Rethinking Sadomasochism: Feminism,Interpretation, and Simulation

In reexamining the “sex war” debates between radical feminists and lesbian feminist sadomasochists, I find that the actual practice of sadomasochism provides the basis for a philosophically more complex position than has been articulated. In response to the anti-SM radical perspective, I develop a distinction between simulation and replication of patriarchal dominant/submissive activities. In light of this important epistemological and ethical distinction, I claim that the radical feminist opposition to SM needs reassessment.     

A Review of Andrea Nye's Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man

In this provocative book, Nye argues that feminist attempts to spin coherent theories from the threads of the various philosophies of man fail as the patriarchal assumptions of each theory resist and undermine every effort. Nevertheless, she claims, although the threads cannot be woven into a coherent tapestry, as dedicated feminist Arachnes meticulously separate strand from strand, “the mechanisms of oppression are finally understood” and the patriarchal tapestries begin to unravel.     

Feminist and medical ethics: two different approaches to contextual ethics

Feminist ethics and medical ethics are critical of contemporary moral theory in several similar respects. There is a shared sense of frustration with, the level of abstraction and generality that characterizes traditional philosophic work in ethics and a common commitment to including contextual details and allowing room for the personal aspects of relationships in ethical analysis. This paper explores the ways in which context is appealed to in feminist and medical ethics, the sort of details that should be included in the recommended narrative approaches to ethical problems, and the difference it makes to our ethical deliberations if we add an explicitly feminist political analysis to our discussion of context. It is claimed that an analysis of gender is needed for feminist medical ethics and that this requires a certain degree of gener-ality, i. e. a political understanding of context.     

Tools for a Cross‐Cultural Feminist Ethics: Exploring Ethical Contexts and Contents in the Makah Whale Hunt

Antiracist white feminists and ecofeminists have the tools but lack the strategies for responding to issues of social and environmental justice cross‐culturally, particularly in matters as complex as the Makah whale hunt. Distinguishing between ethical contexts and contents, I draw on feminist critiques of cultural essentialism, ecofeminist critiques of hunting and food consumption, and socialist feminist analyses of colonialism to develop antiracist feminist and ecofeminist strategies for cross‐cultural communication and cross‐cultural feminist ethics.     

Hearing the Difference: Theorizing Connection

Hearing the difference between a patriarchal voice and a relational voice defines a paradigm shift: a change in the conception of the human world. Theorizing connection as primary and fundamental in human life leads to a new psychology, which shifts the grounds for philosophy and political theory. A crucial distinction is made between a feminine ethic of care and a feminist ethic of care. Voice, relationship, resistance, and women become central rather than peripheral in this reframing of the human world.     

Menage à trois: Freud,Beauvoir, and the Marquis de Sade

Without rejecting Simone de Beauvoir's often cited feminist agenda, this paper takes up her less frequently noted insight – that woman's existence as the inessential other is more than a consequence of material dependency, and political inequality. This insight traces women's subordinated status to the effect of a patriarchal desire that produces and is sustained by a political imaginary that is not economically grounded and is not undermined by women's economic or political progress. Taking up this insight, this paper reads Beauvoir, Freud and Sade through each other, to critique the myths of femininity. It argues that unless feminists of the 21st century follow Beauvoir's logic of ambiguity to challenge the ways in which sexed and gendered subjectivity is currently structured, the place of the inessential other will be preserved, and the feminist vision will be betrayed.     

Amazon Intertextuality and Sinuosity in Sandra Shotlander's Angels of Power

Angels of Power, by Australian lesbian playwright Sandra Shotlander, illustrates political strategies described by American lesbian philosopher Jeffner Allen. In the play three female members of Australian parliament align to force regulation of new reproductive technologies. Using essentialist, materialist, liberal, and radical feminist arguments, the characters practice sinuous strategies through loading and layering female signs (intertextuality) in order to eradicate patriarchal signification and reenact a contemporary version of ancient Amazons taking over the Acropolis.     

Feminist Second Thoughts About Free Agency

This essay suggests that common themes in recent feminist ethical thought can dislodge the guiding assumptions of traditional theories of free agency and thereby foster an account of freedom which might be more fruitful for feminist discussion of moral and political agency. The essay proposes constructing that account around a condition ofnormative-competence. It argues that this view permits insight into why women's labor of reclaiming and augmenting their agency is both difficult and possible in a sexist society.     

Catharine Macaulay on the Paradox of Paternal Authority in Hobbesian Politics

Catharine Macaulay's first political pamphlet, “Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes's philosophical rudiments of government and society with a short sketch for a democratical form of government in a letter to Signor Paoli,” published in London in 1769, has received no significant scholarly attention in over two hundred years. It is of primary interest because of the light it sheds on Macaulay's critique of patriarchal politics, which helps to establish a new line of thinking about the historian as an early feminist writer. It appears she was working from an unauthorized edition of the Thomas Hobbes's De Cive (1647) entitled Philosophicall Rudiments of Government and Society, printed by a royalist bookseller in London 1651. Some errors in this translation may explain Macaulay's skewed understanding of Hobbess argument in support of the premises of monarchy. Her intriguing analysis of paternal authority in “Loose Remarks” anticipates recent feminist explorations of Hobbesian political thought.     

Habermas,Virtue Epistemology,and Religious Justifications in the Public Sphere

Jürgen Habermas's recent challenge to secular citizens calling for greater inclusivity of religious justifications in the public sphere opens new epistemological debates that could benefit from the rich insights of feminist epistemologists. Despite certain theoretical tensions, there is some common ground between Habermas and recent work in feminist epistemology. Specifically, this article explores the shared interests between Habermas and one feminist theorist in particular, Miranda Fricker. I choose Fricker because her formulation of the epistemological and ethical hybrid virtues of testimonial justice and hermeneutical justice provide efficacious theoretical and practical tools capable of deepening the epistemological basis of Habermas's challenge to secular citizens. After a detailed analysis of Habermas's and Fricker's respective epistemological positions, I argue that Fricker's analysis provides a rich framework for thinking through questions of power, identity, and credibility with respect to religious justifications in the public sphere. In conclusion, this article emphasizes the importance of fostering more robust and just epistemic communities capable of countering the social, political, and ethical injustices of epistemic disauthorization and marginalization.     

A Patrimony of Idols: Second-Wave Jewish and Christian Feminist Theology and the Criticism of Religion

This article suggests that second-wave feminist theology between around 1968 and 1995 undertook the quintessentially religious and task of theology, which is to break its own idols. Idoloclasm was the dynamic of Jewish and Christian feminist theological reformism and the means by which to clear a way back into its own tradition. Idoloclasm brought together an inter-religious coalition of feminists who believed that idolatry is not one of the pitfalls of patriarchy but its symptom and cause, not a subspecies of sin but the primary sin of alienated relationship. The first moment of feminist theology’s criticism of patriarchal power is not that it is socially unjust, but that it has licence to be unjust because it is idolatrous. Yet, neither opponents of feminist theology who dismiss it on the grounds that it is a secular import into the tradition, nor feminist students of theology and religion, have paid sufficient attention to feminist theology’s counter-idolatrous turn as the religious ground of women’s liberation. Here, the freedom and becoming of women is dependent on the liberation of the religious imagination from captivity to a trinity of idols: the patriarchal god called God who is no more than an inference from the political dispensation that created him; the idol of the masculine that created God in his own image and the idol of the feminine worshipped as an ideational object of desire only as the subordinated complement of the masculine and as a false image that becomes a substitute for the real, finite women whose agency and will it supplants.     

Sifting Through Tradition: The Creation of Jewish Feminist Identities

In recent decades, feminists have been questioning patriarchal religions. As a result, many find themselves ambivalent about their religious and spiritual identities. This paper presents a model of identity formation that addresses the processes by which potentially conflicted identities are integrated. This model is based on research about how women who identify themselves as both Jewish and feminist create unconflicted Jewish feminist identities. Through a process ofsifting through their available options, they have chosen to identify with only those aspects of Judaism and feminism that satisfy their feminist, religious, and perhaps most importantly, their spiritual, needs. Because these needs vary, what it means to be a Jewish feminist is not static. Three types of Jewish feminist identity—inclusionist, transformationist, and reinterpretationist—are identified.     

An Ethical Justification of Women's Studies; or What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

The feminist in academe, says Paula Bennett, is like Procne married to Tereus, “inextricably wedded to the sources of her harm.” An ethical justification of academic feminism can be found, not in cooperation and affiliation, but in the strategies currently necessary to ensure curricular and cultural diversity. Historically contextualized and strategically politicized, this ethic is founded on the claim that universities are places where we may all learn to know what is other than ourselves.     

The Meaning and the Ends of Teaching Religion

This paper explores the relationship between assessment and ethical value. It starts by reflecting on the traditional assessment convention that distinguishes strongly between process (the ways in which a student constructs a piece of work) and conclusion. The paper then examines three case studies from Holocaust studies, feminist theology, and Providence. The argument of the paper is that these three case studies illustrate that imparting certain values is part of the teaching process, and therefore it should not be excluded from assessment.     

ETHICAL ISSUES IN FEMINIST THERAPY

This article describes ethical issues that have emerged from the past decade of feminist therapy practice in response to context-specific ethical dilemmas. The model of feminist therapy practice within small communities is used to illustrate the types of problems encountered and strategies for ethical practice used by feminist therapists. Two topics are examined in detail: boundary overlap between therapist and client, and role-related strains inherent in feminist therapy practice. The Feminist Therapy Institute (FTI) Ethical Code is drawn upon as a source of norms for ethical feminist practice, and specific examples are related to statements from the FTI Code regarding self-care and management of over-lapping relationships.     

"Wholly Aflame": Erotic Asceticism in the Work of Sara Maitland

Abstract

The writing of the Christian feminist novelist Sara Maitland has explored the interplay of eroticism, masochism and asceticism in women's spirituality. Maitland's 1984 novel Virgin Territory and 1987 essay "Passionate Prayer: Masochistic Images in Women's Experience" condemns how, in patriarchal Christianity, a model of romantic relationship with God, when compounded by the symbolism of women's sinfulness, results in spiritual masochism for women. In her later work, Maitland's writing takes a more ambivalent attitude, wanting to preserve the "otherness" of historical women mystics and martyrs, also admiring the "purity" of the extremity of their devotion. This reflects Maitland's advocating of an excessive and "unsafe" spirituality, given representation in her fiction and in her pursuit of a solitary lifestyle, as explained in 2008's A Book of Silence.     

On Paraconsistent Ethics

Abstract

Advances in modern logic allow us to admit that some ethical dilemmas are veridical contradictions. First, I offer two examples of such paradoxes and discuss their general form. Then the notion of paraconsistency is introduced to provide a coherent understanding of these as contradictions without lapsing into absurdity. With the groundwork in place, some features of an ethic embedded in paraconsistent logic are then shown to include a class of necessary and impossible acts called hypererogatory. Finally, some advantages of upholding such an ethic are discussed. This is a proposal to revaluate the form, rather than the content, of our normative judgements.