifically, they seem to connote the stereotype asserted in (1). Why do they carry this connotation? Plausibly, because the stereotype asserted in (1) is not only an individual stereotype that some people hold, but also a cultural stereotype. Given a situation where there is common awareness of (1) as an association that is widely shared within the culture, it is especially salient as an interpretation of why someone (especially a man) might believe the assertions made in (2) and (3). So someone who utters (2) or (3)—without any disclaimer and in a context like the one described above—can be reasonably interpreted as doing so on the basis of a belief about the natural capacities of women. Hence, utterances of (2) and (3), against certain background conditions, carry a demeaning connotation: the speakers communicate not just statistical generalizations about current men and women and their behavior but also a demeaning generalization about what men and women are naturally capable of. Where does this leave the project of giving an analysis of stereotyping? Someone who adopts the generalization that women are naturally incapable of doing advanced mathematics has a belief that meets Blum’s relatively strict criteria for holding an individual stereotype. The generalization is epistemically defective in various respects: it is false and (in any realistic circumstance) held

448

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

in a rigid manner that is resistant to evidence, given the clear lack of scientific support for it. But (2) and (3) show that other kinds of generalizations can also carry a demeaning message when verbalized. The generalization asserted in (3) is true and can be held in a well-founded manner (by anyone who has done some minimal research about the Fields Medal).10 Yet, it can still be a demeaning message in certain cultural contexts. So it seems that even epistemically innocuous generalizations can carry a demeaning message. We have also seen that to explain why these generalizations can have demeaning connotations we need to appeal to the idea of a cultural stereotype. Another way in which the deployment of a stereotype can demean is where an action is motivated by a stereotype, and this includes actions other than speech acts. Suppose, for instance, that a woman breaks up with her boyfriend and it becomes clear that the motivation for this is that she finds him too “soft”—too caring and emotionally sensitive—relative to social standards for male behavior. This would be demeaning if the breakup occurs because of an explicitly held belief about what is appropriate behavior for a man. But it could also be demeaning if she holds implicit associations between being male and being unemotional, tough, straight, and so on that, let’s suppose, affect her desire for the man. Similar concerns arise in the case of a straight woman who is consistently rejected by potential male partners because they, due to implicit or explicit associations, find her “unfeminine” or unattractive simply because she is ambitious, independent, and so on. In these cases too the deployment of an individual stereotype plausibly becomes demeaning because of an associated cultural stereotype. The rejection of a man for being soft resonates with the broader cultural tropes that to behave in these ways is to be debased or disgusting. (Some further evidence of this effect is that we can easily imagine him feeling especially humiliated by being left for this reason as opposed to having being left for having political views or hobbies that his ex does not share. The latter reasons do not resonate with broader cultural tropes about debasement or disgust.)

5.3  Supporting oppression/subordination Gender oppression (or, as legal theorists tend to say, subordination) is a major concern of feminist theorists. There are important debates about how exactly to define oppression, but I will assume that something like Marilyn Frye’s account is correct: oppression consists in “an enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

449

people” (Frye 1983: 10–11).11 Gender oppression, we can say, involves a set of forces and barriers that structure people’s lives specifically on the basis of their gender, and do so to the systematic detriment of people’s freedom and interests. The relevant structures include formal legal barriers, such as denials of the right to vote on the basis of gender. But they go beyond this to include informal social pressures, such as gendered differences in how men and women are reared. One key source of these informal pressures is the presence of gendered cultural stereotypes, which, as defined in Section 3, are ingrained and widely shared gender associations that structure individual interactions. Take, for instance, the cultural coding of certain kinds of work as “masculine,” such as jobs involving managerial responsibilities. Here we have a set of cultural associations that make some forms of employment seem like “men’s work,” and these associations structure individuals’ interactions: for instance, they make it harder for women to gain employment in these areas because employers will take female applicants less seriously. This structuring is oppressive, because the jobs that are coded masculine are typically those that carry with them the greatest remuneration, social prestige, access to political power, and so on (Cudd 2006). What is the role of individual stereotyping with respect to subordination? As is implicit in what we have already seen, one way in which individual stereotyping can create oppression is for an individual to hold and deploy the very cultural stereotypes that we just considered. For instance, the employer who believes that his line of work is “men’s work,” or holds implicit associations between maleness and his occupation, will directly exclude qualified female candidates. These individual stereotypes fit easily within Blum’s account, since they are false, unsupported by evidence, and so on.12 However, as Frye (1983) points out, even epistemically innocuous generalizations and associations can reinforce subordination when they are deployed against a background of preexisting oppressive structures. For instance, suppose that an employer believes that women can and do have all of the qualities that are generally needed to do managerial work, but accepts a generalization that male workers within their industry generally take female managers less seriously (Frye 1983: 18). The employer’s belief might be true and well founded, given experience with male workers in that industry. Yet, the employer who deploys this generalization in their hiring strategy will systematically discount female candidates, on the grounds that they will be less effective. Here the interaction between an epistemically innocuous statistical generalization and a set of background structures that affect how men respond to women in more powerful roles sustains overall oppression.

450

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

5.4  Blocking social change Somewhat related to concerns about subordination are concerns about the way stereotypes can block social change. According to a broadly Millian view, it is very important that individuals who find their society’s current practices to be defective have “the freedom to point out the way” toward different practices (Mill 2010: 69). This freedom can be defended both because it is a means of creating progress—Mill suggests that it is only by being confronted with alternative ways of doing things that a society can discover the best ways of doing things—and on the grounds that individuals have a right to contribute to the overall direction of the society in which they live. Ronald Dworkin, for instance, endorses a right to “contribute to one’s moral environment” (1993: 41). The practices that individuals should have the freedom to challenge include gendered practices: various ways in which women and men may play different roles in their society. For instance, familiar gendered practices include the fact that women do substantially more care work within the home, the promotion of certain traits—such as aggressiveness—in young men more than young women, and the more substantial representation of men in positions of political power. How might these practices be challenged? One possibility is to challenge them via expression; for instance, someone might simply tell others that men are equally capable of doing care work and that there is nothing inappropriate about a man doing such work. So the freedom to contribute to social change requires freedom of expression. But, as Mill points out, expression is often an insufficient channel for challenging existing practices. Often to induce social change one must not simply say that a certain possibility might be attractive, but show that it is by behaving in a way that differs from the norm: offer “experiments in living,” as Mill calls them. Individuals must be able to engage in, as I’ll call it, “outlier” behavior. So, freedom of action as well as expression is important if individuals are to have a chance to challenge prevailing practices. It is especially difficult to challenge gendered practices because those practices are sustained by engrained social structures, of the kind mentioned above. In particular, the existence of cultural stereotypes about men and women makes it very difficult to challenge gendered practices. Take, for instance, the cultural stereotype that care work is “unmanly” and thus an inappropriate practice for a man to engage in. This stereotype means that it is difficult for a man to engage in this work without facing social stigma. It also means that a man who engages in this work, and illustrates that it is a perfectly good way for a man to live, will often not have much effect on the broader society. Because cultural stereotypes



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

451

are resistant to change even in light of evidence, his example is likely to be ignored or discounted. The woman who wishes to run for Congress will find it difficult to gain enough support—for instance, because the media will focus on her looks rather than her ideas—and even if she succeeds she will find it difficult to convince people that more women should be in politics—even if she does a good job, she may be treated as “the exception that proves the rule,” or as “really a man.” In sum, the existence of cultural stereotypes means that it is especially difficult to challenge gendered practices by being a gender outlier because (a) there are special hurdles to being an outlier of this kind, and because (b) people are especially resistant to changing their beliefs and behaviors in light of what these outliers may demonstrate. It is difficult to engage in the “experiments in living” in this area and even impressive results from these experiments are likely to have little effect. What this means is that it is especially important to reduce the relative costs of engaging in gender outlier behavior. Individual stereotyping has an important role to play here. One way to inhibit the potential contributions of gender outliers is to subject them to epistemically defective stereotypes of the kind Blum focuses on. Suppose, for instance, that women are simply excluded from the military on the grounds that they are incapable of performing the physical tasks involved or because it is not appropriate for a woman to be involved in armed conflict. Stereotyping here would directly prevent women who wish to play a non-traditional role from showing that they can perform it, that there is nothing inappropriate about their performing it, and so on.13 But, there are also more subtle ways in which individual stereotypes (beyond the kind on which Blum focuses) can affect the ability of outliers to contribute to social change. Take, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court case Frontiero v. Richardson.14 The case concerned a military policy that allowed servicemen to automatically claim their (opposite sex) partners as dependents for the purposes of receiving benefits.15 Servicewomen, however, could only claim a (opposite sex) partner as a dependent if they could prove that he was relying on them for more than 50 percent of his income. The assumption was that male members of the military were more likely to be the primary earners within their households than female members of the military: a statistical generalization (along with the assumption that administrative costs could thus be saved by requiring only women to prove that they were the primary earners in their households). There was some support for this generalization and it may well have been true, given the typical household in the United States in the early 1970s. All the same, the

452

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

deployment of this stereotype altered the costs of being a gender outlier relative to being a gender conformist: there was an extra hurdle for households with a female primary earner than households with a male primary earner. In sum, the deployment of several different kinds of individual stereotypes can alter the costs of being a gender outlier relative to being a gender conformist and thereby deny people a reasonable opportunity to contribute to social change in our gendered practices. The reason why it is especially important to carve out space for gender outliers, as opposed to outliers relative to other kinds of social practice, is that the existence of cultural stereotypes regarding gender creates special hurdles to challenging gendered practices.

5.5  Restricting freedom of gender expression The previous two moral concerns that we looked at focused on the broad social impact of various kinds of stereotyping. What we will now focus on is the direct effect that stereotyping can have on the freedom of particular individuals. Different kinds of individual gender stereotypes can severely restrict freedom of gender expression. This is perhaps most obvious, and often most harmful, in the case of trans* individuals, but it has also important effects on the lives of cisgendered individuals who defy common gender expectations. One form of individual stereotyping that clearly impacts individual freedom of gender expression is the deployment of prescriptive stereotypes about what constitutes appropriate behavior for a man or for a woman. Take, for instance, Creed v. Family Express Corporation, which concerned a transgender woman who was fired for presenting an insufficiently masculine appearance at work.16 As the court remarked “Ms. Creed’s allegation she was terminated after refusing to present herself in a masculine way permits the inference she was terminated as a result of [her employer’s] stereotypical perceptions,”17 specifically stereotypes about how men ought to appear in public (her employer misgendered her as a man—recall my assumption earlier that people can be stereotyped both based on their gender and their perceived gender). Pricewaterhouse v. Hopkins illustrates how stereotyping can also affect the freedom of cis-gendered people who defy common gender norms. Ms. Hopkins ran for partnership at Pricewaterhouse accountancy and was denied it. Hopkins had exhibited many of the qualities that the existing partners typically looked for in a candidate, such as assertiveness and the ability to issue directives to subordinates. What they did not find acceptable was that a woman should



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

453

display such qualities: she needed “a course at charm school,” a representative senior partner remarked. In sum, Hopkins was subjected to the prescriptive stereotype that it is unacceptable or inappropriate for a woman to be anything other than deferential in the workplace, especially in her interactions with men. Stereotyping of this kind creates oppression, as was touched on earlier. Hopkins and others like her are in a “double bind” where assertiveness is a necessary trait to be taken seriously as a manager but also something they will be punished for as unwomanly: there is no way both to satisfy what the bosses considered to be the job requirements and not to offend their gender sensibilities. Prescriptive stereotyping also creates limitations on individual freedom, however.18 For instance, suppose that the existing partners would in fact have been willing to allow Hopkins to advance in the firm if she were just a bit more deferential to men. There would be no “double bind” in this case, just a “single bind.” This would still be morally problematic, since while Hopkins would’ve been able to advance economically she would not have been able to openly display character traits that defy gendered expectations: her freedom of gender expression would still have been limited. Descriptive stereotypes can also have a significant impact on individual freedom of gender expression. Consider, for instance, Jespersen v. Harrah's Operating Co. Darlene Jerpersen was required by her employer—Harrah’s casino—to wear makeup during her working hours as a bartender. The employer’s justification for this requirement was not a prescriptive belief that a woman ought not be to be seen without makeup but a descriptive belief, which may well have been both true and well founded, that customers would feel more comfortable around a makeup-wearing woman. Jespersen refused to conform to the company’s policy, and it clearly limited her freedom of gender expression— to appear in a way that defies expectations about appropriate appearance for a woman—but the policy was based on a statistical generalization that may well have been epistemically sound. Now, I have assumed that it is seriously morally problematic when employers violate individual freedom of gender expression: that freedom of gender expression is an individual right. This raises a difficult question. It is seemingly implausible to say that there is an across-the-board right to freedom of individual expression in the workplace: it would be a very invasive step for the government to say that employers may put no restrictions on how they expect their employees to appear and behave. For instance, surely a management consultancy can ask that its senior employees not show up to work dressed as punks, wearing torn

454

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

clothes and spiked hair, or that its workers not go several weeks without bathing. So if there is a right to freedom of gender expression something must be said to explain why there is something special about the sphere of gender conformity and nonconformity that isn’t present in the sphere of, say, bathing conformity and nonconformity. This question deserves a much more extensive treatment than I can offer here.19 But a plausible hypothesis is that gender is distinctive, at least in part, because background cultural stereotypes about gender are so prevalent and significant in our society. First, this means that someone’s perceived/ascribed gender structures almost every interaction they have and thus is central to their entire way of life. As Frye (1983) points out, someone’s gender is one of the first things people try to identify upon meeting them and has an enormous impact on how they interact with that person. Being able to determine one’s own gender expression has a crucial impact on one’s overall lived experience. Second, pressure to conform to standard gender expectations is present not just in the workplace but across nearly all areas of life.20 As Judith Butler puts the point, it is not the case that I can easily “get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today,” because in fact gender expression is typically heavily conditioned by pressure toward “repetition” of what is expected, “very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms” (1992: 83–84).

6 Conclusion In the previous section, we looked at several different kinds of moral problems— each of 5.1 through 5.5—that can be created by individual gender stereotyping. We saw that these moral problems can be created not just by individual stereotypes defined narrowly—as epistemically defective generalizations or associations— but a wide range of different varieties of generalization and association. Moral problems can be created by the deployment of gender generalizations and associations that are explicit or implicit, epistemically neutral or epistemically defective, generic or statistical, and so on: in sum, by any of the candidate varieties of individual stereotype discussed in Section 2. We have also seen that these moral problems typically occur only because of the deployment of one of these individual gender stereotypes within a context in which there are also significant cultural gender stereotypes.



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

455

Now we also saw, in Section 4, that our analysis of gender stereotyping—what we are willing to count as a gender stereotype—needs to be adequate to explain the full range of potential moral problems in this area. What the findings of Section 5 show is that if we want our concept of a gender stereotype to fit the full range of potentially problematic behavior, we will need to be pluralists. We need to view all the disparate forms of individual stereotyping considered in Section 2 and we also need the concept of a cultural stereotype. Let me finish with some more general observations. The notion of a stereotype, we have seen, deserves serious philosophical attention. It turns out to be a complex notion, used in a wide variety of ways in both ordinary and technical contexts. I have offered a map of all these different forms of stereotype and argued that we need each part of that map if we are to be properly prepared to combat all the different forms of wrongful and unjust stereotyping.21 This is crucially important to understanding a wide range of practical situations, including when we should criticize individual utterances for their demeaning content, which policies we should enact in order to end gender subordination, how anti-discrimination law can be used to support freedom of gender expression, and so on.

Notes 1 See Leslie and Lerner (2016) and Nickel (forthcoming) for further explanation. 2 I won’t spend long on these details here, since the differences will not be that important for our purposes, but there are very helpful discussions available in, for instance, Beeghly (2015). 3 Beeghly calls her approach the “descriptive” approach, but since I have reserved that term for a different distinction I have opted here for the term “neutral.” She claims that the neutral approach is the standard approach in the empirical psychology literature, but there are some exceptions: see, for example, Bordalo et al. (forthcoming). Also, as I discuss below, psychology (nor the related fields of behavioral economics and so on) is not the only relevant field of empirical study. 4 It might be better to disaggregate these features of a cultural stereotype so that we can see which are really important, but I will set that possibility aside for present purposes. 5 This approach is partly inspired by and largely (I think) consistent with Haslanger’s (2015) critique of individualism in the implicit bias literature. That literature is an example, I think, of an area where theorists have often tended to assume a purely individualistic concept of stereotyping.

456

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

6 I am thus setting aside the large and important literature on the ethics of belief that considers whether holding certain beliefs is inherently wrong. For an overview, see Chignell (2010). 7 I leave aside here a further moral problem mentioned by Blum that stereotyping can involve exaggerating the differences between one’s own group and others groups: “othering” of members of those groups. See Blum (2004), pp. 276–77. 8 Though for skepticism about the right to be treated an individual, see LippertRasmussen (2013), Chapter 11, Section 2. 9 Compare the examples in Haslanger (2012). Haslanger’s own account of why these examples carry a demeaning connotation is different from mine, however. 10 It might said that even (3) is in fact epistemically defective and can thus fit within Blum’s account because, when uttered (in relevant contexts), (3) connotes (1), and is thus likely to cause other people to have false and unjustified beliefs. It is indeed the case that an utterance of (3) can be damaging to the epistemic community, and is in that sense epistemically defective. But a belief in (3) need not reflect any past or present epistemic malpractice on the part of the individual believer, and so Blum’s account, which emphasizes individual epistemic failings, would not count (3) as an individual stereotype. Thanks to Rose Lenehan for raising this issue. 11 Quoted and discussed in Haslanger, Tuana, and O’Connor (2012). See also Cudd (2006). 12 Compare the examples in Blum (2004), pp. 283–84. 13 As Michaela McSweeney reminded me, it may well be unattractive for anyone (of whatever gender) to serve in the military as currently structured. But this view is compatible with my point in the text, which is just that in so far as there is a military, women should have the opportunity to show that there is nothing impossible or inappropriate about specifically being a woman in this role. 14 Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973). 15 Of course the assumption that people would have or should have only opposite sex partners is also extremely problematic, but I set it aside to focus on the specific problem discussed in the text. 16 Creed v. Family Express Corp., No. 3:06-CV-465RM, 2007 WL 2265630 (N.D. Ind., August 3, 2007). 17 Ibid., p. 3. Quoted in Yuracko (2012), p. 767. I rely on Yuracko’s important discussion throughout this section. 18 Yoshino (2006) makes some similar observations about this case. 19 I try to make some more progress in Hosein (2017). 20 A point emphasized by Frye (1983), Butler (1990, 1992), and Spade (2011). 21 In fact, I have surveyed only a subset of the wrongs associated with stereotyping. See, for instance, Steele (2010) for some further possibilities.



What Is Sex Stereotyping and What Could Be Wrong with It?

457

References Beeghly, Erin (2015), “What is a Stereotype? What is Stereotyping?” Hypatia 30 (4): 675–91. Blum, Lawrence (2004), “Stereotypes and Stereotyping: A Moral Analysis,” Philosophical Papers 33 (3): 251–89. Bordalo, Pedro, Katherine Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer (Forthcoming), “Stereotypes,” Quarterly Journal of Economics. Butler, Judtih (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1992), “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler,” Artforum International, November 3: 82–89. Case, Mary Anne (2000), “The Very Stereotype the Law Condemns’: Constitutional Sex Discrimination Law as a Quest for Perfect Proxies,” Cornell Law Review 85: 1447–91. Chignell, Andrew (2010), “The Ethics of Belief,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online: https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/spr2017/entries/ethics-belief/. Cudd, Ann (2006), Analyzing Oppression, New York: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, Ronald (1993), “Women and Pornography,” The New York Review of Books 21: 36–42. Frye, Marilyn (1983), The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Haslanger, Sally (2005), “What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds,” Hypatia 20 (4): 10–26. Haslanger, Sally (2012), “Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground,” in Resisting Reality, 446–78, New York: Oxford University Press. Haslanger, Sally (2015), “Social Structure, Narrative, and Explanation,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (1): 1–15. Haslanger, Sally, Nancy Tuana, and Peg O’Connor (2012), “Topics in Feminism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/ Hosein, Adam (2015), “Freedom, Sex-Roles, and Anti-Discrimination Law,” Law and Philosophy 34 (5): 485–517. Hosein, Adam (2017), “Gender Libertarianism in the Workplace” (manuscript). Leslie, Sarah-Jane, and Adam Lerner (2016), “Generic Generalizations,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) (forthcoming). Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ generics/ Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper (2013), Born Free and Equal? A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Discrimination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

458

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Mill, John Stewart (2010), “On Liberty,” in The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill, 3–122, New York: Random House. Nickel, Bernhard (Forthcoming), “Generics,” in Bob Hale, Alex Miller, and Crispin Wright (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Language, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell. Spade, Dean (2011), Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Durham: Duke University Press. Steele, Claude (2010), Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, New York: W. W. Norton. Yoshino, Kenji (2006), Covering, New York: Random House. Yuracko, Kimberly (2012), “Soul of a Woman: The Sex Stereotyping Prohibition at Work,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 161: 757–805.

23

Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics: Women, Embodiment, Care Relations, and Systemic Injustice Helga Varden

1 Introduction1 As part of critiquing the condition of woman, feminist ethics commonly seek to understand the importance of embodiment and dependency relations. Analyses of embodiment and dependency relations are, for example, naturally at the center of feminist critiques of physical violence, systemic injustice, and oppression. Analyzing institutions such as marriage, prostitution, and abortion and understanding phenomena involving sexual objectification, sexual violence, and domestic abuse appear similarly impossible without involving ideas of embodiment and dependency. Ideas of embodiment and dependency relations also do important philosophical work in good normative analyses of relations involving caregivers and care receivers, including in light of the asymmetrical nature of these relations and how the unpaid and physically and emotionally exhausting work involved has, historically, so often been deemed “women’s work.” For scholars who have serious interests in both feminist ethics and the history of philosophy, an unavoidable question becomes whether it is worthwhile to use the theories of the classical thinkers to explore these issues. The problem is that most of the philosophical canon is written by men and in ways that have done little to improve the conditions of women—indeed, quite the opposite. Moreover, for those who have major research interests in the philosophy of Kant, the task of using his writings for feminist purposes has struck most thinkers as a particularly impossible project. In contrast to,

460

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

for example, J. S. Mill, Kant is known neither for his rich, close, and interesting relationships with women, nor for being a champion of women’s rights; again, quite the opposite: Kant’s close friends were all men, and when he speaks about women, he often appears to affirm many sexist beliefs and attitudes. Moreover, Kant’s moral philosophy is commonly viewed as advocating a moral ideal of a rather disembodied kind. To many, Kant’s ideal moral agent is the independent, hyper-reflective man who constantly strives to act only on universalizable maxims from a motivation of duty. Kant’s practical philosophy is therefore commonly deemed a particularly poor resource for understanding issues concerning embodiment and dependency in general and for understanding the condition of woman in particular. And yet, in recent years, a significant body of research—especially by women Kant scholars—has engaged Kant’s work anew. Some of these engagements challenge earlier readings of Kant, while others draw extensively on Kant’s philosophy— normally in dialogue with other feminist philosophers—as they seek to develop better philosophical theories of embodiment, dependency, and the condition of woman. A central idea informing many of these efforts is that although Kant’s own judgment and analysis of the condition of woman presents serious problems that need overcoming, an undeniable strength of his practical philosophy is its abundant philosophical resources for defenders of rights, understood in terms of freedom and equality, or autonomy. Indeed, as we will see, some also argue that Kant’s theory is particularly useful not only for defending women’s rights, but also for analyzing (asymmetrical) dependency (care) relations and appreciating the importance of our embodiment for understanding a range of related issues concerning virtue (ethics), right (justice), moral psychology, and philosophical anthropology. Most recently, there have been efforts to show that, despite the problems with Kant’s own account, there might be something important to learn from his approach to gender when it comes to understanding sexual orientation and sexual identity. By setting the focus on issues of dependence and embodiment, in other words, feminist work has and continues to radically improve our understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy as one that is not (as it typically has been taken to be) about disembodied abstract rational agents. This chapter outlines this positive development in Kant scholarship in recent decades by taking us from Kant’s own comments on women through major developments in Kant scholarship with regard to the related feminist issues. The main aim is to provide an overview of the philosophical resources already available in



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

461

the literature as well as a sense of where main interpretive and philosophical challenges currently lie. More specifically, I start with a brief summary of the kinds of statements Kant makes about women that give rise to the many interpretive and philosophical puzzles facing anyone who reads his philosophy carefully. I then provide a brief historical overview of many of the pioneering women Kant scholars who made it possible for there to be so many excellent women scholars in the Kant community today and for firmly establishing the condition of woman as a point of inquiry on the philosophical map. The last section is organized in themes to give the reader a sense of the current, related discussions. More specifically, I provide an overview of the more recent literature regarding Kant on women, embodiment (sexual objectification, sexual activity, sexual violence, abortion), care relations (marriage, dependents, servants), and systemic injustice (poverty, sex work, oppression). As we will see, these many engagements with Kant’s philosophy not only help us to better understand our inherited women-undermining and problematic dependency-furthering institutions and practices, but also provide ample philosophical resources that can be utilized in our efforts to envision the project of reform such that we can achieve a better future for each and all.

2  Kant’s comments about women Kant says some offensive, sexist things about women. Among the frequently cited examples are Kant’s statement that women don’t vote because, like children, they lack a “natural” prerequisite (TP 8: 295); Kant’s claim that women, like children and servants, are “passive citizens” (MM 6: 314) as they depend “upon the will of others” and so lack the independence needed for “active” citizenship (MM 6: 314); his comment that some rather extraordinary woman scholars in his time (Dacier and Châtelet) “might as well also wear a beard; for that might perhaps better express the mien of depth for which they strive” (BS 2: 230); his remark “It is difficult for me to believe that the fair sex is capable of principles” (BS 2: 232); his statement that the philosophical wisdom of women is not “reasoning but sentiment. In the opportunity that one would give them to educate their beautiful nature, one must always keep this relation before one’s eyes” (BS 2: 231); his claim that because she is so attuned to pleasing the public, “the scholarly woman uses her books in the same way as her watch . . . which she carries so that people will see that she has one, though it is usually not running

462

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

or not set by the sun” (A 7: 307). To finish with a couple rather lengthy ones, Kant’s comments that the woman should dominate and the man govern; for inclination dominates and understanding governs.— The husband’s behavior must show that to him the welfare of his wife is closest to his heart. But since the man must know best how he stands and how far he can go, he will be like a minister to his monarch who is mindful only of enjoyment . . . so . . . the most high and mighty master can do all that he wills, but under the condition that his minister suggests to him what his will is (A 7: 309f);

and that: if the question is therefore posed, whether it is also in conflict with the equality of the partners for the law to say of the husband’s relation to the wife, he is to be your master (he is the party to direct, she is to obey): this cannot be regarded as conflicting with the natural equality of a couple if this dominance is based only on the natural superiority of the husband to the wife in his capacity to promote the common interest of the household, and the right to direct that is based on this can be derived from the very duty of unity and equality with respect to the end. (MM 6: 279)

It is therefore not strange that for a long time most of what was written about Kant and women was very critical of him and his approach (Gilligan 1982; Lloyd 1993). These statements give us an indication of why for many feminists Kant’s work serves as a favorite illustration of the rampant sexism found in the Western philosophical canon generally,2 and one reason why leading Kant scholars have typically stayed away from this topic in Kant. More recently, however, and especially with the entrance of women into Kant scholarship, these topics in Kant have received increased attention. For those scholars who do take on the interpretive challenge posed by Kant’s comments on women, several puzzles arise. First, there is the general puzzle of trying to establish exactly what Kant means in each of these statements. Can these remarks be consistent with his universal claims concerning human equality and rights? Moreover, taking on this textual challenge includes dealing with the interpretive puzzles that arise from the fact that, in between the previously discussed sexist comments from the “Beautiful and Sublime” essay, he also says that these “glances” on various “peculiarities of human nature” should be regarded as having been made with “the eye of an observer [rather than] of the philosopher” (BS 2: 207). Also, in his “What Is Enlightenment?” essay,



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

463

Kant somewhat surprisingly appears to encourage everyone, including women, to dare to be wise, and criticizes anyone, including men, who hold another’s efforts in this endeavor back (WE 8: 35f). Moreover, just after he’s talked about the “passivity” of women citizenry in the “Doctrine of Right,” he argues that it cannot be illegal for anyone to work their “way up from . . . [a] passive condition to an active one” (MM 6: 315). Second, there is the general question of how Kant’s talk of “woman’s nature” fits with his moral (ethical and legal-political) theories, wherein freedom, dignity, and rights are core ideas and wherein almost all the analyses are carried out using the gender-neutral concepts of “person” and “citizens.” That is to say, Kant’s systematic writings on freedom consist of his writings on virtue (ethics), such as The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason, and “Doctrine of Virtue” in The Metaphysics of Morals, and his writings on right (justice), the major work of which is the “Doctrine of Right” in The Metaphysics of Morals. In these works, the distinction between men and women almost never occurs; most instances of this distinction are found in Kant’s writings on anthropology, history, human nature, and aesthetics. So, interpreters ask themselves: is Kant simply contradicting himself when he suddenly uses the distinction between men and women in his freedom writings, such as in his aforementioned discussion of marriage in the “Doctrine of Right,” or is there a philosophical reason that explains why the comments appear where they do and that may be important to understanding what they mean in these works? Now, if there is a philosophical reason underlying these textual knots, the next question is not merely interpretive, but philosophical, and it needs to be handled by all thinkers who identify themselves with the Kantian practical philosophy camp. This is the philosophical question of whether there is anything in Kant’s approach to gender in general or women in particular that may be worth holding onto. For example, is the Kantian philosophical project better served by divesting it of these gendered parts and developing his practical philosophical approach simply in terms of persons’ and citizens’ rights and duties to respect their own and one another’s freedom as equals (autonomy)? Most women Kant scholars focusing on his practical philosophy today who have written something that deals—directly or indirectly—with topics concerning woman’s condition all agree on one point: regardless of our interpretive and philosophical disagreements, Kant’s moral philosophy of freedom (autonomy) can be put to excellent use to combat our inherited sexist institutions and practices. In addition, we agree with the many women who are primarily drawn

464

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

to other aspects of Kant’s philosophy—to his first or third Critiques—that his work is tremendously empowering and philosophically challenging in terrific ways. But what of his remarks on women and our condition? Let’s first take a quick look at the growth in numbers of women Kant scholars. Then we’ll focus on the growth of Kantian feminist work in Europe and North America.3

3  A brief history of pioneering women Kant scholars Kant scholarship is among the areas of philosophy that developed an impressive, steadily increasing number of outstanding women scholars early on. It is always difficult to name some and not others, but there is little risk of offending anyone by saying that Eva Schaper deserves special mention. Schaper received her PhD from the University of Münster in 1950, and she made long-lasting contributions, especially to the study of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (third Critique). Another significant pioneer was Ingeborg Heidemann (PhD Köln, 1955) who is especially remembered for her work on an edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (first Critique) and for having been an active force behind the historically most important Kant journal, namely Kant-Studien. Among the earliest groundbreaking woman forces, we also find Mary J. Gregor (PhD Toronto, 1958). Gregor is known not only for her wonderful scholarship on Kant’s practical philosophy, but also for her lasting contributions to the Kant and the wider philosophical communities through her excellent English translations of much of Kant’s practical philosophy. A second, larger wave of trailblazing women Kant scholars includes Onora O’Neill (PhD Harvard, 1969), Gertrud Scholz (PhD Köln, 1972), Jill Buroker (PhD Chicago, 1974), Karen Gloy (PhD Heidelberg, 1974), Patricia Kitcher (PhD Princeton, 1974), Barbara Herman (PhD Harvard, 1975), and Seyla Benhabib (PhD Yale, 1977). Although their PhDs were not in philosophy, but in political science (at Frankfurt am Main in 1971 and at Harvard in 1975, respectively), Ingeborg Maus and Susan Meld Shell are also among those who paved the way for women Kantians. B. Sharon Byrd, who was originally educated in law, falls into this category as well. The 1980s saw another wave of influential women Kant scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, including Sharon AndersonGold (PhD New School, 1980), Jean Hampton (PhD Harvard, 1980), Béatrice Longuenesse (PhD Paris-Sorbonne, 1980), Christine Korsgaard (PhD Harvard, 1981), Marcia W. Baron (PhD North Carolina, 1982), Herlinde Pauer-Studer



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

465

(PhD Salzburg, 1983), Jane Kneller (PhD Rochester, 1984), Claudia Langer (PhD Heidelberg, 1984), Jean P. Rumsey (PhD Wisconsin-Madison, 1985), Sally Sedgwick (PhD Chicago, 1985), Robin S. Dillon (PhD Pittsburgh, 1986), Ursula Pia Jauch (PhD Zürich, 1988), Hannah Ginsborg (PhD Harvard, 1989), and Holly L. Wilson (PhD Penn. State, 1989). This decade also saw the first woman to take a PhD in philosophy in the Nordic countries, namely the Kant scholar Hjørdis Nerheim (in Oslo in 1986), who also became the first woman philosophy professor in these countries (in 1994).4 These scholars, who broke the glass ceiling for women to become Kant scholars and Kantian philosophers, have been tremendously important in infinitely many ways for everyone following them; they serve as inspiring role models, mentors, supervisors, teachers, and transformers of the philosophical profession. As mentioned, many have focused their attention on topics other than practical philosophy, primarily on interpretive and philosophical issues concerning the first and the third Critiques, and most of these scholars haven’t published on Kant in relation to feminist philosophy. There is probably no simple or single reason for why this is. For example, for some, it may be a result of their research focus; for others, research interests may have been combined with (conscious or unconscious) strategic, career-building self-interest (feminist philosophy was for a long time not considered “serious scholarship” in the profession); and for others, it may have been influenced in part by how emotionally difficult it was to engage feminist issues when trying to succeed professionally in an academic discipline dominated by men. The paths of women Kant scholars who wrote on practical philosophy developed quite differently. By the late 1980s to early 1990s, many of these women had begun publishing work on Kant and topics in feminist philosophy.

4  The growth of Kantian feminist scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s5 In the latter part of the 1980s,6 Onora O’Neill’s, Barbara Herman’s, Christine Korsgaard’s, and Marcia Baron’s writings on Kant’s practical philosophy— especially his ethics—took on the challenge from many quarters, including feminist philosophical quarters, to show how Kant’s ethics could respond effectively to concerns regarding particularity, affective emotions, and our social natures (O’Neill 1989; Herman 1993; Korsgaard 1996; Baron 1995). An

466

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

important, critical response to this literature’s ability to face the more general and the explicitly feminist objections to Kant’s ethics came from Sally Sedgwick in 1990. In “Can Kant’s Ethics Survive the Feminist Critique?” Sedgwick argues that although there are ways of overcoming many problems of sexism in Kant and that despite efforts by Herman et al. to emphasize the role he awards feeling in his practical philosophy, pure reason nonetheless remains the basis of his supreme moral law. Consequently, his philosophy is unable to give a sufficient response to objections from feminist quarters—such as the worries expressed by Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice—regarding the constitutive role of the emotions and particularity in morally good and emotionally healthy human relations, let alone care relations. In 1992, Korsgaard also published an important related article that takes on explicitly feminist issues. In “Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations,” Korsgaard focuses on how Kant’s writings can capture dangers regarding sexuality and objectification as well as concerns regarding friendship in intimate relations. These issues are central to capturing his account of the importance of marriage in general and for women in particular (even though the actual historical institution so often has been terrible for women). The year 1992 also saw a remarkable article published by Rae Langton. In “Duty and Desolation,” Langton engages core ideas in Kant’s moral philosophy by reflecting on a letter interchange between Kant and a young woman, Maria von Herbert, who had been studying his philosophy together with friends and who came to him for moral advice. Langton argues that in addition to revealing Kant’s inability to respond well to the challenge of the situation, the interchange between Kant and Herbert reveals troublesome features of his moral philosophy, especially regarding his ideals of truth-telling and moral sainthood. The year 1992 also saw the two first articles from Robin S. Dillon. In these as well as other articles in the 1990s (onward), Dillon developed her Kant-inspired account of self-respect, one facet of which explores connections with care and argued that a morally responsible, emotionally healthy life includes respecting ourselves and others not merely as rational beings but also as embodied, fully particular individuals (Dillon 1992a, b, c, d, 1997, 2001, 2003). Another early, groundbreaking contribution on Kant and women written in the English language during this period came in 1993 from Pauline Kleingeld, then a graduate student at the Dutch University of Leiden.7 In “The Problematic Status of Gender-Neutral Language in the History of Philosophy: The Case of Kant,” Kleingeld discusses the tension between Kant’s sexism and the



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

467

gender-neutral language of his moral and political theory. She criticizes the tradition of interpretation, according to which this aspect of Kant’s text is simply set aside as an unfortunate mistake. Another tremendously influential article in this period was Barbara Herman’s “Could It Be Worth Thinking about Kant on Marriage?” which not only presented an entirely new take on Kant and marriage, but also took up the important themes regarding sexual objectification addressed in Korsgaard’s article (1994). This year Herman’s and O’Neill’s discussions regarding particularity and the related importance of affect and direct emotional responses also received explicit attention in the work of Herlinde Pauer-Studer. Pauer-Studer wrote a series of philosophical papers on feminist philosophy in the 1990s, and in one of these, “Kant and Social Sentiments,” she engages both O’Neill’s and Herman’s arguments by trying to show that neither successfully responds to the charge that Kant’s philosophy is as disembodied and unsocial as feminists (and others) often argue (Pauer-Studer 1994). She proposes that the only way to overcome this challenge would be by complementing Kant’s ethical account with an account of the good. These themes regarding asymmetry and particularity have become especially prominent in the so-called care tradition in philosophy. I will return to these issues below. The 1990s also saw the publication of the first anthology ever to focus exclusively on Kant and feminist issues, namely Robin M. Schott’s Feminist Interpretations of Kant (1997). Many of the pieces and scholars included in this anthology deserve mention, but for the purposes of this chapter, let me focus only on the women Kant scholars.8 To start, in “Kantian Ethics and Claims of Detachment,” Marcia Baron begins by criticizing Kant’s sexism before proceeding to explain why in spite of it, Kant’s moral theory (with its basis in freedom and equality) is still so empowering and useful for feminist causes (Baron 1997). In “The Aesthetic Dimension of Kantian Autonomy,” Jane Kneller discusses the role of aesthetic imagination in Kant’s conception of autonomy (Kneller 1997).9 In “Feminist Themes in Unlikely Places: Re-Reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” Marcia Moen also focuses on Kant’s aesthetics to find support for feminist causes in Kant’s philosophy (Moen 1997), whereas Holly L. Wilson’s is, as the title suggests, an attempt at “Rethinking Kant from the Perspective of Ecofeminism” (Wilson 1997). This year (1997) also saw a Kantbased response to claims of Kant’s inability to meet the challenges regarding particularity and affect in Cynthia Stark’s “Decision procedures, standards of rightness, and impartiality.” The next year, 1998, saw the publication of Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn’s anthology Autonomy and Community: Readings in

468

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy, which includes exploratory papers on Kant in relation to the feminist topics of pregnancy and abortion (Feldman 1998) and marriage (Wilson 1998).

5  Feminist themes in contemporary Kant scholarship As mentioned above, there is a series of general and more specific interpretive and philosophical questions facing anyone who approaches feminist issues within a Kantian philosophical framework. Whether we look at the work mentioned above or the more recent work (see below), what we find is often determined by which of these questions the relevant scholars aim to address. The interpretive issues include trying to establish exactly what Kant said and why he said what he said, which also often leads these Kant scholars to explore structural interpretive issues such as Kant’s accounts of ethics (virtue), justice (right), and human nature (including moral psychology and philosophical anthropology). Some then proceed with these general accounts—of virtue, and/or of right, and/ or of human nature (including evil)—to explore what Kant said about specific feminist issues. Some of these thinkers in turn take on the next question, namely what Kant ought to have said about various feminist issues, once his accounts of virtue, right, and human nature are revised as they ought to be (whatever that is taken to involve). Others set these interpretive questions aside and instead proceed more directly, trying to figure out what Kantians ought to say about feminist issues when armed with the most defensible version of Kant’s accounts of virtue, and/or of right, and/or of human nature. All Kantians who aim to contribute to contemporary discussions of feminist issues therefore employ some or more of Kant’s philosophical tools to explore topics such as embodiment (e.g., sexual objectification, sexual activity, sexual violence, abortion), care relations (e.g., marriage, dependents, servants), and systemic injustice (e.g., poverty, prostitution, oppression). Moreover, some of the Kant-based or Kant-inspired accounts also take part in the project of bridging the philosophical conversations between the traditions by drawing attention to and making explicit the similarities and differences between their accounts and those offered by other kinds of philosophical approaches. Others (also) go beyond the question of Kant and the condition of woman by using the Kantian framework in relation to other topics concerning diversity, such as central issues in the philosophy of sex and love (e.g., nonconventional sexual activities,



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

469

LGBTQIA, and polyamory), the philosophy of race, and the philosophy of disability. To provide an overview of many of these ongoing discussions—and the related, burgeoning literature—Sections 5.1 through 5.4 focus on themes rather than chronology.10

5.1  Kant and women As noted previously, part of the peculiarity of Kant’s writings on women arises from the fact that they are predominantly found not in his moral writings on freedom, but in his third Critique, in the Anthropology, and in his shorter essays on history, politics, and aesthetics. In 2009, Susan Meld Shell published her Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, which deals extensively with Kant’s related published and unpublished anthropological writings, including his (sexist) distinction between man and woman (Shell 2009; cf. Louden 2011). This work does not take on the further task of exploring whether an improved account of human nature needs philosophical distinctions of the kinds Kant utilizes to make sense of gender or, relatedly, sexual identity and orientation. That it does not is symptomatic of how much of the previously addressed scholarship also does not explicitly address the question of whether the distinction between man and woman or any other philosophical distinction would be needed in good philosophical theories of gender and sexuality (broadly understood) were the world to develop in good ways, if we move forward rather than backward in these regards. Instead, these engagements tend to accept that Kant was sexist, explore ways in which he was or was not as sexist as many non-Kantians tend to think, and argue that his critical theory of freedom may be very useful, in various ways, for better understanding the condition of woman and related feminist concerns. A most interesting engagement on the question of how sexist Kant actually was is found in a discussion between Jennifer Uleman (2000) and Jordan Pascoe (2011) over Kant’s comments on the punishability of unwed mothers who committed infanticide—a common phenomenon in Prussia at Kant’s time. Uleman presents an entirely new take on Kant’s puzzlingly comments regarding unwed mothers who commit infanticide: she argues that contrary to what most thought at the time and what was prominently argued by Annette Baier (Baier 1993)—namely that Kant’s comments revealed despicable callousness toward vulnerable newborns—his idea was sympathetic and important in that it questioned the punishability of women who, if they carried their babies to term,

470

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

would doom themselves and their children to a life of shame and economic hardship. Uleman’s paper has recently been criticized by Pascoe, who argues that Kant’s sexism made him unable to hear women’s suffering loudly enough— and hence despite being worried about the legal practice of severely punishing infanticide in Prussia at the time, he ended up defending capital punishment for unwed mothers who committed infanticide. A major aim of two very recent papers on Kant’s writings on women is also to reengage the question of how to understand Kant’s statements on women. In “Kant on Moral Agency and Women’s Nature,” Mari Mikkola (2011) argues that some of the earlier papers are too harsh in addressing Kant’s actual views on women. In my paper “Kant and Women,” I take this argument further by arguing that to understand Kant’s comments on women—including the ones found at the beginning of this chapter—we need to understand both Kant’s account of human nature and how he makes space in his works on freedom for such concerns of philosophical (or what Kant calls “moral”) anthropology (Varden 2015). More specifically, I use this to explain the way in which the distinction between men and women appears in Kant’s freedom writings, Kant’s distinction between passive and active citizenship in the “Doctrine of Right,” and Kant’s encouragement of everyone (also women) in the “What Is Enlightenment?” essay to “Sapere Aude!,” that is, to dare to become wise and develop their ability to live autonomously. In more recent work, I go further, arguing that while we need to revise aspects of Kant’s account of human nature to overcome its sexist and heterosexist elements, his approach nevertheless already contains the philosophical complexity that good philosophical approaches to gender, sex, and love seek. In particular, I suggest that thinking about the role of biology and teleology in Kant’s accounts of gender and sexuality help us understand where he went wrong and why a certain kind of teleological-aesthetic thinking might have a role to play in fully understanding the ideas of sexuality and gender. That is to say, there are useful philosophical resources in Kant, not only with respect to freedom and rights but also with respect to embodiment, biology, teleology, and aesthetics, and, so, also with regard to more comprehensive practical philosophical concerns. More generally, it seems useful to see recent pieces on Kant’s sexism and heterosexism as consistent with writings on Kant’s racism, such as Lucy Allais’s “Kant’s Racism” (Allais 2016). On the one hand, these writings explore the interpretive question, first, of whether Kant was as sexist, heterosexist, and racist as he appears, and second whether his work can still be useful to us if the answer to this question is a firm “Yes.” That is to say, even if he



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

471

really is as sexist, heterosexist, and racist as he seems, there may be things to be learned from Kant’s philosophy and even his sexism, heterosexism, and racism for feminist, anti-heterosexist, and anti-racist thinking.

5.2 Kant and embodiment: Sexual activity, sexual objectification, abortion, sexual violence Korsgaard’s 1992 and Herman’s 1994 papers were groundbreaking in several ways, one of which is that they focus on sexuality and objectification. Herman’s piece is also groundbreaking in how it explicitly draws attention to analogies between Kant’s arguments on these issues and important related work in feminist philosophy, particularly that of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. In Sexual Solipsism Rae Langton takes up the threads of Kant and sexual objectification and intimate friendships—and critically engages the arguments of both Herman and Korsgaard—and adds the topic of pornography (Langton 2009). Moreover, Langton continues to bridge the gap between Kant, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of language. Bridging these gaps between Kant and feminist philosophy and between Kant and other areas of philosophy are prominent in many of the more comprehensive accounts available today. Finally, Herman’s article presents an entirely new approach to Kant’s comments on marriage in that it is the first to draw attention to Kant’s distinction between virtue (first-personal ethics) and right (justice) as well as to point out that Kant’s oftencited comments on married women are found in his “Doctrine of Right.” Hence, gaining a full understanding of what Kant does and does not say on the topic of marriage requires contextualization to issues of right (justice) and not simply to issues of ethics (virtue). Once the context is taken into consideration with what Kant says, other readings can be ruled out. The more recent engagements with Kant on marriage and issues concerning embodiment are multifaceted in their approaches, some more similar to Herman’s and some very different or taking further steps. With respect to sexual activity and sexual objectification, Pascoe and I both argue—in line with the earlier writings of Herman, Korsgaard, and Langton— that Kant was aware of and is right in thinking that some sexual activities are morally dangerous. Nevertheless, it is not clear that all sexual activity is. Pascoe argues that Kant mistakes all sex for kinky sex (Pascoe 2012). While kinky sex may be problematic, much other sex can be genuinely affirming, loving, and affectionately caring. My line of argument agrees with Pascoe on this point as

472

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

well as engages some of the moral challenges inherent in more straightforward sexual activity and seeks to explain the existential importance of sexuality (as revealed in high suicide rates for those minorities who cannot live out their sexual identities and orientations).11 Another classic topic when it comes to embodiment is abortion. The classic liberal piece on abortion is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (1971). Although making significant strides in its defense, as was common at the time, Thomson does not draw an explicit distinction between right (justice) and virtue (ethics). Many critical responses to her article also fail to make the distinction, arguing that if one can show that it’s im/moral (in the sense of un/ ethical) to have an abortion, then one has thereby also shown that it should be il/ legal. Here is where Kant’s separation of spheres of right and virtue are crucial to providing a clearer analysis, or so I argue in “A Feminist, Kantian Conception of the Right to Bodily Integrity: The Cases of Abortion and Homosexuality.” (2012a) Like Herman and others before me, I use Kant’s distinction between right and virtue to show why the movement from immoral to illegal is unjustified. I then draw on Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” to argue that the state can legally require pregnant women to make the choice whether or not to terminate the pregnancy (in otherwise uncomplicated medical cases) by the time of what is traditionally called “quickening” (spontaneous, minimally self-conscious activity). However, if a state cannot provide such conditions of safe abortion, then it can also not justify legislation outlawing abortion at any stage; in such circumstances it must remain up to each woman to own her decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.

5.3  Kant and care relations (marriage, dependents, servants) Perhaps the topic that has received the most attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century in Kantian feminist debates is the topic of marriage—and in large part because of the influence of Herman’s article. As mentioned above, one of the groundbreaking aspects of this paper was that it explicitly drew attention to Kant’s distinction between virtue and right. What followed in subsequent work by others was an emphasis on the one or the other (on virtue or on right) or both. Regardless of this difference, these papers explore the more general question of whether in spite of the horrible history of the institution of marriage for women, Kant may still be correct in thinking that it’s an institution worth maintaining and reforming, including by opening it up for same-sex couples.12



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

473

Kant’s legal account of marriage is found in his “Doctrine of Right,” under the more general category of what he calls “status right,” a category that encompasses marriage relations, relations between parents (legal guardians) and children (dependents), and families and servants. Kant considered his category of status right an innovation in the history of philosophy in that it views shared personal homes as not analyzable through the concepts of private property or contracts. Instead, he argues, this sphere requires a special legal concept and analysis because of the way in which—to use contemporary language—it involves us as particular embodied selves living together in interdependencies and asymmetries in a shared home. In “A Kantian Critique of the Care Tradition: Family Law and Systemic Justice,” I use Kant’s legal-political philosophy to raise a series of objections to feminist care tradition and libertarian and Rawlsian accounts of related family law and systemic justice issues (Varden 2012b). I argue that these other accounts share problems of capturing the structure and importance of family law as well as related systemic issues of dependency that Kant has the philosophical resources to overcome. Two other interesting and possibly complementary approaches to these issues come from Marilea Bramer and Sarah Clark Miller. In her paper on domestic violence, Bramer combines tools from care theory with Kant’s account of justice to justify why the state must treat domestic violence as terrorizing women (Bramer 2011). Similarly, in The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation, Clark Miller develops a Kantian account of care relations that draws heavily on Kant’s imperfect duty of beneficence (Clark Miller 2012). These discussions between the Kantians, other liberal and libertarian traditions, and the care tradition will surely continue in the years to come.

5.4 Kant and systemic injustice: Poverty, prostitution, and oppression Poverty has naturally been an issue at the center of much feminist philosophy. For most of history, women could not own private property, they could not access higher education, and they could not vote or take part in the legal-political processes that determined the coercive framework within which they lived their lives. It has and still is often the case that for many women the only access to private homes and means independent of one’s parents runs through marriage to men. It is also the case that women are not paid equally to men for the same jobs, and it is the case that many women are forced or find that the least bad of the choices available is to engage in sex work they do not want to do.

474

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

A wonderful aspect of O’Neill’s work is her focus on these issues of poverty, sex work, and the systemic aspects of women’s oppression. Poverty has been a core concern in her research from the start, including in her engagement with (her supervisor) Rawls’s Kantian proposal for how the state should respond to need. Emphasizing how systemic issues are central to analyses of issues that have, historically, predominantly involved women, including, but not limited to, domestic work, was central to her 2000 monograph Bounds of Justice. Two particularly notable chapters—“Which Are the Offers You Can’t Refuse?” and “Women’s Rights: Whose Obligations?”—concern issues of dependency and vulnerability and include an explicit focus on women (O’Neill 2000: ch. 5, 6). This importance of poverty to the vulnerability of women’s lives is also central to Sarah Holtman’s treatment of poverty in her important 2004 article, “Kantian Justice and Poverty Relief.” In some of my work, I also address poverty and some of the challenges of prostitution (2006, 2012). An emerging feature of all this work is the acknowledgment that issues like prostitution poverty cannot be understood simply as analyses of individuals’ interactions, but must also be seen as involving identities that track historical oppression and systemic injustice. How to understand obligations in relation to systemic wrongdoing and harm is also central to Carol Hay’s recent work (Hay 2013). Like O’Neill’s analyses of poverty and Clark Miller’s account of care relations, Hay employs Kant’s account of imperfect duties to do core philosophical work. More specifically, Hay defends the claim that women have an imperfect duty to fight oppression. Particularly interesting in her analysis is the way in which she uses her Kantian account to develop a critique of the prominent account of oppression defended by Ann Cudd (2006), according to which the oppressed people’s obligations to fight their oppression are supererogatory in nature. There is little doubt that there is much work yet to come on these themes from Kantian quarters, including as directed specifically at women’s duties to fight their oppression.

6 Conclusion In his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant argues: A public should enlighten itself . . . indeed this is almost inevitable, if only left its freedom. For there will always be a few independent thinkers, even among the established guardians of the great masses, who, after having themselves cast off the yoke of minority [the “inability to make use of one’s own understanding



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

475

without direction from another”] will disseminate the spirit of a rational valuing of one’s own worth and of the calling of each individual to think for himself . . . Sapere aude! [dare to be wise] Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of the enlightenment. (WE 8: 35–36)

Looking at the history of the emergence of women Kant scholars through this passage, we may say that it did not take long under conditions of freedom before the first women broke loose and with the support of established men scholars at influential educational institutions—men who also dared to trust their own judgment and wisely challenged the sexist ways in which scholarship had been denied women—change happened.13 It is also not random, according to Kant’s philosophical system, that brilliant legal-political public reasoning—like the reasoning found in great judges—and academic brilliance from women was slow to appear: brilliant legal-political reasoning and academic brilliance both require training in a way that creative arts—such as music—do not. So there is Mozart-the-genius-musical-child, but no Kant-the-genius-philosophicalchild. The reason, according to Kant’s philosophical system, is that central to brilliance in the creative arts is use of the imagination unbound by reason (the third Critique)—and so can be found already in children—whereas brilliant legal-political reasoning and academic brilliance requires training of reasoning skills to a much larger extent (the first and second Critique)—and, so, cannot be found in children. Consequently, although some of George Eliot’s brilliance in Middlemarch clearly reveals Mary Ann Evan’s education, she could come before Simone de Beauvoir in history because Beauvoir needed her doctoral, academic training to write her brilliant The Second Sex—something not available to women living in Evan’s time. It is also no longer so strange that although history has seen many great queens—women entrusted with and capable of mastering national political emotions—it took much longer before we got the first women ministers, let alone democratically elected prime ministers and presidents. And it is also no longer so surprising that the two first women US Supreme Court justices—Sandra Day O’Connor (b. 1930) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933)— appeared on the Supreme Court as late as in 1981 and 1993 (respectively). In addition to how the US legal-political world had to become less sexist for their appointments to be possible, O’Connor and Ginsburg first had to be trained academically and then practice as lawyers and judges before they were ready for the Supreme Court. Elsewhere, I have argued that Kant was well aware that his (sexist) views of women might simply have been expressions of his own prejudices and sought to ensure that his philosophy as a whole was wiser than he was (Varden 2015).

476

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Kant’s philosophical writings on freedom leave room for concerns of moral anthropology and moral psychology, but they also leave room to revise claims made in those domains. That is, what we find in the anthropological and relevant psychological writings (unlike the freedom writings and yet consistent with them) are not objective, universal claims, but contingent ones. This is why the freedom writings set the framework within which these contingent claims are accommodated and given room (rather than the other way around), which explains the few appearances of “men” and “women” in Kant’s moral freedom writings. Though this may be a controversial interpretive claim, Kant would certainly have held that it is not a given that the positive development regarding women in philosophy generally and in the Kant community in particular over the last few decades will continue. Shortly after the comments just quoted, Kant says, “a public can achieve enlightenment only slowly. A revolution may well bring about a falling off of personal despotism and of avaricious or tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform in one’s way of thinking; instead new prejudices will serve just as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses” (WE 8: 36). What will happen next is, ultimately, up to us—it is now our responsibility, as students, as teachers, as researchers, as professionals. Doing this well does not involve living as if sexism, racism, and heterosexism do not exist. Indeed, as we have seen, we find these pathologies present even in one of, if not the most brilliant philosopher ever to walk the planet—indeed, in the one who also, for the first time in the history of philosophy, was able to imagine a practical philosophical system founded on freedom. Rather, taking on the challenges of racism, sexism, and heterosexism presumably involves learning to face and relate well to those tendencies in ourselves and our meetings with others, and thereby to take part in the transformation of these inherited, damaging, and destructive pathologies into emotionally healthier, morally justifiable ways of interacting. A good future requires that our efforts at reform continue, making our societies better and freer for each and all.

Notes 1 A big thanks to Lucy Allais, Marcia Baron, Anne Margaret Baxley, Lara Denis, Pieranna Garavaso, Barbara Herman, Pauline Kleingeld, Jane Kneller, Jon Mandle, Kate A. Moran, Kathryn J. Norlock, Krupa Patel, Jordan Pascoe, David Reidy, Arthur Ripstein, Judy Rowan, Sally Sedgwick, Jennifer K. Uleman, Shelley Weinberg, and Rachel Zuckert for their generous help with this chapter.



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

477

2 For examples, see relevant articles in Schott (1997), Lloyd (1993), Marwah (2013), Shell (2009). 3 The only reason this overview is limited in this way is because I do not have sufficient knowledge or access to women Kant scholars in other scholarly communities. 4 I’m grateful to Anne Margaret Baxley, Katrin Flikschuh, Howard Gold, André Grahle, Peter Niesen, Daniel Peres, Sally Sedgwick, Jens Timmermann, Rachel Zuckert, and Alice Pinheiro Walla for helping me construct this list. Any remaining imperfections are, of course, entirely my responsibility. 5 Again, because of my insufficient knowledge of publications on these issues in the many other languages, this overview is unfortunately limited to an overview of the many important discussions that have happened in publications in the English language. 6 Another important factor in the development of scholarship on Kant in relation to classical feminist topics from the beginning was the way in which Kantian men directly engaged related topics in productive ways. Contributions worth mentioning include John Rawls’s influential proposal of the family as a basic institution, an idea that was introduced already in his original A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) and Thomas E. Hill, Jr.’s influential Kantian critique of the deferential wife in his “Servility and Self-Respect” (1973). The first comprehensive—and still classic— engagement with Rawls’ theory is Susan Moller Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989). For a most interesting engagement with Hill’s paper, see the discussion between Friedman (1985) and Baron (1985). Mentioning Thomas E. Hill, Jr. and his supervisor, John Rawls, especially also seems particularly appropriate because both are widely recognized as having helped empower women in the profession, including in their service as successful PhD supervisors for several women. 7 One of the very few, critical pieces on Kant’s take on women that existed at the time—“Kant: An Honest but Narrow-Minded Bourgeois?”—was written by another women, namely Mendus (1987). 8 Sally Sedgwick’s 1992 paper was also reprinted in a slightly edited form in this anthology (1997). 9 This article by Kneller was preceded by two 1993-articles on Kant’s feminization of the faculty of imagination (Kneller 1993a, b). 10 For a more general article, see also Hampton in Baehr (2004: Chapter 7). 11 In my forthcoming book A Kantian Theory of Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press), I provide a unified account of sexuality where Kant’s own and suitably revised Kantian accounts of human nature, right, and virtue do complementary philosophical work. See also my forthcoming Kant on Sex. Reconsidered for a critique of Kant’s own and a revised moral-psychological account of sexuality.

478

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

12 Two early pieces here were by Denis (2001) and Schaff (2001), but many pieces followed quickly: Wilson (2004); Brake (2005); Kneller (2007); Wood (2007); Varden (2007); Altman (2010, cf. 2014); Papadaki (2010); Pascoe (2013, 2015, forthcoming). 13 The sea change has been striking. Just one example: in her 2010 introduction to Kant’s moral philosophy, Uleman—in an argument that Kantian moral theory is especially concerned to protect and promote human creativity—assumes readers will appreciate examples drawn from Virginia Woolf and Adrian Piper. The examples describe features of the subjective state required for original creative work and the obstacles women (among others) face in sustaining this state when surrounded by forces determined to objectify or instrumentalize them.

References Allais, Lucy (2016), “Kant’s Racism,” Philosophical Papers 45(1–2): 1–36. Altman, Matthew C. (2010), “Kant on Sex and Marriage: The Implications for the SameSex Marriage Debate,” Kant-Studien 101: 309–30. Altman, Matthew C. (2014), Kant and Applied Ethics: The Uses and Limits of Kant's Practical Philosophy, New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Baer, Amy R. (2004), Varieties of Feminist Liberalisms, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Baier, Annette C. (1993), “Moralism and Cruelty: Reflections on Kant and Hume,” Ethics 103: 436–57. Baron, Marcia W. (1985), “Servility, Critical Deference and the Deferential Wife,” Philosophical Studies 48(3): 393–400. Baron, Marcia W. (1995), Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Baron, Marcia W. (1997), “Kantian Ethics and Claims of Detachment,” in R. M. Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Kant, 145–70, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Brake, Elizabeth (2005), “Justice and Virtue in Kant’s Account of Marriage,” Kantian Review 9: 58–94. Bramer, Marilea (2010), “The Importance of Personal Relationships in Kantian Moral Theory: A Reply to Care Ethics,” Hypatia 25 (1): 121–39. Bramer, Marilea (2011), “Domestic Violence as a Violation of Autonomy: The Required Response of the Kantian State,” Social Philosophy Today 27: 97–109. Cudd, Ann (2006), Analyzing Oppression, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denis, Lara (2001), “From Friendship to Marriage: Revising Kant,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63: 1–28.



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

479

Dillon, Robin S. (1992a), “Care and Respect,” in Eve Browning Cole and Susan Coultrap–McQuin (eds.), Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and Practice, 69–81, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dillon, Robin S. (1992b), “Respect and Care: Toward Moral Integration,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22: 105–32. Dillon, Robin S. (1992c), “Toward a Feminist Conception of Self-Respect,” Hypatia 7: 52–6. Dillon, Robin S. (1992d), “How to Lose Your Self-Respect,” American Philosophical Quarterly 29: 125–39. Dillon, Robin S. (1997), “Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political,” Ethics 107: 226–49. Dillon, Robin S. (2001), “Self-Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Ethics 112: 53–83. Dillon, Robin S. (2003), “Kant on Arrogance and Self-Respect,” in Cheshire Calhoun (ed.), Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers, 191–216, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feldman, Susan (1998), “From Occupied Bodies to Pregnant Persons: How Kantian Ethics Should Treat Pregnancy and Abortion,” in Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn (eds.), Autonomy and Community, 265–82, Albany: State University of New York Press. Friedman, Marilyn A. (1985), “Moral Integrity and the Deferential Wife,” Philosophical Studies 47 (1): 141–50. Gilligan, Carol (1982), In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hampton, Jean (2004), “Feminist Contractarianism,” in Amy R. Baehr (ed.), Varieties in Feminist Liberalisms, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, ch. 7. Hay, Carol (2013), Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppression, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herman, Barbara (1993), The Practice of Moral Judgment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hill, Thomas J. Jr. (1973), “Servility and Self-Respect,” The Monist 57 (1): 87–104. Holtman, Sarah Williams (2004), “Kantian Justice and Poverty Relief,” Kant-Studien 95 (1): 86–106. Kant, Immanuel (1996a), Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology (R), trans. and ed. A. W. Wood and G. di Giovanni, New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1996b), “Metaphysics of Morals (MM),” in M. J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 353–603/MM 6: 203–603. Kant, Immanuel (1996c), “On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice, (TP),” in Practical Philosophy, pp. 273–309/TP 8:273–313. Kant, Immanuel (1996d), “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (WE),” in Practical Philosophy, pp. 11–21/WE 8:35–42. Kant, Immanuel (2007), “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (A),” in R. B. Louden (trans.), Anthropology, History, and Education, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 227–429/A 7:117–333.

480

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Kleingeld, Pauline (1993), “The Problematic Status of Gender-Neutral Language in the History of Philosophy: The Case of Kant,” The Philosophical Forum 25: 134–50. Kneller, Jane (1993a), “Kant’s Immature Imagination,” in  B.-Ami Bar On (ed.), Modern Engendering: Critical Feminist Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, New York: State University of New York Press. Kneller, Jane. (1993b), “Women and Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Taste,” in  C. Korsmeyer and H. Hein (eds.), Feminist Aesthetics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kneller, Jane (1997), “The Aesthetic Dimension of Kantian Autonomy,” in R. M. Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Kant, 173–90, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Kneller, Jane (2007), “Kant on Sex and Marriage Right,” in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, 447–76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kneller, Jane, and Sidney Axinn (1998), Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York Press. Korsgaard, Christine (1992), “Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations,” in James Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 6: Ethics, 305–32, Atascadero, CA: The Ridgeview Publishing Company. Korsgaard, Christine (1996), Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langton, Rae (1992), “Duty and Desolation,” Philosophy 67: 481–505. Langton, Rae (2009), Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lloyd, Genevieve (1993), Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, London: Routledge. Louden, Robert B. (2011), Kant’s Human Being, New York: Oxford University Press. Marwah, Inder S. (2013), “What Nature Makes of Her: Kant’s Gendered Metaphysics.” Hypatia 28 (3): 551–67. Mendus, Susan (1987), “Kant: An Honest but Narrow-Minded Bourgeois?,” in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds.), Women in Western Political Philosophy, 21–43, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books. Mikkola, Mari (2011), “Kant on Moral Agency and Women’s Nature,” Kantian Review 16: 89–111. Moen, Marcia. (1997), “Feminist Themes in Unlikely Places: Re-Reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” in R. M. Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Kant, 213–56, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Okin, Susan Moller (1989), Justice, Gender, and the Family, New York City: Basic Books. O’Neill, Onora (1989), Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, Onora (2000), Bounds of Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



Kant’s Moral Theory and Feminist Ethics

481

Papadaki, Linda (2010), “Kantian Marriage and Beyond: Why It’s Worth Thinking about Kant and Marriage,” Hypatia 25: 276–94. Pascoe, Jordan (2011), “Personhood, Protection, and Promiscuity: Some thoughts on Kant, Mothers, and Infanticide,” APA Newsletter on Feminist Philosophy 10 (2): 4–7. Pascoe, Jordan (2012), “Hunger for you: Kant and Kinky Sex,” in Sharon M. Kaye (ed.), What Philosophy Can Tell You about Your Lover, 25–36, Chicago: Open Court Press. Pascoe, Jordan (2013), “Engagement, Domesticity, and Market-Based Metaphors in Kant’s Rechtslehre,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 41 (3): 195–209. Pascoe, Jordan (2015), “Domestic Labor, Citizenship, and Exceptionalism: Rethinking Kant’s ‘Woman Problem’,” Journal of Social Philosophy 46 (3): 340–56. Pascoe, Jordan. (forthcoming), “A Universal Estate? Why Kant’s Account of Marriage Speaks to the 21st Century Debate,” in Larry Krasnoff and Nuria Sanchez Madrid, Kant’s Doctrine of Right in the Twenty First Century, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Pauer-Studer, Herlinde (1994), “Kant and Social Sentiments,” Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 2: 279–88. Rawls, John (1971), A Theory of Justice, Belknap: Harvard University Press. Schaff, Kory (2001), “Kant, Political Liberalism, and the Ethics of Same-Sex Relations,” Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (3): 446–62. Schott, Robin M. (1997), Feminist Interpretations of Kant, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Sedgwick, Sally (1997), “Can Kant’s Ethics Survive the Feminist Critique?” in R. M. Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Kant, 77–100, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Shell, Susan Meld (2009), Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stark, Cynthia (1997), “Decision Procedures, Standards of Rightness, and Impartiality,” Nous 31 (4): 478–95. Thomson, Judith Jarvis. (1971), “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1): 47–66. Uleman, Jennifer K. (2000), “On Kant, Infanticide, and Finding Oneself in a State of Nature,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, 54 (2): 173–95. Uleman, Jennifer K. (2010), An Introduction to Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Varden, Helga (2006), “Kant and Dependency Relations: Kant on the State’s Right to Redistribute Resources to Protect the Rights of Dependents,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 45: 257–84. Varden, Helga (2007), “A Kantian Conception of Rightful Sexual Relations: Sex, (Gay) Marriage and Prostitution,” Social Philosophy Today 22: 199–218. Varden, Helga (2012a), “A Feminist, Kantian Conception of the Right to Bodily Integrity: The Cases of Abortion and Homosexuality,” in Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson (eds.), Out of the Shadows, 33–57, New York: Oxford University Press.

482

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Varden, Helga (2012b), “A Kantian Critique of the Care Tradition: Family Law and Systemic Justice,” Kantian Review 17 (2): 327–56. Varden, Helga (2015), “Kant and Women,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (4): 653–94. DOI:10.1111/papq.12103. Varden, Helga (forthcoming), “Kant on Sex. Reconsidered: A Kantian Account of Sexuality: Sexual love, Sexual Identity, and Sexual Orientation,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. Varden, Helga (forthcoming), A Kantian Theory of Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Donald (2004), “Kant and the Marriage Right,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85: 103–23. Wilson, Holly L. (1997), “Rethinking Kant from the Perspective of Ecofeminism,” in R. M. Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Kant, 145–70, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Wilson, Holly L. (1998), “Kant’s Evolutionary Theory of Marriage,” in Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn (eds.), Autonomy and Community, 283–306, Albany: State University of New York Press. Wood, Allen W. (2007), Kantian Ethics, New York: Cambridge University Press.

24

Resisting Oppression Revisited Carol Hay

It’s been more than a decade since I first argued that people who are oppressed have an obligation to resist their oppression. I’ve been both surprised and pleased with the uptake this project would go on to receive, both as an instance of the rational reconstruction favored by an increasing number of analytic feminists and as evidence of the long overdue (and still unfinished) but slow and steady acceptance of feminist theorizing by the philosophical mainstream. The question of what duties of resistance there are under oppression has now been taken up by a number of philosophers of feminism and oppression studies. In its initial form, my account of the obligation to resist oppression defended the much more restricted claim that women who’ve been sexually harassed have a duty to confront their harassers (Hay 2005). I took up issues such as the legitimate reluctance to be guilty of blaming the victims of harassment, as well as other normative considerations that might tell in favor of the unfairness of this obligation, but argued that these concerns are not generally sufficient to override women’s obligations to confront their harassers. But I soon came to be dissatisfied with this account, particularly with how overly demanding it was of me to suggest that every woman who has been sexually harassed is obligated to confront the perpetrators (not to mention the underdeveloped nature of my argument for this overly strong claim!). After that early foray, I took up the argument again in another article (2011), before ultimately writing a monograph (2013) where I put forward an extended defense of the much broader claim that people who are oppressed have a selfdirected obligation to resist their own oppression. This version of the argument was not only more general—applying to all cases of oppression, not merely the more restricted case of sexual harassment—it also aimed to provide a stronger

484

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

foundation, with more theoretical nuance and flexibility that was better capable of capturing the complexities of life under oppression. The account was rooted in a Kantian moral framework, explicitly articulating the importance of duties of self-respect in oppressive contexts and defending a broad degree of latitude in what actions should be counted as resistance. In what follows, I’ll pick up where I left off. After quickly recapping the original argument, I’ll move on to expand the implications of the account and connect it up to some of the important contemporary work being done in oppression studies, before moving on to respond to some of the many critical objections I’ve been fortunate to receive. The first objection I’ll consider charges that the typical severity of oppressive harms is not sufficiently great to ground a general obligation of resistance. The second objection I’ll take up charges that this project would do better to conceive of resistance in political, rather than moral, terms.

1  A recap of the argument My argument for a self-directed obligation to resist oppression proceeds as follows. First, consider a representative quote from Kant on the importance of self-respect: To let oneself be insulted without reprisal is already a diminution of one’s own worth. The man who lets himself be trampled underfoot, shows himself to be a worm, a bee without a sting. He displays a want of forcefulness, whereas his duty is to stand opposed to all attacks on his personality. If he wishes others to have respect for his person, he must likewise hold fast to it, and show that he respects himself.” (LE 27: 606–7)

Kant’s views on the moral significance of self-respect set him apart from virtually every other philosopher in the Western canon. He argues that insofar as we’re rational we should conceive of ourselves as having a rational nature, and we should recognize that this rational nature confers upon us a value that requires that we are always treated as an end and never merely as a means. The Kantian duty of self-respect, then, is a duty to recognize the value of the rational nature within us and to respond in the right ways. This is the duty I used to ground my feminist account of the obligation that oppressed people have to resist their own oppression.



Resisting Oppression Revisited

485

This account begins with a discussion of how oppression can harm people’s rational capacities. Allying myself with that band of Kantian scholars who read the Groundwork against the backdrop of other Kantian texts that emphasize how any substantive conception of our moral duties must take into account our empirical nature (e.g., Herman 1991; Wood 1999), I argued that we should think of our capacity for practical rationality as an ordinary human capacity, as susceptible to harm as any other human capacity. Oppression, I claimed, not only restricts the rational agency of its victims, it can also actually damage it. How? Oppression can cause self-deception by creating incentives to form false beliefs, for example. Oppression can harm capacities for rational deliberation, both through external assaults from things such as resource deprivation, institutionalization, and the lack of education and food and through internal assaults from things such as systemically induced failures of imagination and the reduction in ability caused by too few opportunities for its exercise. Oppression can cause weakness of will by means of things such as stereotype threat and pressures to social script conformity and so on. This brings us to the account’s central argument: because we have an obligation to prevent harms to our rational nature and because oppression can harm our capacity to act rationally, we have an obligation to resist our own oppression. One of the issues I’ve explored at length in the various iterations of this project is the nature of the impediments to resistance—how both the structural and systemic features of oppression, as well as concrete practical and material constraints, can combine to make it difficult or impossible to resist oppression. In many oppressive contexts, actively resisting oppression can be dangerous or counterproductive: resistance can be exhausting, victimizing, and can subject an individual to retribution from others. In other cases, resistance might simply be impossible—given the ubiquity of oppression, it’s probably not logistically possible to resist its every manifestation; given the severity of some oppressive harms, a victim might be rendered incapable of resistance; given the social nature of oppression, successful resistance might require the cooperation of others who are unwilling to help; given the mystification of oppression, someone might not even realize she is oppressed. I put all this into focus through the lens of a case found in an essay by David Foster Wallace, where he describes witnessing a friend experience sexual harassment. In it, Native Companion (as Wallace calls her because she’s a local) finds herself held upside down on an otherwise empty carnival ride at the Illinois state fair, so her dress falls up and her underwear is exposed to the lecherous

486

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

view of the men operating the ride below. After she gets off the ride, Wallace and Native Companion have a heated discussion about the incident:  [Wallace asks,] “Did you sense something kind of sexual-harassmentish going on through that whole little sick exercise?” “Oh for fuck’s sake . . . it was fun.” . . . “They were looking up your dress. You couldn’t see them, maybe. They hung you upside down at a great height and made your dress fall up and ogled you. They shaded their eyes and made comments to each other. I saw the whole thing.” “Oh for fuck’s sake.” . . . “So this doesn’t bother you? As a Midwesterner, you’re unbothered? Or did you just not have an accurate sense of what was going on back there?” “So if I noticed or I didn’t, why does it have to be my deal? What, because there’s assholes in the world I don’t get to ride on The Zipper? I don’t get to ever spin? Maybe I shouldn’t ever go to the pool or ever get all girled up, just out of fear of assholes?” . . . “So I’m curious, then, about what it would have taken back there, say, to have gotten you to lodge some sort of complaint with the Fair’s management.” “You’re so fucking innocent . . . ,” she says. “Assholes are just assholes. What’s getting hot and bothered going to do about it except keep me from getting to have fun?” . . . “This is potentially key. . . . This may be just the sort of regional politicosexual contrast the swanky East-Coast magazine is keen for. The core value informing a kind of willed politico-sexual stoicism on your part is your prototypically Midwestern appreciation of fun . . . whereas on the East Coast, politico-sexual indignation is the fun. In New York, a woman who’d been hung upside down and ogled would go get a whole lot of other women together and there’d be this frenzy of politico-sexual indignation. They’d confront the ogler. File an injunction. Management’d find itself litigating expensively—violation of a woman’s right to nonharassed fun. I’m telling you. Personal and political fun merge somewhere just east of Cleveland, for women.” “They might ought to try just climbing on and spinning and ignoring assholes and saying Fuck ’em. That’s pretty much all you can do with assholes.” (Wallace 1997: 101)

What, if anything, is someone like Native Companion obligated to do in a situation like this? How should we understand her protestations that the only real thing to do here is ignore sexist assholes and spin? Aren’t we blaming the victim by suggesting that she has a duty to do more? These are the sorts of questions I’ve attempted to answer.



Resisting Oppression Revisited

487

Despite the obstacles to resistance a woman like Native Companion can face— internalized oppression, self-deception or denial, exhaustion, fear of reprisal, and so on—I argued that the obligation to resist one’s own oppression remains. This argument is made more palatable, I suggested, if the duty to resist is understood as imperfect. Unlike perfect duties, imperfect duties aren’t duties to perform specific actions. Instead, imperfect duties are duties to adopt certain general maxims, or principles of action, that can be satisfied by more than one action. The obligation to resist oppression is this sort of duty: there are lots of things one can to do fulfill it. Native Companion could confront the carnies directly. She could lodge a formal complaint with the fair’s management. We might even think that she actually is resisting her oppression—that by refusing to feel humiliated, refusing to let the carnies dictate when and how she can have fun, and refusing to believe that their sexually objectifying her demeans her moral status in any way—she actually is resisting her oppression. In some cases, the only thing an oppressed person might be able to do to resist her oppression is simply to recognize that there’s something wrong with the situation. I called this “internal resistance” and argued that it is, in a very important way, much better than doing nothing. Engaging in internal resistance means an oppressed person hasn’t bought in to the social messages that conspire to convince her that she’s the sort of person who has no right to expect better. It means she recognizes that her lot in life is neither fair nor inevitable. This, then, is the basic picture: because oppression threatens our rational capacities, the imperfect Kantian duty of self-respect requires us to resist, but permits a wide variety of actions in doing so. With this picture in mind, I’ll now move on to expand some of the implications of my account, connecting it up to some of the new work in oppression studies that has been published since I began the project.

2  Self-respect under oppression As just mentioned, central to my account of the obligation to resist oppression is a discussion of how oppression can damage the rational capacities of its victims. There are, however, many additional ways that oppression can damage its victims’ rational capacities that I didn’t consider in my initial analysis. Many of these harms have to do with how oppression can undermine self-respect. While the importance of self-respect under oppression is something I’ve already defended at length, there’s still more to be said here, particularly with respect to how self-respect actually functions in oppressive social contexts.

488

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

John Rawls, remember, characterizes self-respect in the following way: First of all . . . it includes a person’s sense of his own value, his secure conviction that his conception of his good, his plan of life, is worth carrying out. And second, self-respect implies a confidence in one’s ability, so far as it is within one’s power, to fulfill one’s intentions. When we feel that our plans are of little value, we cannot pursue them with pleasure or take delight in their execution. Nor plagued by failure and self-doubt can we continue in our endeavors. It is clear then why self-respect is a primary good. Without it nothing may seem worth doing, or if some things have value for us, we lack the will to strive for them. All desire and activity becomes empty and vain, and we sink into apathy and cynicism. (Rawls 1971: 440)

Rawls recognized better than most the connections between self-respect and agency, which is why he characterized the social bases of self-respect as the most important primary good, outranking the other social values of liberty and opportunity, and income and wealth. Rawls knew that self-respect neither exists nor flourishes in a social vacuum. Instead, it has ineliminable social bases. Selfrespect is something that is fostered or undermined by the attitudes of those around us. It’s easier to respect ourselves when we know that we have the respect of our peers. It’s easier to respect ourselves when we know that people like us have the respect of society in general. Just as respect from others can function as evidence that we are worthy of our own respect, a lack of respect from others can function as evidence that we are unworthy of our own respect. In oppressive social contexts, where members of oppressed groups are much more likely to be deprived of the social bases of self-respect, oppressed people’s self-respect will thus be significantly more vulnerable than that of those who are not oppressed. A failure to respect members of oppressed groups can be as straightforwardly obvious as when oppressed people are subjected to violence, threats, or insults, are explicitly discriminated against, or even when they’re made to listen to derogatory jokes about people like them. But failures of respect under oppression often take much subtler forms. Karen Jones has argued that another way that failures of self-respect under oppression can undermine rational capacities involves self-respect’s connection to hope.1 Citing Victoria McGeer, she argues that hope is essential to any kind of rational agency that projects itself beyond the present moment: No matter what the circumstance, hoping is a matter, not only of recognizing but also of actively engaging with our own current limitations in affecting the future we want to inhabit. It is, in other words, a way of actively confronting, exploring,



Resisting Oppression Revisited

489

and sometimes patiently biding our limitations as agents, rather than crumpling in the face of their reality. . . . In sum, hoping always has an aura of agency around it because hoping is essentially a way of positively and expansively inhabiting our agency, whether in thought or in deed. (McGeer 2004: 104)

Oppressed people are forbidden certain hopes, Jones reminds us. Social class provides a striking example of this: when the single biggest predictor of one’s adult income is the income of one’s parents (Mitnik and Grusky 2015), the myth of social mobility is exposed for the lie that it is, and believing that one will be the exception who’s capable of single-handedly bootstrapping one’s way out of poverty starts to look more like self-delusion than hope. If one is stymied enough times and in enough ways, the very capacity for hope itself can be endangered, and with it the capacity to see oneself as an agent capable of changing one’s environment in meaningful ways. There’s a very real sense in which we cannot act without hope. Oppression’s potential to engender despair in those who are oppressed thus represents a pernicious threat to their agency. The protagonist from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s nineteenth-century short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” powerfully illustrates this threat, as she responds to the lack of stimulation imposed upon her as a “rest cure” for her “temporary nervous depression [and] . . . slight hysterical tendency” by descending into psychosis. (Gilman 1899: 2) Another way failures of self-respect under oppression can undermine rational capacities, Jones argues, has to do with self-respect’s connection to self-trust.2 Conditions of oppression can undermine self-trust when; for example, oppressors engage in gaslighting, using psychological means such as persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying to manipulate victims into questioning their own sanity. If oppressed people can be made to lose faith in their grip on reality, their ability to navigate the world effectively is clearly undermined. If oppressed people are told often enough and convincingly enough that they’re worthless, or mistaken, or epistemically unreliable, or simply crazy, there’s a risk that they’ll start to believe it. The lack of respect accorded to members of oppressed groups can be particularly damaging to oppressed people’s self-respect, and thus to their rational capacities, when the attitude sets its sights on people’s status as epistemic agents. Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice has been incredibly influential in articulating the ways oppression can wrong people specifically in virtue of their capacities as knowers (Fricker 2007). These wrongs can take a number of forms. Testimonial injustice occurs when someone is considered

490

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

to be an unreliable knower in virtue of their membership in an oppressed group. Hermeneutic injustice occurs when the experiences of an oppressed person are obscured or misunderstood because their interlocutors lack the language or cognitive frameworks to make sense of them. Kristie Dotson has extended this work, articulating two different kinds of testimonial oppression (2011). Testimonial quieting occurs when a listener refuses to see a speaker as someone with knowledge that matters. Testimonial smothering occurs when a speaker recognizes that what she says will not be understood because her audience has failed to do the cognitive and empathetic work necessary to be able to understand her, and so “truncates” what she says to accommodate their diminished epistemic abilities. In other cases, failures of respect rooted in epistemic injustice take the form of implying that oppressed people simply don’t matter enough to warrant our attention. Marilyn Frye argues that a kind of willful ignorance on the part of members of oppressor groups often goes into constructing and maintaining oppressive social institutions. “Ignorance of this sort—the determined ignorance most white Americans have of American Indian tribes and clans, the ostrichlike ignorance most white Americans have of the histories of Asian peoples in this country, the impoverishing ignorance most white Americans have of Black language—ignorance of these sorts is a complex result of many acts and many negligences” (Frye 1983: 118). This “determined ignorance” is not a mere passive failure to know certain things about the lives of oppressed people, Frye argues. Instead, it’s the result of actively, intentionally refusing to pay attention. Echoing Frye, José Medina describes an “active ignorance” that tends to be found in members of privileged classes. Actively ignorant subjects exhibit the epistemic vices of arrogance, laziness, and close-mindedness and “can be blamed not just for lacking particular pieces of knowledge, but also for having epistemic attitudes and habits that contribute to create and maintain bodies of ignorance. These subjects are at fault for their complicity (often unconscious and involuntary) with epistemic injustices that support and contribute to situations of oppression” (Medina 2012: 39). We can see this active, determined ignorance when people respond to the claim that “black lives matter” with the stubborn insistence that “all lives matter”—as if the latter claim was ever in dispute or somehow contradicts the former. We can see this active, determined ignorance when the film industry expects women to watch film after film that fails the Bechdel test, when it expects them to be perfectly happy identifying with a male protagonist while no man would be expected to do the same by watching a “chick flick.”3



Resisting Oppression Revisited

491

The active, determined ignorance described by Frye and Medina threatens the self-respect of members of oppressed groups, in part, by rendering them and their experiences invisible, and therefore irrelevant, to society at large. Selfrespect, remember, has ineliminable social bases. When your society refuses to acknowledge your experiences, refuses to ascribe them with importance, refuses to incorporate them into its cultural narratives, refuses to allow them to inform its shared goals and values or consider whether they represent failures of these goals and values—when these refusals occur routinely, at some point it might make sense to (mistakenly) conclude that you and your experiences really don’t matter. And with this mistaken conclusion could likely come a failure of selfrespect and the attendant threat to one’s rational capacities. In these and other ways, epistemic injustices can feed into failures of selfrespect under oppression, thereby threatening the rational capacities of those who face these injustices. This work in oppression studies bolsters my account of the obligation to resist oppression by further enriching our understanding of the many subtle ways oppression can threaten or harm its victims. In short, it gives us a better, more nuanced, picture of precisely what it is that must be resisted. With these theoretical developments in mind, I’ll now move on to consider a number of critical objections to my arguments defending an obligation for this resistance.

3  Responses to objections Objection 1: Oppression is not typically harmful enough to ground a general obligation of resistance. The first objection I’ll consider charges, in a nutshell, that because oppression’s harms are almost never severe enough to completely destroy people’s rational capacities, my account of why they are obligated to resist oppression doesn’t go through. A number of critics have put forward versions of this objection; I’ll consider them in order. James Stacey Taylor points out an ambiguity in the earliest version of my defense of resistance, where I attempted to establish the more narrow conclusion that women like Native Companion are obligated to confront the men who sexually harass them because of the effects that sexual harassment can have on women’s autonomy.4 When I claimed that sexual harassment undermines women’s autonomy, Taylor argues, I might have been making the relatively

492

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

strong claim that this loss of autonomy renders women less able to make their own decisions. Or, he argues, I might instead be making a weaker claim, that sexual harassment simply renders women less autonomous insofar as they’re less able to exercise their autonomy. He goes on to argue that the first way of interpreting my claim that sexual harassment can make women less autonomous is implausible, because the harms of sexual harassment aren’t usually severe enough to completely destroy women’s ability to make their own decisions. And he argues that while the second way of interpreting my claim that sexual harassment makes women less autonomous is plausible, it doesn’t support my conclusion that women are morally obligated to resist sexual harassment in virtue of their moral obligation to protect their autonomy, because it doesn’t establish that sexual harassment actually makes women less autonomous. [Women’s] autonomy is compromised only in that they are less able to exercise it insofar as the patriarchal society in which they find themselves restricts the options for the expression of their autonomy that are open to them. (2007: 6)

Taylor argues that being able to successfully fulfill all of one’s autonomously chosen desires is a much less severe wrong than not being able to autonomously form one’s desires in the first place, and only the latter wrong could be sufficiently severe to merit an obligation of resistance. Daniel Silvermint launches a very similar charge against a later version of my argument, where I defended the more general claim that insofar as oppression threatens people’s rational capacities they are bound by the duty of self-respect to resist it.5 Silvermint recognizes that oppression can restrict the options available to an oppressed person, and recognizes that this restriction is an unfair wrong, but he doesn’t think these wrongs amount to an “impairment of practical reasoning” and thus doesn’t think my account provides an explanation of why they should be resisted: Among the frequent harms of oppression is the removal of valuable choices from a victim’s option set, either by raising the cost of certain conduct by a prohibitive amount or by outright forbidding that conduct. What should we say about such harms? . . . It is not clear how having unfairly . . . limited options would impair practical reasoning, as a victim still undergoes the normal process of examining available choices, weighing preferences against costs, and choosing the means that best realizes her aims. If a desirable aim is not available to an agent, being forced to choose from among the remaining options might count as a wrongful limitation of her freedom, but it does not limit her rational capacities. If it did, then being blocked in one’s selection of some trivial aim would obligate



Resisting Oppression Revisited

493

resistance just as much as being limited in one’s selection of a genuinely valuable aim. (2013: 416)

Again, the charge here is that most of the time the wrongs of oppression amount only to a restriction on the set of options available to an individual—a restriction that is admittedly unfair, but insufficient to ground a general obligation of resistance that is rooted in an obligation to protect one’s rational capacities. Karen Jones expresses a similar concern about whether all forms of oppression actually endanger their victims’ agency.6 Admitting that oppression can in extreme cases threaten rational capacities, she worries that in most cases “the threat is to the context-dependent exercise of rational capacity rather than to the capacity itself ”: Of course[,] make contexts frequent enough and central enough and the capacity, and not merely its localized exercise, will be under threat. A totalitarian regime of Big Brother reach would clearly do it, as will chattel slavery, but we want a notion of oppression that can theorize not just these extremes, but help us make sense of contemporary liberation movements, including such movements in developed liberal societies, and the groups they claim to be oppressed such as women, Blacks, Indigenous peoples, LBGT, the disabled, the elderly and so on, even as these groups comprise members with intersectional axes of dominance and subordination, axes that can pull in opposing directions. If our theory is to be useful to these liberatory movements, then it needs an account of the harm of oppression that encompasses these diverse groups. . . . [Hay] is right to argue that our capacity for rational agency, like all our capacities, is fragile, but is it as fragile as she supposes? How often, under what sorts of oppressive circumstances, is it at real risk?7

All three critics worry that because oppression’s harms are (thankfully) almost never severe enough to entirely destroy people’s rational capacities, insofar as my account of why the oppressed are obligated to resist hinges on an obligation to protect these capacities, my account fails to establish this obligation in most cases of oppression. They argue that, at most, what oppression usually does is restrict the exercise of rational capacities, and not actually damage them beyond all repair. Taylor’s analysis puts things in terms of autonomy, Silvermint’s in terms of practical rationality, Jones’s in terms of agency; in what follows I’ll use the terms more or less interchangeably because I don’t think anything of consequence for my argument hinges on the differences between these terms. What these critics share in common is a focus on cases where oppression affects one’s ability to make certain valuable choices: all think my account fails

494

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

to show why these harms are wrong and must be resisted. In response, I want to deny that a central distinction made by these critics—between the autonomous ability to internally reflect on one’s desires in order to make decisions and the autonomous ability to externally achieve the satisfaction of these desires—plays out under actual oppressive circumstances in the way they suggest. As many other feminists have argued, the problem of badly adaptive preferences shows that oppression can influence not only the ability to successfully carry out one’s decisions, but also the decisions one makes in the first place. Elsewhere, I’ve described this problem in the following way: Part of respecting someone as an autonomous agent seems to require respecting her as the ultimate author of, and authority over, who she is, what she believes, what she desires, and what she values. But it is clearly the case that social forces can influence what desires we come to have. Anyone who has suffered the self-imposed indignity of enduring an evening wearing an excruciatingly uncomfortable but unbelievably stylish pair of shoes can attest to this. Social forces can make us want things that we almost certainly would not want in the absence of these forces . . . [, including] things that are patently not in [our] best interest, or fail to desire things that are in [our] best interest. Impractical shoes are one thing; choices that threaten one’s actual well-being are quite another. Famously, the economist Amartya Sen has shown that, in conditions of prolonged scarcity, women and other oppressed people can actually fail to desire basic human goods when they become habituated to their absence and socialized to believe that expectations of receiving such goods are inappropriate for people like them.8 In such cases, people can actually stop preferring to live otherwise, even when their quality of life is demonstrably below that which they need to survive. . . . Many feminists have argued that patriarchy causes many women to desire to fulfil stereotypical sex roles that . . . restrict both the kind and the quality of choices that are open to them. This phenomenon, when people come to have preferences that are inimical to their best interests because of the effects of oppressive social forces, has come to be known as the problem of adaptive preferences. (2013: 10)

The problem of badly adaptive preferences illustrates that we cannot ignore the content of people’s preferences in our analyses of oppression. This is one of the oppressive harms to rational capacities I discuss at length elsewhere: Harm to someone’s rational capacity to choose certain valuable ends in the first place can result from oppression because oppression can make it less likely that the oppressed will imagine or conceive of various choices as live options for people like them. . . . Internalized oppression can damage or restrict



Resisting Oppression Revisited

495

people’s sense of self-worth, so they do not set certain worthwhile ends for themselves because they do not think they deserve them. This can also happen when someone internalizes social roles that rule out various lifestyle choices as inappropriate or undesirable for people like her. In a related manner, when an oppressed person has internalized the belief that she is inferior to others, she can be more likely to set ends that fail to protect her future well-being. (2013: 125)

The problem of badly adaptive preferences demonstrates how oppressive social factors can affect not only people’s ability to successfully achieve the ends they have set for themselves; oppression can also affect what ends people will set in the first place. Thus, while Taylor argues that it’s implausible to suggest that sexual harassment can make women less autonomous by interfering with their ability to reflect on their own desires, Silvermint implies that oppression generally does not affect people’s practical rationality, and Jones argues that people’s capacity for rational agency is not as fragile as I suggest, I want to insist that these are precisely the harms of oppression we must not permit ourselves to lose sight of. We must remember that the wrongs of oppression never occur in a social vacuum; each operates as a wire in Frye’s famous birdcage, functioning in concert with innumerable interrelated others (1983: 7). In her groundbreaking analysis of oppression, Frye argued that just as a single wire is incapable of limiting a bird’s mobility but a cage of systematically interconnected wires can completely immobilize its occupant, many of the wrongs of oppression are best understood as interrelated harms of accretion. It’s in this manner— collectively, cumulatively—that oppression usually ends up affecting people’s rational capacities. Elsewhere, I’ve explained the aggregative nature of these harms with an analogy to the erosive effects of water dripping on stone: “Just as individual droplets of water that seem not to have any effect on a piece of stone can cumulatively wear it away, rational nature can be harmed in almost invisible increments” (Hay 2013: 145). Thus, whether the oppressive wrong in question is that of interfering with people’s ability to set or reflect upon their ends or merely interfering with their ability to achieve them, both are wrongs that must be resisted. These critics are correct to imply that obligations of resistance are stronger in cases where oppression’s effect on rational capacities is more severe (that is, in cases where oppression affects people’s ability to set and reflect upon their ends in the first place), but they are mistaken if what they are arguing is that there are no obligations of resistance in cases where oppression’s effect on rational capacities

496

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

is less severe (i.e., in those cases where oppression merely affects people’s ability to successfully achieve the ends they have already set). It’s important to realize that the line between the restriction of rational capacities and the damage of rational capacities is often unclear. But it’s also important to recognize that, in any case, both are injustices that ought to be resisted. My Kantian account doesn’t argue that the duty to resist oppression is grounded only in a duty to protect our rational nature; it’s also grounded in a duty to respect our rational nature. The duty to respect rational nature is what grounds duties of resistance in cases of restriction, regardless of whether this restriction culminates in damage. Furthermore, given vagueness of the distinction between damage and restriction, and given that the stakes are so high because our rational capacities are so morally important, there’s good reason to err on the side of caution and resist whenever possible (especially given that there will also very often be other, non-self-regarding reasons to resist). This, ultimately, is less a point about the relative resilience or frailty of those who are oppressed than it is about how high the stakes are here. Objection 2: Is this best conceived as a moral project or a political one? The second objection I want to take up raises concerns about my having framed the project primarily in moral rather than political terms. Dilek Huseyinzadegan, for example, puts the charge in Kantian terms, arguing that my focus on “the Grundlegung and Tugendlehre at the expense of the Rechtslehre . . . forecloses the possibility of articulating an additional duty of right to resist oppression” (2015) and adds that the sharp distinction that Hay draws between the moral and the political threatens to overdetermine her theoretical moves, with the result that these moves may in fact undercut many of the goals that she hopes to attain. This is the case especially given that sexual harassment, as Hay also acknowledges, is an instance of a more systemic problem of sexist oppression, which concerns a network of relations, social and legal structures, patterns and practices. In light of this, then, Hay’s thesis would benefit from an analysis of Kant’s Rechtslehre, as this would allow her to develop not only a moral but also a political-juridical duty to resist oppression. (2015: 153)

But the first, and most sustained, version of this objection was articulated by Helga Varden (2013). Varden asks why I focus so heavily on Kant’s ethics, rather than also discussing his legal and political theory—that is, why I focus on the Doctrine of Virtue over the Doctrine of Right—given that the harms



Resisting Oppression Revisited

497

of oppression function at least as much, if not more, on the level of legal and political institutions: Oppression is not [merely] an ethical issue, but also an issue of justice (what Kant calls “right”). So, as a matter of Kant interpretation, . . . [a] more complete analysis of sexual harassment and sexual oppression (and the duty to resist) will incorporate an account of Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” as well as an analysis of how this account fits with his account of ethics, including his distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. In the current version of Hay’s theory, there is little attention paid to the “Doctrine of Right” (and the related secondary literature) or to how her current account of self-respect fits with it. (2013)

I sincerely believe this objection cuts to the heart of one of the biggest potential problems with the account I’ve offered of the obligation to resist oppression. The whole reason feminists and others have bothered articulating an account of oppression as a distinct form of injustice stems from the realization that the harms of oppression are not fully explicable on the level of individual interactions. As Frye made so poignantly clear with her birdcage analogy, the harms of oppression must be examined from a macroscopic, not microscopic, perspective. Framing my analysis in moral rather than political terms risks overlooking this theoretical innovation, thereby mischaracterizing from the start the very problems I’ve set out to address. I want to concede that a proper analysis of oppression must always keep one eye on the structural, systemic, and institutional nature of these injustices, and that it’s very likely that I’ve failed to do this in at least some places throughout my project over the years. But I also want to insist that even though a proper analysis of these injustices must happen at the macroscopic level, we must remember that the injustices themselves are always experienced by individual people. There’s a sense in which it is simply false to say that women, as a group, are harmed by sexist oppression, because there’s a sense in which groups cannot experience harm at all. This is because groups of people simply aren’t the sorts of things capable of having experiences—individual people are. Thus groups are only capable of being harmed insofar as their individual members are harmed. This is, in part, the point of the defense of liberal individualism I articulated here: A commitment to individualism need not require a rejection of more radical methods of identifying oppression. What this commitment amounts to is an ontological claim about what is the basic unit of social reality and a metaethical claim about what is the fundamental locus of value (that is, the individual person, not the community or group), as well as an ethical claim about the importance

498

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

of fairly attributing this value (and the abilities of moral choice that give people this value) to all people in an unbiased way. Neither of these claims rules out the possibility of adopting radical methods of identifying and ameliorating oppression. (2013: 26, emphasis in original)

Of course, these critics are right to point out the serious oversight on my part in failing to include a more thorough discussion of Kant’s Doctrine of Right, and right to insist that we must not focus only on the moral obligations an individual has in oppressive contexts, that we can and should ask what political obligations she has in these contexts as well. But this latter question does not exhaust the subject matter here. Jones has characterized my project in a way that is helpful in this regard. My work should be read, she says, as a “first-person challenge to all who are oppressed to look for the ways in which, restricted and cramped though our agency may be by the double binds that characterize oppression, there remains space for resistance. It’s the self-ascription of the duty to resist that matters, for the ascription of that ought reminds us that we can.”9 It is from this first-person perspective, in particular, that the importance of a moral duty of self-respect in oppressive contexts comes most clearly into focus. I wish I’d put it as clearly as this myself, because I think if I had I might’ve been able to head off a number of interrelated questions and criticisms I’ve received about the relationship between the moral and political in this project. Still, I don’t want to pretend that my project is without its limitations. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that my approach is the only way to use a Kantian framework to analyze obligations under oppression. It might not even be the best. But it was one that had been undertheorized when I came to it. I happily grant that the political side of the Kantian framework has promising resources here, and I look forward to reading the work of other Kantian feminists who I hope to see take this up. But it might not be enough to wave my hands at the need for more work here to be done by future feminist Kantian scholars. Varden worries that there is actually a deep incompatibility between the Doctrine of Right and the comprehensive account of the duty of self-respect I argue that we need in order to analyze the problem of sexist oppression: Kant, in the Doctrine of Right, insists (for good reasons) that imperfect duties necessarily fall outside the scope of right. In the very least, it seems necessary to maintain that such an imperfect duty cannot be understood as enforceable, that is, it does not track punishable culpability. But then it cannot also be what



Resisting Oppression Revisited

499

explains any legal (coercive) measures to protect everyone’s right not to be oppressed. (2013)

Pace these concerns, I think there’s reason to hold out hope for the possibility of demonstrating that an imperfect duty of self-respect is compatible with the Kantian political framework. When it comes to questions of punishable culpability, for example, it’s actually a good thing that the imperfect duty of self-respect isn’t legally enforceable—we pretty clearly shouldn’t want it to be! Similarly, it’s acceptable that the imperfect duty of self-respect can’t ground legal protections against oppression, because Kant’s more general account of the perfect duty to respect the dignity of the individual can do that already. Varden goes on to question the compatibility of my comprehensive Kantian account with liberalism in general, wondering “what role a duty of self-respect can play in a liberal theory of justice that is fundamentally committed to the idea that individuals have a right to set and pursue ends of their own, including imprudent ends, as well as a right to consent to be harmed in many ways?” (2013). Amy Baehr has asked a related question in the context of pressing me to articulate the implications of my comprehensive liberal feminist account for the appropriate use of state power.10 We must be careful here, as there’s room for a lot of ambiguity in these sorts of discussions. There are at least three ways to interpret the claim that an individual has a right to set and pursue her own ends: (1) that it’s impermissible to use coercive measures to force the individual to change the end (call this the “coercive interpretation”); (2) that it’s impermissible to ignore the end when making decisions about larger social issues that might affect the individual in question (so we’re required to give it weight in social choice calculations, or something like that) (call this the “political interpretation”); and (3) that the end is in a moral category that requires no further normative philosophical analysis (call this the “moral interpretation”). In light of these possible interpretations, when we say that an individual has the political right to decide whether to set and pursue the moral end of fulfilling the duty of self-respect, many standard interpretations of liberalism will insist that we must affirm the impermissibility of both coercing someone to change the end (affirming the “coercive interpretation”) and of ignoring the end when making social choice calculations (affirming the “political interpretation”), but remain agnostic about the moral status of the end (affirming the “moral interpretation”). But I think things are actually significantly more complicated than this.

500

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

What this comes down to is a question of whether feminism is a comprehensive doctrine too thick to be compatible with political liberalism. My view on this differs from that of many other liberal feminists. Many have argued that the appeal of political liberalism is that if we restrict our toolbox to the sparse tools provided by the shared values of public reason then the feminist conclusions we reach on these sparse grounds will be much more difficult to reject. While I agree with this hypothetical—and I appreciate the practical value of talking to people where they really are, not where we want them to be—I’m significantly less optimistic about the possibility of actually reaching feminist conclusions on these sparse grounds in every society than are the defenders of this approach. I discuss this at length in my book, where I defend Jean Hampton’s claim that liberals can, and should, endorse certain comprehensive doctrines, and argue in favor of a comprehensive liberal feminism that responds appropriately to the existence of oppressive societies where not everyone is committed to the ideals of freedom and equality (Hay 2013: 36–39).11 In such cases, I argue, state intrusiveness is justified to entrench and support these feminist ideals even (and perhaps especially) when they’re not endorsed by everyone.12 Alice MacLachlan raises another version of the objection that my project would be better cast in political rather than moral terms when she asks whether a self-directed duty to resist oppression might apply not only to victims of oppression but also to those who perpetrate, collude with, or benefit from oppressive social systems. After all, she points out, oppression can also damage the rational nature of those who are members of oppressor groups, manifesting, for example, in “white fragility” and other “ordinary vices of domination.”13 One such damage is self-deception: we are likely to receive and internalize disproportionate messages about our value, abilities, and achievements and we are likely to see our individual experiences as “normal” or “default” or “neutral”, when in fact they are highly distorted and unrepresentative, not to mention bolstered by invisible privilege. Similarly, our practical knowledge and decisionmaking are systematically distorted by selective and socially constructed ignorance about the lives of people who are different from us, and how our lives and choices affect them. We likely have deep and unconscious biases that make it difficult for us to internalize and take up this knowledge, forming appropriate beliefs that would inform our practical reasoning. They may also limit our imaginative empathy. Social privilege has an insulating function, one that not only distorts our beliefs about the world, it also affects our ability to assess and respond to our environment appropriately.14



Resisting Oppression Revisited

501

This discussion is in line with Frye’s and Medina’s examinations of the active, determined ignorance that can be exhibited by members of oppressor groups that we considered above. MacLachlan argues that the existence of these epistemic harms suggests that my defense of a self-directed obligation to resist oppression should also apply to oppression’s beneficiaries, not merely its victims. But she worries that even if we grant that the obligation to resist others’ oppression is overdetermined—motivated at least as much by other-regarding considerations such as an obligation to help those who are most harmed by oppression, or a general obligation to rectify injustice wherever it’s found, as by self-regarding considerations—there is still something “if not wrong then at least . . . odd” about characterizing privileged people’s obligation to resist oppression as an obligation they have to themselves. “I can’t help feeling that my primary motivation for correcting the rational inadequacies caused by my racial privilege ought to be instrumental: I do it because I am aware of the epistemic, moral[,] and political harm these biases and ignorance cause to others in the world, not because I want to be a better self for my own sake” (MacLachlan 2015). Motivations such as these lurk behind one of the more problematic tendencies found in many social justice movements, MacLachlan suggests, when “privileged allies become preoccupied with their own moral purity, seeking to become and then prove that they are one of the ‘good guys,’ that they aren’t racist or sexist or homophobic, rather than focusing on what [Hay] identifies as external resistance: collectively engaged efforts to undermine and transform institutions and political structures” (MacLachlan 2015).15 Articulating this project in moral, rather than political, terms thus risks running afoul of a concern first articulated by Hannah Arendt about the possibility of allowing moral motivations for political struggles leading us to lose sight of our shared political lives. In Arendt’s words, “In the centre of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the centre of political considerations of human conduct stands the world” (2003: 153). Something like this concern, to be honest, is what’s always rubbed this particular Kantian the wrong way about virtue ethics: the primary locus of moral attention seems mistakenly placed on the agent’s character instead of those who are affected by what she actually does to or for others with this character. And MacLachlan’s characterization of the phenomenon of allies who become obsessed with the task of demonstrating their own moral purity at the expense of engaging in collective efforts to undermine oppressive social structures is disturbingly accurate. (I’d add to it a concern about how

502

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

this phenomenon is too often accompanied by a cannibalistic tendency in progressive political circles to spend more time and energy scrutinizing allies for their perceived ideological impurities than banding together to fight common enemies.) But MacLachlan’s concerns about this phenomenon falling too quickly out of my approach can be addressed if we simply argue that when ranking the importance of duties in a given situation the most morally important consideration should almost always be how the victims of oppression are affected. This should be thought of in terms of something like Rawls’s difference principle: that our moral responses must benefit the least well-off first and most; if they have a secondary effect of also benefiting others then that’s obviously a good thing, morally speaking, but this should not be our primary motivation. This would only actually make a morally important difference in cases of conflicting obligations, where the self-directed obligation to resist another’s oppression might tell in favor of one course of action (or inaction) but the other-directed obligation tells in favor of another. Think, for example, of a case where an ally is faced with a choice between taking an intersectionally flawed action or doing nothing at all—say, joining in an urgent effort to save a poor public school in a minority area, even though it requires working with and inadvertently endorsing anti-LGBTQ religious groups. Or think of a case where an ally spends so much time focusing on self-education that she never actually does anything, instead spending all her time online reading think pieces and making small language critiques.16 In both sorts of cases using this difference principle–inspired ranking points to action, insisting that we prioritize the obligations that are directed toward those who are harmed most (which, in virtually all cases, will be members of oppressed groups, not oppressor groups). My account of the obligation to resist oppression thus need not result in an unpalatable affirmation of those allies who become obsessed with demonstrating how “woke” they are instead of actually getting anything done collectively to undermine oppression. Thus, while I believe these critics have been right to raise concerns about my framing of the analysis of the obligation to resist oppression primarily in moral rather than political terms, these concerns do not undermine the project itself. They do, however, point to the need for further theoretical work on these issues, work I look forward to seeing from other scholars as well as continuing to contributing to myself.



Resisting Oppression Revisited

503

4 Conclusion This chapter has been my attempt to bring up to date the Kantian account of the obligation to resist oppression I first put forward more than a decade ago. In it, I’ve tried to both connect the account up to some of the work in oppression studies that has been published in the interim, and respond to some of the thoughtful objections I’ve received from critics over the years. If I had to characterize my feminist philosophical approach in the broadest terms, I’d say it’s been to try to see what we can do with the philosophical canon that we’re not supposed to be able to. In some ways, my work aims to be the antithesis of Audre Lorde’s famous admonition about the impossibility of dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools.17  I want to see just how much dismantling we can do with these tools. My grad school advisor, Louise Antony, used to say that just as the bullies on the playground take the good toys for themselves and won’t let anyone else play with them, people with power have tried to take all the good philosophical toys—the best ideas and conceptual frameworks—for themselves. Some feminist philosophers have responded to these bullies by rejecting ideals such as rationality and autonomy as masculinist and individualist and abstract, advocating that we replace them with concepts that are more relational or interdependent or embodied or particular. I’ve been drawn to a different strategy, sincere in my hope that there might be radical liberatory potential in philosophical frameworks that many feminists have written off as irredeemable. But this is not to suggest that I believe feminists who prefer other strategies are mistaken or wrongheaded. Much of the most important and influential work written in feminist philosophy has been done by those who believe that the canon is too far gone—too infected with sexism and other oppressions—to be worth salvaging. Instead of trying to use philosophical concepts and frameworks they believe are ineliminably infected by or complicit in unjust and oppressive social orders, these feminist philosophers have attempted to come up with new, better concepts and frameworks, and this strategy has yielded impressive results. In the spirit of letting a thousand flowers bloom, I see revisionary work in rational reconstruction such as mine as complementing, not competing with, these more revolutionary approaches. Kantianism, liberalism, and an analytic approach to philosophy are but some of the many theoretical frameworks that stand ripe for revision and reclamation by philosophers opposed to oppression and committed to social justice. These are, to borrow the words of Helga Varden, “fun and inspiring times” to be a feminist philosopher.18

504

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Notes 1 Karen Jones, “Comments on ‘The Obligation to Resist Oppression,’” unpublished remarks presented at the symposium honoring the recipient of the 2015 Gregory Kavka/UC Irvine Prize in Political Philosophy, American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, 2015. 2 Without self-respect, Jones argues, self-trust becomes impossible. And without self-trust, she points out, we cannot function as rational agents. Consider the three options that exist in cases where we find ourselves doubting our own judgment: (1) we can withhold judgment; (2) we can revisit the judgment and consider the matter again; or (3) we can defer judgment to someone else. Option (1) is often not possible because, for practical purposes, we cannot usually withhold judgment indefinitely. Option (2) requires that we trust our more considered judgment, and option (3) requires that we trust our judgment about to whom it’s best to defer. Option (1) is not usually possible, and options (2) and (3) both require some degree of self-trust if they’re to be resolved. Jones also points out how self-trust is at the heart of intention: we cannot act on our intentions if we cannot trust ourselves to have in the past deliberated in a reliable way. And if we cannot do this, we cannot form new intentions, for we risk finding ourselves stuck in a never-ending cycle of revisiting earlier deliberations. Self-trust, then, and the self-respect on which it is premised, is a necessary component of rational agency. See Jones, “Comments on ‘The Obligation to Resist Oppression.’” 3 In order to pass the Bechdel test (named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced it in her 1985 comic Dykes to Watch Out For) a movie has to have (1) at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something other than a man. Most movies fail the test because, on some level, we don’t think that female characters can speak for all human experience.   Sandra Bartky discusses this phenomenon in terms of what she calls “cultural domination,” according to which women are expected to identify with the abstract and universal subject for whom art and culture is made, even though this subject isn’t really universal, it’s male. See Bartky (1990). 4 Taylor discusses this ambiguity in his rebuttal of the version of my argument that appeared in Hay, “Whether to Ignore Them and Spin.” See Taylor (2007). I offer a longer response to Taylor’s objection that is similar to this one in Hay (2013): 106–09. 5 Silvermint aims this objection at the version of my argument that appeared in Hay (2011). See Silvermint (2013). 6 Jones expresses this concern about the version of my argument found in Hay, Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism. See Jones, “Comments on ‘The Obligation to Resist Oppression.’” 7 Jones, “Comments on ‘The Obligation to Resist Oppression.’”



Resisting Oppression Revisited

505

8 See, for example, Amartya Sen, “Gender Inequality and Theories of Justice,” Women, Culture, and Development, Glover and Nussbaum (eds.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 259–274, and “Rights and Capabilities,” Resources, Values, and Development (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell and MIT Press, 1984), 307–24. 9 Jones, “Comments on ‘The Obligation to Resist Oppression.’” Emphasis in original. 10 Amy Baehr, “Remarks on Carol Hay’s Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism,” unpublished remarks presented at an Author Meets Critics session, American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, 2014. 11 Hampton presents this argument in her 2007 paper, a wonderful and underappreciated one. 12 Susan Moller Okin’s criticisms of Rawls’s Political Liberalism are exactly in line with this argument. See Okin (2004). 13 See D’Angelo (2011) and Lisa Tessman (2005). 14 Alice MacLachlan, “Reflections on Resistance: Remarks on Carol Hay, ‘The Obligation to Resist Oppression’” unpublished remarks presented at the symposium honoring the recipient of the 2015 Gregory Kavka/UC Irvine Prize in Political Philosophy, American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, 2015. 15 See Sullivan (2014) for a stronger version of this worry. 16 Thanks to Alice MacLachlan for suggesting both these examples. 17 The full quote reads as follows: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde 2007: 112). 18 Varden begins her NDPR review of Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism by exclaiming that, “These are fun and inspiring times to be a Kantian philosopher!” (Varden 2013).

References Arendt, Hannah (2003), Responsibility and Judgment, New York: Schocken Books. Bartky, Sandra (1990), Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, New York: Routledge. D’Angelo, Robin (2011), “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3: 54–70 Dotson, Kristie (2011), “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26: 236–57. Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, New York: Oxford University Press. Frye, Marilyn (1983), The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Thought, Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1899), The Yellow Wallpaper, Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co.

506

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Hampton, Jean (2007), “The Common Faith of Liberalism,” in Daniel Farnham (ed.), The Intrinsic Worth of Persons: Contractarianism in Moral and Political Philosophy, 151–84. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hay, Carol (2005), “On Whether to Ignore Them & Spin: Moral Obligations to Resist Sexual Harassment,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 20: 94–108. Hay, Carol (2011), “The Obligation to Resist Oppression,” Journal of Social Philosophy 42: 21–45. Hay, Carol (2013), Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism: Resisting Oppression, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herman, Barbara (1991), “Agency, Attachment, and Difference,” Ethics 101: 775–97. Huseyinzadegan, Dilek (2015), “Review of Carol Hay’s Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism: Resisting Oppression,” Kantian Review 20: 150–54.  Lorde, Audre (2007), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. MacLachlan, Alice (2015), “Reflections on Resistance: Remarks on Carol Hay, ‘The Obligation to Resist Oppression,’” unpublished remarks presented at the symposium honoring the recipient of the 2015 Gregory Kavka/UC Irvine Prize in Political Philosophy, American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting. McGeer, Victoria (2004), “The Art of Good Hope,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592: 104. Medina, José (2012), The Epistemology of Ignorance: Gender & Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, & Resistant Imaginations, New York: Oxford University Press. Mitnik Paul and David Grusky (2015), “Economic Mobility in the United States,” The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Russell Sage Foundation, July. Available online: http:// www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/07/economicmobilityintheunitedstates. pdf?la=en (accessed July 27, 2017). Okin, Susan Moller (2004), “Justice and Gender: An Unfinished Debate,” Fordham Law Review72 (5) 1537–67. Rawls, John (1971), A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Silvermint, Daniel (2013), “Resistance and Well-Being,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 21: 405–25. Sullivan, Shannon (2014), Good White People, New York: SUNY Press. Taylor, James Stacey (2007), “Autonomy, Responsibility, and Women’s Obligation to Resist Sexual Harassment,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 21: 55–63. Tessman, Lisa (2005), Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles, New York: Oxford University Press. Varden, Helga (2013), “Review of Carol Hay’s Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism: Resisting Oppression,” Notre Dame Philosophical Review, November 5. Available online: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/kantianism-liberalism-and-feminism-resistingoppression/ (accessed July 27, 2017). Wallace, David Foster (1997), “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from it All,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 83–137. Boston: Little, Brown. Wood, Allan (1999), Kant’s Ethical Thought, New York: Cambridge University Press.

25

Women and Global Injustice: Institutionalism, Capabilities, or Care? Angie Pepper

1 Introduction Growth in telecommunications, the internet, and global news coverage means that we are more aware than ever before of the extensive and egregious inequality that exists between individuals across the globe. The awful truth about the extent and severity of global poverty has prompted sustained philosophical enquiry into the nature and extent of our responsibilities to fellow human beings across the globe, which has in turn yielded a variety of positions ranging from views that posit stringent duties of justice to all humans, to more conservative accounts which instead argue for duties of beneficence to less fortunate noncompatriots. While theoretical discussion about the scope and content of our duties to other humans has flourished over the last forty years, the predominant views emanating from that discussion have remained conspicuously silent about the ways in which gender structures operate as a key factor in the persistence of poverty, and as a barrier to achieving global justice. Inattention to gender in thinking about global justice is extremely problematic since there are few, if any, societies existing today in which women are not systematically subordinated to men. Consequently, in this chapter I suggest that we cannot hope to develop adequate theories of global justice if we do not pay sufficient attention to gender inequality and oppression. Moreover, I show that approaching the current debate from a feminist perspective is instructive for how we ought to think about global injustice.

508

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

To these ends, this chapter involves a critical examination of three rival theories of global justice. The three accounts I consider are Thomas Pogge’s global institutionalism, a global ethics of care, and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. The chapter has two main objectives. The general aim of this investigation is to demonstrate how approaching the issue of global injustice from an analytic feminist perspective enables us to critically evaluate existing theoretical frameworks and more adequately determine their success or failure. The second more substantive aim of the chapter is to show that some version of the capabilities approach is to be preferred over both global institutionalism and an ethics of care. I conclude, however, by noting that the ultimate success of capability theories depends on their ability to respond to a number of pressing objections.

2  The gendered dimensions of global injustice Women across the world are viewed and treated as unequal to men in many spheres of human activity, which is to say that women in most (if not all) societies are systematically subordinated to men socially, economically, and politically. Indeed, inequality between the sexes pervades all aspects of human life from conception to death. In countries where boys are strongly preferred to girls, sex-selective abortions are more likely to be carried out on female fetuses than male fetuses, and baby girls are more likely to be the victims of infanticide and deliberate neglect than baby boys.1 Women and girls across the globe have lesser access to basic goods like nutrition, health care, and education; they are more vulnerable to poverty; they have lesser opportunities in employment; they receive less remuneration for the work they carry out; they have lower status before the law;2 they have more restrictions on freedom of movement; they are more vulnerable to violence;3 and, they are more vulnerable to poverty and hardship in old age.4 Of course, these inequalities may not occur altogether in one place at one time, but almost all societies in the contemporary world are marked, in varying degrees, by the subjection and oppression of women who are discriminated against because they are women.5 Given the systematic subordination of the world’s women, feminists are engaged in the emancipatory project of achieving freedom and equality for all women and bringing an “end [to] sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression” (hooks 2000: 1). Of course, there are many different ways of conceptualizing



Women and Global Injustice

509

gender, sexism, and oppression, and, as a result, multiple feminisms have flourished both in theory and in practice. Yet, despite the differences and disagreements between feminists about how best to articulate the particulars of a feminist agenda and how best to achieve feminist goals, feminists are unified in opposition to the subjection and oppression of women. Importantly, the feminist project is without borders because achieving freedom and equality for all women is a task that naturally transcends the bounds of territorially discrete nation-states (Reilly 2007; Mohanty 2003). As such, feminism is inherently cosmopolitan insofar as it encompasses a commitment to protecting the freedom and equality of all women globally and looks to challenge oppression wherever it occurs. The global scope of the feminist project suggests two ways in which feminists do, and ought to, care about questions of global social justice. First, gender justice will not be achieved unless sexism, exploitation, and oppression are eliminated the world over. In other words, even if local feminist movements were able to achieve genuine freedom and equality for some women in a particular region, feminism would not yet have fully achieved its emancipatory goals. As long as there are women who are disadvantaged, exploited, and oppressed because they identify as, or have been identified as, women, then gender injustice persists. Therefore, the project of securing gender justice is necessarily global in scope. Second, there are gendered dimensions to the distinctively global problems that now confront us. The forces and processes of contemporary globalization have resulted in a variety of political problems that transcend states and societies, affect the lives of individuals living in multiple states, and are unresolvable without the cooperation and collaboration of individuals across states. David Held has suggested that these global problems can be divided into three categories (Held 2006, 158). The first category pertains to the global commons and includes issues related to global warming, ecosystem losses, water deficits, air pollution, and environmental integrity more generally. The second category concerns the bodily health and physical integrity of sentient animals and includes problems of material deprivation, conflict prevention, and global infectious diseases.6 The third category includes issues associated with our socially constructed rules, norms of behavior, and institutions, such as nuclear proliferation, toxic waste disposal, intellectual property rights, cyberspace governance, genetic research rules, and trade and tax rules. All of these phenomena have emerged or have been exacerbated by the forces and processes of globalization, and cannot be tackled by individual nation-states acting alone. In light of these challenges,

510

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

many theorists of global justice have argued that our moral and political concern can no longer be confined to our co-nationals, and we must consider what we owe to others with whom we share the planet (Brock 2015). Importantly, because these problems have developed against a backdrop of entrenched systems of gender, they are often not gender neutral. This means that processes and phenomena associated with globalization often have genderspecific effects, which is to say that they affect men and women differently. Moreover, because systems of gender work to disadvantage women economically and politically, women are more vulnerable to many of the global challenges that we now face. For example, systems of gender tend to produce economic and social inequalities that render women more vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters and climate change (Cannon 2002; Nelson et al. 2002; Neumayer and Plümper 2007; Terry 2009). Additionally, political disempowerment often makes it difficult for women to influence community-wide adaption strategies or have a say in how natural resources, such as the land, are used, which in turn affects their ability to adapt to the changing climate (Terry 2009: 12–14). Further evidence for the claim that challenges of globalization are not gender neutral can be seen in the ways that “contemporary transnational institutions and recent global policies . . . have had systematically disparate and often burdensome consequences for specific groups of women in both the global North and the global South” (Jaggar 2014: 10). For example, structural adjustment policies implemented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been heavily criticized by feminists for disproportionately burdening women who “have had to assume extra productive and reproductive activities in order to survive the austerities of adjustment and stabilization policies, including higher prices, and to compensate for the withdrawal or reduction of government subsidies of food and services” (Moghadam 1999: 370). The gendered dimensions of globalization are well documented in the social sciences and detailed analyses have been conducted on, for instance, the feminization of poverty, the feminization of migration and labor, trafficking in women and girls, and gendered vulnerability in warfare.7 Such studies indicate that the goals of achieving global distributive, social, and climate justice must be seen as intimately connected with the feminist project of ending sexism and sexist oppression. Global justice will only be achieved if we recognize and are attentive to the ways in which global collective action problems harm men and women in gender-specific ways. Moreover, in order to theorize adequately about our duties and entitlements of global justice we must critically interrogate



Women and Global Injustice

511

predominant theories and concepts to ensure that they do not conceal or reinforce gender injustice. Thus, any plausible theory of global justice must be able to identify patterns and structures of gender injustice and ensure that duties and entitlements of justice are sensitive to the gender-specific burdens and responsibilities assumed disproportionately by women. In the remainder of the chapter, I outline and examine three rival approaches to global injustice. My analysis of these views is conducted through a feminist lens, which means that I am primarily concerned with how well these approaches can identify and speak to the gender-specific dimensions of global injustice.8

3  Global institutionalism Thomas Pogge’s global institutionalism is underpinned by a commitment to moral cosmopolitanism, which holds that all individuals are the ultimate units of moral concern, a status that generates obligations that are binding on all moral agents (Pogge 1992: 48). From this starting point, Pogge argues that we have a cosmopolitan duty of justice not to participate in, or maintain, institutional arrangements that cause harm and violate human rights. The conception of human rights at play here is institutional. Having a human right to X means that “in so far as reasonably possible, any coercive social institutions be so designed that all human beings affected by them have secure access to X” (Pogge 2002: 46). Accordingly, our human rights are moral claims against the imposition of an institutional order that unreasonably denies us access to the objects of those rights, including access to basic goods like food, clothing, shelter, basic health care, basic education, freedom of movement, and political rights and liberties (Pogge 2002: §1.5). We therefore have claims on the design of institutional arrangements that coerce us, and against individuals not to “violate their duties of social justice—by contributing to the design or imposition of unjust social institutions” (Pogge 2012: 321; see also Pogge 2005: 43). Pogge’s global institutionalism focuses on our negative duty “to ensure that others are not unduly harmed (or wronged) through one’s own conduct” (2002: 130). Crucially, Pogge contends that our current contribution to international institutional frameworks violates our negative duties of justice: “Citizens and governments of the affluent countries—whether intentionally or not—are imposing a global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably reproduces severe and widespread poverty. The worse-off are not merely poor

512

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and often starving, but are being impoverished and starved under our shared institutional arrangements, which inescapably shape their lives” (Pogge 2002: 201, emphasis in original). To support this conclusion Pogge extensively details the harm that the current economic order imposes on the global poor (Pogge 2001, 2002, 2005, 2008). For example, he discusses how international resource and borrowing privileges work to encourage and sustain corruption, conflict, instability, and poverty in poorer countries (Pogge 2002: 113–16), and he argues that the current global economic regime, as sanctioned by the World Trade Organization, works to the benefit of rich countries while penalizing the poor. Ultimately, Pogge concludes that individuals have a duty not to participate in these unjust institutional schemes because they obstruct or otherwise render insecure some people’s access to the objects of their human rights. That is, the world’s affluent have a negative duty to stop perpetuating a system which inflicts severe rights-violating deprivation on the world’s poor. To sum up Pogge’s position, global injustice occurs when social institutions operate in ways that violate human rights, and individuals act unjustly when they “collaborate in the design or imposition of social institutions that foreseeably and avoidably cause human rights to be unfulfilled” (Pogge 2011: 17). This means that when we evaluate the justness of our global social institutions we must consider whether those institutions could be designed differently in order to improve people’s access to the objects of their human rights. If our analysis shows that better alternatives exist, we can judge the current arrangement to be unjust. Once injustice has been identified those responsible for imposing or perpetuating the existing institutional arrangements (i.e., wealthy global elites and the more affluent participants of those arrangements) have a duty to reform those institutions.

3.1  Global institutionalism and gender injustice Pogge himself says very little about gender and thus the uniquely gendered dimensions of global poverty and injustice are largely absent in his work. The assumption behind this omission might be that, at the level of theory, global institutionalism is concerned with all humans globally and thus necessarily captures the interests of women and any particular injustices that they may face. At first glance, Pogge’s approach does seem to be able to identify and address global gender injustice. Since the rights of individual humans are of ultimate importance within his framework, it looks well positioned to challenge women’s human rights violations and the gendered dimensions of material disadvantage.



Women and Global Injustice

513

However, despite its promise, Fiona Robinson has argued that Pogge’s global institutionalism is “fatally flawed in a number of ways which prevent the realization of its critical potential” (Robinson 2006: 2). Here I outline two key objections advanced by Robinson. First, that global institutionalism operates with a faulty conception of the person, and second, that it occludes relational dynamics of power and domination at subglobal levels. I then raise two further concerns about global institutionalism, which are concerned with its scope and the metric of justice. Robinson alleges that normative individualism—the view that individuals are the primary units of concern—unrealistically (and undesirably) assumes that people are autonomous, impartial, and rational “super agents” (Robinson 2006: 12). Though here directed at Pogge, this concern might be applied to liberal political theories in general, and is nicely elaborated by Virginia Held in the following passage: For liberalism . . . individuals are conceptually and normatively prior to social relations or groups. It is assumed that we should start in our thinking with independent individuals who can form social relations and arrangements as they choose and that the latter only have value instrumentally to the extent that they serve the interests of individuals. Feminist arguments take into account the realities of caretaker/child relations show how misleading is this liberal individualist assumption, ignoring as it does that for any child to become a liberal individual she must have been for many years enmeshed in the caring social relations of caretakers and children. The adult liberal individual regarding himself as “separate” is formed as well by innumerable social bonds of family, friendship, professional association, citizenship, and the like. (Held 2006: 101; see also Robinson 1999: 62–63)

Thus theories premised on the idea of the autonomous individual do not accurately reflect human experience or the core facts of dependence and interdependence. Contrary to the concept of persons at work in Pogge’s theory, “people do not spring up from the soil like mushrooms” (Kittay et al. 2005: 443). Additionally, conceptualizing humans as independent and free of caring responsibilities renders the necessity of caring relations and care work invisible. This is particularly problematic from a feminist perspective because it conceals injustice connected to the gendered provision of care and the inability of caregivers to provide adequate care. Injustices that are not confined to households, communities, or nations, but which also play out at the global level.9 Robinson further argues that Pogge’s commitment to normative individualism obscures complex relational dynamics that operate at subglobal levels; relational

514

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

dynamics that may contribute significantly to injustice. Think, for example, of how gendered and hierarchical family structures, common to most societies, render girls and women vulnerable to violence and economic disadvantage (Okin 1989). More generally, consider how systems of gender limit the opportunities of both women and men and produce systemic patterns of oppression. As noted above, systems of gender interact with the contemporary forces of globalization in ways that result in gender-specific global injustices. Failure to be attentive to structures of oppression and dominance at subglobal levels can obscure the gendered dimensions of the global challenges that we face. Thus, Pogge’s preoccupation with poor individuals and their relation to the global economic order limits his theory’s ability to identify instances of injustice that women suffer because they are women. Further to Robinson’s concerns, we should also be troubled by the relational nature of global institutionalism. In essence, Pogge’s view holds that our entitlements and duties of justice are grounded in the institutional relations that hold between us. That is, individuals have rights and responsibilities of global justice because we all belong to the same global cooperative scheme. However, making justice contingent on the existence of institutional relations is problematic for two reasons (Pepper 2015). First, only individuals who participate within the global institutional order are legitimate entitlement-bearers. This means that excluded individuals do not have a legitimate claim on insiders to assist them in meeting their basic needs because they fail to stand in the correct justicegrounding relations. Second, only individuals who participate in the global institutional order are legitimate duty-bearers within a scheme of justice. Thus, prosperous countries or individuals could freeze out resource-poor countries and individuals from the global scheme of interaction, or they themselves could withdraw in order to dissolve their duties of justice to less fortunate individuals. On this view, then, the status of individuals as subjects of justice may be revoked even though, as individuals, we may have done nothing to alter our institutional relation to others and our basic needs remain the same. Given the unlikelihood of individuals or states successfully extricating themselves from the existing global order, both of these worries may look moot. However, there is something deeply unsatisfying about the claim that relations of justice hold because our social world happens to be structured in the correct way, especially when we can so easily imagine it being structured otherwise. Thus, the fact that global institutionalism allows, in theory, that individuals be cut adrift from the protective sphere of justice or release themselves from stringent duties of justice makes it an unattractive framework.



Women and Global Injustice

515

Moreover, feminists have long sought to ensure that theories of justice encompass all those affected by the realm of the political. Specifically, feminists have critiqued mainstream theories for neglecting the experiences of women and other oppressed social groups, and for excluding such groups from their theorizing altogether (e.g., Nussbaum 1999, 2000; Okin 1980, 1989). Thus, one feminist goal has been to ensure that the scope of justice captures all persons, and to challenge theories of social justice that arbitrarily exclude those who do not fit the dominant model of a subject of justice or member of the moral community. Part of this project has involved revealing and problematizing pervasive assumptions that undermine the equality of individuals on the basis of arbitrary factors, such as sex, race, and disability. When a theoretical perspective allows that the place of one’s birth can affect one’s moral status and entitlements, such a view is plainly incompatible with a feminism that seeks to preserve the equal moral worth of all. The final criticism of Pogge’s account pertains to his appeal to primary goods as the metric of justice. Pogge evaluates the justness of institutions by looking at whether people have secure access to the objects of their rights, namely, to basic goods such as physical integrity, adequate nutrition, access to clean water, clothing, shelter, basic health care, freedom of movement, basic education, and economic participation (Pogge 2002: 49). Thus for Pogge injustice occurs whenever social institutions hamper individuals’ secure access to basic primary goods. From a feminist perspective, this is unsatisfactory because not all cases of gender injustice are evidenced by insecure access to primary goods. Women may have secure access to primary goods and yet have restricted employment opportunities, be disproportionately burdened by domestic labor, or be disadvantaged by preferences distorted by norms and expectations of gender. Furthermore, though Pogge’s account may be able to identify some of the effects of gender injustice, as, for example, in cases where women have greater insecurity in access to basic health care and education, its focus on the distribution of primary goods within institutional contexts means that it cannot speak to deeper background social conditions that cause and perpetuate unjust gender inequality. In sum, while global institutionalism takes individuals as the primary units of moral concern, its focus on economic institutions, human rights, and primary goods leaves it inattentive to the nuances of gender injustice and the ways that gender interacts with the processes of globalization. Since Pogge’s global institutionalism is limited in these ways, we must look elsewhere for a more

516

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

adequate theory of global injustice. In the following section, we will consider a global care-theoretical approach, which is endorsed by some feminists, such as Robinson and Virginia Held, as a superior alternative to Pogge’s position.10

4  A global ethics of care What fundamentally motivates an ethics of care is the fact that all of us are, for significant periods of our lives, dependent on others.11 From the moment that we are born, we are all dependent on others to provide us with the care necessary for survival. The same will also be true for a great many of us in the final stages of our lives. Over the course of a lifetime we are also likely to require and enjoy care from others in a variety of ways, and, for some of us, the high degree of our dependency on others will render their care crucial to our ongoing survival. Moreover, many of us will spend a great deal of time caring for others; whether they be our children, our partners, our parents, our friends, our families, or others with whom we enter caring relations. Consequently, whether we are giving care or receiving care, our experience of human interdependency is central to our experience of being human. Thus, as Robinson notes, the “activity of caring is not peripheral to our lives; it constitutes what makes us who we are, and is, thus, of fundamental social, political and moral significance” (Robinson 2013: 136). It is these undeniable facts about the human condition that make care, for the care ethicist, a (if not the) fundamental value: for if there were no care, there would be no persons (Held 2006: 17). For care theorists, placing the value and practice of care at the heart of our moral and political theorizing has several key implications. The first is that the value of care provides the foundations of a “wider and deeper” ethical framework in which other values, like justice, are to be strived for (Held 2006: 17). Essentially this means that the value and practice of care take priority, at least in many instances, over other values. Second, by prioritizing the practice and value of care, the care theorist adopts a relational ontology that views caring relations as both conceptually and normatively prior to the individual (Held 2004: 143; 2006: 13–14; Robinson 1999: 39). In other words, the care theorist holds that the central unit of moral concern is not individuals but the relations that exist between them, and the most valuable of these relations are those that manifest the value of care. Consequently, an ethics of care looks to promote and cultivate caring relations between individuals, while challenging relations that are “dominating, exploitative, mistrustful, or hostile” (Held 2004: 145).



Women and Global Injustice

517

Lastly, by prioritizing caring relations, care theory looks to shift our political priorities. As Held notes, “instead of seeing the corporate sector, and military strength, and government and law as the most important segments of society deserving the highest levels of wealth and power, a caring society might see the tasks of bringing up children, educating its members, meeting the needs of all, achieving peace and treasuring the environment” as where we should be concentrating our attention (Held 2006: 19). Moreover, care theory moves beyond rights-based approaches to injustice, by arguing that injustices occur not only when rights are not met or duties remain unfulfilled, but whenever “practices, institutions, structures and discourses . . . inhibit or subvert adequate care or . . . lead to exploitation, neglect or a lack of recognition in the giving and receiving of care” (Robinson 2013: 137). Thus, care-theoretical approaches broaden our understanding of the political by taking care, caring relations, and our capacity to care as central to political theory. We are now in a position to see why advocates of a global ethics of care believe that care theory is superior to the global institutionalism discussed above. The shift to a relational ontology signifies concern for relationships all the way down—not only those that exist between global institutions and impoverished individuals. Injustice, for care theorists, is present when people are unable to give or receive adequate care. Accordingly, care theorists recognize the kaleidoscope of relational dynamics that exist, ranging from the familial to the global, which can distort and impoverish caring relations, and the interdependencies that exist between “multiple scales in the workings of the global economy” (Robinson 2013: 141). Thus, prioritizing care as both a practice and value enables care theorists to identify the many unjust gendered impacts of globalization that affect women specifically. However, though care-theoretical conceptions of justice are sensitive to gender injustice in ways that global institutionalism is not, there are three drawbacks to the view that make it unattractive as a theory of global injustice. Specifically, a global ethics of care obscures the needs of individuals, cannot protect the needs and interests of distant strangers, and is unable to identify all instances of gender injustice. I will discuss each of these objections in turn.

4.1  The ultimate unit of moral concern: Relations or individuals? While I am sympathetic to some aspects of Robinson’s critique of global institutionalism, I disagree with the central claim that normative individualism entails an abstract conception of the person and I think we should reject the

518

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

move to prioritizing relations over individuals. First, it is worth noting that Pogge’s account of human individuals is far from fictional. On the contrary, global institutionalism is motivated by the stark realities facing the world’s most vulnerable people and their lived experiences. More importantly, though, abandoning the commitment to normative individualism may in fact hinder the emancipatory goals of feminists because recognizing individuals as the ultimate units of value is essential to ensuring that the needs and well-being of women everywhere are recognized as equal to the needs and well-being of others (Nussbaum 1999: 63). Following Martha Nussbaum, I am persuaded that affording individuals normative priority reflects the important fact that almost all human beings are physically distinct and separate to others. While it is true that most of us are enmeshed in relations of interdependence, we nonetheless each have our own minds and bodies, which we experience in a way that no other can. As Nussbaum notes, “extremely poor people are likely to be especially keenly aware of the separateness of each person’s well-being—for hunger and hard physical labor are great reminders that one is oneself and not someone else” (Nussbaum 2000: 56–57). Recognizing the separateness of persons is essential to protecting women’s fundamental interests since their needs often go neglected when they are subsumed under the needs of their children, husbands, families, communities, and the nation-states in which they live. It is unlikely that the care theorist will be satisfied by this response. Indeed, Held criticizes Nussbaum for not feeling the full force of the care ethicist’s objections: The feminist critique of liberalism that a view such as Nussbaum’s misses is the more fundamental one that turning everyone into a liberal individual leaves no one adequately attentive to relationships between persons, whether they be caring relations within the family or social relations holding communities together. . . . it is not satisfactory to think of care, as it is conceptualized by liberal individualism, as a mere personal preference an individual may choose or not. (Held 2006: 95)

But it is far from clear why prioritizing individuals over caring relations necessarily reduces the value of care to “mere personal preference.” Taking the needs and interests of individuals as primary to those of relationships, groups, and nations does not preclude us from also viewing individuals as embodied, vulnerable, and enmeshed in relations of care. Nor does the prioritization of individuals entail that families, communities, and nations have no worth, or that caring relations are not of significant value to us.



Women and Global Injustice

519

It is true that global institutionalism and other liberal cosmopolitan views are committed to ethical individualism—the view that individual human beings are the primary units of moral concern. However, it does not follow that they are also committed to ontological individualism—the view that only individuals and their properties exist (Robeyns 2005: 107–09). The truth of the matter is that there are two important facts on the table: the fact of the separateness of persons and the fact of dependency. When theorizing about global justice both of these facts must be taken into consideration. In short, not only is normative individualism necessary for ensuring that the needs and interests of women are visible and afforded their due weight in our moral considerations, but adopting theories that have this feature does not entail a commitment to an undesirable and inaccurate view of human beings and human life.

4.2  Caring for distant others Care theorists suggest that we can come to see our responsibilities to distant others by recognizing that they are similarly enmeshed in caring networks of interdependence. However, prioritizing caring relations over justice is problematic in the absence of a robust global civil society. Humanity as a whole is a long way off realizing global relations of care, trust, and solidarity between all members of the human community. Sadly, millions of people have their most fundamental human rights violated every day. These violations range from the most heinous acts of physical violence to those which result when we are unable to secure for ourselves the most essential necessities for human life such as safe water, adequate nutrition, shelter, and basic medical care. Justice demands that human rights be upheld and that we work together to end these violations since we all bear some responsibility for the complex global institutional scheme within which we live our lives (Young 2004). Importantly, justice demands all of this even when relations of mutual care, trust, and solidarity are absent. As Serena Parekh notes, one of the virtues of a human rights framework, perhaps the virtue, is that human rights are supposed to operate precisely when care, empathy, and solidarity are absent. I am obliged not to violate human rights even when I do not care about someone, even when I may hate or despise them. History has shown that human rights are needed most when care and solidarity are absent. (Parekh 2008: 106)

So, in the absence of global networks of care, concern, and solidarity, the language of rights and justice is necessary to ensure the protection of all humans

520

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

globally. Prioritizing caring relations in the current context would likely increase the vulnerability of those to whom the powerful and privileged already show so little regard. Furthermore, care theorists typically acknowledge that the paradigmatic case of a caring relation is that exhibited in the family between parents and children. This familial bond is perhaps the strongest and is qualitatively different to the kind of care that might be exhibited between co-nationals. Nonetheless, care theorists are optimistic that we can extend our capacity to care for one another beyond the private sphere of friends and family to the public sphere where we interact as citizens in global political society (Held 2006). But, there is an obvious tension between securing care and concern for all, and an ethic that explicitly prioritizes our care of a few. Ultimately, a global ethic of care prioritizes care within the family and demands a moral orientation that respects relations of partiality over the needs and interests of distant strangers. It might be countered that a global ethics of care demands that we strengthen relationships of partiality everywhere and in so doing secures respect for the caring relations of distant others. Note, however, that what matters most is one’s own relationships of partiality. But, this being the case, it is difficult to see how we draw the limits of partiality on this view, and when, if ever, morality demands that we act against the interests of our near and dear in order to promote the caring relations of those who live beyond our borders. The forces of consumerist capitalism, social anxiety about potential harms, and technological advances shape contexts of care, and social expectations about “good care” in the Global North. For example, it might plausibly be argued that parents, who provide their children with mobile phones, laptops, and transport to and from school, show care and concern for their children’s safety, social development, and education. Yet, mobile phones nearly always contain conflict minerals, and transport to and from school is rarely carbon-neutral, which means that parents who provide such resources for their children contribute to the harms experienced by those living in mineral-rich countries and by those most vulnerable to climate change (not to mention future generations of all sentient animals). Thus, in order to facilitate caring relations elsewhere in the world it is arguably imperative that parents in the Global North modify their caring behaviors and respond differently to the needs of their children. But such a demand appears to be in tension with the foundations of an ethic of care, which emphasizes the lived experience of moral life. Many people choose daily to prioritize the safety, comfort, and education of their children over the caring relations of distant strangers with whom they share no bonds of familiarity.



Women and Global Injustice

521

Furthermore, many parents believe that they are obligated to prioritize their children, even when their efforts go far beyond what is required to ensure their children a decent level of well-being. Care ethics does not condemn such people; it only asks them to try and cultivate a greater sensitivity to distant others. And those distant others whose lives are shattered by conflict and natural disaster can only hope that such sensitivity and recognition comes sooner rather than later.

4.3  Injustice and the absence of care As we have seen, a global ethics of care views “practices, institutions, structures and discourses which inhibit or subvert adequate care or which lead to exploitation, neglect or a lack of care of recognition in the giving and receiving of care” as unjust (Robinson 2013: 137). The benefit of utilizing the metric of care to evaluate the justice of particular states of affairs is that it dissolves the boundary between the public and private and renders visible the unequal distribution and lack of support for reproductive work in the domestic sphere. While this is a clear improvement on the limits of a rights-based global institutionalism, identifying injustice solely in terms of the absence of conditions necessary for providing and receiving adequate care is problematically narrow. There are many women globally who receive adequate care and are able to adequately care for others but who do not have important political, social, and economic rights, or control in those domains. To characterize injustice as merely an absence of the conditions for adequate care overlooks the many ways in which women experience the harms of sexist discrimination and oppression. Consider the following examples. Though the gender wage gap may affect the ability of many women to provide adequate care to others, women in higher paid positions or women who have no dependents may not be disadvantaged in the same way. However, on the care-theoretical picture it is unclear that women who are paid less for the same work as their male counterparts are in any way wronged when the disparity in pay has no bearing on their ability to give or receive care. But, the gender wage gap is clearly unacceptable from a feminist perspective because it evidences systematic discrimination against women on the grounds of their gender—women are paid less for the same work because they are women. Similarly, the gendered division of labor within the family need not always undermine the conditions that women need to give and receive adequate care. However, when a man, because of gender norms and expectations, does less of the domestic labor than his woman partner, his partner has less time than him to fulfill her personal projects (Robeyns 2010: 225–29). Gender norms and

522

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

expectations can also work to limit women’s opportunities outside of the home including the types of work that may be available, the types of leisure activities that they might be free to pursue, and the ease with which they can move about within the community. Importantly, none of these constraints necessarily affect women’s ability to provide or receive adequate care but are widely taken as instances of gender injustice: women because they are women have less control over how their lives go. All of this suggests that some gender injustices are disconnected from the value and practice of care. Thus, focusing solely on the conditions for adequate care is insufficient to capture all of the dimensions of gender injustice. Moreover, talking about an absence of care in these cases is beside the point. What makes the disadvantage unfair in these cases is not that there is an absence of care on the part of employers, spouses, or society, but rather that women are arbitrarily discriminated against on the grounds of their gender.

5  The capabilities approach Since a global ethic of care cannot guarantee protection to all women globally or identify all instances of gender injustice, I suggest that we look again at individualistic conceptions of cosmopolitan justice. In this section, I outline Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach (hereafter CA), which I think avoids the limitations of global institutionalism and a global ethic of care. CA is primarily concerned with what individuals are able to do and what they are able to be, specifically, with their human capabilities. Nussbaum states that her understanding of human capabilities is “informed by an intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being” (2006: 70). Human dignity, on this view, is only achieved when a human is able to live their life in a truly human way. That is, humans must have opportunities to function in ways that we can identify as truly human. Starting from the “intuitive idea” of human dignity Nussbaum suggests ten central human capabilities: (1) life; (2) bodily health; (3) bodily integrity; (4) senses, imagination, and thought; (5) emotions; (6) practical reason; (7) affiliation; (8) other species; (9) play; and (10) control over one’s environment (2000: 78–80, 2006: 76–78).12 For each of these capabilities there is a threshold beneath which truly human functioning is not possible and individuals whose capabilities fall below the appropriate threshold do not possess a life worthy of human dignity (Nussbaum 2006: 71, 78). When individuals do suffer deficits



Women and Global Injustice

523

in capability, we must consider how institutions might be designed to improve their opportunities for flourishing, and when institutions fail to promote, or otherwise compromise human capabilities below the threshold level, then the state of affairs is unjust. Consequently, justice demands protecting and enabling human capabilities to the capability threshold and human capabilities ought to underpin the political principles at the foundation of every nation-state’s constitution (2006: 70).

5.1  The promise of the capabilities approach From a feminist perspective, CA, as articulated by Nussbaum, has a number of advantages over the other two positions previously discussed. First, its commitment to normative individualism means that the capabilities of all women globally matter and cannot be elided or downgraded in favor of the promotion of relations, communities, or nations. Importantly, CA, unlike global institutionalism, does not render our duties and entitlements of justice contingent on our membership to particular institutional arrangements. Instead, CA holds that duties and entitlements of justice obtain in virtue of the fact that all humans deserve to live lives worthy of human dignity. Thus, CA does not permit individuals to be excluded from considerations of justice because of morally irrelevant features such as sex, race, disability, and membership to an institutional scheme, which are neither earned nor deserved. Second, the normative individualism central to CA does not preclude taking seriously the role and value of care in our lives. On the contrary, care is taken to be of fundamental importance and this is explicit in CA: Thinking well about care means thinking about a wide range of capabilities on the side of both the cared-for and the caregiver. Good care for dependents, whether children, elderly, ill, or disabled, focuses on support for capabilities of life, health, and bodily integrity. It also provides stimulation for senses, imagination, and thought. It supports emotional attachments and removes “overwhelming fear and anxiety”; indeed, good care constitutes a valuable form of attachment. Good care also supports the capacity of the cared-for for practical reason and choice; it encourages affiliations of many other sorts, including social and political affiliations where appropriate. It protects the crucial good of selfrespect. It supports the capacity to play and enjoy life. It supports control over one’s material and political environment. (Nussbaum 2006: 168–69)

Good care is required to develop and sustain the central human capabilities of each individual and in order to ensure that individuals meet the capability

524

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

threshold for justice the cared-for and caregivers must be supported in their relations of interdependency. CA therefore takes seriously both the fact of the separateness of persons and the fact of dependency. Third, CA holds that injustice occurs whenever people’s central human capabilities are thwarted. Thus, similar to care-theoretical approaches, CA is able to identify injustice at multiple levels and recognize how complex relational dynamics between domestic, local, national, regional, and global levels might interconnect in ways that thwart the capabilities of individuals. Fourth, and relatedly, because CA deploys the metric of capabilities to measure the justness of states of affairs, it is better equipped than both global institutionalism and the ethics of care to identify more covert forms of gender injustice. By focusing on what one can do and be, as opposed to what resources one has access to or whether there is an absence of care, CA is far more sensitive to the ways in which social structures can hamper an individual’s capacity to achieve valuable doings and beings. Though state laws may protect women’s rights to equal opportunity in employment and equal pay, there may be pervasive social norms that thwart women’s attempts to pursue jobs of their choosing. When women are discouraged from working, or informally excluded from certain jobs, this undermines their fundamental capability to control their environment, which includes “having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others” and being able to engage in “meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers” (Nussbaum 2006: 78). Moreover, when women are discouraged from working outside of the home, their capability to be treated as dignified human beings of equal moral worth to others is also impaired. CA, with its focus on capability rather than functioning is sensitive to societal pressures that limit an individual’s capability for valuable functionings and so can deal with problematic social structures that unjustly impede a person’s ability to live the life that is valuable to them. As a result, CA is well equipped to identify all of the barriers to substantive equality; the attainment of which is crucial to the feminist agenda.

6 Conclusion In this chapter, I have offered a feminist analysis of three approaches to global injustice. I have suggested that although global institutionalism has the resources to identify women’s human rights violations it is insensitive to injustice done to



Women and Global Injustice

525

women because they are women. Moreover, injustice, on this view, is produced by formal institutions and so the approach has difficulty speaking to more covert and informal systems of gender oppression that are no less pernicious. The second approach discussed was global care ethics. While this view fared better at being able to identify the gendered dimensions of poverty, immigration, and violence at multiple social levels, I argued that it suffered from three major flaws. First, the rejection of normative individualism has the potential to mask oppression within relationships and eclipse the needs and interests of individual women. Second, the prioritization of familial caring relations engenders a tension between the idea that we should care both for those close to us and for those far away. Third, gender injustice cannot be characterized solely by the absence of care or the absence of conditions for good care since there are instances of injustice that affect women even when they are able to give and receive adequate care. In the final section of this chapter, I outlined Martha Nussbaum’s CA, which, I suggested, avoids the problems identified with a global institutionalism and the ethics of care. While I am sympathetic to CA, its adequacy as a theory of global justice depends on its ability to speak to a number of significant challenges. For instance, commentators have argued that Nussbaum’s capabilities list lacks adequate justification (Jaggar 2006), that it lacks democratic legitimacy, and that it represents a parochial Western vision of the good life. One serious and troubling implication of these objections is that one might judge CA to be little more than a form of neocolonialism through which Nussbaum wages her “Western feminist civilising mission” (Hobson 2007: 102). The challenge here is not restricted to the capabilities list, but expresses a deeper mistrust with topdown theorizing. I do not have space here to defend CA against these objections, but it is worth noting that defenders of CA have fruitfully pursued two strategies: either they have continued to defend some version of a capabilities list, or they have rejected a universal list in favor of a more contextual approach (Sen 2005). In conclusion, it is worth emphasizing that the analysis that I have presented is severely limited. I have not, for example, considered other strains of liberal cosmopolitan thought that are neither forms of institutionalism nor capabilities approaches. Nor have I considered feminist arguments against cosmopolitan frameworks altogether. Moreover, it may be possible for defenders of global institutionalism and a global ethics of care to respond to the concerns I have raised here and for capability theorists to falter in developing a view that can meet the challenges noted above. Finally, all cosmopolitans, including the ones

526

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

discussed here, must consider the ways in which their work might reproduce hierarchical relations of domination, and whether their normative frameworks and recommendations manifest forms of neocolonialism (Kohn 2013; Robinson and Tormey 2009). Nonetheless, this chapter has shown how a feminist analysis of theories of global injustice might be conducted and that such analyses are necessary if our theories are to adequately recognize and address the situation of the world’s women.

Notes 1 It has been argued that these factors have contributed to the now often-cited “100 million missing women” (Sen 2010). It should also be noted that the problem of sex-selective abortion currently appears to be, for the most part, targeted at female fetuses. There is no example of a country with cultural norms that favor girls over boys, where there is a corresponding disproportionate occurrence of sex-selective abortions carried out on male fetuses. 2 The legal system in many countries discriminates against women in the areas of family law, inheritance, property and land ownership, citizenship, and criminal law. 3 For more information on the types and extent of violence against women see The United Nations Secretary-General’s In-depth Study on All Forms of Violence against Women (2006). 4 Globally women tend to live longer than men with the majority of the world’s population of older women living in developing regions (World Health Organization 2009 esp. Ch. 6). 5 To be clear, I am not suggesting that women globally experience gender oppression and exploitation in identical ways. Besides gender, each of us has multiple facets to our social identity that intersect with one another to produce patterns of privilege and disadvantage. Thus, how we experience gender discrimination (or privilege) depends on our particular social location and the interplay between structures of oppression (and privilege) in that context. Nor am I suggesting that gender can be disentangled from other structures of oppression. However, this chapter does rely on the claim that gender structures systematically disadvantage those who identify, or who are identified, as women. 6 Held limits this second category of problems to those which concern “sustaining our humanity” (Held 2006: 158). However, as I have argued elsewhere, all other sentient nonhuman animals have the capacity for well-being and thus also have interests in adequate nutrition, being free from disease, and being protected against human conflict (see Pepper 2016 and 2017).



Women and Global Injustice

527

7 For more on the feminization of poverty see Chant (2012). On the feminization of migration and labor, see Richer (2012) and Standing (1989). On trafficking in women and girls, see Territo and Kirkham (2010). On gendered vulnerability in warfare see Hynes (2004). 8 Here I am primarily concerned with how well these accounts can speak to issues of gender injustice but there are, of course, many other axes of analysis along which these theories may fall short. For example, approaches must also be assessed on their ability to accommodate the interests of nonhuman animals (see Pepper 2017). However, my focus here is on how adequately these approaches can deal with systemic global gender injustice and any approach to global justice that fails on this front will be inadequate. 9 There is a rich literature on the “global care chain” phenomenon, which captures the situation of women who leave their children, or other dependents, to pursue care work in other countries. Though migrant women are remunerated for their work, which they then send home to their families, the care gain in the receiving countries corresponds to a care deficit in the sending country (Hochschild 2003: 186–87). For more on the global commodification of care and injustices associated with global care chains, see Fudge (2012), Ghaeus (2013), Hochschild (2000), Kittay (2008), and Yeates (2012). 10 In recent years, a number of care theorists have advanced care-theoretical approaches that are global in scope (Miller 2010; Held 2006; Robinson 1999, 2011, 2013). 11 In fact, as Eva Kittay notes, the idea that humans can be generally independent is a fiction because most of us are dependent on others at all points during our lives. We depend, for example, on others to produce and provide us with access to food, water, energy, clothes, transport, to survive, even though these are goods that we may purchase. While “many of these dependencies are hidden, . . . dependence that goes unacknowledged is still not independence” (Kittay 2001: 270). 12 It is important to note that Nussbaum takes this list to be open-ended and subject to continual revision, making the itemization of fundamental human capabilities an ongoing project.

References Brock, Gillian (2015), “Global Justice,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2015/entries/justice-global/ Cannon, Terry (2002), “Gender and Climate Hazards in Bangladesh,” Gender and Development 10 (2): 45–50.

528

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Chant, Sylvia (2012), “Feminization of Poverty,” in George Ritzer (ed.), Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog202/abstract?userIsAuthenticated=false&de niedAccessCustomisedMessage= Clark Miller, Sarah (2010), “Cosmopolitan Care,” Ethics and Social Welfare 4 (2): 145–57. Fudge, Judy (2012), “Global Care Chains: Transnational Migrant Care Workers,” International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations 28 (1): 63–69. Gheaus, Anca (2013), “Care Drain as an Issue of Global Gender Justice,” Ethical Perspectives 20 (1): 61–80. Held, David (2006), “Reframing Global Governance: Apocalypse Soon or Reform!” New Political Economy 11 (2): 157–76. Held, Virginia (2004), “Care and Justice in the Global Context,” Ratio Juris 17 (2): 141–55. Held, Virginia (2006), The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobson, John M. (2007), “Is Critical Theory Always for the White West and for Western Imperialism? Beyond Westphalian Towards a Post-Racist Critical IR,” Review of International Studies 33: 91–116. Hochschild, Arlie R. (2000), “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value,” in Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton (eds.), On the Edge: Globalization and the New Millennium, 130–46, London: Sage Publishers. Hochschild, Arlie R. (2003), “Love and Gold,” in B. Ehrenreich and A. R. Hochschild (eds.), Global Women: Nannies, Maid and Sex Workers in the New Economy, 15–30, New York: Henry Holt and Company. hooks, b. (2000), Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics, London: Pluto Press. Hynes, Patricia H. (2004), “On the Battlefield of Women’s Bodies: An Overview of the Harm of War to Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (5): 431–45. Jaggar, Alison M. (2006), “Reasoning About Well‐Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities,” Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (3): 301–22. Jaggar, Alison M., ed. (2014), Gender and Global Justice, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kittay, Eva F. (2001), “When Caring is Just and Justice is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation,” Public Culture, 13 (3): 557–79. Kittay, Eva F. (2008), “The Global Heart Transplant and Caring Across National Boundaries,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 46: 138–65. Kittay, Eva F., B. Jennings, and A. A. Wasunna (2005), “Dependency, Difference and the Global Ethic of Longterm Care,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 13 (4): 443–69. Kohn, Margaret (2013), “Postcolonialism and Global Justice,” Journal of Global Ethics 9 (2): 187–200. Moghadam, Val M. (1999), “Gender and Globalization: Female Labor and Women’s Mobilization,” Journal of World-Systems Research 5 (2): 366–89.



Women and Global Injustice

529

Mohanty, Chandra T. (2003), Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nelson, Valerie, Kate Meadows, Terry Cannon, John Morton, and Adrienne Martin (2002), “Uncertain Predictions, Invisible Impacts, and the Need to Mainstream Gender in Climate Change Adaptations,” Gender and Development 10 (2): 51–59. Neumayer, Eric, and T. Plümper (2007), “The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters: The Impact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy, 1981– 2002,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (3): 551–66. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1999), Sex and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. (2006), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Okin, Susan M. (1980), Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Okin, Susan M. (1989), Justice, Gender, and the Family, New York: Basic books. Parekh, Serena (2008), “Care and Human Rights in a Globalized World,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 46: 104–10. Pepper, Angie (2015), “A Feminist Cosmopolitanism: Relational or Non-Relational?” in Darren O’Byrne and Sybille De La Rosa (eds.), The Cosmopolitan Ideal: Challenges and Opportunities, 39–60. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Pepper, Angie (2016), “Beyond Anthropocentrism: Cosmopolitanism and Non-Human Animals,” Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric 9 (2): 114–33 Pepper, Angie (2017), “Justice for Animals in a Globalizing World,” in Andrew Woodhall and G. Garmendia da Trindade (eds.), Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues: Towards an Undivided Future, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Pogge, Thomas (1992), “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103 (1): 48–75. Pogge, Thomas (2001), “Priorities of Global Justice,” Metaphilosophy 32 (1/2): 6–24. Pogge, Thomas (2002), World Poverty and Human Rights, Oxford: Polity. Pogge, Thomas (2005), “Real World Justice,” The Journal of Ethics 9 (1/2): 29–53. Pogge, Thomas (2008), “Access to Medicines,” Public Health Ethics 1 (2): 73–82. Pogge, Thomas (2011), “Are We Violating the Human Rights of the World's Poor,” Yale Human Rights Development Law Journal 14 (2): 1–33. Pogge, Thomas (2012), “Cosmopolitanism,” in Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit and Thomas Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 312–31, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reilly, Niamh (2007), “Cosmopolitan Feminism and Human Rights,” Hypatia 22 (4): 180–98. Richer, Zach (2012), “Feminization of Labour,” in George Ritzer (ed.), Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog201/abstract?userIsAuthenticated=false&de niedAccessCustomisedMessage=

530

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Robeyns, Ingrid (2005), “The Capability Approach: A Theoretical Survey,” Journal of Human Development 6 (1): 93–117. Robeyns, Ingrid (2010), “Gender and the Metric of Justice,” in Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns (eds.), Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, 215–35, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Andrew, and Simon Tormey (2009), “Resisting ‘Global Justice’: Disrupting the Colonial ‘emancipatory’ Logic of the West,” Third World Quarterly 30 (8): 1395–1409. Robinson, Fiona (1999), Globalizing Care, Boulder: Westview Press. Robinson, Fiona (2006), “Care, Gender and Global Social Justice: Rethinking ‘Ethical Globalization’,” Journal of Global Ethics 2 (1): 5–25. Robinson, Fiona (2011), The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Robinson, Fiona (2013), “Global Care Ethics: Beyond Distribution, Beyond Justice,” Journal of Global Ethics 9 (2): 131–43. Sen, Amartya (2005), “Human Rights and Capabilities,” Journal of Human Development 6 (2): 151–66. Sen, Amartya (2010), “More Than 100 Million Women are Missing,” in P. Murthy and Clyde Lanford Smith (eds.), Women’s Global Health and Human Rights, Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Standing, Guy (1989), “Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor,” World Development 17 (7): 1077–95. Territo, Leonard, and George Kirkham (2010), International Sex Trafficking of Women & Children: Understanding the Global Epidemic, New York: Looseleaf Law Publications. Terry, Geraldine (2009), “No Climate Justice Without Gender Justice: An Overview of the Issues,” Gender and Development 17 (1): 5–18. UN General Assembly (2006), In-Depth Study on all Forms of Violence Against Women: Report of the Secretary-General, doc no. A/61/122/Add.1, available at http://www. refworld.org/docid/484e58702.html (accessed March 13, 2017). World Health Organization (2009), Women and Health: Today’s Evidence Tomorrow’s Agenda, Geneva, Switzerland: WHO Press. Yeates, Nicola (2012), “Global Care Chains: A State-of-the-Art Review and Future Directions in Care Transnationalization Research,” Global Networks 12 (2): 135–54. Young, Iris M. (2004), “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (4): 365–88.

26

Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism: Reconceptualizing the Contested Relationship Ranjoo Seodu Herr

1 Introduction Feminism is frequently associated with nationalism and transnationalism,1 as conjoined terms such as “nationalist feminism” and “transnational feminism” exemplify. Feminism’s relationship to nationalism, however, has been predominantly antagonistic, whereas feminism’s more recent relationship to transnationalism has been unequivocally amicable. This chapter attempts to provide some conceptual and normative clarity about the relationship among diverse conceptualizations of feminism, nationalism, and transnationalism by mapping their conceptual links, disjunctures, and intersections. The ultimate aim of the chapter is to propose a plausible way to reconceptualize their relationship in a way that promotes the feminist goal of gender justice across cultures. Toward this aim, the chapter proceeds as follows: Sections 2, 3, and 4 examine each idea not only in terms of its history as a sociopolitical movement but also in terms of its conceptual evolution. In Section 5, I consider a prevalent trend in contemporary feminism, which is to reject nationalism and align with transnationalism. I argue in Section 6 that this trend is problematic, because the transnational perspective cannot properly address transnational capitalism’s deleterious effect on disadvantaged Third World women in its sweeping rejection of nationalism. I conclude this chapter by emphasizing the relevance of nationalism for attaining the feminist goal of cross-cultural gender justice.

532

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

2 Feminism “Feminism” originated in the West; the French first used the term to refer to the women’s movement in nineteenth-century United States, which aimed to advance women’s position in society. When this term was introduced in the United States, it referred to a particular brand of women’s rights activism that emphasized women’s uniqueness as mothers. In its contemporary usage, feminism refers to all attempts to end women’s subordination and oppression (Jaggar 1983: 5). The history of Western feminism has often been understood in terms of “waves,” among which “second-wave” feminism since the 1960s has played a pivotal role in defining feminism, not only as a movement but also as an academic discipline. For this reason, despite the emergence of “third” and even “fourth” waves of feminism (Snyder 2008; Chamberlain 2016), as well as feminist voices skeptical of the wave “metaphor” itself (Nicolson 2010; Laughlin et al. 2010),2 I will focus here on important challenges to second-wave feminism from “women of color” feminisms (Tong 2009). Feminists of color in the United States have been intimately involved in second-wave feminism from the beginning, whether in collaboration with white feminists or in their autonomous organizations (Thompson 2002: 338). In the 1970s and 1980s, these feminists of color began to expose the limits of white second-wave feminism with its exclusive focus on gender by emphasizing the multiple forms of oppression—race, class, in addition to gender—experienced by women of color. In the 1990s, feminists from the Third World residing in the West, who identify themselves as “Third World feminists,” added colonialism, imperialism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism to the list of intersectional oppressions experienced by Third World women. In the middle of the 1990s, some feminists of Third World origin began to emphasize the transnational level in their theories of Third World women’s oppression and advocated “transnational feminism.” Third World feminism and transnational feminism exposed blind spots regarding Third World women’s oppression in white second-wave feminism and contributed to the expansion of feminism’s scope: by recognizing the complex intersectionality of Third World women’s oppression, they rectified the narrowness of white feminism’s exclusive focus on gender and thereby rendered feminism relevant and applicable to Third World women’s experiences and struggles. Given the diversity in foci and methodologies of different branches of feminism, is there a common denominator among these different conceptions

Book.indd 550

29-Jun-22 06:56:08



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

533

of feminism that justifies bringing them together in transnational feminist solidarity in the twenty-first century? I propose that it be the shared goal of resisting, opposing, and overcoming pervasive and systemic forms of women’s oppression anywhere and attaining gender justice across cultures. Any form of “feminism”—such as neoliberal feminism (Prügl 2015)—that allows for a group of women or “feminists” to advance themselves at the expense of other groups of women cannot share in this goal and is therefore suspect. The goal of gender justice across cultures is compatible with Alison Jaggar’s “global gender justice,” which emphasizes eliminating “vulnerabilities created by possible gender bias in global institutions” (2009: 47, my emphasis). Building just global arrangements so that women who migrate transnationally are treated more justly is undoubtedly important. In proposing gender justice across cultures as the feminist goal of the twenty-first century, however, my focus is on attaining forms of gender justice that are local and culturally specific in different parts of the globe. Attaining this shared feminist goal, however, would not be easy. Although the generality of the goal of gender justice across cultures is part of its universal appeal, it is also a source of formidable obstacles in its attainment. The reason is that feminists come from diverse social worlds not only in terms of race, class, and sexual preference but also in terms of nationality and culture. Feminists across the globe may agree in principle that a primary goal of feminism and transnational feminist solidarity is to attain gender justice across cultures. Yet specific forms of oppression that women face vary from culture to culture. Similarly, not only forms of feminist resistance but also feminist visions of gender justice may vary across cultures. Complicating the situation even further is the existence of significant power inequalities among participants in feminist discourses (Jaggar 1998: 20), as well as a “hermeneutical injustice” in the discourses themselves due to the exclusion of historically oppressed groups’ experiences (Fricker 1998: 208). Under these circumstances, feminists from privileged social locations may be not only oblivious to the experiences and perspectives of women and feminists from historically oppressed groups, but also unaware that they may be perpetuating assumptions and attitudes ingrained in locations of power and privilege. Since ignoring differences among women is not an acceptable feminist option, feminists must persist in working together to attain gender justice across cultures. In doing so, feminists must not only recognize the limitations attendant upon advantaged social locations, but also acknowledge that women and feminists from oppressed groups may have an “epistemic privilege”

534

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

(Mohanty  2002; see also, Harding 1993) concerning events and conditions relating to their oppression. The idea of epistemic privilege of the oppressed has been justified on different, albeit related, feminist grounds: some argue that marginalized social locations are especially propitious for producing less biased and even an “objective” understanding of the human condition (Harding 1993: 56, 62); others argue that members of oppressed groups have “more immediate” knowledge about their oppression than outsiders (Narayan 1988: 35). At a minimum, members of oppressed groups have a privilege of “a corrective variety” that would adjust and remedy the pervasive but distorted understandings of the social world by providing perspectives that were previously unrecognized or concealed (Fricker 1998: 210). If this reasoning is plausible, then we may conclude that feminists committed to transnational feminist solidary in the twenty-first century ought to be united on two things, among others. First, they ought to share the feminist goal, which is to attain gender justice across cultures. Second, in working toward this goal, feminists ought to confer epistemic privilege on women and feminists who come from disadvantaged social locations. Although no viewpoint is infallible, any account that purports to explain oppression must include how it is experienced and described by the oppressed. Accepting and respecting the epistemic privilege of the oppressed may not come naturally or easily to members of privileged groups. It must therefore be predicated on “methodological humility” (Narayan 1988: 38) and assiduous effort to overcome the limits of one’s imagination and comprehension in grasping firsthand experience of oppression. Only by recognizing the epistemic privilege of and paying due respect to women with firsthand experience of oppression can feminists of advantaged groups begin to understand women’s complex and varied social worlds and prepare themselves for transnational feminist solidarity with the former.

3 Nationalism The term “nationalism” may be used in different ways to refer to diverse, albeit related, phenomena. In this chapter, I use this term primarily to connote the political movement by members of a nation-state to pursue national selfdetermination (see Smith 1991: 73). Nationalism, defined thus, is a distinctly modern phenomenon predicated on the modern state apparatus. Absolute monarchies of the seventeenth century played a pivotal role in the birth of

Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

535

the modern state, as they created a larger and stronger political structure by subjugating smaller and weaker political units, strengthened their rule over a unified territorial area, solidified the system of law and order, and enforced it throughout a territory. The idea of sovereignty originally enabled absolutist rulers to claim that they alone were the source of supreme and indivisible power. However, it has gone through a transformation from state sovereignty to popular sovereignty, as the source of political authority has gradually transferred from the absolute monarch to the people in theory and practice. Concurrent with the transformation of the idea of sovereignty, the European modern state gradually developed into the “nation-state,”3 which not only wielded political authority over a bounded territory with supreme jurisdiction but also enjoyed legitimacy generated by subjects’ support and loyalty (Held 1995: 48). This occurred historically through three mechanisms in an environment of severe competition among European states in warfare. First, European states had to organize and deploy their military efficiently. Second, they expanded globally in search of resource and consumer bases through colonialism, which led to the exponential growth of capitalism. Third, the severe military competition among European states had ironically ushered in the development of democracy within such states, as rulers needed the support of their subjects for their military endeavors (57). The more the subjects got involved in wars the more conscious they became of their membership in the state and their concomitant obligations and rights as citizens, which in turn led to a heightened awareness of their national identities and nationalist sentiments. The heightened national awareness among the subjects was therefore a “critical force” in the formation of the democratic nation-state (58). The intimate connection between democracy and nationalism is most obvious when we consider major theories of political philosophy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) in particular forcefully articulated the democratic ideal as self-determination. In order to resolve the paradox that men are “in chains” although they are born free (1987: 17), Rousseau argued for the social contract, which dictates that every citizen subject his person and powers under “the supreme direction of the general will.” Through a “total alienation” of their rights to the community to form a perfect union (24, emphasis in original), the people are transformed into the author of laws that regulate the conditions of their society (38) and the true sovereign of a self-determining polity. The Rousseauian idea of a people’s right to self-determination was so influential that it became “a major legacy” of the

Book.indd 553

29-Jun-22 06:56:09

536

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

French Revolution (Ishay 1995: 4). When Napoleon Bonaparte assumed the title of emperor and began to invade other European nations, including Germany, under the pretense of spreading the ideal of “universal citizenship” inherent in the French Revolution (5), however, a people’s right to self-determination morphed into nationalism in invaded nations, as their members felt that their unique cultures were threatened.4 Despite its relatively benign beginnings, the ideology of nationalism in European nation-states in the late nineteenth century deteriorated into ethnocentric nationalism predicated on the idea that power and value dwell exclusively in one’s own nation (Smith 1983: 158). Many assume that this deterioration is due to nationalism’s inherent defects. As the political movement for national self-determination, however, nationalism does not necessarily entail ethnocentric nationalism. To the contrary, a more consistent form of nationalism would be “polycentric” nationalism, which advocates the equal rights of nations to join the “family” of self-determining nations (Smith 1983: 159). What led to the corruption of nationalism, I argue, is the European interstate system since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In the Westphalian system, sovereign states were the only bearers of rights and duties in international law, which established minimal rules of coexistence among them (Held 1995: 75). Under the organizing principle of territorial sovereignty, states enjoyed the right to non-interference in their domestic affairs and pursued their “own national interest above all others” (78). In effect, no superior authority existed over and beyond the states. Consequently, conflicts among states were endemic, but the only way to adjudicate conflicts was by force. The upshot of the Westphalian system was aggressive wars among European empires in pursuit of their national interest, which resulted in the First World War. The brutal exploitative regimes of European colonialism in Africa and Asia prompted widespread anti-colonial resistance movements in these societies, which took the form of nationalism. The version of nationalism that anticolonial nationalists advocated was polycentric nationalism. European colonies in Africa and Asia, which attained national independence after the Second World War, would be later dubbed the “Third World.”5 When most previously colonized nations of the Third World gained independence after the Second World War, the ensuing decades until 1989 were dominated by the logic of the Cold War. During this time ethnic and nationalist conflicts were confined to the outskirts of the Third World (Weiner 1996) and many Western observers of world affairs thought that nationalism was a remnant of a bygone era. When



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

537

nationalist skirmishes erupted after the Cold War in the former communist states, many in the West found its resurgence incomprehensible. This fueled an upsurge of interest in nationalism in Western academia and much ink has been spilled over it. Most liberal theorists tend to be critical of nationalism, except for “Western” or liberal nationalism. Western nationalism is “rational and liberal in character” and is opposed to “Eastern” nationalism, which is “backward-looking and mystical” (Miller 1995: 8); Western nationalism is “at least compatible with a liberal state if not positively conducive to such a state” and Eastern nationalism “leads more or less inevitably to authoritarianism and cultural oppression” (9). What seems to make Western nationalism superior to Eastern nationalism are the liberal values that it promotes, and for this reason many call it liberal nationalism. The contrast between Western/liberal nationalism and Eastern nationalism, however, is asymmetrical, as the latter is not defined in terms of values. The alleged qualities of Eastern nationalism as “backward-looking and mystical” cannot thereby render it inferior to Western nationalism, as many versions of the latter in Western Europe are also based on premodern ethnic ties (Smith 2008). Consequently, they also “look back” into their national origin, which is shrouded in myths, in order to reimagine their national communities horizontally (see Miller 1995: 35–41). Therefore, the mere fact that nationalism is “backward-looking and mystical” does not by itself make it unjustifiable. If we focus on the other characterization of Eastern nationalism as leading to authoritarian tendencies (“authoritarianism and cultural oppression”), the distinction is clearly lopsided in favor of liberal/Western nationalism even before the analysis begins. In order to make the comparison evenhanded, therefore, I suggest that the distinction be rephrased as between “liberal” and “nonliberal” nationalisms based strictly on values.6 The first type of nationalism is to be understood as upholding liberal values predicated on the utmost importance of protecting individual freedom while the second promotes communitarian values that may at times justify overriding certain kinds of individual freedom for the sake of the common good. Liberal theorists argue that nonliberal nationalism is no match for liberal nationalism, for nonliberal values necessarily lead to authoritarianism and oppression (Kymlicka 1995: 95, 2001: 39–40, 208–9). Yet not only is this presumption philosophically unjustifiable (see Herr 2006), but its acceptability is also challenged by recent developments regarding indigenous self-determination. Not only Third World but also indigenous (“Fourth World”)

538

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

nationalist movements can be categorized as nonliberal nationalism, as their national cultures are centered on nonliberal and communitarian values. The right to national self-determination by indigenous peoples, however, has been gaining wider international acceptance, as evidenced by the 2007 United Nations adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. If nonliberal nationalisms of indigenous peoples deserve international support, then the reason cannot be that they promote liberal values. What justifies nationalism as a movement for national self-determination lies in what makes it a distinctly modern phenomenon, its “lateral, horizontal” imagining of the nation as a community of equal members (Taylor 1997: 38; see also, Anderson 1991: 7, 82, 154). In other words, nationalism is morally justifiable because it promotes the ideal of collective self-determination by members of equal status who share history, language, institutions, and culture (see, Miller 2009; Taylor 1998). This is the internal dimension of national self-determination, which has to do with the relationship between a people and its government (Thornberry 1993: 101). Ideally, internal self-determination ought to enable self-identifying members of a people, who may disagree with one another about various aspects of their cultural community, to participate as equal members in internal contestations and negotiations and to contribute to the development of a cultural-political system that would promote the common good (see Herr 2006). This is democracy,7 broadly understood (see also, Cassese 1995: 11), and I will therefore use “internal self-determination” and “democracy” interchangeably. Nationalism is typically understood in its external dimension as involving an equal status of a nation in relation to other nations. I argue, however, that the internal dimension of nationalism is normatively more significant, as the external dimension of nationalism is defensible only when the nation has been or has the potential to be internally self-determining.

4 Transnationalism Despite its modest origin in the early 1990s in anthropology relating to migration (Schiller et al. 1992), “transnationalism” now refers more generally to “sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations and social formations spanning nation-states” (Vertovec 2009: 2) and has become a central optic through which to interpret contemporary global processes. As the term “transnational” has been overstretched to refer to variegated phenomena



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

539

not necessarily connected to one another, there is “much conceptual muddling” (4). What is beyond debate, however, is that transnationalism closely tracks post–Cold War globalization or transnational capitalism. In my attempt to bring some coherence to the idea of transnationalism, I focus on three major aspects of transnationalism: transnational capitalism, transnational consciousness, and transnational politics.

4.1  Transnational capitalism Transnational capitalism in its current form began in earnest in the 1980s in the wake of the “neoliberal revolution” led by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Neoliberalism is rooted in the idea of the Invisible Hand originally promoted by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It is opposed to any government intervention in the market, claiming that it would interfere with the “natural efficiency” of the free market, resulting in “social stagnation, political corruption, and the creation of unresponsive state bureaucracies” (Steger 2003: 40). Examples of neoliberal policies are privatizing state-held enterprises, deregulating the economy, cutting taxes, tightly controlling or prohibiting organized labor, reducing government’s social spending, and downsizing government. Neoliberalism spread across the globe, as neoliberal policies called “structural adjustment policies” were imposed on Third World nation-states8 either getting loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Prashad 2008: 232) or joining bilateral or multilateral free trade agreements. In the former case, coercion was applied to the loaning nation-states, as they lacked alternatives and had no recourse. Even in the latter case, in which the actions of the weaker nation-states may seem voluntary, the weaker nation-states were arguably “forced” to join, lest they suffer from more detrimental consequences by not signing (Gruber 2001: 723; see also Hurt 2003). There are reasons to believe, therefore, that the spread of neoliberal transnational capitalism was engineered rather than spontaneous. I now consider three notable consequences of transnational capitalism that may have important feminist implications: the increasing influence of international economic institutions, such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), which are dominated by the wealthy donor nation-states of the Global North (Prashad 2008: 243); the proliferation and clout of transnational corporations, which are based in the Global North; and the liberalization of finance and trade worldwide.

540

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

First, the international economic institutions have been invested with the power to restructure the global economy in favor of transnational capitalism: as previously mentioned, the IMF and the World Bank imposed neoliberal structural adjustment policies on nation-states obtaining loans from them. Although the official rationale for the loans to Third World nation-states was to help them develop, many of them experienced an increase of their debt without the benefit of development. In fact, the debt crisis of the Third World reached a point by 1983 at which the money flow from the Third World to the Global North in the form of debt payment exceeded the money flow from the Global North to the Third World in the form of loans and aid (Prashad 2008: 231). The impact of structural adjustment policies has been devastating to women, children, and the poor in the affected nation-states (Anderson and Cavanagh with Lee 2005: 78–79; Prashad 2008: 234; Black 2001). Since 1995, the WTO has adjudicated trade conflicts in favor of reducing tariff barriers or eliminating any perceived barrier to trade and investment. Often, government measures to protect citizens’ health and the environment were pitted against the interest of transnational corporations to make profit by flooding foreign markets with their cheap products, with dubious impact on human health and the environment. The WTO has almost always been on the side of transnational corporations. More disturbingly, these decisions were made behind closed doors, safe from public scrutiny (Anderson and Cavanagh with Lee 2005: 85–89). Second, transnational corporations are corporations based in the Global North with subsidiaries in several nation-states. Their numbers have dramatically increased since the 1970s and their economic power has grown to such a level that they rival nation-states in wealth (Anderson and Cavanagh with Lee 2005: 69). By leveraging their economic power, they were able to pressure their governments in the Global North to expedite global deregulation through the imposition of neoliberal policies by international economic institutions on Third World nation-states; consequently, they were able to operate in the Third World unchecked by regulation and oversight (Prashad 2008: 239). As a result, they could determine major economic activities around the world, including where industries are located and how much trade is to take place (Steger 2003: 51). Some pro-globalizers argue that transnational corporations’ domination in the global economy has been positive, as it has resulted in the diversity and low prices of consumer products across the globe. Yet it has not always been positive for workers at transnational corporations’ factories, the majority of whom are women, who receive the lowest possible wages or are abandoned without severance pay as



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

541

transnational corporations move their production lines to somewhere else with even lower labor costs (Anderson and Cavanagh with Lee 2005: 60). Further, aided by the pro–free trade decisions made behind closed doors in the WTO or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) tribunals, transnational corporations exponentially increased profit at the expense of the environment and consumers’ health in nation-states in which they hawk their wares. Third, the liberalization of financial transactions—which allows short-term investment of financial assets, such as stocks, bonds, derivatives—imposed on Third World nation-states either by the international economic institutions or free trade agreements led to extreme economic volatility and instability, aptly dubbed “financial casino,” in the affected nation-states (Anderson and Cavanagh with Lee 2005: 80). As the 1997 Asian financial crisis exemplifies, its impact was often devastating for ordinary citizens of such nation-states. Regarding the liberalization of trade, pro-globalizers tout the increased global gross domestic product (GDP) as evidence for its positive influence, claiming that the increased global wealth will trickle downward and benefit the rest of the humanity. The reality is that neoliberal economic policies that drive transnational capitalism favor the extremely wealthy. The gap between rich and poor nation-states, with a small number of exceptions such as China and India, as well as the gap between the rich and the poor within nation-states dramatically widened. This has serious feminist implications, as women constitute a significant majority of the poor in most countries, including the United States. Even in nation-states whose GDP grew, domestic inequality was exacerbated. The result is that the richest 1 percent of the world has more wealth than the rest of the world combined as of 2016 (Oxfam 2016: 2).

4.2  Transnational consciousness Under the circumstances of transnational capitalism, the groups of people that transnational theorists consider “the exemplary communities of the transnational moment” are ethnic diasporas (Tölölyan 1991: 5). Historically, the term diaspora specifically referred to Jews who left their homeland in the Middle East and were dispersed throughout Europe (Safran 1991: 83). According to a broader contemporary usage, the term “diaspora” refers to any group of people who live outside of their original homeland (Oxford English Dictionary), such as “immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community” (Tölölyan 1991: 4). In disciplines where cutting-

542

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

edge transnational theories are popular, such as cultural studies, the intension of the term “diaspora” has further expanded to be associated with any phenomenon that leads to displacement, dislocation, and divided loyalties, including “travel” (Mitchell 1997: 534). The focus on diasporas as the most representative communities of transnationalism is not surprising. Many leading theorists who champion the transnational or postcolonial9 consciousness are themselves members of diasporic communities of Third World origin ensconced in the liberal West. Methodologically, they tend to align themselves with postmodernism and poststructuralism. Prime examples are Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Arjun Appadurai, among others.10 According to transnational theorists, subjectivities of diasporic members are formed through “cultural hybridization,” as they reside in “partial” or “in-between” cultures, and this allows them to articulate social divisions and developmental disparities among communities within the host nation. Consequently, the reasoning goes, diasporic members are able to disturb and challenge the host nation’s self-recognition of its culture as pure, authentic, and homogeneous, and effectively destabilize such national presumptions (Bhabha 1996: 54, emphases in original). The diasporic consciousness is extolled by transnational theorists who credit it as making possible new sites of collaborations and contestations in the act of conceptualizing the idea of society itself. In particular, it contests the allegedly well-established definitions of tradition and modernity, disrupts the conventional distinctions between the private and the public, as well as between high and low, and defies the orthodox views about what counts as development and progress (Bhabha 1994: 2).

4.3  Transnational politics Some transnational theorists have optimistically argued that the diasporic consciousness gives rise to “diasporic public spheres” in which ordinary people can engage in collective action beyond national boundaries (Appadurai 1996: 8). This is enabled by the electronic media, which does the “work of the imagination” and constructs newly imagined selves and worlds (3, original emphases). Appadurai argues that the emergence of “international civil society” is conducive to democratic “globalization from below,” which advocates the well-being of the 80 percent of the world population who are poor and socially disadvantaged (Appadurai 2000: 3). In particular, nongovernmental



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

543

organizations (NGOs) concerned about and focused on global issues are the most promising agents of globalization from below. As nation-states are increasingly unable to withstand incursions on their sovereignty in this transnational world, transnational advocacy networks consisting of NGOs can become major players in a more just “new architecture of global governance” (16) by mobilizing local, national, and regional groups to address economic injustice at various levels. One of the most distinct features of the NGO-centered transnational politics is the increasing irrelevance of nation-states and nationalism. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, considered “canonical” transnational feminists (Nagar and Swarr 2010: 9), argue that under the socio-politico-economic conditions of “postmodernity,” characterized by “postmodernist cultural forms” and “a new round of time-space compression in the organization of capitalism” (Harvey, quoted in 1994: 4), modernity’s constitutive binaries of center-periphery and global-local are no longer applicable. Viewing the current situation through these binaries is “inaccurate” because parameters of the local and global are often “indefinable or indistinct” as they “thoroughly infiltrate” each other (11). Therefore, they use the term “transnational” to problematize “a purely locational politics of global-local” in favor of “the lines cutting across them.” Although it is not readily clear what constitutes “the lines cutting across” the global-local, Grewal and Kaplan argue that good examples are found in the work of postcolonial scholars who examine global movements of people, technologies, capital, and cultures, whose studies show that cultural flows are “disjunctive” (13). The idea of cultural “creolization” (Hannerz 1987) seems to give credence to Grewal and Kaplan’s claim that the global-local binary may erase “multiple expressions of local identities and concerns and multiple globalities” (1994: 11). According to Ulf Hannerz, the so-called periphery is also becoming increasingly interconnected, mixed, and fluid, as the elites of the postcolonial Third World nation-states who were exposed to the metropole cultures bring some aspects of such cultures to their own nation-states; consequently, not only Third World nationals in large cities, but people in remote villages also experience metropolitan cultural influences within their nation-states. In such ways, people in different cultural communities become “entangled” with one another (Hannerz 1987: 549), and national cultures once thought to be discrete and homogeneous become “creolized” (551). Grewal and Kaplan therefore reject not only the center-periphery but also the global-local

544

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

binaries as monolithic and essentialist constructs; they argue that nationstates, as the paradigmatic local (Wallerstein 1991: 92), are irrelevant in the postmodern age.

5  Feminist rejection of nationalism in favor of transnationalism When we examine the prevailing relationship among feminism, nationalism, and transnationalism, we find that most feminists writing in the Western context have been opposed to nationalism. White feminists in the West have been antagonistic toward nationalism from the beginning. While recognizing that nationalism in the modern Western European context functioned both positively and negatively (1997: 8), Gisela Kaplan claims that feminism is incompatible with nationalism in most Western European nation-states. The reason is nationalism’s close connection to the notion that European culture is “superior” (9), bolstered by the nineteenth-century racial theories that allegedly proved “the immutable and unalterable inferiority” of non-Europeans and women (11).11 In addition, nationalism perpetuates women’s subjugation by postulating a venerable and timeless national essence predicated on the subjugation of women in the social hierarchy (McClintock 1995: 357–58). Disadvantages that women experienced with ethnocentric nationalisms in the Western European context prompted European feminists to turn international. International feminism, which was clearly “antinationalistic” (McClintock 1995: 16, emphasis in original), conceived of women’s oppression as a “universal” concern akin to the socialist construction of class oppression as universal (17). The notion that women suffer from “universal patriarchy” regardless of their national affiliations was embraced by “global feminism” of the 1980s. This movement has been led by white feminists who aspire to recognize diversity in women’s oppression across the globe by turning their eyes to the rest of the world (Morgan 1984; Bunch 1987). I qualify this global feminism as “white” in order to contrast it with its more recent usage as interchangeable with transnational feminism (see Moghadam 2005; Ferree and Tripp 2006). White global feminism is distinct from “international feminism,” which accepted the existent international configuration comprising sovereign nation-states (Kaplan and Grewal 1994: 73). In contrast, white global feminism advocates transcending national boundaries.



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

545

The single-minded focus on gender as the primary cause of women’s oppression worldwide led white feminists to believe that Third World women are suffering from the same kind of oppression as white women—“universal patriarchy” (Bunch 1987: 304). Most notably, Robin Morgan claims that women “per se” have become “‘other,’ the invisible” in almost all nation-states where “the standard for being human is being male” (Morgan 1984: 1). According to Morgan, women have “shared” attitudes because of “a common condition” besetting all those born female (4; emphases in original). Based on “a shared biology,” women all over the world must launch a coordinated resistance movement (34) against the universal “patriarchal mentality” (1). This coordinated “global sisterhood” movement requires transcending particularities that divide women, including their respective “nation-state” (Bunch 1987: 301); feminists must work together to end forms of oppression based on social forces that divide women, such as race, class, sexual orientation, colonialism, poverty, religion, and “nationality” (303). Although well intentioned, white global feminism incurred severe criticism from feminists of Third World origin, such as Chandra Mohanty, who argues that it is only through homogenization and historical reductionism that white feminists are led to believe that women are “a cross-culturally singular, homogeneous group with the same interests, perspectives, goals” (Mohanty 1991b: 33). Ahistorical conceptions of gender and patriarchy presumed by white global feminism obscure the history of colonialism and imperialism as well as their contemporary effects (34). White feminists view Third World women’s oppression as simply worse than that of white women in the West, eliding the complex nature of Third World women’s oppression and depriving them of their “historical and political agency” (72; original emphasis). From Mohanty’s critique we can derive two necessary conditions for properly theorizing about Third World women’s oppression: First, Third World women’s oppression and resistance ought to be carefully examined in their historical specificity with particular attention to the intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nation-state pertaining to their locations (Mohanty 1991a: 2–3). Studies that adhere to this condition have revealed that Third World women’s resistance do not involve an explicit demand for gender equality or radical social restructuring to attain explicitly feminist goals. Instead, Third World women opt for gradual changes that result from their collaboration with their male counterparts to enhance their communal influence and to improve living standards of their families and of the community itself (see Jayawardana 1986;

546

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Ong 1987; Shiva 1993; Basu 1995; Forbis 2003; Basu 2010). Also, local women’s activisms tend to be aligned with other local social movements, such as national, pro-democracy, or human rights movements (Basu 1995: 19). Second, Third World women’s historical and political agency ought to be recognized and respected. Third World women have engaged in various forms of local activism and enacted positive changes in their particular locations. As active agents of positive change in their communities, their perspectives must receive due respect. Paying due respect to Third World women’s perspectives is the only way to honor their epistemic privilege concerning events and conditions that affect their lives. These two necessary conditions for properly theorizing about Third World women’s oppression are directly related to the aforementioned prerequisites of transnational feminist solidarity: first, sharing in the feminist goal of attaining gender justice across cultures and, second, conferring epistemic privilege on women and feminists from disadvantaged social locations. The attainment of gender justice across cultures, on the one hand, is possible only when Third World women’s oppression and resistance are carefully examined in their historical and local specificity. Conferring epistemic privilege on Third World women’s voices and perspectives, on the other hand, is itself a prerequisite for transnational feminist solidarity. At this juncture, I venture to make a proposal that many feminists may find unusual, or even problematic: given that Third World women’s activisms have often aligned with Third World nationalisms, feminist analyses about Third World women’s oppression and resistance that honor these two conditions ought to consider nationalism as relevant to transnational feminist solidarity. My proposal to take nationalism seriously in feminist theorizing is clearly counter-hegemonic, as it goes against a widely supported feminist mandate by not only white feminists but also leading transnational feminists: most notably, Grewal and Kaplan reject nation-states and nationalism12 for two reasons: One reason, as discussed earlier, is that they repudiate the modern binaries of centerperiphery and global-local, and a fortiori the nation-state as the paradigmatic local. A second reason is that the concept of national identity primarily served patriarchal interests in various locations (1994: 22; see also Moghadam 2005: 83; Alarcon, Kaplan, and Moallem 1999: 6). Under these circumstances, they argue, the feminist movement has to become “transnational” in order to focus on “the lines cutting across” modern dichotomies of the global-local (1994: 13) and their effects on women. In transnational feminism, women from different



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

547

communities working to dismantle various forms of patriarchal practices must give up their attachment to their specific nation-states and instead create “transnational alliances” (20).

6  Are nation-states and nationalism relevant for feminism? Is the transnational feminist rejection of nation-states and nationalism plausible?13 I do not think so. I readily concede that patriarchal nationalists’ essentialist conceptions of the nation as a monolith, predicated on women’s subjugation, are oppressive to women. I also believe that it is important for women and feminists to form transnational alliances. Yet neither of these concessions implies that nation-states and nationalism are irrelevant to transnational feminist solidarity, which aims to attain gender justice across cultures. I believe that nationalism, correctly understood, is not only compatible with but also conducive to the feminist goal of gender justice across cultures. I take two steps to demonstrate this: The first step involves refuting the claim that nation-states and nationalism are irrelevant in the age of transnational capitalism. This is the task of the current section. After showing that nationstates and nationalism are still relevant in the so-called postcolonial era, I then take a second step in the conclusion to show how nationalism can be conducive to gender justice in different national contexts. Let me begin with the first step: I am not convinced by Grewal and Kaplan’s claim that the global and the local are radically “permeable” (1994: 14) and that therefore the binary itself is “inadequate and inaccurate” (13). The majority of impoverished human population stuck in their locality would still experience the global and the local as distinct realms. This is not to deny that the local is influenced by the global; many local cultures are to some degree “creolized.” Nor do I deny that many may experience the local as oppressive in various ways. Yet, it is of utmost importance to understand the coercive manner in which neoliberal transnational capitalism has been imposed on Third World nation-states and its exploitative and oppressive impact on the majority in the Third World. Unlike the small percentage of elites in such nation-states who benefit handsomely from the forced opening up of their national economy to foreign capital and transnational corporations, most citizens experience the global—the external imposition of neoliberal policies on their nation-states by international economic institutions or free trade agreements—as threatening to

548

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

not only their traditional ways of life but also their survival. More disturbingly, the global has undermined internal democracy by overriding national policies of democratically  elected governments. Under “capitalist processes of recolonization” (Alexander and Mohanty 1997: xxi), therefore, the majority in the Third World are justifiably wary of the global. A possible reason that Grewal and Kaplan’s transnational perspective does not do justice to the experience of the majority in the Third World is that their perspective reflects their own personal background as scholars of cultural studies, a field dominated by “postcolonial intellectuals” of Third World origin heavily influenced by postmodernism and poststructuralism (Dirlik 1994). Diasporic intellectuals enjoy a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis the majority in their countries of origin: they do not directly experience the negative impact of transnational capitalism in their native countries; they are able to traverse—both physically and intellectually—different worlds with ease, albeit with a tinge of discontent. Consequently, they may feel, based on their particular and privileged experience, that human identities are all fragmented, marginalized, and liminal and that the global-local binary is obsolete in the world they inhabit. Yet, the undeniable fact is that they are only a fraction of “only 2 percent of the world’s population” who live outside their country of origin (Steger 2003: 63). Consequently, the transnational consciousness of a privileged class of postcolonial intellectuals does not represent the consciousness of the disenfranchised and oppressed majority who are stuck at their local level, including those in the Global North (Reich 1991). The danger of the transnational perspective, which celebrates the consciousness of a small relatively privileged portion of human population as representative of the “transnational” era or as a normative ideal that ought to be universalized (Khagram and Levitt 2007), lies in the reintroduction of a false universalism and its harmful effects on those left behind. This is ironic because Grewal and Kaplan themselves explicitly disavow a false universalism of Eurocentric “global” and “international” feminisms that mask particularities (1994: 16–17). I examine three reasons, among others, that a false universalism promoted by the transnational perspective is dangerous for the majority of Third World nationals, including women: first, the transnational perspective of postcolonial intellectuals does not provide any meaningful “programmatic politics” to counter the harmful effects of transnational capitalism in the transnational era (O'Hanlon and Washbrook 1992: 166). Nationalism as a political movement is rejected out of hand as a “historicist” and atavistic movement that presupposes a homogenous



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

549

national essence, which is merely imagined and belies “the disjunctive forms of representation” that signify a nation or national culture (Bhabha 1990: 292). In its stead, some transnational theorists propose, on the one hand, transnational politics in which transnational advocacy networks consisting of NGOs play a major role in promoting democratic “globalization from below” (Appadurai 2000: 3). The efficacy of this proposal will be examined presently. Some others, on the other hand, see nothing problematic about “symbolic analysts” pledging allegiance to transnational corporations, as nations are receding into the background merely as “an environment, a local market” (Hannerz 1996: 86). A new system of values shared by “company managers” will provide the “glue” once provided by nations, as the latter “wither away” (85). This seems to confirm the suspicion that the transnational perspective involves “methodological individualism” that views social relations in “extremely voluntaristic” terms and offers solutions that are “conservative and implicitly authoritarian” (O’Hanlon and Washbrook 1992: 166). Such an approach is problematic because it fails to historicize the social locations of those being theorized and of theorists themselves. Indeed, according to Arif Dirlik, postcolonial intellectuals’ failure to critically examine their own advantaged relation to transnational capitalism results in their “complicity . . . in hegemony” (1994: 331). Second, and relatedly, the transnational perspective has obscured resistance by the globally disadvantaged mobilizing around their national, ethnic, or tribal identities. We all form our identities in relation to our particular social locations; when we are oppressed because of our association with a social location that partly constitutes our identities, then we resist oppression by rallying around the misrecognized aspect of our identities (Honneth 1995). Under the threat of transnational capitalism, those who are negatively affected have invoked nationalism to resist it. For example, the Zapatista movement of the impoverished indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico, against NAFTA is also a nationalist movement to restore Mexico’s “sovereignty” that has been threatened by transnational capitalism (Johnston and Laxer 2003: 71). Similarly, nationalism has been invoked by citizens and politicians of Asian nation-states, such as Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia, which experienced the 1997 Asian financial crisis and were forced to open up their national economies to foreign capital and transnational corporations following the imposition of the IMF’s structural adjustment policies (Higgot 1998). More generally, many Third World nation-states, which gained independence due to nationalist movements, have initially aspired to create “national liberation states” to promote democracy

550

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

and equality among their citizens; yet their nationalist aspirations were savagely dashed by international economic institutions’ imposition of structural adjustment policies, as the case of Jamaica superbly exemplifies. Women and children, as the most vulnerable citizens, were among the worst affected by such impositions (Prashad 2008: 234; Black 2001). Under such circumstances, a “positive economic nationalism” (Reich 1991: 311), which promotes national economic independence, democracy, and citizens’ well-being, can be liberatory and progressive. The transnational perspective, however, is oblivious not only to the track record but also the potential of nationalism’s contribution to the liberation of the oppressed. Third, the transnational consciousness may adversely affect poor and disenfranchised Third World women and their nationally based feminist advocacy groups, rather than promote “globalization from below” to benefit them. Third World women and feminists are themselves not monolithic but divided along the lines of not only nation-states but also race, class, and ideology within Third World nation-states. The transnational perspective, which is paradoxically aligned with liberal individualism in sharing methodological individualism and voluntarism, is familiar to Third World women and feminists from privileged backgrounds who are westernized through their exposure to the Western educational system and are conversant in the language of the metropole. Yet the majority of Third World women who are not so privileged are unfamiliar with the transnational perspective. Different groups of Third World women and feminists, therefore, diverge in their interests and values and compete for a limited pool of resources to promote their conflicting agendas. For instance, some transnational feminist networks, in which those familiar with the transnational perspective participate, focus on women’s issues that are more in line with Western feminists’ concerns, such as women’s civil and political rights or physical violence against women (see, Chowdhury 2009: 62). Although these issues are relevant to Third World women in general, what is more urgent for poor and disenfranchised Third World women are women’s economic rights or “structural violence against women” (Basu 2000: 75), which tend to be neglected by international and Western funding agencies and foundations. Under the circumstances of limited resources, such differences among Third World women’s groups cast an ominous shadow over the future of feminism in the Third World in at least two ways. First, they may generate divisions and distrust among Third World feminists, some of whom are better aligned with



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

551

Western feminist interests and values whereas others are more locally and nationally oriented. Amrita Basu reports that transnational feminist network activism has “provoked more distrust” among Third World feminists especially in nations where local and indigenous women’s activisms are strong. Transnational feminist network activism may also deepen divisions and dissensions between elite women, who participate in transnational networks, and the large majority of women, who do not (Basu 2000: 76). Second, and more seriously, when such divisions exist, transnational feminist networks “skilled in the art of lobbying” may have decisive advantage in attaining external funding from Western aid agencies and private foundations. Consequently, they have the power to determine the larger women’s movement’s agenda in world conferences (Alvarez 1998: 308; see also 314–15). Domestically, too, elite and professionalized transnational NGO feminists may present themselves as “representatives” of the feminist movement (313) and thereby shadow the diversity among feminists within their national context. Such tendencies fuel distrust among grassroots and less-institutionalized women’s groups, which are increasingly excluded from “national and international policy arenas and funding sources” (314).

7 Conclusion Although nation-states and nationalism are relevant in the era of transnational capitalism, feminists might wonder whether nationalism can be conducive to gender justice across cultures. After all, transnational feminists claim that nation-states and nationalism not only were but will continue to be oppressive to women, as the nation-state as a “monolithic formation” excludes “subaltern groups as well as the interplay of power in various levels of sociopolitical agendas” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994: 11). Consequently, “the retrospective activity of nation-building in modernity is always predicated upon Woman as trope” (Alarcon, Kaplan, and Moallem 1999: 6; my emphasis). Although I agree that many nationalist movements were patriarchal, the past does not predetermine the present or the future of nationalism; transnational feminists’ adamant opposition to nation-states and nationalism only demonstrates their subscription to essentialized and monolithic conceptions of the nation-state and nationalism (13). My aim in the conclusion is to argue, albeit briefly, that nationstates and nationalism can be reconceptualized to be conducive to the feminist goal of gender justice across cultures.

552

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

The first step in this reconceptualization is to understand the nation-state neutrally as a politically bounded cultural community sharing history, language, institutions, and culture, whose complex and multidimensional culture evolves through socio-politico-economic participation of self-identifying members who have equal status (Herr 2006: Section V). This is not a radical departure from how the modern nation-state was initially conceived in Western Europe and continued to operate into the twentieth century.14 As Benedict Anderson forcefully demonstrated, the modern nation-state was imagined as involving “deep, horizontal comradeship” (1991: 7). In the Western context, this comradeship has come to include women in the early twentieth century and this premise is by now categorically accepted by not only women but also men, notwithstanding past and continuing feminist struggles within. If so, there is no reason why nonliberal Third World nation-states and Fourth World nations cannot accommodate women’s equal membership. Similarly, nationalism as a political movement for national self-determination need not be essentialist. Recall that the internal dimension of nationalism involves internal self-determination/democracy predicated on the political and social empowerment of national members of equal status to collectively self-determine their culture, economy, and politics. Third World and Fourth World women and feminists, as equal members of their nations, are entitled to participate in an ongoing national dialogue to effect changes in the course of their nations. When these women exercise their birthright of national participation, it is possible to promote their culturally specific form of gender justice within the national context. This is not to say that this would be easy; the process of engaging in dialogue with patriarchal nationalists is going to be precarious, if not outright dangerous. But Third World and Fourth World women and feminists must continue their valiant efforts, however difficult and frustrating, as leaving nationalist discourses solely in the hands of patriarchal nationalists would amount to abandoning their rightful legacy. Furthermore, allowing national culture to be determined by patriarchal nationalists would risk leaving an intolerably misogynist future for the next generation. When Third World and Fourth World women and feminists are able to transform their national culture to be democratic and just through their political and social participation, then they have a stake in protecting their democratic and just national culture against external threats by joining the movement for external national self-determination. After the colonial era officially ended, many newly independent Third World nation-states have aspired to promote democracy and equality among their



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

553

members within their national liberation states. Numerous such attempts were thwarted either by powerful hegemonic states’ external interventions, whether political or military, or by their tacit support for homegrown brutal dictators (Prashad 2008, “La Paz” and “Bali”; Chomsky 2007). In the era of neoliberal transnational capitalism, external interventions in Third World nation-states’ national self-determination have been mainly economic and seemingly less violent. Yet they were no less disruptive or damaging, especially to the most vulnerable members—poor women and children. Under these circumstances, I argue that nationalism in the Third World and the Fourth World would be conducive to the feminist goal of cross-cultural gender justice, as it would enable Third World and Fourth World women and feminists to transform their nations into a more egalitarian, inclusive, and just communities according to their own culturally specific evaluative frameworks. Feminists in the West have been skeptical about nationalism, whether justifiably or not. Yet when Third World and Fourth World women and feminists advocate nationalism, the transnational feminist community ought to support them in transnational feminist solidarity.

Notes 1 In the context of this chapter, “feminism,” “nationalism,” and “transnationalism” are used as umbrella terms each encompassing multiple conceptualizations that share some core characteristics. Accordingly, these terms are used mainly in the singular form. 2 I would like to thank Shelley Park for bringing these new feminist trends, including neoliberal feminism, to my attention. 3 In the nationalism literature, “nation” and “state” have distinct connotations: The former connotes a community predicated on a shared history, language, and culture, whether or not its national boundary has been internationally recognized. The latter primarily refers to a territorial-political unit. “Nation-state” then typically means a nation with internationally recognized boundaries. In this chapter, however, I use “nation-state” generically to refer to a political and territorial entity to which “nationalism” is relevant, unless when I discuss indigenous nations. 4 Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1864)’s Addresses to the German Nation (1808) provides an example par excellence. 5 Although this term seems to have gone out of fashion, I use it to refer to regions of the world negatively affected by European imperialism and colonialism to honor its spirit of resistance to oppression and domination. This term is roughly coextensive

554

6 7

8

9 10 11

12

13

14

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

with “Global South,” and I will use these terms exchangeable when needed. For more on the Third World, see Prashad (2008). My distinction roughly corresponds to Smith’s distinction between “civic” and “ethnic” models of nation and nationalism (1991: 9–15). My position is opposed to that of liberal theorists who argue that democracy without liberalism is morally unjustifiable (Zakaria 2003; Diamond 2008). For reasons of space, I merely note this here. After the end of the Cold War, former “Second World” countries as well as less well-off European countries, such as Greece, were subjected to the same neoliberal regimen. These terms overlap considerably, as key transnational theorists are postcolonial theorists as well. I use them interchangeably unless otherwise specified. This is not to deny that there are influential non-diasporic theorists of transnationalism, such as James Clifford and Ulf Hannerz. It is worth noting, however, that some British women, including feminists, were complicit with the British imperial agenda. Antoinette Burton (1994) calls it “imperial feminism.” They do, however, subscribe to the two necessary conditions of the proper theorization of Third World women’s oppression (Grewal and Kaplan 1994: 3, 17), which leads me to suspect inconsistency in their position. See, for more, Herr (2014). My critique of transnational feminism here applies primarily to those who advocate it from the discipline of cultural studies and may not be applicable to transnational feminists who have socialist and anti-capitalist affiliations, for example, Alexander and Mohanty (1997), Mohanty (2002). Arguably, they still do even within the European Union.

References Alarcon, Norma, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem (1999), “Introduction,” in Norma Alarcon, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem (eds.), Between Women and Nation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alexander, M. Jacqui and Chandra Mohanty (1997), “Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements,” in M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds.), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, xii–xiii, New York: Routledge. Alvarez, Sonia E. (1998), “Latin American Feminisms ‘Go Global’,” in Evelina Dagnino, Sonia Alvarez, and Arturo Escobar (eds.), Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Anderson, Benedict (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

555

Anderson, Sarah, John Cavanagh, and Thea Lee (2005), Field Guide to the Global Economy, New York, NY: New Press. Appadurai, Arjun (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization [in English], Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, Arjun (2000), “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture 12 (1): 1–19. Basu, Amrita (1995), The Challenges of Local Feminisms, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Basu, Amrita (2000), “Globalization of the Local/Localization of the Global,” Meridians 1 (1): 68–84. Basu, Amrita (2010), Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1990), Nation and Narration, London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (1996), “Culture’s in-Between,” Questions of Cultural Identity, 53–60. Black, Stephanie (2001), “Life and Debt.” Bunch, Charlotte (1987), “Prospects for Global Feminism,” in Charlotte Bunch (ed.), Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Burton, Antoinette M. (1994), Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Cassese, Antonio (1995), Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, Prudence (2016), “Affective Temporality: Towards a Fourth Wave,” Gender and Education 28 (3): 458–64. Chomsky, Noam (2006), Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Chowdhury, Elora (2009), “Locating Global Feminisms Elsewhere: Braiding Us Women of Color and Transnational Feminisms,” Cultural Dynamics 21 (1): 51–78. Diamond, Larry Jay (2008), The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World [in English], New York: Times Books/Henry Holt and Co. Dirlik, Arif (1994), “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20 (2): 328–56. Ferree, Myra Marx, and Aili Mari Tripp (2006), Global Feminism, New York: New York University Press. Forbis, Melissa (2003), “Hacia La Autonomia: Zapatista Women Developing a New World,” in Christine Engla Eber and Christine Marie Kovic (eds.), Women in Chiapas: Making History in Times of Struggle and Hope, New York and London: Routledge. Fricker, Miranda (1998), “Rational Authority and Social Power: Towards a Truly Social Epistemology,” Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan (1994), “Introduction,” in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds.), Scattered Hegemonies, 1–33, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

556

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Gruber, Lloyd (2001), “Power Politics and the Free Trade Bandwagon,” Comparative Political Studies 34 (7): 703–41. Hannerz, Ulf (1987), “The World in Creolisation,” Africa 57 (4): 546–59. Hannerz, Ulf (1996), “The Withering Away of the Nation,” in Transnational Connections, London, UK: Routledge. Harding, Sandra (1993), “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: ‘What Is Strong Objectivity?’” in Linda Martin Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds.), Feminist Epistemologies, 49–82, New York, NY: Routledge. Held, David (1995), Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Herr, Ranjoo S. (2006), “In Defense of Non-Liberal Nationalism,” Political Theory 34 (3): 304–27. Herr, Ranjoo S. (2014), “Reclaiming Third World Feminism: Or Why Transnational Feminism Needs Third World Feminism,” Meridians 12 (1): 1–30. Higgott, Richard (1998), “The Asian Economic Crisis: A Study in the Politics of Resentment,” New Political Economy 3 (3): 333–56. Honneth, Axel (1995), The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Hurt, R. Stephen (2003), “Co-Operation and Coercion? The Cotonou Agreement between the European Union and Acp States and the End of the Lomé Convention,” Third World Quarterly 24 (1): 161–76. Ishay, Micheline (1995), “Introduction,” in Omar Dahbour and Micheline Ishay (eds.), The Nationalism Reader, 1–19, Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books. Jaggar, Alison (1983), Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Jaggar, Alison (1998), “Globalizing Feminist Ethics,” Hypatia 13 (2): 7–31. Jaggar, Alison (2009), “Transnational Cycles of Gendered Vulnerability: A Prologue to a Theory of Global Gender Justice,” Philosophical Topics 37 (2): 33–52. Jayawardena, Kumary (1986), Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, London: Zed Books. Johnston, Josée, and Gordon Laxer. (2003), “Solidarity in the Age of Globalization: Lessons from the Anti-Mai and Zapatista Struggles,” Theory and Society 32 (1): 39–91. Kaplan, Gisela (1997), “Comparative Europe: Feminism and Nationalism: The European Case,” in Lois West (ed.), Feminist Nationalism, New York: Routledge. Khagram, Sanjeev, and Peggy Levitt (2007), The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations, London: Routledge. Kymlicka, Will (1995), Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Kymlicka, Will (2011), Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Laughlin, Kathleen, Julie Gallagher, Dorothy Cobble, Eileen Boris, Premilla Nadasen, Stephanie Gilmore, and Leandra Zarnow (2010), “Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor,” Feminist Formations 22 (1): 76–135.



Feminism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism

557

McClintock, Anne (1995), Imperial Leather, New York: Routledge. Miller, David (1995), On Nationality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Miller, David (2009), “Democracy’s Domain,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37 (3): 201–28. Mitchell, Katharyne (1997), “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (5): 533–53. Moghadam, Valentine (2005), Globalizing Women, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1991a), “Cartographies of Struggle,” in Ann Russo, Chandra Mohanty, and Lourdes Torres (eds.), Third World Feminism and the Politics of Feminism, 1–47. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1984/1991b), “Under Western Eyes,” in Ann Russo, Chandra Mohanty, and Lourdes Torres (eds.), Third World Feminism and the Politics of Feminism, 51–80, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2002), “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28 (2): 499–535. Morgan, Robin (1984), “Introduction,” in Robin Morgan (eds.), Sisterhood Is Global, New York: Doubleday Anchor Press. Nagar, Richa, and Amanda Lock Swarr (2010), “Introduction: Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis,” in A. Swarr and Richa Nagar (eds.), Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, Albany: State University of New York Press. Narayan, Uma (1988), “Working Together across Difference: Some Considerations on Emotions and Political Practice,” Hypatia 3 (2): 31–48. Nicholson, Linda (2010), “Feminism in ‘Waves’: Useful Metaphor or Not?,” New Politics 12 (4). O’Hanlon, Rosalind, and David Washbrook. (1992), “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1): 141–67. Ong, Aihwa (1987), Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. OXFAM. (2016), “Oxfam Report: An Economy for the 1%,” https://www.oxfam.org/ sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-taxhavens-180116-en_0.pdf. Prashad, Vijay (2008), The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, New York City, NY: The New Press. Prügl, Elisabeth (2015), “Neoliberalising Feminism,” New Political Economy 20 (4): 614–31. Reich, Robert (1991), The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for Twenty-First Century Capitalism, New York: Alfred Knopf. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1987), On the Social Contract, translated by Donald Cress. Hackett publishing company. Safran, William (1991), “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1): 83–99.

558

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc‐Szanton (1992), “Towards a Definition of Transnationalism,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 (1): ix–xiv. Shiva, Vandana (1993), “GaTT, Agriculture and Third World Women,” in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, London: Zed Press Books. Smith, Anthony D. (1983), Theories of Nationalism, New York: Holmes & Meier Pub. Smith, Anthony D. (1991), National Identity, Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press. Smith, Anthony D. (2008), The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant, and Republic, London: John Wiley & Sons. Snyder, R. Claire (2008), “What Is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay,” Signs 34 (1): 175–96. Steger, Manfred (2003), Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles (1997), “Nationalism and Modernity,” in Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (eds.), The Morality of Nationalism, 31–55, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.. Taylor, Charles (1998), “The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion,” Journal of Democracy 9 (4): 143–56. Thompson, Becky (2002), “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” Feminist Studies 28 (2): 337–60. Thornberry, Patrick (1993), “The Democratic or Internal Aspect of Self-Determination with Some Remarks on Federalism,” in Christian Tomuschat (ed.), Modern Law of Self-Determination, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Tölölyan, Khachig. (1991), “The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1): 3–7. Tong, Rosemarie (2009), Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. United Nations. (2007), Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP). Vertovec, Steven (2009), Transnationalism, London: Routledge. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991), “The National and the Universal,” in Anthony King (ed.), Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, London: Macmillan Education Ltd. Weiner, Myron (1996), “Bad Neighbors, Bad Neighborhoods: An Inquiry into the Causes of Refugee Flows,” International Security 21 (1): 5–42. Zakaria, Fareed (2003), The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, New York: W. W. Norton.

Part Five

Tools

560

Basic Logical Notions1 Pieranna Garavaso and Lory Lemke

Students who have not taken an introductory course in Logic are sometimes intimidated by the vocabulary of logic and the array of logical terms used by instructors who teach analytic philosophy. To dispel this type of worry and to provide students with the indispensable tools to enjoy our courses, we usually spend a few classes going over the following topics: 1. The notion of argument and the difference between passages that contain arguments and passages that do not, for example, descriptions or explanations; 2. Deductive versus inductive arguments: major types of deductive arguments; 3. Deductive arguments: validity and soundness; 4. Inductive arguments: strength and cogency; 5. Fallacies: formal and informal; 6. Necessary and sufficient conditions; 7. How to extract an argument and put it in valid form; 8. How to explain and evaluate a valid argument or “what we expect you to do in the papers we ask you to write.” The following notes are supplementary materials that we distribute to our classes. Feel free to use these materials if you find them useful. Students may also wish to consult introductory textbooks on logic for a more developed discussion of these notions such as Copi and Cohen (2008) or Hurley (2000). There are also many useful short practical guides to reading and writing as an analytic philosopher, which I also recommend to my students. Here is a sampling of these sources: ●●

●●

●●

Gorovitz, Samuel, and Merrill Hintikka, Donald Provence, Ron G. Williams, Philosophical Analysis: Introduction to its Language and Techniques, Random House (1979); Rosenberg, Jay, The Practice of Philosophy, Prentice Hall (1996); Thomas, Stephen Naylor, Argument Evaluation, Worthington Publishing Company (1991);

562 ●●

●●

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Woodhouse, Mark B., A Preface to Philosophy, Wadsworth Publishing Company (1994). A wonderfully rich online source is http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/ vocab/. It provides way more detailed information than students will need so it is advisable to point out to them the areas to focus on.

1. The notion of argument and the difference between passages that contain arguments and passages that do not, for example, descriptions or explanations. An argument is a set of statements or propositions that have a special relation with each other. One of the propositions is the main point that the author of the passage is trying to get across to us. Sometimes in the English discipline, they call this the “topic sentence” and encourage writers to put it at the very beginning of a paragraph. Many philosophers follow this same practice which means that the statements that follow the beginning statement provide the reasons or the evidence the author is offering that the important statement expresses a truth. We call the statement that expresses this proposed truth the “conclusion” of the argument and the statements that express the author’s reasons in support of the truth of the conclusion, the “premises” of the argument. Let’s look at two elementary examples: A. Joe is registered in this course. For all students whose names are on my roster are registered students and Joe’s name is on my roster. B. Joe surely has a university ID. All students registered for a course have university IDs and Joe is registered in this course. In these two examples of argument, the first sentence contains the conclusion of the argument and the other sentences provide the reasons why it is true that Joe is registered in this course (conclusion of the first argument) and why it is true that Joe has a university ID (conclusion of the second argument). Please notice that the very same statement, that is, “Joe is registered in this course,” can be used as either a conclusion or a premise. Nothing in the content of this statement determines whether it is a conclusion or a premise. It is only in the context of the evidential relationships between statements that we can determine by reading the passage as a whole whether a given statement plays the role of a premise or that of a conclusion in that argument. One of the most important skills students learn in a philosophy class is the ability to recognize arguments. This is not an easy skill to learn and it is not one that can be learned without practice. It depends on appreciating how



Basic Logical Notions

563

statements (or propositions) evidentially relate to one another in the context of a passage and goes beyond simply understanding the meaning of each statement (or proposition). The first step in developing this skill is to learn to distinguish passages that contain arguments from passages that do not. Take for example the following passages: a. Video streaming offers the viewers more options than broadcast and cable television systems can offer and it usually delivers a much higher quality image. For these reasons, it is likely that the number of television and cable subscribers will continue to decrease rapidly. b. The audio system consists of a discriminator, which translates the audio portion of the carrier wave back into an electronic audio signal, an amplifier, and a speaker. The amplifier strengthens the audio signal from the discriminator and sends it to the speaker, which converts the electrical waves into sound waves that travel through the air to the listener (“Television,” Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000). c. Television has a variety of applications in society, business, and science. The most common use of television is as a source of information and entertainment for viewers in their homes. Security personnel also use televisions to monitor buildings, manufacturing plants, and numerous public facilities. Public utility employees use television to monitor the condition of an underground sewer line, using a camera attached to a robot arm or remote-control vehicle. Doctors can probe the interior of a human body with a microscopic television camera without having to conduct major surgery on the patient. Educators use television to reach students throughout the world (“Television,” Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000). Students usually identify the first and the third passage as containing arguments. In the first passage, the conclusion is stated by the last sentence in the paragraph. The author uses a device called a “conclusion indicator”: this is the phrase “for these reasons.” This device tells the reader that what follows this phrase provides the premises that support the truth of what precedes this phrase. In the third  passage, the conclusion is stated by the first sentence, and please notice that the author does not use any indicator words to help the reader. To fully understand the passage, we need to see that the conclusion is a general claim and that the sentences that follow it provide examples or illustrations that provide evidence or reasons for the truth of the first sentence. The second passage contains a description of the internal functioning of the audio system of

564

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

television sets. There is no evidential relationship between any of these sentences where one provides reasons for the truth of another. As is clear in this discussion, the presence of premise and/or conclusion indicator words/phrases are often very helpful tools to highlight the evidential relationships between statements. This is true for readers as well as for authors who wish to clearly indicate where and when an argument occurs. Some of the most common words/phrases are: ●●

●●

Premise indicators: since, in that, seeing that, as indicated by, may be inferred from, for the reason that, because, as, inasmuch as, for, given that, owing to; Conclusion indicators: therefore, accordingly, entails that, wherefore, we may conclude, hence, thus, it must be that, it follows that, consequently, whence, implies that, we may infer, so, as a result.

Two important points need to be made concerning premise and conclusion indicators: (i) the occurrence of one of these terms is not sufficient to tell you we have an argument in the passage. It should be taken as a hint, not as a sure proof that we have an argument; we can all be sloppy in our writing and use a term inappropriately; (ii) their presence is not necessary: we may have an argument without any premise or conclusion indicators such as in passage c. above. 2. Deductive versus inductive arguments: major types of deductive arguments. The distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning is one of the most fundamental in logic. Deductive arguments are the most prized arguments as they aim at supporting their conclusion with the highest strength; yet, they are the least commonly used in everyday life. At the end of this section, we will return to the question of why it is important to study these arguments even if we seldom encounter them in our daily life. Here follows how to define these two types of arguments: ●●

●●

Deductive argument—an argument in which the premises support the conclusion in such a way that it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false; the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises; Inductive argument—an argument in which the premises support the conclusion in such a way that it is improbable that the premises be true and the conclusion false; the conclusion is claimed to follow only probably from the premises.



Basic Logical Notions

565

Thus the fundamental difference between deductive and inductive reasoning is in the strength of the link between the premises and the conclusion. If the premises support the conclusion with the highest degree of strength, then the argument is deductive; if the strength allows for ranges of probability, the argument is inductive. The above accounts of deduction and induction are phrased in terms of successful arguments where the premises actually support the conclusion, but we need to allow for the possibility that some deductive/inductive arguments fail at supporting their conclusion. There are indeed bad deductive arguments that commit what we call formal fallacies; we will come back to fallacies in section 5. Fortunately, all of these distinctions become clearer after we look at some examples. Here are some common types of deductive arguments; we use acronyms to make it easier to remember them. The lowercase letters “p,” “q,” and “r” symbolize declarative sentences such as “Today is Thursday” or “It is sunny outside,” that is, sentences that can have a truth value true or false, Modus Ponens (MP) If p then q p Therefore q

Modus Tollens (MT) If p then q not q Therefore not p

Example of MP: If quartz scratches glass, then quartz is harder than glass. (If p then q) Quartz scratches glass. (p) Therefore, quartz is harder than glass. (q)

Example of MT: If quartz scratches glass, then quartz is harder than glass. (If p then q) Quartz is not harder than glass. (not q) Therefore, quartz does not scratch glass. (not p)

Hypothetical Syllogism (HS) If p then q If q then r Therefore if p then r.

Disjunctive Syllogism (DS) Either p or q Not p [or not q] Therefore q [or p]

Example of HS: If the temperature arises above 32 degrees F, then the snow will melt (If p then q). If the snow melts, then there will be mud in the garden. (If q then r) If the temperature arises above 32 degrees F, then there will be mud in the garden. (If p then r)

Example of DS: Either I will go to the movies or I will stay home and finish reading this novel. (Either p or q) I will not go to the movies (Not p). Hence, I will stay home and finish reading this novel. (q)

The above selection of types of deductive arguments is only a sample. We will come back to talk about MP in section seven, when we suggest an easy way to state an argument in valid form. Let us now see what it means to say that an argument is valid or sound.

566

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

3. Deductive arguments: validity and soundness. When we evaluate deductive arguments, we distinguish between validity and soundness. A valid argument is a deductive argument in which it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. It is important to understand this statement as saying that IF all the premises of a valid argument are true, then the conclusion cannot be false; we are not saying that the premises are actually true but only that if they are true there is no way for the conclusion to be false. For example, let us look at the following argument: I. All the books on my desk are philosophy books. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is on my desk. Hence, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a philosophy book. This argument is valid; it is called a categorical syllogism first because it has exactly two premises and one conclusion—all syllogisms have two premises and one conclusion—and second because it uses “quantifiers” such as “all,” that is, words that signify a quantity. It is valid because if the two premises are in fact true, then it is impossible for the conclusion to be false. But notice that the following argument is also valid: II. All the books on my desk are philosophy books. The biography of Cristiano Ronaldo is on my desk. Hence, the biography of Cristiano Ronaldo is a philosophy book. This second syllogism has the same logical form of the first syllogism; we have only replaced the subject of the second premise. The structure of the argument is the same then: III. All A are B. This item is an A. Hence, this item is a B. In order to recognize this logical form in I. and II., you need to understand the role of variables, quantifiers, and connectives. The variables A and B can be replaced by names of sets or classes like “the set of books on my desk” or “the set of philosophy books.” The first premise uses the quantifier “all” to claim that all members of class A, that is, all the books on my desk, are also members of class B, that is, the class of philosophy books. The second premise states that a particular item is a member of class A and the conclusion draws the valid inference that that same item is a member of class B. If you reread arguments I., and II., you can



Basic Logical Notions

567

appreciate that both have the same structure; both arguments are thus valid, that is, if the premises are all true, then the conclusion will also be true. Contrast now the above arguments with the following: IV. All dogs are mammals. This item, that is, my cat, Felix, is a mammal. Hence, this item, that is, my cat, Felix, is a dog. Clearly, if you understand the two premises of this argument to be true, then the conclusion is false. This violates the above definition of validity. It is called an invalid argument. But it is important to see that the invalidity of this argument is not a result simply of our understanding the difference between cats and dogs. There is a logical reason for the invalidity of this argument that can be understood by appreciating its logical form which is the following (where the variable A is substituted by the set of dogs and B by the set of mammals): V. All A are B. This item is a B. Hence, this item is an A. The first premise in V. has the same form as the first premise of III., and thus of I. and II.; it uses the quantifier “all” and it claims that all members of class A are also members of class B. The second premise claims a particular item is a member of class B. This is the difference between the above valid argument forms and this invalid form. Because if it is true that all A’s are B’s and an item is a B, it does not follow that this item is also an A. For this reason, this argument is invalid. To appreciate this last point, compare the invalid argument in IV. with the following: VI. All the books on my desk are philosophy books. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a philosophy book. Hence, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is on my desk. You should be able to appreciate that IV. and VI. have the same logical form which is spelled out in V. Now, let’s also say that my desk is so arranged that the two premises and conclusion in VI. are all true: such arrangement does not make this argument valid because nothing in the premises makes it the case that Kant’s book must lay on my desk rather than on a shelf. In other words, the truth of the premises in VI. is insufficient to make the conclusion true. This is what

568

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

is needed for validity and why in order to decide whether or not an argument is valid we need to go beyond simply understanding whether the premises and conclusion are true or false. We can conclude this section with the following definitions: ●●

●●

Valid argument—a deductive argument in which it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. Invalid argument—a deductive argument such that it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false.

Knowing the strength of the link between premises and conclusion, however, does not tell us whether or not all the premises are true. Are indeed all the books on my desk philosophy books? Is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on my desk? Is Cristiano Ronaldo’s biography on my desk? The answers to these questions are irrelevant for deciding validity, but crucial for deciding the soundness of deductive arguments. Let us start with the definitions of sound and unsound, first: ●●

●●

Sound argument—a deductive argument that is valid and has all true premises. Unsound argument—a deductive argument that is invalid and/or has at least one false premise.

Of all the deductive arguments listed above, only I. is sound because it is valid and its two premises are true: all the books on my desk are philosophy books and I have the Critique of Pure Reason on my desk. II. is unsound because although valid, it is false that the biography of Cristiano Ronaldo is on my desk. IV. is unsound because it is invalid even if the two premises and the conclusion were all true statements. It should be clear by now how the inferential structure of an argument is at least as, if not more important than, the actual truth of the statements that compose it. Before returning to talk about validity, we very briefly mention inductive arguments. 4. Inductive arguments: strength and cogency. Strength and cogency are two properties of inductive arguments that are analogous to what validity and soundness are for deductive arguments. Here are the relevant definitions: Strong argument—an inductive argument, such that it is improbable that the premises be true and the conclusion false.



Basic Logical Notions

569

Weak argument—an inductive argument, such that the conclusion does not follow probably from the premises. Cogent argument—an inductive argument that is strong and has all true premises. Uncogent argument—an inductive argument that is either weak or has at least one false premise. Some common types of inductive arguments are: ●●

●●

●●

●●

Inductive generalization—an inductive argument that proceeds from the knowledge of a selected sample to some claim about the whole group: Eighty out of these hundred apples are delicious. Probably all the apples in this crate are delicious apples. Analogy—an inductive argument that depends on the existence of a similarity between two things or states of affairs: I bought these two apples in the same store where I bought four delicious apples yesterday. Probably these two apples are delicious too. Causal inference—an inductive inference that proceeds from knowledge of a cause to a claim about the effect, or from knowledge of an effect to a claim about the cause: I forgot to take the cake out of the oven; it is most likely burned. Authority—an inductive argument in which the conclusion rests on a statement made by some presumed authority or witness. My physics professor says that String Theory is dead. In all probability, String Theory is not a flourishing field in physics any more.

5. Fallacies: formal and informal. A fallacy is a mistake in reasoning. Formal fallacies are mistakes affecting the structure of a deductive argument. For example, the two following fallacies are formal: Affirming the consequent—an invalid argument form: If p then q q Therefore p

Denying the antecedent—an invalid argument form: If p then q not p Therefore not q

If you compare the structure of these two invalid inferences with the patterns of MP and MT above, you will notice the relevant difference in the switching of the position of the sentences used. Here are two examples of these fallacies:

570

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

If you have a valid Minnesota driver’s license then you are sixteen years old or older. Julia is sixteen years old or older. Therefore, Julia has a valid Minnesota driver’s license.

If you have a valid Minnesota driver’s license then you are sixteen years old or older. Julia does not have a valid Minnesota driver’s license. Therefore, Julia is not sixteen years old or older.

Suppose that our friend Julia is older than sixteen and does not hold a valid Minnesota driver’s license simply because she does not like driving and enjoys using public transportation. In that scenario, all the premises in both arguments are true and the conclusions are false. Both arguments are invalid and commit these two common mistakes in reasoning, which can be described as making an incorrect application of MP and MT, respectively. It is impossible to give a fair treatment of informal fallacies here; some logic textbooks list up to forty of them! We will just give a small selection of some commonly mentioned informal fallacies. Students are encouraged to consult a logic textbook to learn more. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Appeal to force—arguer threatens reader/listener. Example: “Boss talking with Employee: You should agree with me that your colleague Mr. White’s business proposition is unwise; after all, if you don’t agree with me, you may lose your job.” Appeal to pity—arguer elicits pity from reader/listener. Example: “Employee talking with Boss: You gave me a negative appraisal because I am always late for work and get little done when I am here; but I have a family to maintain. Please, say my work is fine.” Argument against the person (abusive)—arguer verbally abuses an other arguer. Example: “Nietzsche said that God is dead and that we killed God. But what did he know? Nietzsche was a crazy man and thus all he said was nonsense.” Straw man—arguer distorts opponents argument and then attacks the distorted argument. Example: “Mr. Black has argued against prayer in the schools. Clearly, Mr. Black supports atheism. But atheism leads to all sorts of evils. Clearly, prayers in the schools should be protected.” Appeal to unqualified authority—arguer cites untrustworthy authority. Example: “My Dance instructor says that String Theory is dead. In all probability, String Theory is not a flourishing field in Physics any more.”

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Basic Logical Notions

571

Appeal to ignorance—premises report that nothing is known or proved, and then a conclusion is drawn. Example: “Many people have tried to disprove the predictions of astrology and no one ever succeeded. Hence, what astrology says must be true.” Hasty generalization—conclusion is drawn from an atypical sample. Example: “During my trip to Iceland I met a group of Italian tourists and not one of them was Catholic. Catholicism is probably not as dominant in Italy any more.” False cause—conclusion depends on nonexistent or minor causal connection. Example: “Tomorrow, I have a final exam. I know I will do well because I will wear the same T-shirt I wore last month when I got an A in a test.” Slippery slope—conclusion depends on unlikely chain reaction. Example: “The employees would like to be able to spend their lunch break in the employees’ lounge, but if we allow them to do so, then they will ask to spend their days off there and if we allow them to do that, they will want to spend their whole yearly holidays there. Therefore, we should not allow employees to spend their fifteen minute daily break in the employees’ lounge.” Weak analogy—conclusion depends on defective analogy. Example: “I bought this book in the same bookstore where I bought the last mystery I read; both books have a red cover and both books are paperback. I liked the last mystery I read; I bet I will like this too.” Begging the question—arguer creates the illusion that inadequate premises are adequate by reasoning in a circle. Example: “All those who advocate for the revolution have a vision for a better future simply because if you do not have a vision for a better future, then you do not support the revolution.” Complex question—multiple questions are concealed in a single question. Example: “Did you stop cheating on your income taxes?” Equivocation—conclusion depends on a shift in meaning of a word or phrase. Example: “Some angles are acute angles. Everything acute is smart. Thus some angles are smart.” Amphiboly—conclusion depends on the wrong interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous statement. Example: “The writer advises to pay attention to grammar mistakes in his textbook on English composition. That publisher must have pretty incompetent copyeditors.” Composition—an attribute is wrongly transferred from parts to whole. Example: “Every part of this engine is light. Thus the whole engine is light.” Division—an attribute is wrongly transferred from whole to parts. Example: “This engine is very heavy. Therefore, each of its eight hundred parts must be very heavy.”

572

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

6. Necessary and sufficient conditions.2 The distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions is one of the most useful conceptual tools students will ever learn in a logic and/or philosophy course. Necessary and sufficient conditions are often expressed by the use of conditional statements, that is, statements of the form “if . . ., (then) . . .” A conditional statement is a statement with an “if-clause” (called the antecedent) and a “then-clause” (called the consequent). Example: “If air is removed from a solid closed container, then the container will weigh less than it did.” Antecedent: “Air is removed from a solid closed container.” Consequent: “It will weigh less than it did.” Necessary condition—the condition represented by the consequent in a conditional statement; B is said to be a necessary condition for A whenever A cannot occur without the occurrence of B (If A then B). Sufficient condition—the condition represented by the antecedent in a conditional statement; A is said to be a sufficient condition for B whenever the occurrence of A is all that is needed for the occurrence of B (If A then B). Let us look at some examples. Being sixteen years old or older is necessary to hold a valid driver’s license in Minnesota, USA, but it is not sufficient as there are many people who are sixteen years old or older who do not hold a valid Minnesota driver’s license. The following conditionals capture the relationships between the two conditions, that is, being sixteen years old or older and holding a valid Minnesota driver’s license: ●●

●●

If you hold a valid Minnesota driver’s license then you must be at least sixteen years old; If you are not at least sixteen years old you cannot hold a valid Minnesota driver’s license (this is called the contrapositive of the previous conditional: it reverses the order of the conditions and denies each).

There are many pairs of conditions that can help clarify this very important logical relation. For example, being a dog and being an animal: the former is sufficient for the latter for if something is a dog then it is also an animal; but being an animal is not sufficient for being a dog because if something is not an animal, neither can it be a dog. Poaching an egg is sufficient for cooking it, but it is not necessary as there are many ways for cooking an egg. If you do not poach it, it does not follow that you do not cook it: you may fry or baste it.



Basic Logical Notions

573

7. How to extract an argument and put it in valid form. In the last two sections, we will show you how to state arguments contained in short passages; we will then give some examples of what many instructors in analytic philosophy courses call “stating, explaining, and evaluating arguments.” In order to state an argument in valid form, one has to find its logical form. With some experience in logic and symbolic notation, this can easily be done using propositional or predicate logic. Since we are not presupposing any previous knowledge of logic in this brief introduction, we will introduce an easy process for stating any argument in valid form that does not require any previous knowledge of logic. In this process, we start by identifying premises and conclusion, then we list all premises first as independent statements and write the conclusion at the end of the list of premises. To complete the statement of the argument in valid form we only need to add what we call the “conditional premise” or an if/then statement in whose antecedent we place all the premises and in whose consequent we place the conclusion. The purpose of this process is to streamline the evaluation of an author’s argument. Since the argument as stated is in valid form, the only evaluation to make (in order to determine the soundness of the argument) is the truth or falsity of each premise. Here is the first example. The passage states, “Without welfare, some poor people would have no means of support, so we must not eliminate welfare. The government has a duty to provide everyone with at least the essentials of life.” First let us identify and list premises and conclusion. In the first sentence, the indicator word “so,” shows that the preceding statement is a premise and the succeeding statement is a conclusion. As an argument, something is missing from the first sentence. The premise indicates an unfortunate consequence, but does not provide a reason for why the government should act. The second sentence provides such a reason: P1. Without welfare, some poor people would have no means of support. P2. The government has a duty to provide everyone with at least the essentials of life. C We must not eliminate welfare. Here is how the argument looks when stated in valid form by adding the conditional premise: P1. Without welfare, some poor people would have no means of support. P2. The government has a duty to provide everyone with at least the essentials of life.

574

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

P3. If without welfare, some poor people would have no means of support and the government has a duty to provide everyone with at least the essentials of life, then we must not eliminate welfare. C. We must not eliminate welfare. The argument is now stated in a form such that if the premises are true the conclusion must also be true. Let us look at two other arguments about welfare that happen to defend quite different political positions from the one reflected in the first argument: Welfare is a form of expropriation; it takes money out of one person’s pocket and puts it into someone else’s. Since the function of government is to protect individual rights, including property rights, it should not be running welfare programs.

In the second sentence, the indicator word “since,” shows that the immediately following statement is a premise and the succeeding statement is a conclusion. The first sentence, however, seems to contain an inference too: welfare is a type of expropriation because it takes money out of some people’s pockets to give it to other people. This fact provides further support for the overall conclusion that the government should not run welfare programs. Notice then that this argument is a bit more complicated than the previous one: it has two conclusions. By our method, to state each part of the argument in valid form we need to add a conditional premise for each part of the argument leading to a conclusion: P1. Welfare takes money out of one’s pocket and puts into someone else’s. C1. Welfare is a form of expropriation. P2. The function of government is to protect individual rights, including property rights. C2. The government should not run welfare programs. Now in valid form: P1. Welfare takes money out of one’s pocket and puts into someone else’s. P2. If welfare takes money out of one’s pocket and puts into someone else’s, then welfare is a form of expropriation. C1. Welfare is a form of expropriation. P3. The function of government is to protect individual rights, including property rights.



Basic Logical Notions

575

P4. If the function of government is to protect individual rights, including property rights, and welfare is a form of expropriation, then the government should not run welfare programs. C2. The government should not run welfare programs. In this argument, there are two conclusions as the author first argues for the claim that welfare is a form of expropriation and then on the basis of that claim now used as a premise argues for the general conclusion of the passage which is the opinion that the government should not run welfare programs. Let us now look at one more example extracted from the writing of a philosopher: The evils of the world are due to moral defects quite as much as to lack of intelligence. But the human race has not hitherto discovered any method of eradicating moral defects. . . . Intelligence, on the contrary, is easily improved by methods known to every competent educator. Therefore, until some method of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought by improvement of intelligence rather than of morals. (Russell 1935: 127)

In the fourth sentence, the indicator word “therefore” shows that the succeeding statement is a conclusion. The kind of progress claimed in the conclusion refers back to the first premise and its claims of the presence of moral evils and their twin causes. The second and third premise indicate specifically where this progress is likely to be found. Here is the argument extracted from the passage and stated in valid form: P1. The evils of the world are due to moral defects quite as much as to lack of intelligence. P2. But the human race has not hitherto discovered any method of eradicating moral defects. P3. Intelligence, on the contrary, is easily improved by methods known to every competent educator. P4. If P1., P2., and P3., then C. C. Until some method of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought by improvement of intelligence rather than of morals. We conclude this section by motivating this procedure. The first advantage of explicitly stating the premises and conclusion of an argument is of course clarity. By distinguishing each and every reason why an author is claiming that a given

576

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

conclusion is true, we can see much more clearly why people believe what they believe and we can more precisely understand why we may disagree with them in terms of the reasons that they offer and that we may not share. Moreover, we can see more clearly what connections, or inferences, others are making. We may agree or disagree on which consequences they believe follow from certain assumptions. Finally, and this is the reason why we believe that it is instructive to state arguments in valid form, by adding the conditional premise that links the premises to its conclusion, we are forced to raise the question that is at the core of any discussion of an argument: do these premises, or the reasons stated in them, actually prove the truth of the conclusion, that is, if the premises are true, must the conclusion be true as well? In other words, when we discuss the truth of any conditional premise we have added to the argument, we are actually asking whether the argument is deductively valid. 8. How to explain and evaluate a valid argument or “what we expect you to do in the papers we ask you to write.” We complete this brief practical guide to working with arguments with two examples of stating, explaining, and evaluating an argument. Here first is what these assignments require: Statement: Extract the premise(s) and conclusion of an argument; state them as separate statements; number and list the premise(s); for the argument to be valid you need to put it in the form of a valid argument form, for example, an MP, MT, DS, or HS—see above list. Of course, the easiest way to state an argument in valid form is to list all the premises and to add a conditional premise before the conclusion. Explanation: Explain the argument in your words, making sure to address each premise, make it plausible; put yourself on the side of whoever supports it; you may use examples to show you get the point of the supporter of the argument. Evaluation: First you comment on the logical form of the argument; then you comment on the truth or falsehood of the premises; use evidence and counterexamples. If you made the argument valid by adding a conditional premise, this will likely be the most important premise to discuss.



Basic Logical Notions

577

Example #1 Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion. (Patrick Hurley’s Logic textbook; Margaret Sanger, Family Limitations)

Statement: P1. The average working man can support no more than two children at most. P2. The average working woman can take care of no more than two children in decent fashion. P3. If P1. and P2., then C. C. Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. Explanation: Sanger argues that women of the working class should not have more than two children because an average working-class woman cannot take appropriate care of more than two kids and the average working man can earn only enough to support two kids. Evaluation: The argument has been stated in a valid form by the addition of a conditional premise; however, it is not sound because there are good reasons to doubt the truth of all the premises. The weakest premise is P3 because in order to be true it assumes several controversial facts, which, moreover, are not stated explicitly in the passage. For P3 to be true, it must be the case that the average salary of a man of the working class is relevant to the care that an average woman of the working class can offer to her children. This seems to assume that mothers of the working class are all dependent economically on men of the working class. But there could be women of the working class who raise their children alone, there could be same-sex working-class families, or finally there could be working-class mothers married to men who belong to other social classes. Thus, P3 is false and the argument is not sound. P1 is possibly true; but P2 is highly debatable: there are plenty of examples of working-class families with many children that seem to manage their care in more than decent fashion.

578

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Example #2 The institution of public education thrives on its own failures. The more poorly its charges perform, the more money it asks for (and gets) from the public and the government. The more money it gets, the more it can grow itself. (Ian Hamet, “School for Scandal”)

Statement of the argument as a valid deductive argument: P1. The more poorly the charges of the institution of public education perform, the more money public education asks and gets from the public and the government. P2. The more money public education gets, the more it can grow itself. P3. If P1. and P2, then C. C. Thus, the institution of public education thrives on its own failures. Explanation: Ian Hamet argues that there is a sort of a vicious circle supporting the worsening of public education. The idea is that when the students who attend public schools perform badly, perhaps below the required standards, administrators of public schools ask for more money from the public and the government. For example, Hamet might have in mind programs to support these failing students. By getting more funds, public schools grow. Hence, Hamet concludes, the failures of public education are at the origin of financial support for public schools. Evaluation: The argument is stated in a valid form with the addition of a conditional premise; however, it is not sound because there are good reasons to doubt the truth of all the premises. The first two premises seem to overlook many factors behind public school funding. The primary source of income for public schools depends on the number of students and, in Minnesota, public school enrollment numbers in the last ten to fifteen years have been remarkably stable. Furthermore, government increases in financial support have not matched the inflation rate over this period of time. This means that while the net amount of money given to public schools has increased over time, this fact does not mean that there is “new” money for public schools as increases simply go to pay for increasing expenses such as utilities, supplies, and, most of all, employee salaries and benefits. When data, that is standardized test scores, show that a district is doing poorly, it is true that more money is used in an attempt to address this problem. However, this does not necessarily mean that “new” money is being



Basic Logical Notions

579

used by a district, but rather that money for other programs is being directed to these new programs, so the pot of money for a district does not necessarily grow when new programs are offered. Premise 3 is the premise that makes the vicious circle suggested by the author of this passage more apparent. In order to evaluate this premise, we need to assume, contrary to what is claimed earlier in this evaluation that it is true that when more students of public schools fail, these schools will get more money and that the more money public schools get, the more they grow. If this much is granted, there seems to be a rather straightforward mechanism for public schools to increase their income: let students fail! The question is whether this implies that public schools really thrive on the failure of their students. The term “thrive” suggests a flourishing or improvement, enrichment, positive development in public schools. Any institution, like a school, can be said to thrive when it not only accomplishes its goal, but exceeds them. However, all the author of the argument is concerned with is the size of its budget. This way of looking at public schools and evaluating whether or not they are thriving seems to use a business model. After all, one clear measure of a business’ thriving is an increasing income stream. Of course, even this is a shortsighted way of evaluating businesses because it neglects looking at expenditures. A business can radically increase its income, but if its expenses increase even more, it cannot be said to thrive. Indeed, the very opposite seems to be true if we assume that a primary goal of a business is to make a net profit. For this goal, looking only at income is shortsighted. The problem with the author’s argument is similar. Let’s grant that public schools have enjoyed a large increase in income from the government due to poor academic performances. By itself, this is insufficient reason to claim that public schools are thriving. On the contrary, it seems that they are doing the opposite of thriving because they are failing their primary goal of education. For this goal, the author’s focus on income is shortsighted. In conclusion, although the passage allows us to extract a valid argument, we cannot say that this argument is sound because the premises are insufficiently supported.

Notes 1 Some of the examples and definitions have been taken from Hurley (2000). 2 The definitions have been taken from Martin (1994).

580

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

References Copi, Irving and Carl Cohen (2008), Introduction to Logic, Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Gorovitz, Samuel and Merrill Hintikka, Donald Provence, Ron G. Williams (1979), Philosophical Analysis: Introduction to its Language and Techniques, New York: Random House. Hurley, Patrick (2000), A Concise Introduction to Logic, 7th ed., Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning 2000. Martin, Robert M. (1994), The Philosopher’s Dictionary, 2nd ed., Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Rosenberg, Jay (1996), The Practice of Philosophy A Handbook for Beginners, Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Russell, Bertrand (1935), Skeptical Essays, London: Allen & Unwin. Thomas, Stephen Naylor (1991), Argument Evaluation, Tampa, FL: Worthington Publishing Company. Woodhouse, Mark B. (1984), A Preface to Philosophy, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts Pieranna Garavaso

Adversarial method In this definition, “adversarial” is usually taken to negatively describe a subset of common practices in philosophy. It is a common practice in philosophical debate to start from stating a thesis that is then criticized on the basis of objections and/or counterexamples; in the end the thesis may be revised or rejected. “Adversarial” has been used to point out an aggressive style of argumentation in professional philosophical settings such as presentations at meetings and debates in professional journals which connotes a belittling or denigration of the view criticized. Taken as such, this adversarial approach is certainly not a necessary component of the fruitful employment of the method of philosophical argumentation described above. As Daniel Cohen aptly points out in his TED talk “For Argument’s Sake,” being shown one’s own mistakes in beliefs, reasoning, or thinking should be a positive step toward the truth, or at least toward a more reliable system of beliefs, rather than a loss. A classic discussion of the adversarial method in philosophy is in Janice Moulton’s “A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method,” in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality, 149–64, Dordrecht: Springer. This allegedly characteristic feature of analytic philosophy has been repeatedly mentioned as a possible explanation for the low percentages of women engaged in academic careers in philosophy; Cheshire Calhoun mentions it among other possible explanations in her thoughtful and informative musings “The Undergraduate Pipeline Problem,” Hypatia 24, 2 (Spring 2009): 216–23. This reason is however hardly consistent with the high percentages of women successfully pursuing law and law-related careers in which it is usually common to engage in even litigious argumentation.

582

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

(Conceptual) analysis One of the signature features of (feminist and nonfeminist) analytic philosophy is the use of conceptual analysis in discussing any philosophical issue. The answers to the metaphysical question of what is a concept and to the methodological question of what is analysis differ widely between philosophers. What is common seems to be a focus on general terms like “reality,” “knowledge,” and “morality” and the effort to clarify them by relating them to other terms like “matter,” “evidence,” and “self-interest,” respectively. One aim of analysis is to identify and eliminate pseudo-problems that are the result of a limited understanding of our language uses. Russell’s theory of descriptions is a good example of a type of analysis that has dissolved the problem of trying to find some entity corresponding to void definite description, that is, expressions that seem to describe something but that in reality are failing to do so such as the phrase “the current king of France.”

Analytic(al) feminism Analytic feminism is a philosophical tradition that originates from the work of philosophers who are trained mostly in the analytic tradition and who focus on issues of social discrimination. This quote from a paper by Ann Cudd, which has been circulated online for many years, usefully describes the mutual interactions of analytic and feminist philosophies that converge in analytic feminism: “Analytic feminism applies analytic concepts and methods to feminist issues and applies feminist concepts and insights to issues that traditionally have been of interest to analytic philosophers.” Ann Cudd, “One Woman’s Attempt at a Definition: Analytic Feminism,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement Available online: https://archive.is/WMHE (accessed July 28, 2017).

Analytic philosophy A philosophical tradition influenced by the thought of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and many others. Although there is wide debate about its historical origins and about which philosophers are to be included among its main representatives, it is commonly accepted that most



A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

583

analytic philosophers value clarity in the definition of their terms and structured argumentation in the development of a topic. For extensive discussions on the features of analytic philosophy, see Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson (2014) The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy, London: Bloomsbury; Michael Beaney (2013), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Avrum Stroll (2001), Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press; and Scott Soames (2003), Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, two volumes, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Androcentrism versus sexism “Androcentrism” is often considered synonymous with “sexism,” but these two terms denote different notions. The former term comes from the term “andros,” which in Greek means “male,” and the term “centrism,” which means “focus”; consequently, an androcentric system of beliefs is based on the idea that male/ masculine human beings function as models for the whole of humankind. In general, sexism is any form of social discrimination that is based on the oppressed person’s sex or gender. It is most often used to describe the oppression of women (cis and trans) in a patriarchal society where men have most or all power. For this reason, it is easy to see how sexism may derive from androcentrism, but clearly there can be forms of sexism that do not imply or require androcentrism; for example, a sexist society in which men are socially oppressed can be based on the idea that female/women human beings function as models for the whole of humankind; hence this society would not be androcentric. Thus, “sexism” is a term that describes a discriminatory and oppressive social arrangement of power relations between the sexes or the genders and it can accurately portray a society dominating either sex or gender, while “androcentrism” describes systems of beliefs or cultures that regard male or masculine ideals as models.

Argument An argument is a set of statements with an internal structure. At least two statements are needed to have an argument and one of them, called the conclusion of the argument, is the statement that conveys a thesis or opinion

584

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

that the proponent of the argument is aiming to support or to show to be true. The other statement or statements, called premises, provide reasons for the truth of the conclusion. See also “Basic Logical Notions” for more on arguments and how to recognize them.

Bias paradox This paradox was clearly and usefully identified by Louise Antony in her article “Quine as a Feminist” in Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), (1993) A Mind of One’s Own,110–53, Boulder, CO: Westview Press: “If we don’t think it’s good to be impartial, then how can we object to men’s being partial?” (189). The main idea is that there is a potential conflict between (1) the claim that there is no objective point of view, that everyone has a point of view that should be valued and that provides that subject with a privileged knowledge and (2) the claim that androcentric and sexists views should be rejected. If we accept that everyone has a partial and valuable perspective, how can we, as feminists, reject the perspectives of those who are sexist? For a helpful statement and brief clarification of this paradox, see also Deborah Heikes’s “The Bias Paradox,” in Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone (eds), (2011), Just the Arguments, 154–55, London: Blackwell.

Continental feminism Feminist philosophies that have been influenced by continental philosophy analogously to how analytic feminist philosophies have been influenced by analytic philosophy. See Continental philosophy.

Continental philosophy Geographically, this is a philosophical tradition that has historically dominated and still greatly influences the profession and the culture of philosophy in continental Europe. In Section 1.1 of Chapter 1 of this book, we have introduced Tim Crane’s two theoretical criteria for defining a philosophical tradition, that is, (1) identifying a set of canonical texts together with a specific interpretive



A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

585

approach to them and (2) understanding the questions raised by philosophers, who are or have been working in a certain tradition, within the context provided by their canonical texts and their leading interpretation. In the same section, we clarify that the determination of the canonical texts for analytic and feminist philosophies is a contested matter; the same is true naturally also for continental philosophy. With no claim to provide a comprehensive listing, we include the following philosophers among those whose work has been very influential in the continental tradition: Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Plato, Sartre, and so forth. Many articles and books have been published on the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, especially in Europe. There have also been many criticisms, which either deny this divide or reject political interpretations of it. In our opinion, the above criteria proposed by Crane provide a theoretically plausible and pragmatically applicable method to outline a distinction between analytic and continental feminist and nonfeminist philosophical traditions that can be useful and less politically and emotionally charged than those that have so far emerged in the literature.

“Different Voices” model This expression is often used to refer to Carol Gilligan’s influential study In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), in which Gilligan criticizes Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. Gilligan’s work inspired a broad discussion and contrast between traditional ethical theories such as utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, which are based on universal rules and characterized as part of an ethics of justice, and what was called an ethics of care. This contrast and the development of Gilligan’s views is discussed in greater depth in the first section of the Introduction to Feminist Value Theory in this book.

Empiricism This is a philosophical approach usually opposed to rationalism. Its main thesis is that all knowledge derives from and is based on sensory experience. In ancient philosophy, Aristotle is considered an empiricist in contrast to Plato, who claimed

586

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

there is knowledge that is gained independently of experience, for example, by direct intuition of mathematics and universal notions (called “forms”) such as justice and beauty. Modern empiricists are Locke, Berkely, Hume, and Mill.

Epistemology Epistemology designates the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and all notions connected with the notion of knowledge, for example, belief, evidence, and justification.

Essentialism and gender essentialism Essentialism is the view that entities have essential properties or essences, without which these entities could not be what they are. For example, an essential property of a knife may be the property of being able to cut something; whereas a non-essential property of a knife may be its having a red handle. In other words, being able to cut is essential for anything to be a knife but having a red handle is not. There is broad debate whether there are any essential properties. Gender essentialism is an essentialist view applied to gender: is being a man or a woman an essential property of a person? If so, how do we understand the properties of being a man or woman. If not, could one be the same person but with a different gender?

Feminist empiricism This is one of the three main positions in the philosophy of science identified by Sandra Harding in her important book The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); the other two were feminist postmodernism and standpoint theory. Feminist Empiricism is described as a feminist philosophy that claims that sexism and androcentrism can be corrected in the sciences and in society by applying with greater care and precision empiricist methodological norms such as impartiality and objectivity. This first version of feminist empiricism has been the object of criticism especially after the rejection of the fact/value distinction or the ideal that science is based only on



A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

587

facts and unaffected by social, political, and ethical values. All the three feminist philosophies of science named by Harding are still influential in the current debates despite having undergone significant changes.

Feminist postmodernism This is one of the three main positions in the philosophy of science identified by Sandra Harding in her important book The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); the other two were feminist empiricism and standpoint theories. Harding characterizes this position as a challenge to both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory. Postmodern feminists are skeptical of all universal principles or entities including those of reason, objectivity, truth, and the unified self. Of all three feminist epistemologies, this is one that has been influenced most deeply by the thought of continental philosophers such as Deridda, Foucault, Lacan, and Gadamer. Judith Butler and Hélène Cixous are among the most well-known postmodern feminists. All the three feminist philosophies of science named by Harding are still influential in the current debates despite having undergone significant changes.

Gender versus sex This controversial distinction is a fundamental starting point to understand contemporary debates within feminist philosophies. When this distinction was originally identified, for example, by Simone DeBeauvoir when she claimed that one is not born but becomes a woman, the term “sex” was meant to indicate a range of biological characteristics that make an individual male or female such as the genitalia and particular chromosomes. “Gender,” on the other side, was meant to indicate a range of socially bestowed and recognized psychological features that make an individual feminine or masculine. For example, psychological features, such as being nurturing, caring, sensitive, are usually associated with femininity; whereas, features such as strong, decisive, tough, and courageous are usually associated with masculinity. It is perhaps tempting to overlook this distinction if one believes that the above female biological characteristics of having breasts, vaginas, and uteri (sex) are essentially connected to the abovementioned feminine psychological features, and the above male biological characteristics

588

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

of having penises and testicles are essentially connected to the abovementioned masculine psychological features. However, the distinction between the notions of sex and gender has been given prominence in two ways. The first is the attack of the above accounts of sex and gender as binary. The notion of binary sex ignores careful empirical studies of the range of possible combinations of “X” and “Y” chromosomes as well as physical genitalia (see https://www.nature.com/news/ sex-redefined-1.16943). Of course, the notion of binary genders ignores the incredible variety of individual psychological makeups of strength, nurturing, decisiveness, caring, courage, and sensitivity. The second is the realization that any correlation between gender and sex features is not a necessary one: there are brave and strong humans with vaginas and breasts and there are sensitive and caring humans with penises and testicles. This point has been supported by Judith Butler’s insightful claim that gender is “performative,” that is, it is ascribed and maintained by means of social practices. In general, feminist analyses of both sex and gender have brought to light the need to consider both notions as resting on a spectrum with several intermediate positions. In other words, there are not only two sexes, there are not two diametrically opposed genders, and there is no essential correlation between the two notions.

Gender schemas In cognitive psychology, schemas are sets of concepts and beliefs shared within a community bonded by a common culture. Gender schemas are thus sets of such concepts and beliefs used to identify an individual’s gender. Some examples of gender schemas are the beliefs that women are caring and nurturing, while men are aggressive and brave. Within feminist literature, there is a broad debate whether gender roles are to be rejected in their totality. However, because gender schemas are often rigidified and used in a discriminatory fashion to maintain systems of oppression, it is common to find arguments to abolish gender schemas.

Hermeneutics The term is often used especially in continental philosophy to indicate a particular methodology for interpreting a text. This term encompasses an incredible variety



A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

589

of approaches. In general, one can interpret a text in light of the whole body of work of an author, or in light of that author’s historical and/or cultural and/or economic perspective, or in light of the interpreter’s own presuppositions.

Heteronormativity This is a position that supports the idealization of heterosexuality, that is, taking relations between different sexes, as the norm or preferable type of sexual relations. There is clearly no necessary connection between being heterosexual and supporting a heteronormative position.

Implicit bias An implicit bias is an unconscious prejudice that leads people to make discriminatory choices without being aware of acting on a prejudice. Research in social psychology has provided evidence of implicit bias toward socially stigmatized groups. An often-cited example of implicit bias concerns the selection of applicants for jobs: applicants with names that seem to be prima facie female or belonging to ethnic minorities such as black Americans are evaluated more harshly with the same resumes than male applicants or applicants with names suggesting white ethnic origins. Implicit bias, as well as gender schemas, have often been considered responsible for discriminatory behavior and the maintenance of systems of oppression.

Intersectionality This notion is distinctive of current feminist philosophies. Thanks to the feminist criticisms coming especially from women of color against the early feminist positions that focused mostly on the life experiences of white and middleclass women and thanks to the ever-expanding multicultural dialogue between feminist philosophers, feminist philosophies have recognized the important truth that no system of social discrimination operates in isolation from all the other systems of oppression. Thus, women are treated differently, differently oppressed or privileged not merely on the basis of their sexual or gender features

590

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

but also because of a wide range of other characteristics such as being lesbians or heterosexual, wealthy or poor, black or white, Jewish or Lutheran, and so forth. The different systems of social discrimination work together and when striving for social justice, one needs to pay attention to how these hierarchical systems intersect with each other.

Logic: Deductive and inductive Logic studies the norms of reasoning. There are two major types of reasoning— deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning leads to necessary or undeniable conclusions, given the truth of the supporting premises. Inductive reasoning leads to a highly probable conclusion, given the truth of the supporting premises. For more information on deductive and inductive reasoning, see Basic Logical Notions in this book.

Logical positivism Logical positivism is a set of philosophical theses which emerged from the Vienna Circle: a group of philosophers who held regular meetings and discussions of philosophical texts in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the most wellknown logical positivists were Moritz Schlick, who was assassinated by a former student; Rudolf Carnap, who later immigrated to the United States and had protracted philosophical exchanges with Willard V. Quine; the mathematician Karl GÖdel; and the British philosopher A. J. Ayer. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is one of the philosophical works read and discussed by the philosophers of the Vienna Circle during their meetings. The logical positivists are also called logical empiricists as their epistemology was empiricist, that is, was based on the thesis that all informative knowledge comes from some form of sensory experience. One of the theses for which logical positivism is best known is the verifiability criterion of linguistic meaning: a sentence is meaningful only if it is possible to empirically verify its truth. Thus, if we do not have, or cannot imagine what would be, an empirical test to verify the truth of a sentence, then that sentence is devoid of meaning. Ethical and metaphysical statements such as “murder is wrong” or “there are bodies and minds” are thus meaningless according to this verifiability criterion of meaning.



A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

591

It has been often said that logical positivism is dead; yet, interestingly enough, one often finds that in the literature, philosophers still accuse each other of being a logical positivist. Even if the movement is dead, their ideas must still survive in some form or other.

Metaphysics Once called “first philosophy,” metaphysics is the area of philosophy devoted to answering questions concerning the nature and ultimate composition of reality. One part of metaphysics is ontology, or the study of what exists and what is the nature of what exists. Metaphysics also discusses topics that are fundamental for other areas of philosophy such as the notions of personhood, freedom, and time.

Naturalism This philosophical theory is based on the thesis that all that exists can be accounted for by the natural sciences. There are many versions of naturalism and many philosophical domains in which philosophers have developed a naturalistic approach, for example, naturalized epistemology and naturalism in ethics. In both cases, the main idea is that scientific research will provide useful information to answer the philosophical questions discussed in those fields, for example, “What is knowledge?”, “What are beliefs and justification?”, and “What are the perceivable features of a morally good action?”

Nominalism Nominalism is an anti-realist view in metaphysics that denies that universals, that is, properties and relations, exist independently of our classificatory systems. It typically allows that only individuals exist and may attempt to “reduce” universals to simply how we name things in the world.

592

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Object-relations theory In a section devoted to the social construction of human sexuality in her book The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), Sandra Harding mentions the object-relations theory as a psychological theory that has been very influential for feminist philosophies of science in the United States. Harding mentions D. W. Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, and Harry Guntrip as psychologists who developed this theory; she also mentions Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Jane Flax as feminist epistemologists whose thought has been influenced by this theory. This theory is so named because “it describes the social/physical mechanism through which adult men and women come to model—to objectify—themselves and their relations to the world in very different ways” (Harding 1986: 131). According to this theory, boys build their sense of themselves, their identity, by differentiating and distancing from their mothers; because of this process of separation from their caretakers with whom boys cannot identify due to their opposite sex characteristics, boys grow up to become independent and autonomous men. On the other side, girls do not need to distance themselves from their mothers and caretakers; they identify with them and learn to relate and be connected. Girls grow up to become caring and nurturing women: “According to these analyses, masculinity is defined through the achievement of separation, while femininity is defined through the maintenance of attachment” (Harding 1986: 133). In this way, the objectrelations theory connects the gender characterization of women and men with a theory of psychological development.

Ontology Ontology is considered one of the major areas of metaphysics. It addresses the question of what exists and what is the nature of what exists.

Phenomenalism Phenomenalism takes various forms but fundamentally it is a form of idealism, that is, the view that there are no mind-independent (physical) objects. A general common thesis of phenomenalism is that only sensations, appearances, sensedata, or representations exist.



A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

593

Physicalism Physicalism is a metaphysical view that claims that all that exists is physical or “supervenes” on the physical. In this sense the term “physicalism” is merely a more recently coined synonym of the term “materialism” that was used more commonly in the past to denote the theory that there exist no real mental or spiritual entities. Many versions of physicalism appeal to the notion of supervenience. This term is used to posit a relation between physical entities and mental states such that there can be no difference in the latter without a difference in the former. In other words, if two individuals are physically identical, then they will also be mentally identical. The interesting idea behind supervenience is that, for the above example, it need not imply that mental entities are “reduced” to physical entities because it is “neutral” with respect to the ontological status of mental entities. It is perhaps a way of entitling materialists to speak substantively about mental entities, but without commitment to anything existing beyond physical entities.

Pragmatism Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition distinct from both continental and analytic philosophies. It is associated with the thought of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. These philosophers sought to give greater attention to the practical consequences of their philosophical ideas and analyses and considered these practical consequences as part of the content or meaning of an analyzed notion. In the last fifty years or so pragmatism has attracted the attention of both feminist and nonfeminist analytic philosophers and is currently enjoying a form of revival.

Queer studies or theory Talia Bettcher in her 2014 entry of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entitled “Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues” (available online: https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/feminism-trans/ (accessed July 30, 2017)) clarifies these terms and the history of this area of scholarship as follows: “Queer” is a political and theoretical term and a reclamation of the word used as an insult. Politically, it was associated with groups such as Queer Nation and is used as an umbrella term to apply to individuals often associated with the

594

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

categories lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT). Queer theory roughly applies to theoretical work, typically informed by Foucault and Derrida, that aims to study and “deconstruct” heteronormative ideology.

Two main scholars in this area of research are Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Rationalism This is a philosophical approach usually opposed to empiricism. Its main thesis is that we can gain knowledge based only on reason and thus independently of experience. Plato is considered an early rationalist; modern rationalists are Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza.

Realism There are distinct types of realism relevant to distinct domains; in all cases, a realist asserts the existence of some kind of mind-independent entity. In contrast, an anti-realist would claim that those entities are mind-dependent, that is, they cannot exist independently of a mind conceiving or thinking of them. For example, a version of realism asserts the existence of universals, that is, properties and relations, over and above individuals. This kind of realism argues that, for example, redness (a property) and being-taller-than (a relation) exist independently of our knowledge. In this context, realism is the opposite view of nominalism.

Relativism Relativism is the view that there is no unique truth or correct belief. Most relativists claim that each person or culture has different sets of truth and fully justified beliefs even if these truths are inconsistent with each other and cannot even be consistently held by just one person or culture. Most often this position is held in the domain of ethics as the main thesis that there exist no universal ethical principles or imperatives and accordingly that there are no actions that are morally right or wrong for every individual or for every culture.



A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

595

Sexism See Androcentrism versus sexism.

Social constructionism This is the view that a great variety of objects are constructed by different types of social agents. Gender, race, sex, homo- and heterosexuality, and mental illness are commonly claimed to be social constructs. The causal agents of construction can be personal, for example, human beings, or impersonal, for example, cultural or political systems. Usually, the claim that an object is socially constructed is taken to deny that it is real in the same way as empirical reality; for example, physical objects are real.

Standpoint theory One of the three most important epistemologies and philosophies of science discussed by Sandra Harding in her important book The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); the other two were feminist empiricism and postmodernism. This theory originates from Hegel’s representation of the relationship between the master and the slave and from Marx’s development of Hegel’s representation. The focus of this approach to knowledge is the insight that each individual occupies a different “standpoint” or point of view in the social world that results in a privileged epistemic access to a certain portion of reality. In the case of social oppression such as patriarchy, the oppressed have a very different perspective from the point of view of the oppressor. However, the slaves or the oppressed must be able to understand the masters’ or the oppressors’ point of view for their own survival; thus, the oppressed have a better overall grasp of reality, including its system of power imbalance and discrimination because they have a more perceptive and complete grasp of different points of view than is available to the oppressors. All the three feminist philosophies of science named by Harding are still influential in the current debates despite having undergone significant changes.

596

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

Stereotype threat These terms denote problems originating from the power of gender schemas which include stereotypes based on rigidified gender roles. The expression “stereotype threat” however points out explicitly the dangers of allowing stereotypes and schemas to affect our thinking and the ways we socially relate to each other. Stereotypes about gender, race, class, sexual orientation, disability, and so forth are sets of beliefs often based on hasty generalizations or transmitted from generation to generation without being critically examined. Research has shown that members of underrepresented minorities need to be aware of the negative effects that stereotypes have on the ways privileged groups perceive them (Steele 1997; Spencer, Steele, and Quinn 1999; and Dar-Nimrod and Heine 2006). Just like gender schemas, stereotypes often operate without our awareness of them. Feminist analysis and discussion of them is necessary to bring them to our attention and to prevent their discriminatory and oppressive effects.

Strong and weak objectivity Sandra Harding coined these two labels to characterize two different conceptions of objectivity in her The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). “Weak” objectivity is the allegedly neutral position of those who ignore the effects that cultural and social locations exert on epistemic agents. In contrast to weak objectivity, Harding proposed “strong” objectivity as the position of those epistemic agents who acknowledge that all knowledge comes from a specific point of view and who make an effort to take on also the perspectives of those who are socially oppressed. These two conceptions of objectivity rely on the insights of feminist standpoint epistemologies that have stressed the impact of individual and cultural points of view in the creation of all types of knowledge. Helen Longino in her book The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) has further developed this debate by supporting a notion of objectivity that relies on the idea that theories are objective only if they have undergone a social process of critical examination.

Transgender and transsexual These terms denote different properties and are not synonymous. To understand the distinction, we need to assume that there is a viable distinction



A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

597

between gender, that is, the features socially and culturally associated with a certain gender role, and sex, that is, the biological features associated with the ascription of a certain sex. “Transgender” denotes an individual for whom the gender they were assigned at birth—which is usually ascribed on the basis of the sex characteristics of a baby—does not correspond to the gender which is part of their identity as a person. “Transsexual” denotes an individual for whom the sex they were assigned at birth on the basis of sex characteristics such as genitalia does not correspond to their sexual identity. In some cases, transsexual individuals decide to undergo medical procedures, for example, surgery and/or hormonal treatment, in order to align their body’s sexual features to the sex which is part of their identity as a person. As it is now much more widely known, sex features in babies are not always so decidedly classifiable as only male or female; there are intersexed individuals, that is, individuals who have male and female sexual characteristics. With broader acknowledgment of the life experiences and perspectives of intersex and transsexual individuals, more parents are foregoing corrective surgeries and hormonal treatment for babies whose sex organs do not conform to male or female types. Transgender individuals may not elect any type of sex reassignment, as the focus of the mistaken ascription they have been subjected to is not their sexual but their gender identity. For a useful reconstruction of the origins and development of these two terms, the social and political movements connected to them, and their relationships with feminist philosophies, see Talia Bettcher, (2014), “Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring. Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/feminism-trans/ (accessed July 30, 2017).

“Waves” of feminism The metaphor of the waves has been used extensively to describe three different phases of historical development of Western feminist movements. Although this metaphor has been more recently criticized for overlooking significant similarities and continuities among these distinct phases, it still occurs in the literature often enough to make it worth mentioning. The first wave corresponds to the struggles to obtain equal political representation and economic opportunities, mainly by liberal white feminists in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The second wave is often associated with the 1949 publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and is characterized by a fight for equality

598

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism

for women beyond legal rights. They call into discussion the distinction between public and private spheres and fought for equality in social institutions such as marriage, sexual mores, and sexuality. The third wave begins around the late 1980s and stresses the need to look beyond gender to understand the diversity of women by explicitly taking into consideration race, class, sexual orientation, disability, and many other intersecting systems of social discrimination.

Index ability differences  200 abortion  46, 87, 292, 356, 357, 360, 363, 368, 371, 459, 461, 468, 472 debate on  364, 366 abortion ethics and fetal moral status 394–5 feminist approach and  395–406 fetal status feminist view and  406–12 gradualism/relationality and  413–15 “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate” (Little)  407 abstract individualism  23 abstraction  89, 96, 97, 402 and idealization, distinction between 88 meta-theory of  90–5 achievement thesis and knowing community 201–3 active ignorance  490–1 adaptive preferences, problem of  494–5 Addams, Jane  6 advance directives, feminist approaches to patient proxy relationship  423–9 proxy accuracy studies and  430–2 shared agency and  432–5 treatment decision and  429–30 adversial method  581 “Aesthetic Dimension of Kantian Autonomy, The” (Kneller)  467 affectability imbalance  311 affectability imbalance and tracking violations 316–18 affective authority  348 agency  85, 88, 137, 147, 152, 261, 269, 303, 322, 367, 380, 382–3, 386, 388, 430, 434, 489, 493, 498, 545, 546 autonomous  375, 390 n.5 epistemic  271, 323 human  84, 85, 88, 89, 391 n.7 moral  260, 263–5, 271, 274 practical  124, 125, 129–30, 132, 133, 136, 138

rational  267, 273, 485, 488, 493, 495, 504 n.2 sexual  383, 387 shared 432–5 social 128 threat to  489 agent neutrality  430 agent relativity  429, 430 agnotology  182, 231 n.3, 281. See also ignorance Agonito, R.  12 A Kantian Critique of the Care Tradition (Varden) 473 Allais, Lucy  470 Altmann, Jeanne  251–2, 255 amelioration  99 n.3, 205 ameliorative approach, to conceptual analysis 444 American Philosophical Association  xvii, 7 American Philosophical Association (APA) 37–41 amphiboly 571 analogy 569 analytic and continental feminist philosophies 11–12 analytic feminism, concept of  582 “Analytic Feminism: A Brief Introduction” (Cudd) 9 “Analytic Feminism” (Garry)  9 analytic feminists  xvi, 3, 8, 17–23, 26–9, 40, 46, 53, 80, 175, 176, 215, 224, 226, 230, 355, 363, 365, 369, 416, 417, 483, 508, 584 analytic philosophy  3, 8, 10, 14 nn.4, 6, 15n.7, 17–24, 26, 29, 32 n.1, 37–8, 41 n.1, 46, 53, 175, 325, 367, 401 concept of  582–583 controversies about  4–5 and impact philosophy  223–6 of sex  144–66 analytic semi-manqué  18

600

Index

Anderson, Benedict  552 Anderson, Elizabeth  51, 91, 191 Anderson-Gold, Sharon  464 androcentrism  19–21, 40, 177, 189, 236, 247, 254 versus sexism  583 “Anglo-American feminist epistemology”  33 n.8 answerability 389 anti-black police brutality. See maladjusted epistemic salience “anti-black racism”  320 anti-realism  60, 116, 591, 594 Antony, Louise  21, 32 n.3, 99 n.2, 180, 215, 584 Appadurai, Arjun  542 appeal to force  570 appeal to ignorance  571 appeal to pity  570 appeal to unqualified authority  570 Appiah, K. Anthony  121 n.3, 124, 125, 135, 137 applied ethics  355, 363–5 applied metaphysics  45–6 “Approaches to Feminism” (Tuana)  11– 12 appropriative and transformative identifications, distinction between 206 Aquinas, Thomas  359 Arendt, Hannah  501 argument, concept of  583–4 argument, in valid form  573–6 argument against person  570 Aristotle  45, 272–5, 300, 359 ascriptive normativity  127–30, 137 asocial metaphysics  70 asocial reality  63, 67, 70–4, 77 Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir  50, 56 n.2, 99 n.1, 121 n.8, 130–1, 139 n.7, 140 nn.11–12 asymmetry  344–5, 459, 460, 467, 473, 537 Audi, Robert  274, 278 n.11 Austin, J. L.  20, 27 authenticity, in choice and action  387 authoritarianism  347, 537, 549 authority  180, 182, 222, 229, 261, 274, 291, 313–14, 317, 322, 348, 356, 366, 375–91, 424, 425, 428, 430–2, 494, 535, 536, 569, 570

affective 348 political  384, 535 authority interest  391 n.14 autonomous agency  375, 390 n.5 autonomous agent  22, 265, 269, 295, 361, 379, 390, 494 autonomy  21, 46, 65, 94, 126, 128, 139–40 n.9, 176, 224, 265, 268–70, 273, 295, 296, 345, 350 n.7, 366 bodily 364 loss of  492 relational  22, 140 n.9 as sovereign practical authority  377–9 toward a unified view of  386–90 of women, and sexual harassment 491–2 Autonomy and Community (Axinn)  467–8 Axinn, Sidney  467 Baehr, Amy  499 Baier, Annette  469 Baker, Lynne Rudder  92, 96 Barnes, Elizabeth  55 n.1, 56 n.1, 58, 59, 74, 77 n.1 Baron, Marcia W.  464, 465, 467, 477 n.6 Bartky, Sandra  504 n.3 Basu, Amrita  551 Battersby, Christine  99 n.1 Baxley, Anne Margaret  477 n.4 Beaney, Michael  4–5, 10, 14 nn.1, 3–6, 583 Beard, Mary  345 “Beautiful and Sublime” (Kant)  462 Bechdel test  504 n.3 Beeghly, Erin  442, 455 nn.2–3 begging the question  571 “Being Objective and Being Objectified” (Haslanger)  99 n.2 Benhabib, Seyla  270–1, 464 Bernard, S.  391 n.10 Beske, Jamon  xvii Bettcher, Talia Mae  50, 140 n.15, 593, 597 Bhabha, Homi  542 bias  83, 94, 190, 197, 202, 212, 217, 218, 222, 226, 228, 265, 270, 289, 290, 301, 304, 311, 364, 426, 428–9, 501 confirmation 72 feminist concerns with  214–16

Index gender  13, 115–16, 175, 268, 299, 533 implicit  385, 443, 455 n.5, 589 male  21, 40, 357–9 paradox  21–2, 180, 182, 584 social  189, 216, 220 unconscious 500 “Bias Paradox, The” (Heikes)  584 binary sex differences  157 bioethics 363–4 biological essentialism alternative to  116 Foucault-type of argument against 113 biological normativity  127 Black Lives Matter (BLM) campaign  310– 12, 314 Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, The (Friedman and Bolte)  369 Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy, The (Dainton; Robinson)  10, 583 Blum, Lawrence  441–4, 446, 447, 449, 451, 456 n.7, 456 n.9 Bolte, Angela  363, 369 Bordalo, P.  455 n.3 Bordo, Susan  179 Bounds of Justice (O‘Neill)  474 Boyd, Rekia  310, 311, 315, 317, 325 Boylan, Jennifer Finney  132, 140 n.17 Bramer, Marilea  473 Brennan, Samantha  360–2, 369, 370, 401, 402 Brentano, Franz  10 Briggle, Adam  225 Brister, Evelyn  181, 182 Buckwalter, W.  12, 13 Burbules, Nicholas  269, 272, 278 n.11 Buroker, Jill  464 Burton, Antoinette  554 n.11 Butler, Judith  6, 20, 48, 69, 76, 175, 391 n.9, 454 #ByeAnita campaign  315 Byrd, B. Sharon  464 Calhoun, Cheshire  12, 581 Callahan, Joan  7, 9, 362, 371 nn.2–3 Callahan, Sidney  404 Call for Papers  31, 33 n.8 Callicott, Baird  225

601

Cambridge School of Analysis  14 n.6 Campbell, Richmond  230 n.2 Cancer Wars (Proctor)  285 “Can Kant’s Ethics Survive the Feminist Critique?” (Sedgwick)  466 capabilities approach  522–3 promise of  523–4 Carby, Hazel  347 Card, Claudia  19, 28, 362 care-based feminism  404 care relations and Kant  472–3 Caring (Nodding)  356 Cartesian reason  271 categorical syllogism  566 causal inference  569 causal model, of male sexual determination 246–7 causal social construction  104, 105, 107–8, 112, 113, 117, 120, 121 n.7, 149, 150–1, 153, 158, 166 n.13 Chant, Sylvia  527 n.7 Chignell, A.  456 n.6 China 541 circularity objection, to factors prior to social construction  68–9 response to  71–2 circumstantial necessity  137 civic engagement  310–11, 315–17, 323, 325, 326 n8 Clark Miller, Sarah  473, 474 class  6–8, 19, 24, 48, 49, 55, 90, 125, 128–9, 132–4, 136, 141 n.20, 174, 179, 191–3, 196, 200, 205, 238, 266, 297, 331, 337, 340, 341, 397, 489, 490, 532, 533, 544, 545, 548, 550 Clifford, James  554 n.10 Clough, Sharyn  22, 32 n.4, 191, 227 Code, Lorraine  185 n.2, 209 n.14 coercive interpretation  499 cogent argument  570 Cohen, Daniel  581 coherence argument 126–7 internal 194 collective intentionality  109, 116 collective self-determination  538 Collegium of Black Women Philosophers 28 Collins, Patricia Hill  191–2, 209 n.17, 341

602

Index

Colombier, Arabella  140 n.13 colors, significance of  61 Combahee River Collective  330 community-based ignorance  287, 292–293 complex question  571 composition 571 compulsory heterosexuality  329–32 Mills as feminist separatist and  338–48 questionable motivations argument and 333–6 racial solidarity argument and  336–8 concept-dependent social constructionism  115, 116, 119 conceptual analysis  582 conceptual choices  98 conclusion indicators  564 conferralism  131, 140 nn.11–12 conferred property  50 Conkey, Margaret  293 consciousness  198, 208 n.3, 405, 406, 414, 418 n.8, 427, 433 diasporic 542 political 20 self- 126 transnational  541–2, 548, 550 consistency  76, 91, 178, 194, 217, 222, 438 logical  19, 40 constitutive social construction  104–8, 111, 112, 114, 117, 120, 149, 151–3, 155, 158, 166 n.13 contemporary standpoint theory  188–9 achievement thesis and knowing community and  201–3 background 191–3 as contextual  193 identity and  203–7 merging feminist empiricism and standpoint 193–5 methodology and epistemology and 195–201 normative 193 contextual empiricism and scientific objectivity 220–3 contextualism 181–2 contextual values  91 Continental feminism  11–12, 584

continental philosophy  4, 10, 14 n.4, 20, 584–585, 587, 588 Conway, Erik  281, 285, 286 Copi, Irving  561 Correll, S. J.  391 n.10 cosmopolitan, feminism as  509 cosmopolitan justice  522 Could It Be Worth Thinking about Kant on Marriage? (Herman)  467 counter-narratives, role of  64–6 Crane, Tim  3, 5, 8, 339 Crasnow, Sharon  41, 181, 208 n.7, 231 n.9 Creager, Angela N.  256 n.1 “Creating the Kingdom of Ends” (Creating the Kingdom of Ends)  466 credibility deficient  322 Creed v. Family Express Corporation 452 Crenshaw, Kimberle  209 n.17 critical social realism (CSR)  83, 84, 90 critical theory  20, 88–9, 469 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant)  463 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)  464 Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant) 464 Cross-method communication  27 cross-methodological work, recent examples and future suggestions 29–32 Crow, Jane  314 Crow, Jim  314 crude conventionalism  412 Cudd, Ann  xv, xvi, 3, 4, 9, 14 n.1, 18, 19, 28, 29, 32 n.2, 40, 41 n.1, 134, 139 n.7, 399, 474, 582 Cullors, Patrice  310 cultural “creolization”  543 cultural Catholics  18 cultural domination  504 n.3 cultural hybridization  542 cultural relativism  261 cultural stereotypes  442–3, 447, 449–51, 452, 454, 455 culture-dependent social constructionism  111–14, 119–20 “Curious Disappearances” (Dotson and Gilbert)  310–11, 316 Dainton, Barry  10, 583

Index Daly, Mary  27, 28, 32 n.5 Danton, Barry  4 Darbellay, Aurélien  121 n.5 Daston, Lorraine  213 Davidson, Donald  32 n.4 De Beauvoir, Simone  5, 6, 24, 31, 45, 47, 475, 587, 597 “Decision procedures, standards of rightness, and impartiality” (Stark) 467 deductive argument  564–6, 590 “Defense of Abortion, A” (Thomson)  399, 472 “deliberative perspective”  432–3 Dembroff, Robin  350 n.1 demeaning message and sex stereotypes 446–8 de Melo-Martín, Inmaculada  226 dependency, idea of  459, 460 dependency, issue of  474 de Pisan, Christine  6 Descartes, R.  282–3 descriptive stereotypes  453 determined ignorance  490, 491 DeVault, Margaret  194, 198 DeVore, Irven  248 Dewey, John  271, 283 Diallo, Nafissatou  316 diaspora  541–2, 548 Diaz-Leon, Esa  52, 54, 120 n.1, 121 nn.4, 9, 209 n.16 “Difference and Dominance” (MacKinnon) 66 different voices model  585 Dillon, Robin S.  41, 465, 466 “Diotima’s Ghost” (Walker)  10 Dirlik, Arif  549 disempowerment 316 diversity importance, in scientific knowledge producing communities 303–5 division 571 Dixon, James  315 Dobkin, Alix  28 “Doctrine of Right”  463, 470–3, 496–8 “Doctrine of Virtue”  496 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen)  386, 388–9 dominance intercourse as  145–8

603

male 248–9 domination  271, 338, 340 Dotson, Kristie  13, 32 n.7, 183, 316, 321, 326 n.10, 490 Douglas, Heather  32 n.4 Dresser, Rebecca  424, 427, 432, 433 Dummett, Michael  4, 10 Durkheim 296 “Duty and Desolation” (Langton)  466 Dworkin, Andrea  28, 53, 144–8, 159–64, 165 nn.2–3, 11, 166 n.13, 341, 342, 350 n.11, 365, 471 Dworkin, Ronald  424, 450 Early Modern Social Contractarians  65 Eastern nationalism  537 Eastwood, Mary O.  3 6 n.6 Eaton, A. W.  365 egalitarian metaphysics  97 Eigi, Jaana  223 Eliot, George  475 Emanuel, Ezekiel  425, 428, 429, 432 Emanuel, Linda  425, 428, 429, 432 embeddedness, concept of  93–4, 96, 272, 339, 376, 391 n.14 embodied sexual experience and erotic situation 161 embodiment 459 Kant and  471–2 modes, with men and women  345 empathy  267, 278 n.10, 490, 500, 519 nonobjective 251 empirical adequacy  90, 194 empiricism, concept of  177, 181, 263, 585–6. See also individual entries empty-category version, of social constructionism 116 engendering  139 n.8 Enlightenment project  176 epistemic agency  271 epistemic authority and ignorance  180 epistemic defect  441 epistemic ignorance  31, 180 epistemic injustice  30–1, 32 n.6, 33 n.8, 172, 324, 489–91 Epistemic Injustice (Fricker)  30 Epistemic Injustice in Practice 31 epistemic modesty  75 epistemic oppression  321, 324

604

Index

epistemic privilege  533–4 epistemic structures  330 epistemic violence and affectability imbalance 311 epistemic virtues  194. See also reasonableness, as epistemic virtue epistemologies of ignorance  30 Epistemologies of Resistance (Medina)  324 epistemology  4, 20–3, 29, 30, 31, 32 n.3, 33 n.8, 39, 41 n.1, 46, 75, 93, 132, 171– 85, 188–95, 202, 203, 206–8, 214, 215, 216, 218, 220, 223, 224, 226, 228, 231 nn.3–4, 7, 237, 260, 263, 273–6, 282–5, 287, 324, 325, 355, 371 n.7, 401, 586, 587, 590–2, 595, 596 heterosexuality 329–51 social  209 n.19, 222, 225, 229, 231 n.6 standpoint methodology and  195–201 equality  21, 230 n.2, 263, 274, 276, 359, 400, 403, 460, 462, 515, 524, 597–8 democracy and  549–50, 552 epistemic  229, 260, 261 freedom and  467, 500, 508, 509 gender  5, 6, 58, 397, 545 lack of  269 race 6 sexual  165 n.12 social 12 equivocation 571 eroticized abjection  159, 160 Erotic Life of Racism, The (Holland)  350 n.7 esoteric metaphysics  97 essentialism  53, 55, 109–13, 119, 123–7, 133–6, 138, 139 nn.6–7, 141 n.21, 176, 203, 264, 544, 547, 586 essentialism and gender essentialism  586 ethics and political philosophy, link between 362 Ethics and Sex (Primoratz)  155 Ethics of Need, The (Clark Miller)  473 ethnicity  200, 202, 205 European Society for Analytical Philosophy  14 n.2 Evan, Mary Ann  475 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick  32 n.6, 340, 350 n.5 Excitable Speech (Butler)  391 n.9 explanatory power  194

explicit associations  439–40 Eze, Emmanuel  271 fairness, justice as  265, 266, 268, 269 fallacies 569–70 false cause  571 false dichotomy objection, to factors prior to social construction  69 response to  72–3 Fanon 31 Farley, Lin  198 Fate of Knowledge (Longino)  596 Fausto-Sterling, Anne  65, 69, 70, 152, 244–6 Federici, Silvia  350 n.10 Fedigan, Linda M.  256 Fehr, Carla  231 n.9, 256 n.1 Female Primates (Small)  257 n.3 feminism. See individual entries “Feminism as Meeting Place”  29 “Feminism in Metaphysics” (Haslanger) 71 Feminist, Kantian Conception of the Right to Bodily Integrity (Varden) 472 feminist empiricism  30, 177, 183, 184, 188–92, 199, 207–8, 231 n.4, 238, 586–7, 595 merging with standpoint theory  193–5 feminist empiricists  20, 29–30, 177, 178, 181 feminist epistemology  171–3, 179–180, 185 n.1 and philosophy of science  173–5 varieties of  175–9 Feminist Epistemology, Methodology, Metaphysics and Science Studies (FEMMSS) 28 feminist ethics  356, 369–70 applied ethics and  363–5 origins of  356–9 and political philosophy  361–3, 370 theoretical foundations of  359–61 Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) 28 “Feminist Explorations in Feminist Ethics” (conference) 360

Index “Feminist History of Philosophy” (Witt; Shapiro) 11 Feminist Interpretations of Kant (Schott) 467 feminist metaphysics  45–7, 52, 56 n.1 different conception of metaphysics for 74–6 feminists against  62–74 gender as analytical lens for  47–51 metaphysicians against  59–60 feminist objections, defending metaphysics against 70–4 feminist philosophers categorizing, by philosophical methods 22–5 not using methodological labels  26–9 using methodological labels  25–6 feminist philosophical accounts, and abortion 398–406 Feminist Philosophical Quarterly 31 feminist philosophies, of science  236–8 case studies  244–53 contextualism in  238–43 scientific theorizing and knowledge, social nature of  243–4 feminist postmodernism  587 feminist primatologists  250 feminist standpoint theory  29–31 “Feminist Themes in Unlikely Places” (Moen) 467 feminist virtue epistemology  178 fetus and abortion  404–6 Figdor C.  13 Flikschuh, Katrin  477 n.4 focus-generated ignorance  288, 293–4 Foucault, Michel  24, 68, 175, 271, 296 Foucault-type social constructionists  113 framework-centered ignorance  288, 294–7 Frankfurt, Harry  135–6, 367, 424 Fraser, Rachel  183 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (Frankfurt)  424 free will and determinism  46 Frege, Gottlob  4, 10, 14 n.6, 17, 46 Fricker, Miranda  30, 92, 489 Friedan, Betty  6 Friedman, Marilyn  268–70, 363, 369, 477 n.6 Frodeman, Robert  225

605

Frontiero v. Richardson 451 Frye, Marilyn  19, 27, 32 n.6, 165 n.5, 329, 330, 448, 449, 454, 456 n.20, 490, 495, 497, 501 “Fucking the Police” example  160–3 Fudge, Judy  527 n.9 fundamental metaphysics  84 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  14 n.3, 175 Galison, Peter  213 Garavaso, Pieranna  185 n.5, 231 n.9, 390 n.1, 435 Gardner, Eric  315 Garfinkel, Harold  68, 77 n.1 Garry, Anne  xv, 9, 32 n.1, 37, 205–6, 209 n.18 Garza, Alicia  310 Gatens, Moira  343 gender  21, 123–5, 138 n.2, 202, 205, 341–2. See also individual entries as analytical lens for feminist metaphysics 47–51 as distinct from sex  62, 104 ascribed from third-person perspective argument 130–3 ascriptivism 124 bias 115–16 diversity 134–5 equality  5, 6, 58, 397, 545 essentialism  53, 124–7, 136 expression freedom, restricting  452–4 identity, as map  128–9 nominalism  48–9, 133–5, 141 n.20 as not essential to persons argument 127–30 ontology of  50 and race, and social construction 105–7 realism  49, 133 sexuality and  363 skepticism 48 social individuals ontology and  126–7 as social universal  133–5 uniessentialism  50, 53, 124, 135 universalism  124–5, 133, 135 unthinkable and inescapable and  135–7

606

Index

“Gender and Philosophical Intuition” (Buckwalter; Stich)  12 gendered dominance/subordination and intercourse, linking  160–3 gendered metaphors  241–3 gendered vulnerability  510, 527 n.7 gender justice  50, 51, 80, 369, 509, 531, 533–4, 546, 547, 551–3 gender-neutrality 402 gender oppression. See oppression gender realism  49 gender schemas  588 gender skepticism  48 gender stereotypes  241, 243 gender versus sex  587 generic generalizations  440 gestational relationship  407–8 Get Out (Peele)  350 n.8 Ghaeus, Anca  527 n.9 Giladi, Paul  33 n.8 Gilbert, Maria  183, 310–11, 316 Gilbert, Scott F.  247, 256 Gilligan, Carol  356–8, 404, 466, 585 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins  489 Ginsborg, Hannah  465 Ginsburg, Justice  397, 403 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader  475 Glasgow, Joshua  121 n.3 “global care chain” phenomenon  527 n.9 global ethics of care  516–17 caring for distant others and  519–21 injustice and absence of care and  521–2 moral concern and  517–19 global feminism  544 global gender justice  533 global injustice  369, 507–8, 526 capabilities approach and  522–4 gendered dimensions of  508–11 global ethics of care and  516–22 global institutionalism and  511–16 global institutionalism  511–12 and gender injustice  512–16 global justice  368, 507–11, 514, 519, 525, 527 n.8, 533 Global North  510, 520, 539, 540, 548 Global South  216, 510, 554 n.5 global sisterhood movement  545

Gloy, Karen  464 Gold, Howard  477 n.4 Golden Holocaust (Proctor)  285 Goldman, Alan  155 Goldman, Emma  6 Gorovitz, Samuel  561 gradualism  395, 405, 407, 412, 419 n.16 and relationality  413–15 Grahle, André  477 n.4 Grant, Judith  153 Grasswick, Heidi  41, 171, 172, 185 n.1 Gregor, Mary J.  464 Grewal, Inderpal  543, 546–8 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, The (Kant)  463, 465 Gutmann, Amy  278 n.9 Habermas, Jürgen  14 n.3, 175 Hall, Stuart  542 Hampton, Jean  464, 477 n.10, 500, 505 n.11 Hannerz, Ulf  543, 554 n.10 Hansen, Jennifer  11 Hanson, N.R.  238 Haraway, Donna  69, 219, 251 Harding, Sandra  22, 65, 93, 173, 177, 179–80, 185 n.6, 188–91, 195–7, 200–1, 208, 209 n.10, 215–20, 225–7, 231 nn.4, 7, 586, 587, 592, 595, 596 Harman, Elizabeth  418 n.8 Harnois, Catherine  7 Harris, Lisa  414 Hartsock, Nancy  224 Haslanger, Sally  21, 49, 51, 56 n.2, 71, 83, 90, 93, 97, 99 nn.1–3, 105, 107, 120 n.1, 121 n.4, 133, 140 nn.10, 16, 18, 149, 205, 230, 342, 444, 455 n.5, 456 n.9 hasty generalization  571 Hawkesworth, Mary  296 Hay, Carol  19, 368, 474, 483, 493–6, 504 nn.4–5 Health Professionals Follow-Up Study 298 hedonist accounts of sex  155, 156, 158 Hegel, Georg  176, 359 Heidegger, Martin  273 Heidemann, Ingeborg  464 Heikes, Deborah  182, 278 n.1, 584

Index Heil, John  60 Held  516–18, 526 n.6 Held, David  509 Held, Virginia  513 Hempel, Carl  32 n.4, 239 Herbert, Maria von  466 Herman, Barbara  464, 465, 467, 471, 472 hermeneutic injustice  490 hermeneutics  14 n.3, 23, 184, 296, 316, 319, 320, 588–9 Herr, Ranjoo S.  369, 554 n.12 heterogeneity, of women  48, 49 heteronormativity  76, 589, 594 heteropatriarchy  317, 325 heterosexism  470–1, 476 Hicks, Dan  208 n.8 hidden agenda objection, to factors prior to social construction  69–70 response to  73–4 High, Dallas  434 Hildegard of Bingen  6 Hill, Thomas E., Jr.  477 n.6 Hines, Melissa  301 History of Ideas on Women (Agonito)  12 History of Sexuality (Foucault)  68 Hoagland, Sarah  28 Hobbes, Thomas  65, 296 Hochschild, Arlie R.  527 n.9 Hofweber, Thomas  97 Hohfeld, Wesley  378 Holland, Sharon P.  335, 350 n.7 Holtman, Sarah  474 Holtzclaw, Daniel  310, 322, 323 Hornsby, Jennifer  382 Hosein, Adam  367, 456 n.19 “How Feminism Is Rewriting the Philosophical Canon” (Witt) 10 “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” (Dotson) 13 Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer  252–3, 255 Hubbard, Ruth  256 n.1 human dignity  522 human rights  519 Hume, David  261, 262, 278 nn.2–3, 283, 296, 381 Hurley, Patrick  561 Hursthouse, Rosalind  406, 418 n.10 Huseyinzadegan, Dilek  496

607

Husserl, Edmund  10, 14 n.3, 24 hylomorphism 76 Hynes, Patricia H.  527 n.7 Hypatia (journal)  9, 30, 40, 41 n.1, 171, 399 Ibsen, Henrik  386, 388 ideal-as descriptive model  87, 89–90, 98, 99 n.3 ideal-as-idealized-model  87, 99 n.3 ideal-as-model 87 ideal-as-normative model  87, 99 n.3 identity 202–3. See also individual entries contextual account of  205 essentialism  139 n.6, 141 n.21 gendered 204 ignorance as active construct  284–7 knowledge of women and  302–5 as passive construct  287–8 as virtuous  288–90, 299–302 of women, actively constructed  290–1 of women, passively constructed  292–9 traditional philosophical conception of 282–4 Ignorance (Unger)  282 immanent strategy, to theorizing  93 impartiality  174, 179, 180, 213 imperfect duties  487, 498 implicit associations  440–1 In a Different Voice (Gilligan)  356, 466, 585 India 541 individual essentialism  139 n.6 individualist approach, of stereotypes  442 Indonesia 549 inductive argument  564, 565, 568, 569, 590 inductive generalization  569 inegalitarian pornography  365 inequality  146, 165 n.9, 260, 265 social  3, 8, 9, 171, 214, 215, 219, 224 injustice  9, 40, 51, 83, 87, 89, 90, 92, 123, 341, 349, 418 n.6, 445, 496, 497, 501, 527 n.9, 543 absence of care and  521–2 epistemic  30–1, 32 n.6, 33 n.8, 172, 324, 489–91

608

Index

gender  50, 509, 511–17, 522, 524, 525, 527 n.8 global  369, 507–26 hermeneutic  490, 533 systemic  461, 473–4 testimonial 489–90 integration, goal of  25–6 intellectual capacity, of women  299–300 Intemann, Kristen  29–30, 193, 195, 199, 226, 231 n.4 intentionalist accounts of sex  155, 158–9 Interconnected systems, of discrimination  9, 177 Intercourse (Dworkin)  145–6, 165 n.2 intercourse. See sexual activity interest-based objectivity  195, 208 n.7 internal resistance  487 internal self-determination  538 international feminism  544 International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 364 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 37 interpretive judgments  221 intersectionality  6, 8, 27, 31, 33 n.9, 130, 134, 174, 200, 205–6, 209 nn.13, 18, 493, 502, 532, 589–90 “Intersections between Analytic and Continental Feminism” (Warnke) 12 intersubjectivity  180, 200, 266 intimacy 161–2 Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies, An  185 n.6 invalid argument  567, 568 Irigaray, Luce  6, 175 Isaac, Jeffrey  296 Jackson, Frank  96 Jaggar, Alison  19, 22, 359–61, 371 n.3, 401–3, 533 Jamaica 550 Janack, Marianne  172, 213 Jastrow, Robert  285 Jauch, Ursula Pia  465 Jenkins, Katharine  13, 53, 128, 132, 140 nn.10, 15–16, 18, 350 n.11, 371 n.7 Jerpersen, Darlene  453 Jeske, Diane  4, 370

Jespersen v. Harrah's Operating Co. 453 Johnson, Marsha P.  324 Jones, Aiyanna Stanley  310 Jones, Edward P.  385 Jones, Karen  368, 488, 493, 498, 504 nn.3, 6 Journal of the American Medical Association 298 justice  19, 23, 32, 40, 52, 85–7, 92, 260–1, 263, 265, 267, 270, 271, 276, 278 n.10, 321, 324, 357–61, 404, 460, 463, 468, 471–3, 497, 499, 507, 513, 517, 521, 523–4, 585, 586 cosmopolitan  511, 522 gender  50, 51, 80, 369, 509, 531, 533–4, 546, 547, 551–3 global  368, 507–11, 514, 519, 525, 527 n.8, 533 as fairness  265, 266, 268, 269 political conception of  267, 268 reproductive  397, 417 n.3 social  83, 89, 90, 105, 107, 140 n.18, 174, 183, 195, 205, 312, 325, 503, 509, 511, 515, 590 Justice, Gender, and the Family (Okin)  477 n.6 justification, notion of  172 Kant, Immanuel  24, 182, 260–4, 268–70, 277, 278 nn.4–7, 10, 359, 367–9, 496, 498–9 on Doctrine of Right  497–9 on self-respect  484 Kant’s moral theory and feminist ethics 459–61 comments about women and 461–4 feminist themes in contemporary Kant scholarship and  468–74 Kantian feminist scholarship growth in 1980s and 1990s and  465–8 pioneering women Kant scholars history and  464–5 “Kant’s Racism” (Allais)  470 “Kant and Social Sentiments” (PauerStuder) 467 Kant and the Limits of Autonomy (Shell) 469 “Kant and Women” (Varden)  470

Index “Kantian Ethics and Claims of Detachment” (Baron)  467 Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism (Hay) 368 “Kantian Justice and Poverty Relief ” (Holtman) 474 Kantian Theory of Sexuality, A (Varden)  477 n.11 “Kant on Moral Agency and Women’s Nature” (Mikkola)  470 Kant on Sex. Reconsidered (Varden)  477 n.11 Kant-Studien (journal)  464 Kaplan, Caren  543, 546–8 Kaplan, Gisela  544 Keller, Evelyn Fox  256 n.1 kind essentialism  134, 139 n.6 Kirkham, George  527 n.7 Kitcher, Patricia  464 Kittay, Eva F.  527 nn.9, 11 Kleingeld, Pauline  466 Klenk, (“Ginger”) Virginia  37–40, 42 n.2 Kneller, Jane  465, 467, 477 n.9 knowing communities  201–3, 209 n.19 knowledge, significance of  176 Known World, The (Jones)  385 Kohlberg, Lawrence  356, 357 Korsgaard, Christine  464–6, 471 Kourany, Janet  182, 191 Kripke, Saul  139 n.6, 141 n.21 Kuhn, Thomas  194, 208 n.6, 283 Kukla, Rebecca  276, 278 n.11 Langer, Claudia  465 Langton, Rae  165 n.7, 382–5, 466, 471 laryngeal prominence (Adam’s apple)  157 law-like generalizations  110–11, 118, 119 Layne, Linda  406, 408, 409, 419 n.20 Lenehan, Rose  456 n.9 Lerner, A.  455 n.1 Leslie, S.  455 n.1 Lewis, D.  121 n.6 liberalism  22, 23, 89, 94, 268, 270, 272, 335, 371, 394, 396–8, 400, 402, 409, 472, 473, 493, 497–500, 503, 513, 518–19, 525, 537–8, 542, 550, 554 n.7, 597 liberal pro-choice view  396–8 Lind, Marcia  278 n.1

609

Lindemann Nelson, Hilde  363–4, 367, 435 “linguistic turn”  4, 14 n.3, 37 Lippert-Rasmussen, K.  456 n.8 Little, Margaret  405–8, 410, 412, 419 n.17 Lloyd, Eisabeth A.  256 n.1 Lloyd, Genevieve  179 logical consistency  19, 40 logical positivism  590 Longino, Helen  175, 177–80, 185 n.6, 190, 195, 199, 208 n.8, 209 n.11, 215, 220–2, 224–6, 231 nn.4–7, 596 Longuenesse, Béatrice  464 loose battery of criteria, for theory choice 95–6 Lorde, Audre  13, 21, 27, 347, 503, 505 n.17 Ludlow, Jeannie  406, 419 n.21 Lugones, Maria  28 Luker, Kristin  417 n.3 Luna, Zakiya  417 n.3 Lunbeck, Elizabeth  256 n.1 Lynn, Joanne  434–5 McAfee, Noëlle  370 McCandless 330–1 McDowell, John  275–6 McGeer, Victoria  488–9 McGowan, Mary Kate  382, 391 n.8 Mackenzie, Catriona  366, 376, 391 nn.12–13, 409, 411, 419 nn.13, 16 MacKinnon, Catherine  66, 67, 71, 365, 382, 383, 397, 403, 471 McKinnon, Rachel  137, 139 n.3, 141 nn.23, 25 McKitrick, Jennifer  52, 140 n.14 MacLachlan, Alice  379, 380, 500–2, 505 nn.14, 16 McMillan, Nicola  33 n.8 McSweeney, Michaela  456 n.13 mainstream “metaphysics”  63, 70, 75–6, 80, 82, 97 characteristics of  59–60 narrowness of  60–1 terminological and substantive  61–2 mainstream epistemology  176–7 Maitra, Ishani  382 maladjusted epistemic salience (MES)  310–11, 318–19

610

Index

affectability imbalance and tracking violations and  316–18 for black women and girls  321–3 objections 323–4 resentment as tracking wrongs and 311–12 resentment of oppressive state and 312–14 Say Her Name campaign and  314–16 as structural  319–21 male bias  21 male desire  340 male dominance  248–50. See also oppression male supremacy  341, 342 Mallon, Ron  120 n.1 manipulation hypothesis  253 Markowitz, Sally  403 Marques, Teresa  107, 108 Marquis, Don  398–9 marriage institution of  472–3 Martin, Emily  256 n.1 Marx, Karl  20, 22, 176, 296 Mason, Rebecca  121 n.10 masturbation 156 Maus, Ingeborg  464 Mayberry, Maralee  256 n.1 Medina, José  32 n.7, 324, 490, 501 Mendus, Susan  477 n.7 Merchant, Carolyn  256 n.1 Merchants of Doubt (Conway and Oreskes) 285 Merleau-Ponty  20, 69 Merton, Robert  248 metaethics  39, 81, 355, 497 metaphysics. See also individual entries applied 45–6 asocial 70 concept of  591 egalitarian 97 esoteric 97 fundamental 84 mainstream  59–63, 70, 75–6, 80, 82, 97 non-ideal 80–90 serious 96 substantive 61–2 Metaphysics of Gender, The (Witt)  139 n.7 Metaphysics of Morals, The (Kant)  463

methodological humility  534 methodological labels  24–6 feminist philosophers not using  26–9 feminist philosophers using  25–6 and narrowness as virtue, opposition to 24–5 methodology 195–201 and epistemology, distinction between 196 methodology-created ignorance  288, 297–9 Mikkola, Mari  xvi, 48, 51, 52, 55 n.1, 56 n.1, 99 n.1, 121 n.2, 139 n.7 Milazzo, Marzia  350 n.9 Mill, Charles  52 Mill, J.S.  450, 460 Mill, John Stuart  6, 20, 260, 261 Millett, Kate  28 Mills, Charles  30, 87, 90, 98, 121 n.3, 183, 278 n.8, 332, 335–8, 350 n.4 as feminist separatist  338–48 mind/body problem  46 mind-independence  59, 62, 67, 68, 71, 74 Mind of One’s Own, A (Antony; Witt)  32 n.3, 99 n.2, 584 Mirzakhani, Maryam  447 modernism moral failings of  262–5 overturning of  265–70 Moen, Marcia  467 Mohanty, Chandra  545 Moi, Toril  68 Moore  4, 14 nn.3, 6, 17 moral action  264 moral agency  265, 271 failure of  263 moral agents  261, 266 ideal 460 Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, The (Warren) 399 moral anthropology  470 moral arguments  402 moral authority  261 moral beings  260 moral category  499 moral claims  511 moral commitment  362

Index moral community  409, 515 moral concerns  445, 516 moral defect  441 moral development  356, 357 moral dilemma  357 moral duty  404, 408, 485, 498 moral expectation  403 moral experience  359 moral freedom  476 moral gravity  420 n.22 moral guardianship  409 moral interpretation  499 morality  262, 263. See also individual entries feminist ethics and  361–2 moral judgment  356 moral law  466 moral life  520 moral maturity  357 moral motivations  501 moral obligation  408, 492, 498 moral perspective  404 moral philosophy  401, 404, 466 moral power  379 moral psychologists  390 n.2 moral psychology  355 moral reasoning  358 moral reflection  362 moral relevance  360, 362 moral respect  270 moral response  502 moral responsibility  73, 366 moral significance  360, 361, 379, 409, 411, 484, 516 “Moral Significance of Birth, The” (Warren) 399 moral situation  380 moral standing  265, 366, 397, 398, 405, 409, 411 moral status  365, 487, 515. See also abortion ethics and fetal moral status moral theory, of Kant  478 n.13 moral value  178 moral vice  56 n.1 moral world  263 moral worth  265 moral writings  469 Morgan, Robin  545

611

Morgan, Seiriol  158–64, 166 n.17 Moss, Michael  281, 285 Moulton, Janice  581 Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT) 297 Murray, Pauli  326 n.6 Nagel, Thomas  141 n.24, 154, 429 Nancy, Tuana  11, 350 n.9, 371 n.4 Narayan, Uma  383 National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act (1993)  297, 298 nationalism 369, 531–53, 553 n.3, 554 n.6 nationality 205 nation-state  362, 509, 518, 523, 534–6, 538–41, 543–53, 553 n.3 natural essentialism  203 naturalism, concept of  591 naturalized epistemology  21 natural kinds  117–20, 121 n.10 natural sexuality  68 necessary and sufficient conditions, distinction between  572 Nelson, Julie  66, 71, 294 Nelson, Lynn Hankinson  32 n.4, 177, 181–2, 190, 256 n.1 neoclassical economics and conceptual framework 294–5 neoliberal feminism  533 neoliberalism 539 Nerheim, Hjørdis  465 Nettles, Islan  310, 311, 315, 317, 325 neutral approach, of stereotypes  442 Nickel, B.  455 n.1 Nierenberg, William  285 Niesen, Peter  477 n.4 nipples, sexual pleasure from  156–7 Noddings, Nel  356–8, 404 Nolan, Lawrence  61 nominalism  48–9, 133, 135, 141 n.20 concept of  591–2 resemblance 134 non-ideal metaphysics, feminist metaphysics as  80–3 metaphysical lessons and  95–8 metaphysical theories and aims and 83–5 meta-theory of abstraction and  90–5

612

Index

political philosophy and theory of 85–90 non-ideal theory, notion of  52 nonliberal nationalism  537–8 nonobjective empathy  251 Norlock, Kathryn  xv, 9, 14 n.1, 18, 28, 32 n.2, 41 normative approach, of stereotypes  441–2 normative authority  366, 376 normative ethical theories  355 normative ideals  88–9 normative individualism  513, 518, 519, 523 normative powers  379–81, 386, 391 n.7 normativity  271, 272, 274, 275 unity 126 Nozick, Robert  272–3, 278 n.12 Nussbaum, Martha  118, 165 n.7, 368, 508, 518, 522, 523, 525, 527 n.12 objectification  147, 148, 165 n.7 and objectivity, link between  230 n.1 sexual  459, 467, 468, 471 objective reality  63 objectivity  17, 19, 21, 40, 51, 60–3, 66–8, 71, 75, 77, 94, 110, 111, 113, 117, 119–20, 121 n.6, 160, 174, 176, 179–81, 184, 185 n.6, 534, 586, 587 interest-based  195, 208 n.7 scientific  30, 212–31 strong  93, 179–80, 196–7, 199, 209 nn.11–12, 215–20, 222–4, 596 traditional  180, 194 Objectivity and Diversity (Harding)  196 object-relations theory  592 O’Connor, Sandra Day  475 offenses 312 Okin, Susan Moller  266–7, 278 n.10, 477 n.6, 505 n.12 O‘Neill, Onora  88–9, 464, 465, 467 ontological individualism  519 ontological naturalism  94–5, 97 ontological realism  50, 51 ontology  45, 52, 61, 63–4, 76, 83, 96, 123–4, 135, 213, 237, 355, 357, 592, 593 of gender  47, 50 as normative injunction  69 relational 516–17

social  58, 84, 90, 126–7 oppression  21, 50, 106, 165 n.5, 176, 205, 206, 209 n.18, 271, 275, 350 n.10, 368, 375, 403, 468, 474, 508–10, 514–15, 521, 525, 526 n.5, 532–4, 544–51, 553 n.5, 583, 588, 589 class 544 cultural 537 epistemic privilege and  534 racial 347 responses to objections about  491–502 self-respect under  487–91 sexual politics and  362 social  595, 596 and subordination  448–9, 532 of Third World women  532, 545–6, 550–2, 554 n.12 oral sex  162 Oreskes, Naomi  281, 285, 286 Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Dummett) 10 Oshana, Marina A. L.  137, 141 n.22 Owens, David  379, 380, 391 n.14 Oxford Handbook on the History of Analytic Philosophy, The (Beaney)  4, 10, 583 Oxford University Press  xvii Parekh, Serena  519 Park, Shelley  553 n.2 particularity  55, 85, 172, 213, 270, 465–7, 545, 548 Pascoe, Jordan  469–71 passion 175. See also sexual activity passivity 242 Patient Preference Predictor (PPP)  426, 427, 429, 430 patient proxy relationship  423–9 Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA)  423, 434 patriarchy  73, 80, 165 n.3, 174, 176, 180, 271, 317, 322, 325, 331, 335, 338, 339–42, 344, 349, 351 n.13, 383, 433, 492, 494, 546–7, 551, 552, 583, 595 universal  544, 545 Pauer-Studer, Herlinde  464, 467 Paxton, M.  13 Peace of Westphalia (1648)  536 Peele, Jordan  350 n.8

Index Penn State University Press  15 n.10 Pepper, Angie  368, 526 n.6, 527 n.8 Peres, Daniel  477 n.4 personal identity  46 personhood  128, 140 n.9, 413 social account of  409, 419 n.20 Petit, Philip  147 phenomenalism, concept of  592 phenomenology  4, 11, 14 n.4, 18, 20, 23, 129, 137, 184, 296 philosophers and analytic feminism  17– 18 analytic philosophy kinds amenable to feminist use and  20 feminist project types amenable to analytic methods and  20–2 open-mindedness and enthusiasm and 18–19 philoSOPHIA  26, 28 Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (Soames)  583 philosophical enquiry  92 philosophical power, politics of  26 philosophical tradition, analytic feminism as  8–9 PhilPapers  40, 42 n.3 physicalism 593 Physicians’ Health Study  297 Piper, Adrian  478 n.13 plainer sex view  155, 157 plain sex view  155–6 Plato  20, 329 pluralism 270 “plus respicere”  225, 231 n.8 Pogge, Thomas  368, 508, 511–16 Pohlhaus, Gaile  201, 202 Pohlhaus, Gaile, Jr.  32 n.7, 319, 320 police brutality  311–12, 314–18, 321–5 political communities  202 political consciousness  20 political disempowerment  510 political interpretation  499 political liberalism  500 political philosophy  355, 404 and feminist ethics  361–3, 370 link between ethics and  362 non-ideal theory in  85–90 polycentric nationalism  536 Popper, Karl  283

613

pornography  365, 371, 382–4 Porter, Lindsey  413, 419 nn.17–19 postmodernism  6, 11, 20, 23, 173, 183–4, 189, 219, 265, 272, 542–4, 548, 586, 595 feminist  175–6, 587 postmodern world  265 poststructuralism  18, 23, 24, 296, 542, 548 Potter, Elisabeth  256 n.1 poverty  141 n.22, 368, 403, 461, 468, 473, 474, 489, 507, 508, 510–12, 525 feminization of  527 n.7 power 296 and morality  361–2 practical rationality  493 practical realism  92, 93, 96 pragmatism  23, 26, 30, 41 n.1, 99 n.3, 174, 184, 271, 365, 585, 593 premise indicators  564 prescriptive stereotypes  452–3 Preston, Aaron  37 Pricewaterhouse v. Hopkins 452 Priest, Graham  13 Primary and Secondary Qualities (Nolan) 61 primatology, as case study  247–53 Primoratz, Igor  155–8 problematic ideal theory  87–8 “Problematic Status of Gender-Neutral Language in the History of Philosophy, The”  (Kleingeld)  466–7 Proctor, Robert  281, 284–90, 303 Proud, Penny  310 proxy accuracy studies  430–2 proxy designation, as agent  367 purposiveness  263, 278 n.5 Quantifying the Gender Gap (Paxton; Figdor; Tiberius)  13 queer studies and theory  593–4 questionable motivations argument 333–6 reinterpretation of  338–40 Quine, W. V. O.  5, 20, 21, 24, 32 n.4, 98, 177, 240 Quinean holism  190

614

Index

race  136, 200, 202, 205. See also class; oppression; racism and gender, and social construction 105–7 Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance 30 Racial Contract, The (Mills) 30 racial micro geography  343 racial solidarity argument  183, 336–8, 348, 349 reinterpretation of  340–6 racial subordination  385 racism  115–16, 265, 270, 302, 317, 325, 337. See also class; oppression political and cultural resistance to  347 Rader, Karen A.  247, 256 rape  21, 165 n.2, 314, 322, 344, 382, 391 n.8 victims 27 rational agents  273 rational capacity  276, 368, 485, 487–489, 491–6 rationalism 594 rationality  11, 19, 21, 27, 40, 93, 94, 136, 174, 176, 179, 182, 224, 227, 228, 262, 266, 267, 269–74, 276, 277, 278 n.11, 283, 295, 300, 359, 368, 433, 446, 460, 466, 475, 483–5, 487–9, 491–6, 500, 501, 503, 504 n.2, 513, 537, 585 concept of  594 deliberate 270 divorce of humanity from  264–5 loss of  271 Rawls, John  20, 85–8, 261, 265–70, 272, 368, 477 n.6, 488 theory of justice  85–6 Reagan, Ronald  539 realism  37, 49, 50–2, 54–5, 59–60, 66, 75–6, 83, 90, 92–3, 96, 116–17, 133, 283, 447, 594 reason, notion of  176, 179, 182, 197 reasonableness, as epistemic virtue  260–2 modernism’s moral failings  262–5 non-modern grounds and  270–7 Rawls and overturning of modernism and 265–70 reasonable pluralism  270 relational autonomy  22, 140 n.9 relational autonomy and practical authority 375–7 normative powers  379–81

sovereign practical authority and  377–9 unified view  386–90 violations, abuses, and failures of uptake and 381–6 relational capacity, oppressive harms to 494–5 relationality  395, 405–12, 418–19 n.11, 419 n.20, 420 n.22 and autonomy  22, 140 n.9 and gradualism  413–15 “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice” (Pohlhaus Jr.)  319 relational ontology  516, 517 relativism  60, 66, 76, 83, 152, 180, 182, 191, 195, 218, 222, 227, 261, 273, 277, 298, 301, 302, 331, 343, 344, 386, 430, 433, 443, 447, 448, 451, 452, 491–2, 496, 548, 594 repression 271 resentment of oppressive state  312–14 as tracking wrongs  311–12 “Resentment and Assurance” (Walker) 312 Resisting Reality (Haslanger)  99 n.2 respect and recognition failures and sex stereotypes 446 “Rethinking Kant from the Perspective of Ecofeminism” (Wilson)  467 Ricardo, David  539 Richardson, Sarah  190, 229 Richer, Zach  527 n.7 Rid, Annette  426, 429, 430, 432 Roberts, Dorothy  417 n.3 Robinson, Fiona  513, 516 Robinson, Howard  4, 10, 583 Rogan, Mary  136 Rolin, Kristina  223 Rooney, Phyllis  172, 185 nn.1, 5 Rorty, Amelie  271 Rose, Steven  302 Rosen, Alexander C.  68 Rosenberg, Jay  561 Rossiter, Margaret  256 n.1 Roth, Amanda  366 Rothman, Barbara Katz  408 Roundtable on Latina Feminism  28 Rousseau, Jean Jacque  359, 535

Index Routledge Companion to Epistemology, The  185 n.1 Routledge Companion to Ethics, The (Brennan) 369 Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, The (Garry; Khader; Stone) xvi Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, The 31 Rovane, Carol  432, 433 Ruddick, Sara  360 Ruetsche, Laura  276, 278 n.11 Rumsey, Jean P.  465 Russell  4, 10, 14 nn.3, 6 Saad, Lydia  418 n.9 Salt, Sugar, Fat (Moss)  285 Sandel, Michael  266, 278 n.9 Saul, Jennifer  205 Say Her Name campaign  314–16, 321, 326 n.9 Schaper, Eva  464 Scheman, Naomi  18, 28, 32 n.3, 227, 334 Schiebinger, Londa  256 n.1, 292 Scholz, Gertrud  464 Schott, Robin M.  467 Schwartzman, Lisa  88–9, 94 Science as Social Knowledge (Longino) 221 Science Question in Feminism, The (Harding)  173, 216, 218, 586, 587, 592, 595, 596 scientific objectivity  30, 212–14 contextual empiricism and social account of  220–3 directing feminist theories, to increased impact 226–9 feminist analytical philosophy and impact philosophy and  223–6 feminist concerns with bias and  214–16 strong objectivity and feminist standpoint theory and  216–20 second nature  275–7, 278 n.11 warrant 276 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir)  475, 597 Sedgwick, Sally  465, 466, 477 nn.4, 8 Seitz, Fred  285, 286

615

self-authorization  391 nn.12–13 self-conception  124, 128, 135, 137, 138 self-deception  485, 500 self-determination 535–8 self-directed obligation, to resist oppression 484 self-governance  366, 375–8, 390 n.2 autonomy as  386, 388, 389 moral-psychological accounts of  390 n.5 self-identification 205 self-respect  368, 466, 484, 492, 497, 498, 504 n.2, 523 and oppression  487–91 self-trust  489, 504 n.2 self-worth 495 Sellars, Wilfred  32 n.4 Sen, Amartya  494 separatism  183, 330–1 serious metaphysics  96 “Servility and Self-Respect” (Hill)  477 n.6 Sevin, Dante  315 sex  69, 140 n.11 as distinct from gender  62, 104 sex determination, as case study  244–7 sex essentialism  139 n.6 Sexing the Body (Fausto-Sterling)  69 “Sex in the Head” (Morgan)  158, 160 sexism  7, 12, 18, 19, 21, 40, 50, 172, 174–7, 189, 190, 261, 265, 270, 302, 314, 325, 335, 340, 433, 460–3, 466–7, 469–71, 475–6, 496–8, 501, 503, 508–10, 521, 584, 586 androcentrism versus  583 and oppression  498–9 sexist science  190 sex stereotyping  140 n.11, 367, 438–9 individualist versus cultural approaches and 442–3 meaning and possibilities of  439–42 methodology of  443–5 problems with acting on  445–54 sexual/romantic relationships  341–2, 351 n.13 sexual activity  53, 114, 116, 118, 144–5, 293, 461, 468, 471–2 analytic attempts to define sex and 154–8 Dworkin, Morgan, and  158–63

616

Index

intercourse as dominance and  145–8 intercourse, sex, and social construction varieties and  148–54 sexual agency  387 sexual authority  382 sexual desire  155, 335–6 sexual equality  165 n.12 sexual harassment  21, 198, 292, 322, 360, 365, 483, 485–6, 491–2, 495–7 sexual identity  460, 469 sexuality  68, 136, 202, 338, 363. See also individual entries moral psychological account of  477 n.11 unified account of  477 n.11 sexual meaning  159, 163, 164, 166 n.17 sexual orientation  8, 48, 76, 103, 109–10, 113–17, 119, 205, 304, 329, 350 n.1, 460, 469, 545, 596, 598 sexual pleasure  156–7 Sexual Solipsism (Langton)  471 sexual violence  459, 468 threat of  345 Shaffer, Jonathan  55 n.1, 77 n.1 Shapiro, Lisa  11, 179, 185 n.4 shared interests  202 Shell, Susan Meld  464, 469 Sherwin, Susan  403, 409, 411–13, 419 n.16 Shiffrin, Seana  379, 380 Shouten, Gina  404 Sider, Theodore  55 n.1, 61, 62, 77 n.1, 96, 97, 121 n.6 Siegel, H.  278 n.11 Signs (journal)  171 Silvermint, Daniel  492–3, 495, 504 n.5 Simpson, Anika  347 Singal, Jesse  139 n.5 Singer, Fred  285 Singer, Peter  397 situated knower  319 situated knowledge  178 slippery slope  571 Small, M. F.  256 n.2, 257 n.3 Smith, Adam  539 Smith, Dorothy  195, 197, 224 Soames, Scott  583 Sobstyl, Edrie  32 n.4 social agency  128

social change, blocking  450–2 social class  129, 132, 489, 577. See also class social conception  54, 146, 162, 201 social construction  52–4, 63–5, 71, 84, 595 and inevitability  104–9 feminist objections to theorizing about factors prior to  67–70 kinds of  103–4 and universality  109–20 social context  84, 91, 97, 145, 153, 155, 178, 219, 239, 243, 247, 254, 256, 359, 383, 487, 488 social contract  535 social discrimination  8, 174, 177, 360 social embeddedness  93 social epistemology  222 social fact  64, 84, 111, 115 social factors  73, 75, 104–6, 108–9, 111–14, 118, 120, 149–53, 155, 157–8, 164, 166 n.13, 200, 243, 244, 495 social forces  494 social identity  48, 53, 316, 526 n.5 social individuals  53, 124, 128, 129, 131, 135 arguments for ontology of  126–7 social inequality  3, 8, 9, 171, 214, 215, 219, 224 socialization  337, 338, 375 male  339, 340 social justice  83, 89, 90, 105, 107, 140 n.18, 174, 183, 195, 205, 312, 325, 503, 509, 511, 515, 590 social kinds  59, 121 n.10 social location  526 n.5, 533–4 metaphor of  191–3, 200–2 social maleness  340 social map  343–4 social movement  200, 325 social normativity  50, 127, 128, 132, 134, 137 ascriptive 129 social norms  126–8, 131, 134, 153, 223, 381, 524 social power  147, 182, 217 social practices  150 social privilege  500 social properties  109

Index social reality  62–7, 83, 84, 90, 107, 125, 133, 177, 331, 346, 349, 497 social relations  206, 216, 249, 296, 513 social role  53, 70, 104, 106, 112, 123, 124, 126, 128–32, 136, 347, 495 imposed  140 n.18 social self  50 social situatedness  193 social space  343 social world  125–7, 269, 296, 345, 534 Society for Analytical Feminism (SAF)  9, 18, 23, 28, 37–41 Conference (2016)  19 presidents 41 Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP)  26 Society for the Study of Women Philosophers (SSWP)  28 Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP)  28, 38, 39 Sojourner Truth  6, 15 n.8 solidarity  28, 200, 347, 519 racial  183, 330, 332, 336–8, 340–6, 348, 349 transnational feminist  533, 534, 546, 547, 553 Solomon, Robert  155 sound argument  568 South Korea  549 sovereign practical authority  366, 376, 387 autonomy as  377–9 sovereignty  362, 535 Spelman, Elizabeth  48 Spencer, Ayanna  183 Sperling, Susan  248–50 Standing, Guy  527 n.7 standpoint feminism. See feminist standpoint theory standpoint theory  176–7, 179, 181, 195–201, 216–20, 595 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The  37, 185 n.4, 359, 370 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady  6 Stark, Cynthia  467 statistical generalizations  440 status right  473 Steele, C.  456 n.21 Stein, Edward  109–11, 113, 116–20

617

stereotype threat  596 Stich, S.  12, 13 Stoljar, Natalie  49, 53, 139 n.6, 140 n.18, 141 n.19, 390 n.3 Stoller, Robert J.  68, 77 n.1 Stone, Alison  33 n.8 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique  316 straw man  570 stroll, Avrum  583 strong argument  568 strong objectivity  93, 179, 196–7, 199, 209 nn.11–12, 215–20, 222–4, 596 subjectivity  53, 68, 175, 180, 208, 212, 229, 241, 266, 295, 410, 478 n.13 Submarinan, Banu  256 n.1 subordination of women  7–8, 46–7, 49, 105–7, 133, 145, 147, 148, 160–1, 163, 176, 188, 252, 335, 338, 340, 358, 359, 362, 365, 371 n.3, 376, 383–7, 448–50, 455, 493, 507, 508, 532. See also oppression substantive metaphysics  61–2 Sullivan, Shannon  350 n.9, 505 n.15 Superson, Anita  25, 41 systemic injustice and Kant  473–4 Tanesini, Alessandra  185 n.1 Tarasenko-Struc, Aleksy  390 n.1 Taylor, Charles  278 n.11 Taylor, James Stacey  491–3, 495, 504 n.4 Taylor, Paul  121 n.3 Territo, Leonard  527 n.7 territorial sovereignty  536 Terry, P. B.  434 Tessman, Lisa  86 testimonial injustice  489–90 testimonial quieting  490 testimonial smothering  490 Thailand 549 “That’s not Philosophy” (Jenkins)  13 Thatcher, Margaret  539 theory/political movement, as feminist 7–8 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls)  477 n.6 third gender  131–2, 136, 138 n.3, 139 n.5, 596–7 Third World  531, 536, 537, 542, 548 feminism 532

618

Index

nation-states  539–41, 543, 549, 552, 553 oppression of women in  532, 545–6, 550–2, 554 n.12 Thomas, Stephen Naylor  561 Thomasson, Amie  96, 115 Thomson, Judith Jarvis  87, 396–7, 399–402, 418 n.7, 472 Thomson Reuters Web of Science  218 Tiberius, Valerie  13, 225–6 time and space  46 Timmermann, Jens  477 n.4 Tomenti, Opal  310 Tong, Rosemary  359, 370 Tooley, Michael  397 totalitarianism  271, 493 totality  263, 271, 588 Toulmin, Stephen  278 n.11 traditional metaphysics. See mainstream “metaphysics” transculturality  103, 109–11, 120 transfeminism 50 transgender. See third gender transnational consciousness  541–2, 548, 550 transnational corporations  540–1 transnational feminism  532–4, 546, 547, 553, 554 n.12 transnationalism 369 transnationalism 538–9 capitalism and  539–41 consciousness and  541–2 feminist rejection of nationalism in favor of  544–7 transnational politics  542 trans self-identification  205 transsexual 597 Trans Women of Color Collective  315, 321 truth  17, 19, 22, 32, 40, 67, 71, 75, 91, 96, 132, 165 n.6, 172, 173, 176, 181, 212, 215, 216, 224, 229, 265, 441, 466, 507, 519, 562–5, 567, 568, 573, 576–8, 581, 584, 587, 589, 590, 594 Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Stroll) 583 “Twenty-five Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory” (Intemann) 29 Tyson, Willie  28

Uleman, Jennifer  469–70, 478 n.13 uncogent argument  570 “Undergraduate Pipeline Problem, The” (Calhoun) 12–13 underrepresentation of women in profession, bibliographic resources of 13–14 Unger, Peter  282–3 uniessentialism  50, 53, 123–5, 133–5, 138 United States  19, 532 universal generalizations  440 universalism 133 gender  124–5, 133, 135 universality  109–10, 174 concept dependence, empty categories, social construction and  114–17 culture-dependence and social construction and  112–14 natural kinds and social construction and 117–20 notions of  110–12 unsound argument  568 Valentine, Gill  351 n.14 valid argument  566, 568, 576–9 value judgments  91 value-neutrality  51, 59, 60, 62, 80, 91, 177, 179, 190, 194, 216, 217, 221, 223 values  197, 199, 205. See also individual entries contextual 91 crucial roles, in shaping scientific knowledge and ignorance  303 as subject to empirical evidence  190–1 value theory  355–6, 371 n.7 van Fraassen, Bas  239, 283 Varden, Helga  367–8, 470–3, 477 n.11, 496, 498, 499, 503, 505 n.18 variation, notion of  18 victim feminism  382–3 violence  132, 144, 153, 271, 310–11, 313–15, 317, 321–5, 345, 365, 368, 384, 385, 403, 459, 461, 473, 488, 508, 514, 519, 525, 526 n.3, 550, 553 virtue  24, 30, 45, 49, 50, 106, 112, 127, 131, 137, 173, 177, 178, 212, 213, 318, 342, 357, 385, 409, 411, 418

Index n.10, 440, 460, 463, 468, 471–2, 477 n.11, 490, 492, 501, 519, 523, 575 epistemic  8, 194, 208 n.6, 260–77 virtuous and ignorance  288–90, 299–302 volitional necessity  136–7 voluntarist conception, of power  296–7 voluntarist normativity  127, 129 voluntary deference  380 vulnerability  165 n.11, 331, 345, 404, 469, 474, 488, 508, 510, 514, 518, 520, 550, 553 Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies 31 Walker, Margaret  xvi, 6, 8, 10, 312, 316, 317, 361–2 Walla, Alice Pinheiro  477 n.4 Wallace, David Foster  485 Warnke, Georgia  12, 77 n.2, 203–5 Warren, Mary Anne  397, 399–402 Washburn, Sheldon  248 Watson, Gary  379 Watson, Lori  371 waves, of feminism  6, 11, 15 n.9, 164 n.1, 382–3, 532, 597–8 objections to metaphor of  7 Weadel, Lisa  256 n.1 weak analogy  571 weak argument  569 weak objectivity  596 Weir, Alison  206 Wendler, David  426, 429, 430, 432 Western feminism  532 Western nationalism  537 Westlund, Andrea  366, 390 n.4 Whaite, Mary Ellen  6 “What Is a Woman?” (Moi)  68 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant)  462–3, 470, 474

619

white global feminism  544, 545 white ignorance  337–8, 350 n.9 whiteness 337 of feminist ethics  361 white supremacy  331, 336–8 Why Abortion Is Immoral (Marquis)  399 “Why I Don’t Have a Living Will” (Lynn) 434 willful hermeneutical ignorance  319, 320 willful ignorance  490 Williams, Michael  223 Williams, Nancy  359, 370 Wilson, Holly L.  465, 467 Witt, Charlotte  10–11, 15 n.10, 32 n.3, 45, 50, 53, 99 n.2, 123–35, 137, 139 nn.6, 8–9, 179, 185 n.4, 209 n.15, 584 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  4, 5, 10, 14 n.6, 17, 20, 22, 28, 141 n.19, 271 Wollstonecraft, Mary  6, 260, 261 womanness 48 women, in philosophy  12–14 women and Kant  469–71 Woodhouse, Mark B.  562 Woolf, Virginia  478 n.13 working definition, of feminism  5–8 World Trade Organization (WTO)  540 Wylie, Alison  65, 193–4, 199, 208 n.6, 223, 256 n.1 Yeates, Nicola  527 n.9 “Yellow Wallpaper, The” (Gilman)  489 Yoshino, Kenji  456 n.18 Young, Iris Marion  345, 384 “yuppie”  114, 119 Zack, Naomi  209 n.13 Zapatista movement  549 “Zomnia society” parable  117–18 Zuckert, Rachel  477 n.4

620

621

622