Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
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I'm a second year BPhil, working primarily in philosophy of language, aesthetics, and feminist philosophy. I am the Women and Minorities Representative for the Oxford philosophy graduate community. Blog by Charlotte Figueroa.
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
In addition to Krause's “Contested Questions, Current Trajectories: Feminism in Political Theory Today” (2011), we will also be reading her "Beyond Non-Domination: Agency, Inequality and the Meaning of Freedom" (2013).
Link: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0191453712470360 ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
Reading: Krause, Sharon R. “Contested Questions, Current Trajectories: Feminism in Political Theory Today.” Politics & Gender, vol. 7, no. 1, 2011, pp. 105–111.
Summary: "I once mentioned to a prominent feminist scholar that I was using one of her books in my course on feminism and political theory. She looked at me blankly for a moment and then replied, “Feminism and political theory? I thought feminism is political theory.” She was right of course; in some sense, everything that is feminist theory is also political theory. Feminism illuminates gendered relations of p ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
Reading: Draft of "On the Distinction between Objectifying Attitudes and Objectifying Actions."
Summary: In this essay, I attempt to bolster Nussbaum’s account of objectification by clarifying and articulating the distinction that she draws between seeing and treating a person as an object. I defend her account from thinkers like Haslanger (1993), who claims that both of these are necessary for objectification (while Nussbaum claims that either is sufficient for objectification), and Halwani (2008, 2010), who claims that Nussbaum’s account is too broad, as only actions can constitute a good d ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
Reading: Anderson, Scott A. "Prostitution and Sexual Autonomy: Making Sense of the Prohibition of Prostitution." Ethics 112.4 (2002): 748-780.
Summary: This article outlines the radical feminist critique of prostitution and then describes how liberals have responded to this critique, in particular, the suggestion that prostitution, including our attitudes toward it, can and should be reformed. To make progress in resolving this dispute, I first step back from a narrow focus on prostitution and examine the broader role that certain social regulations of sexual behavior play in protec ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
Reading: Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Bloomsbury Publishing USA (2015); Chapter 1, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Chapter 2, The Rape of Animals, The Butchering of Women.
Summary: "The Sexual Politics of Meat" argues that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating are often clustered around virility. First published in 1990, "The Sexual Politics of Meat" is a landmark text in the ongoing debates about animal rights. In the two deca ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
Reading: Woollard, Fiona. "Motherhood and Mistakes about Defeasible Duties to Benefit." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2016).
Summary: Discussion of the behaviour of pregnant women and mothers, in academic literature, medical advice given to mothers, mainstream media and social media, assumes that a mother who fails to do something to benefit her child is liable for moral criticism unless she can provide sufficient countervailing considerations to justify her decision. I reconstruct the normally implicit reasoning that leads to this assumption and show that it is mistaken ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
Please note the following changes to the feminist philosophy reading list for Michaelmas:
Week 7: Figueroa, Charlotte. "On the Distinction between Objectifying Attitudes and Objectifying Actions" (draft).
Week 8: Krause, Sharon R. “Contested Questions, Current Trajectories: Feminism in Political Theory Today.” Politics & Gender, vol. 7, no. 1, 2011, pp. 105–111.
I will distribute copies of my paper draft in advance for Week 7. I hope to see many of you this Thursday to discuss Alcoff's "Visible Identities" (2006 ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
Reading: Alcoff, Linda Martín. "Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self." Vol. 10. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006; Chapter 5, The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory, and Chapter 6, The Metaphysics of Gender and Sexual Difference.
Summary: In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. "Visible Identities" fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martín Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not lik ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
"A recent study looks at whether perceptions about how “masculine” philosophy is can help explain the gender disparities in the field.
In “21% versus 79%: Explaining Philosophy’s Gender Disparities with Stereotyping and Identification,” forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology, authors Debbie Ma, Clennie Webster, Nanae Tachibe, and Robert Gressis (all at CSU Northridge), present data that, they argue, supports the idea that male domination in philosophy could be eroded ... by changing how it is taught.
They find that students who haven’t taken much philosophy do not have a sense that the fiel ..read more
Oxford Philosophy Graduate Women & Minorities Representative
4y ago
'The Husband Stitch' is a short story by Carmen Maria Machado which explores some of the epistemological consequences of gender. The article, 'What I Don't Tell My Students about 'The Husband Stitch',' explicitly explores the themes present in the fiction as a critique against certain modes of philosophical thinking. For example, in her article, Jane Dykema discusses Occam's Razor and how it can be used to (erroneously) discredit the testimony of women. We will be discussing the role of epistemic credibility in the feminist philosophy reading group this week, and this short s ..read more