The Politics of Self-Respect: A Feminist Perspective

Recent liberal moral and political philosophy has placed great emphasis on the good of self-respect. But it is not always evident what is involved in self-respect, nor is it evident how societies can promote it. Assuming that self-respect is highly desirable, I begin by considering how people can live in a self-respecting fashion, and I argue that autonomous envisaging and fulfillment of one's own life plans is necessary for self-respect. I next turn to the question of how societal implementation of rights may affect self-respect, and I urge that discretionary rights, which allow people to decline the benefits they confer, support self-respect more effectively than mandatory rights, which forbid people to refuse the benefits they confer. I conclude by examining the import of these contentions for feminist theory. I believe that my arguments are of particular concern to women because women have traditionally been victimized by a mandatory right to play a distinctively “feminine” role which has undermined their self-respect.     

Three Types of Self-Respect

According to John Rawls, self-respect is the most important of the primary goods and is essential for the construction of the just society. Self-respect, however, remains a concept which is inadequately theorised, being closely linked to other concepts such as dignity, shame, pride, autonomy and security. Most usually self-respect is considered to be just the self-reflection of the respect we receive from others. In this paper I argue that self-respect consists of both a self-evaluative and a social reflexive element. Using Darwall’s distinction between two types of respect as a building block, I argue that it is worth considering self-respect as having three dimensions. Broadly these are human recognition, status recognition and appraisal.     

Bridging the Social and the Symbolic: Toward a Feminist Politics of Sexual Difference

By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference (and contrasting it with a feminist analysis of gender as social reality), I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unconscious since the political cannot be localized in, or segregated to, the sphere of social reality; sexual difference is an indispensable concept for a feminist politics.     

Incentives, Inequality and Self-Respect

Rawls argues that ‘Parties in the original position would wish to avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect’. But what are these social conditions that we should so urgently avoid? One evident candidate might be conditions of material inequality. Yet Rawls seems confident that his account of justice can endorse such inequalities without jeopardising citizens’ self-respect. In this article I argue that this confidence is misplaced. Unequalising incentives, I claim, jeopardise the self-respect of those least advantaged—at least under a Rawlsian schema—by undermining the very processes by which Rawls hopes to make distributional inequalities and self-respect compatible. I begin by setting out Rawls’s distinct account of self-respect before moving to describe how Rawls expects the difference principle to support citizens’ in this regard. I then draw upon GA Cohen’s distinction between ‘strict’ and ‘lax’ interpretations of the difference principle to argue that the presence of unequalising incentives undermines both the direct and indirect support that the difference principle can offer to citizens’ self-respect. As such, I claim that Rawls must either weaken his endorsement of unequalising incentives, or risk violating his ‘prior commitment’ to avoiding social conditions harmful to citizens’ self-respect.     

Toward a New Model of the Hindu Pantheon A Report on Twenty-some Years of Feminist Reflection

This article argues that the familiar triadic model of the Hindu pantheon obscures the significance of goddesses in Hinduism by incorrectly locating the major division within the Hindu pantheon along gender lines. Instead, it will be argued that the familiar ‘moksha-dharma’ tension and synthesis be used to organise the deities into a pantheon, with both female and male deities patronising both moksha and dharma.     

Hate Speech,Dignity and Self-Respect

This paper engages with the recent dignity-based argument against hate speech proposed by Jeremy Waldron. It’s claimed that while Waldron makes progress by conceptualising dignity less as an inherent property and more as a civic status which hate speech undermines, his argument is nonetheless subject to the problem that there are many sources of citizens’ dignitary status besides speech. Moreover, insofar as dignity informs the grounds of individuals’ right to free speech, Waldron’s argument leaves us balancing hate speakers’ dignity against the dignity of those whom they attack. I suggest instead that a central part of the harm of hate speech is that it assaults our self-respect. The reasons to respect oneself are moral reasons which can be shared with others, and individuals have moral reasons to respect themselves for their agency, and their entitlements. Free speech is interpreted not as an individual liberty, but as a collective enterprise which serves the interests of speakers and the receivers of speech. I argue that hate speech undermines the self-respect of its targets in both the agency and entitlement dimensions, and claim, moreover, that this is a direct harm which cannot be compensated for by other sources of self-respect. I further argue that hate speakers have no basis to respect themselves qua their hate speech, as self-respect is based on moral reasons. I conclude that self-respect, unlike dignity, is sufficient to explain the harm of hate speech, even though it may not be necessary to explain its wrongness.     

The Listening Partners Program: An Initiative Toward Feminist Community Psychology in Action

The Listening Partners intervention is described and analyzed as a synthesis of feminism and community psychology, within a developmental framework. Working from an empowerment perspective, this social action, peer group intervention supported a community of poor, rural, isolated, young, White mothers to gain a greater voice, claim the powers of their minds, and collaborate in developmental leadership—creating settings that promote their own development and that of their families, peers, and communities. High quality dialogue, individual and group narrative, and collaborative problem-solving were emphasized, in a feminist context affirming diversity, inclusiveness, strengths, social-contextual analyses, and social constructivist perspectives. The power of enacting a synergy of feminism and community psychology is highlighted.     

Workplace Democracy,Market Competition and Republican Self-Respect

Is it a requirement of justice to democratize private companies? This question has received renewed attention in the wake of the financial crisis, as part of a larger debate about the role of companies in society. In this article, we discuss three principled arguments for workplace democracy and show that these arguments fail to establish that all workplaces ought to be democratized. We do, however, argue that republican-minded workers must have a fair opportunity to work in a democratic company. Under current conditions, this means that a liberal order must actively promote workplace democracy.     

On Political Morality and the Conditions for Warranted Self-Respect

In my recent book Liberalism with Excellence (2017: chapter 7), I have expounded at length a conception of warranted self-respect. That conception, which draws heavily though far from uncritically on the scattered passages about self-respect in the writings of John Rawls, is central to my defense of a variety of liberalism that combines and transfigures certain aspects of Rawlsianism and perfectionism. However, it is also central to the positions taken in some earlier books of mine on capital punishment and torture. (Kramer, The ethics of capital punishment, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011; Torture and moral integrity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) Although my understanding of warranted self-respect was presented far more briefly or obliquely in each of those earlier books than in Liberalism with Excellence, it in fact underlies both my limited defense of the death penalty and my absolutist insistence that the use of interrogational torture is never morally permissible. The present paper will recount the gist of my conception of warranted self-respect and will then explain how that conception figures pivotally in my ruminations on the diverse matters of political morality that have been mentioned here.     

Reflections of a Midlife Lesbian Feminist Therapist

In this paper the author evaluated her own work as a lesbian feminist psychotherapist form a critical perspective. Using the work of Kitzinger and Perkins, Carter Heyward and Samuel Sandweiss, she suggests that psychotherapy, as constructed today, has become primarily behavioral, cognitive, apolitical and disconnected from its original purposes. After describing her own midlife spiritual crisis she details, through journal entries, a journey toward a deeper and more absorbed state of mental health. The author then questions how a therapist might utilize techniques drawn from spiritual and body work practices that might help a client find a place inside that is more soul healing, rather than just of the mind.     

On Creating a Theory of Feminist Therapy

Feminism implies, and comes out of, a phenomenological philosophy. This means that we know what is true not by the "givens" of society, but by listening to our inner experience and that of others. The fundamental political act is the same as the fundamental therapeutic act: it is the process of joining another person's experience in a way which enables that person to make explicit her internal knowledge of what is real. The therapeutic stance, which implies a belief in the basic rightness of a person's way of being in the world, is what makes this kind of experimental knowing possible. To carry our thinking and practice of feminist theory forward in an authentic way, we must approach ourselves and one another from a therapeutic stance. From this we can begin to formulate a reality which encompasses the experience of those who have thus far been invisible and silenced. This article uses the problem of boundary violations as an example of a current issue in feminist therapy that can be explored from an experiential perspective. The questions that come out of this perspective can inform our creation of a therapy and society that is truly pluralistic.     

Why Fat is a Feminist Issue

The proposition that fat is a feminist issue is almost an axiom within the feminist literature. And yet, different feminist scholars see fat as a feminist issue for radically different reasons. An analysis of mainly U.S. research suggests that for some, fat is a symptom of underlying distress and compulsive eating as a coping mechanism for this gendered anguish. For others, higher rates of “obesity” among poor women and women of color is a scandalous form of environmental injustice necessitating policy interventions to combat obesity in these populations. Others have argued that fat is a feminist issue because the fear of being or becoming fat tyrannizes average-size and relatively thin women, limiting their quality of life and often leading to eating disorders. In contrast, Fikkan and Rothblum (2011) argue that fat is a feminist issue because fat women are subjugated to bias, discrimination and abuse precisely because they are fat women. Unlike other approaches, they put actual fat women at the heart of their analysis, comparing their experience to that of both thin women and to fat men. They rightly signal the importance of examining how the social experiences of fat people vary by sex, social class, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation, among other factors. While emphasizing the importance of their perspective, this article advocates that this line of feminist analysis be pushed even further.     

Towards a Feminist Reassessment of Intellectual Virtue

This paper presents an argument for reconceptualizing (human) intelligence as intellectual virtue, and makes same proposals as to how we would understand intellectual virtue if feminist values were taken into account. Several abilities are identified which are closely connected to one aim that is common to most feminists: the building of communities in which well-being is possible.     

Constructing a Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust

The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust , Melissa Raphael, Routledge 2003 (0-415-23665-7) pp. xii + 228, Pb. £18.99     

Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust

This essay examines an aesthetics of disgust through an analysis of the work of Scottish painter Jenny Saville. Saville's paintings suggest that there is something valuable in retaining and interrogating our immediate and seemingly unambivalent reactions of disgust. I contrast Saville's representations of disgust to the repudiation of disgust that characterizes contemporary corporeal politics. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn and Julia Kristeva, I suggest that an aesthetics of disgust reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to critically attend to the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body.     

A Lesbian Feminist Subscale for the Feminist Perspectives Scale

In an attempt to increase the breadth offeminist perspectives assessed by the FeministPerspectives Scale (FPS2; Henley, Meng, O'Brien,McCarthy, & Sockloskie, 1998), we developed andpsychometrically evaluated a new subscale that assesses lesbianfeminist attitudes. As do the six other subscales of theFPS2, the Lesbian Feminist subscale includes 10attitudinal and 3 behavioral items. We conducted 3 studies with 287 respondents (58% EuropeanAmerican, 15% Latino, 13% Asian, and 6% AfricanAmerican); 88% were women and most were collegeeducated. Findings from these preliminary psychometricevaluations support the subscale's reliability (Cronbach'salpha = .91) and validity. We offer recommendations forthe scale's use and discuss its potentiallimitations.     

Feminist Biologies: Revising Feminist Strategies and Biological Science

Rebecca Hannagan’s analysis of gender and leadership based in evolutionary biology challenges scholars to integrate research in biology with feminist insights. This commentary argues that this is a timely challenge and that that the project of integrating feminism and evolutionary biology in accounts of gender is necessary for bringing about more equitable futures. However, the commentary also suggests that biological inputs should be understood as operating within categories that feature substantial variation, that change through time, that are not independent and complete sources of human outcomes, and that biological factors interact with language and culture.