To many people, the very idea of nationalism smacks of ethnocentrism or even racism. They suspect that violence, hatred, and distrust of the Other, embodied in a sharply divided world of "us" and "them," always lurk within the nationalist's heart. Recent world events have done nothing to allay these suspicions. Nationalism, on this view, is an evil to be overcome by a cosmopolitan stance that denies the significance of national boundaries. Yet positive values have also been associated with the nationalist (...) idea, as some recent accounts remind us.ii Democracy, autonomy, community, pluralism -- these goods have been connected with the development of nationalism over the past several centuries. Some of the values underlying nationalism also manifest themselves today in its dilute and more respectable cousin, multiculturalism. And it goes without saying that whatever its merits, nationalism exerts enormous power on the aspirations of many people around the world. (shrink)

In psychoanalysis, enlivenment is seen as residing in a sense of self, and this sense of self is drawn from and shaped by lived experience. _Enlivening the Self: The First Year, Clinical Enrichment, and the Wandering Mind _describes the vitalizing and enrichment of self-experience throughout the life cycle and shows how active experience draws on many fundamental functional capacities, and these capacities come together in support of systems of motivation; that is, organized dynamic grouping of affects, intentions, and goals. The (...) book is divided into three essays: Infancy – _Joseph Lichtenberg_ presents extensive reviews of observation and research on the first year of life. Based on these reviews, he delineates twelve foundational qualities and capacities of the self as a doer doing, initiating and responding, activating and taking in. Exploratory therapy – _James L. Fosshage _looks where therapeutic change is entwined with development. There are many sources illustrated for enhancing the sense of self, and _Frank M. Lachmann _pays particular attention to humor and to the role that the twelve qualities and capacities play in the therapeutic process. The wandering mind – _Frank M. Lachmann _covers the neuroscience and observation that "mind wandering" is related to the immediacy of the sense of self linking now with past and future. Throughout the book the authors’ arguments are illustrated with rich clinical vignettes and suggestions for clinical practice. This title will be a must for psychoanalysts, including trainees in psychoanalysis, psychiatry residents and candidates at psychoanalytic institutes and also graduate students in clinical and counselling psychology programs. (shrink)

This article is a review essay of Judith Butler’s latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? The book considers the anti-gender ideology movement and rising right-wing authoritarianism with which it is associated. In review considers the following key themes that Butler disusses: recognition of a contemporary crisis; the creation of a moral panic around gender; the complicity of ‘gender critical’ feminism in enabling anti-feminist totalitarian politics; the disingenuous figuration of ‘censorship’ as a weapon deployed by the forces of ‘gender ideology’; (...) and the relationship of the phantom to colonialism and race. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Schopenhauer and the Nature of Philosophy by Jonathan HeadJudith NormanJonathan Head. Schopenhauer and the Nature of Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. xviii + 183. Hardback, $95.00.It is a bit strange to read an overview of Schopenhauer's philosophy that does not center on the obvious and attention-grabbing idea of will, but Jonathan Head has brought a fresh and welcome perspective to the topic by focusing instead (...) on Schopenhauer's notion of philosophy itself. This perspective enables Head to paint a more sympathetic picture of Schopenhauer than is often the case—more coherent in his systematic pretensions, more consistent in his philosophical project over the long course of his writings, and (perhaps most surprisingly) more solicitous for the welfare of his readers.Head's thesis is that Schopenhauer analyzed ('diagnosed' might be a better word) the human need for metaphysics and constructed his own philosophy carefully to address this need. "The need for metaphysics," Head explains, "is a natural desire that all human beings have for explanation and consolation, in the face of the recognition of pessimistic truths regarding the world we live in" (xiv), specifically recognition of the "wrongness of the world" (51) and "the illusory nature of the principle of individuation" (70). Several quite specific metaphilosophical insights and methods arise from this seemingly straightforward statement. [End Page 528] For one thing, Head points out that explanation and consolation are rather different goals for philosophy, uniting theoretical and practical concerns in a way that might not be expected from a self-declared Kantian. But he argues for this dual functionality by tracing the notion of "better consciousness" from Schopenhauer's earliest writings to its evolution into a "denial of the will," a form of consciousness with directly salvific consequences (interestingly, according to Head, not just for the individual but intergenerationally), now rooted in a metaphysics of will.The second and more philosophically fruitful peculiarity about Schopenhauer's diagnosis of the human "need for metaphysics" is the manner in which it arises from "the recognition of pessimistic truths" (xiv). There is a lot packed into the notion of recognition here. Schopenhauer has a distinctive philosophical method that grounds philosophical thinking in intuitive apprehension of basic truths. And, as Head argues, while this intuition functions as the ground for truth-seeking, it also hampers philosophy as a discursive discipline, since the concepts in which truth claims are presented cannot capture or communicate the unique proximity to truth characteristic of intuition. Thus, philosophical truths cannot be communicated directly, and the function of philosophical texts is to inspire an intuitive insight on the part of the readers so that they are able to see for themselves what the philosophy purports to say. (Stoicism, for instance, is for Schopenhauer an admirable but ultimately limited philosophical perspective in that it develops a system that relies exclusively on reason without promoting a grounding intuition.) Head argues that insight into the basic nature of the will is the intuition that Schopenhauer spins his philosophy around.This has both metaphysical and metaphilosophical implications. As for the former, it means that metaphysics is possible as a discipline, even in the wake of (and while by and large respecting) the limits Kant imposed on epistemology. Metaphysics has an empirical aspect, relying on empirical cognitive sources to provide a worldview for which it provides a key. Head emphasizes the irreducibility of this "objective" perspective, for offering both understanding as well as consolation (namely, knowledge that we have cognitive resources that other creatures do not). But Head argues that Schopenhauer gives primacy to the (compatible and complementary) subjective standpoint, and in particular our (quasi-speculative) intuition into the thing-in-itself via insight into our own basic essence as will. This peek into a nonrepresentational reality provides the reader with a guiding intuition (and the text with a central thought) that has an "inbuilt [implicitly] inferential structure" (72) from which an extraordinarily fruitful set of implications follows for constructing a metaphysics of will.The implications for metaphilosophy are no less interesting, and the central claim of Head's text is that Schopenhauer carefully constructed his central work, The World as Will and Representation, to guide... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 140-144 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Culture and Self: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives, East and West Culture and Self: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives, East and West. Edited by Douglas Allen. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997.xv + 184 pp. Inspired perhaps by both deconstructive and constructive impulses, this important collection of nine essays undertakes to challenge the notion, common in both Western and Eastern philosophical (...) and religious traditions, that there exists such a thing as an objective, ahistorical, universal "self." At the same time, the volume as a whole makes a case for the value of a notion of the self that takes account of its cultural and historical situatedness. Douglas Allen's introduction succinctly frames the central claim of this project: While an increasing number of scholars, both Eastern and Western, appreciate the importance of the dialectical relationship between self and culture, and the vital role culture plays in determining the nature of the self, notions of the self as unconditioned by culture, or of the self as influenced by cultural factors that are merely superficial, subjective, and illusory, continue to dominate the religious and philosophical thought of both West and East. Thus it is the aim of these essays to undermine the dominance of those notions, in particular by means of a comparative, [End Page 140] cross-cultural methodology that highlights the existence of differing views of the self, thereby calling into question the dominant monolithic understanding.The essays are divided into four sections. The first part, "Multiple Asian and Western Perspectives," contains two essays in which a number of different Asian views are considered, resulting in analyses that are broad rather than deep. Obviously this approach has its limitations: the observations about the various cultural understandings discussed in each of these essays tend to be somewhat lacking in complexity. However, both essays do a creditable job of presenting the cross-cultural resources available to critique the notion of an enduring, true, objective self, free of sociohistorical determinants.Douglas Allen's essay clearly articulates the somewhat narrow understanding of the self against which his and many of the other views contained in this collection are implicitly positioned, characterizing it as post-Cartesian: autonomous, rational, individual, skeptical, and foundational. In spite of frequent references to the dominance within Eastern thought of the notion of an ahistorical, culturally unconditioned self, and in spite of the richness of views on the eternally unchanging nature of the self to be found, for example, in various forms of Hinduism, it is clearly and explicitly a modern,Western view of the self against which Allen wants to argue. His basic claim, then, is that this modern Western view is itself historically and culturally determined and that, moreover, there are pressing philosophical and political reasons for challenging it. In contrast to this post-Cartesian self, Allen offers four alternative conceptions--the self of the Bhagavad Gita, determined by karma and social position; the "no-self" of Buddhism; the Marxist self, constituted by the economic conditions of production within which it finds itself; and the relational self of much modern Western feminist theory--suggesting that these understandings provide richer views of the self by virtue of taking account of the self's location in history and culture.The target of Alan Roland's essay is not the largely philosophical notion of selfhood considered by Allen, although clearly it builds on that notion. Rather, Roland takes up the self ofWestern psychoanalytic theory in order to ask whether, given the Western assumptions upon which it is based, psychoanalysis can be universally valid. He suggests, in the context of a critical reading of several major psychoanalytic studies of Asian cultures, that psychoanalysis in Asia can be found in three predominant guises, each limited in some important way: evolutionism, which posits the individualist self as the goal of psychological development, thereby dismissing the more relational selves of Asian cultures as developmentally inferior; universalism, which argues for a self that is essentially the same across cultural differences, imposing a single analytical standard on widely diverging... (shrink)

The growing influence of the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Christian theology is nowhere more apparent than in this impressive work by Daniel Colucciello Barber. Here diaspora is explored not as a sociological phenomenon but as a concept, a composition of thought that reveals the differential nature of the origins of Christianity and its others, religion and secularism. What seems to be at stake in the concept of diaspora, for Barber, is its ability to destabilize the logic of domination (...) that has been identified with much of the history of Christianity, and which arguably carries over into secularism as it is historically conceived.According to Barber’s view of the gospels, the Christian declaration—understood as the injunction to love one’s enemies and imitate divine perfection—provides a liberatory opening out of this logic of dominion and into the construction of new possibilities of human relatedness. How is it, then, that Christianity has historically been allied with .. (shrink)

A critical review of four recent works that reflect current conflicts and tensions among feminists regarding new reproductive technologies: In Search of Parenthood by Judith Lasker and Susan Borg; Ethics and Human Reproduction by Christine Overall; Made to Order, Patricia Spallone and Deborah Steinberg, eds. and Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, Michelle Stanworth, ed. Their positions are evaluated against the background of growing feminist dialogue about the future of reproduction and the bearing of reproductive innovations on such related (...) issues as racism, sexuality, motherhood and abortion. (shrink)

This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his metaphysics and view of the subject, all while revealing ambiguities within his position. The result is a sophisticated reconsideration of the post-Hegelian tradition (...) that has predominated in modern French thought, and her study remains a provocative and timely intervention in contemporary debates over the unconscious, the powers of subjection, and the subject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal VirtuesJudith W. KayRedeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal Virtues Bruce K. Ward Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 230 pp. $26.00.Bruce Ward has written a remarkably rich intellectual history whose theological diagnosis yields refreshing interpretations of ethical norms. Each chapter treats one of liberalism’s cherished virtues (equality, authenticity, tolerance, and compassion) and argues for the Christian roots of each in (...) order to show how Christianity is “the fulfillment of what the Enlightenment, at its best, sought” (196).Ward uses the Christian humanism of Dostoevsky to redeem the equality espoused by Rousseau and Kant in light of Nietzsche’s attacks. Equality is grounded neither in a human capacity nor in obedience to a principle, but in the imago Dei. While hardly original, this foundation with attention to immanence can create an enlivened perception of others in their richness while being transformed by love from “the other world.” Ward redeems authenticity with agapic self-dispossession rather than self-assertion, which liberates it from individualism and opens it to the “call of God.” Liberal compassion finds its fulfillment in the love of particular, suffering humans, which requires discernment, respect, and effective action. Such compassion is rooted in and revelatory of divine love.Ward’s most compelling chapter, on tolerance, begins by noting how this ideal often inhibits moral judgment or promotes indifference. Ward is a student of neither Mill’s nor Nussbaum’s libertarian versions of tolerance. Instead, Ward draws upon René Girard to argue that tolerance must account for the perpetrator’s demonization of social outcasts that leads to the victim’s resentment. Victims must lead the way in exposing and then exiting this cycle. Dostoevsky recommends a practice of taking responsibility for all persecution (“all are guilty for all”) as an expression of active love. Such a practice forges points of human contact between groups in conflict, even if prejudices are slow to change. In response to intolerant religions, Christians should assume such universal responsibility rather than rely on the “restrained” violence of the liberal state. Although Ward derides multicultural versions of tolerance that “celebrate difference,” he observes that the universal human of Enlightenment ontology cannot exist except through the particularity of a lived story—precisely multiculturalism’s insight. [End Page 213]The deep lament motivating this book is that an inadequate Christian theology lost its power to explain the world. The resulting defense of humanism by Enlightenment philosophes was deeply shaped by Christian ideals, but they were unable to articulate a foundation for moral norms, which made Nietzschean nihilists appear sane. Both groups are ill equipped to respond to current religious terrorism. As Charles Taylor explores in The Secular Age, the third contenders are those who affirm a good beyond this world. Ward differs from Taylor by arguing that the problem is not a lack of transcendent grounding for norms but an inadequate conceptualization of immanence and transcendence. Ward uses the Trinitarian approach of Dostoevsky to reorder transcendence and immanence, which avoids translating “Christianity into liberalism” or injecting transcendence into secularism.Ward’s project succeeds if one accepts Nietzsche as the major critic of the Enlightenment. Readers who have accepted as legitimate other criticisms of the philosophes may be disappointed. His discussion of compassion lacks Catholic interlocutors such as Edward Vacek who argue that agape avoids the polarity between self-love and compassion; feminists who critique Enlightenment dichotomies between savage and civilized or reason and emotion; and Marxists who argue that capitalism denies human equality, thus making Ward’s “capitalist liberal humanism” sound naive. It is not clear how Ward would redeem the Enlightenment from such criticisms.Nevertheless, Ward’s rereading of the Enlightenment is majestic in its sweep, compelling in its close textual analysis, and brimming with fresh insights. The text assumes much familiarity with the philosophes; its pedagogical use is recommended for graduate students and scholars. [End Page 214]Judith W. KayUniversity of Puget SoundCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Boris Roman Gibhardt, : Denkfigur Rhythmus. Probleme und Potenziale des Rhythmusbegriffs in den Künsten, Hannover : Wehrhahn Verlag 2020 – ISBN-13 : 978-3-86525-783-3, 240 S. Reviewed in ArtHist.net by Judith Preiß, Tübingen School of Education, Universität Tübingen. Rhythmus scheint auf den ersten Blick zu den Begriffen zu zählen, mit denen sich zeitliche und formale Aspekte ästhetischer Phänomene relativ unproblematisch beschreiben lassen. Wenig - Recensions.

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Language is a cognitively demanding human trait, but it is also a fundamentally cooperative enterprise that rests on the motivation to share information. Great apes possess many of the cognitive prerequisites for language, but largely lack the motivation to share information. Callitrichids (including marmosets and tamarins) are highly vocal monkeys that are more distantly related to humans than great apes are, but like humans, they are cooperative breeders and all group members help raising offspring. Among primates, this rearing system is (...) correlated with proactive prosociality, which can be expressed as motivation to share information. We therefore propose that the unique coincidence of these two components in humans set the stage for language evolution: The cognitive component inherited from our great ape-like ancestors, and the motivational one added convergently as a result of cooperative breeding. We evaluate this scenario based on a review of callitrichd vocal communication and show that furthermore, they possess many of the mechanistic elements emphasized by the mirror system hypothesis of language evolution. We end by highlighting how more systematic phylogenetic comparisons will enable us to further promote our understanding of the role of cooperative breeding during language evolution. (shrink)

Editors of scientific literature rely heavily on peer reviewers to evaluate the integrity of research conduct and validity of findings in manuscript submissions. The purpose of this study was to describe the ethical concerns of reviewers of nursing journals. This descriptive cross-sectional study was an anonymous online survey. The findings reported here were part of a larger investigation of experiences of reviewers. Fifty-two editors of nursing journals (six outside the USA) agreed to invite their review panels to participate. A 69-item (...) forced-choice and open-ended survey developed by the authors based on the literature was pilot tested with 18 reviewers before being entered into SurveyMonkeyTM. A total of 1675 reviewers responded with useable surveys. Six questions elicited responses about ethical issues, such as conflict of interest, protection of human research participants, plagiarism, duplicate publication, misrepresentation of data and ‘other’. The reviewers indicated whether they had experienced such a concern and notified the editor, and how satisfied they were with the outcome. They provided specific examples. Approximately 20% of the reviewers had experienced various ethical dilemmas. Although the majority reported their concerns to the editor, not all did so, and not all were satisfied with the outcomes. The most commonly reported concern perceived was inadequate protection of human participants. The least common was plagiarism, but this was most often reported to the editor and least often led to a satisfactory outcome. Qualitative responses at the end of the survey indicate this lack of satisfaction was most commonly related to feedback provided on resolution by the editor. The findings from this study suggest several areas that editors should note, including follow up with reviewers when they identify ethical concerns about a manuscript. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is the 20th century theology philosopher with the greatest importance to theology. A cradle Catholic originally intended for the priesthood, Heidegger's studies in philosophy led him to turn first to Protestantism and then to an atheistic philosophical method. Nevertheless, his writings remained deeply indebted to theological themes and sources, and the question of the nature of his relationship with theology has been a subject of discussion ever since. -/- This book offers theologians and philosophers alike a clear account (...) of the directions and the potential of this debate. It explains Heidegger's key ideas, describes their development and analyses the role of theology in his major writings, including his lectures during the National Socialist era. It reviews the reception of Heidegger's thought both by theologians in his own day (particularly in Barth and his school as well as neo-Scholasticism) and more recently (particularly in French phenomenology), and concludes by offering directions for theology's possible future engagement with Heidegger's work. - See more at:. (shrink)

Background: On a day to day basis, nurses are facing more ethical dilemmas during end-of-life care resulting in not being able to actualize a good death for patients. Research objective: The purpose of this study was to explore how experienced hospice nurses resolve day to day ethical dilemmas during end-of-life care. Research design: The study used a qualitative narrative approach. Participants: Through purposeful sampling, a total of six experienced hospice nurse participated. Ethical considerations: Approval from the researcher’s university Institutional Review (...) Board for ethical review was obtained. Findings: Using core story creation, several different ethical dilemmas were identified divulging struggles with key stakeholders including family members and providers. Thematic analysis generated three main themes: Ethics within Practice, Ethical Knowledge, and Ethical Solutions. Discussion: The participants told their stories depicting a keen awareness of ethical conflicts situated by contextual factors including social, political, and personal issues. The nurses’ deliberations were informed through formal, experiential, and intuitive knowledge. Ethical predicaments were resolved by either following rules or choosing acts of resistance. Conclusion: A better understanding was obtained on how experienced hospice nurses successfully resolve ethical dilemmas culminating in better deaths for patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue of Feminist Studies presents an eclectic view of women ’s friendships from across Western history and from several different cultures. Several of the articles question whether identity or sameness is a prerequisite for friendship and ask what friendships across difference look like, including charting the difficulties of making and sustaining such friendships. The articles in this issue contrast the variety and functions of women’s friendships (...) with the narcissistic masculinist ideals of classical Western thought about friendship in which friends serve as reflections of a person—typically a male and upper-class person. The authors in this issue present women’s friendships that are more pragmatic and more vulnerable and that contend more fully with difference. Some authors reflect on the high expectations placed on friendship within Second Wave feminism in the United States, noting how competition and feelings of betrayal can suffuse friendships; others trace more autonomous, productive, and forgiving contemporary visions of friendship. The issue opens with Susan Van Dyne’s archival study of student friendships in a pioneering US women’s college, revealing how love, flirtation, and desire between women was expressed in Smith College’s class of 1883. In another historical study, sociologist Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen contrasts the narratives of Norwegian girls and young women from the late nineteenth century with those of present-day women and girls, noting differences between rural and urban contexts. Ivy Schweitzer 272Preface surveys classical Western masculinist ideals of friendship from Aristotle to Montaigne and traces the transformation of this tradition into the present quest for equality without hierarchy. Alexandra Verini addresses models of female friendship in the European Middle Ages, arguing that Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe illustrate a “viable female alternative ” to classical models. The vulnerability of women’s close relationships comes to the fore in Nancy K. Miller’s moving elegies for deceased feminist friends, while Judith Taylor explores the more open and autonomous friendships adumbrated in contemporary fictions by Zadie Smith and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, themes also addressed in Judith Kegan Gardiner’s review essay of advice books on friendships between women and other studies of women’s friendships. Richa Nagar’s interview articulates an ideal of feminist friendships that “enable continuous evolution of our beings and mindsets... without feeling threatened by one another.” If our articles focus on the close bonds between women, our News and Views pieces in this issue point to collective ties formed in response to political and social threats: Dalia Abd El-Hameed and Nadine Naber describe responses by Egyptian feminists to government crackdowns, and our forum “Orlando: Observances” offers a selection of first-person accounts from vigils organized to mark the massacre at the Pulse nightclub this summer. This issue also presents internal negotiations of identity, identification, and body image in Stephanie Han’s short story and in the vivid and bold transgressions of Wangechi Mutu’s collages as described by Sarah Jane Cervenak. In “‘Abracadabra’: Intimate Inventions by Early College Women,” Susan Van Dyne takes us on a fascinating journey into the “the early formation of a homosocial student culture and the bonds between women” at Smith College in the late nineteenth century. Mining an archive of diaries, letters, photos, and other materials from a group of friends from the class of 1883, she focuses on two kinds of written evidence: one, the inchoate expressions of homoerotic desire in one student’s journal at a moment when “lesbian” did not yet exist as an identity, and the other, a love poem to two students, written as a parody by one of their women professors, but which reverberated beyond the college and ignited male opprobrium. In her discussions of these developments, rather than ascribing identity, Van Dyne navigates the “messiness” of the archive, keeping her eye trained on the “only partially intelligible strategies of self-representation that can’t be translated or reduced to the modern Preface 273 language of sexual self-recognition.” What is most surprising in her account is not that young women would feel desire for one another, nor that male peers or authorities might find this threatening, but that the fabric of the students’ homosocial community had such resilience, nurturing... (shrink)

Recently, amid growing awareness that computer algorithms are not neutral tools but can cause harm by reproducing and amplifying bias, attempts to detect and prevent such biases have intensified. An approach that has received considerable attention in this regard is the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology, which aims to contribute to both the critical analysis of (dis)values in existing technologies and the construction of novel technologies that account for specific desired values. This article provides a brief overview of the key (...) features of the Value Sensitive Design approach, examines its contributions to understanding and addressing issues around bias in computer systems, outlines the current debates on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning, and discusses how such debates could profit from VSD-derived insights and recommendations. Relating these debates on values in design and algorithmic bias to research on cognitive biases, we conclude by stressing our collective duty to not only detect and counter biases in software systems, but to also address and remedy their societal origins. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in Patriarchal Society. By Barbara Katz Rothman. Surrogate Motherhood: The Legal and Human Issues. By Martha A. Field.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface At a time when access to safe abortions is being curtailed in the United States under the pretext of a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on abortion and women’s embodiment. The essays by Melissa Oliver-Powell, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, and Jennifer L. Holland each contribute new approaches to the stillvexed topic of abortion, positioning movements for abortion access in relation to historical and (...) ecological change. Two collaboratively written essays, by South American authors María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra and Tania Pérez-Bustos, and by North American and European authors Laura Bisaillon with six colleagues, both center the body within feminist labor, exploring how the embodied experience of work can also be a site of knowledge-making. Other authors push us to move beyond humanistic understandings of affect and the body in feminist work, as Nathan Snaza shows in a review essay of four recent books engaging “Biopolitics without Bodies.” Poems by Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Darlene Taylor, and Abby Minor also feature experiences of bodily violence and bodily pleasure, while Ellyn Weiss discusses the distinctive representations of bodies in the visual art of Swedish-American artist Anna U. Davis. To close the issue, two News and Views pieces by Pang Laikwan and Sealing Cheng on the recent protest movement in Hong Kong provide two complementary perspectives on living through tumultuous political times. Our next issue will include content directly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first essay, Melissa Oliver-Powell’s “Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France” addresses the complexities of anti-​ abortion 8 rhetoric in France. Placing Varda’s 1977 film in the historical context of French nationalistic anxiety about low birthrates in the twentieth century, Oliver-Powell argues that the film deconstructs polarized narratives about abortion. While dominant cultural representations of abortion typically depicted it as the result of female irresponsibility or traumatic victimization, Varda’s film rejects the binary concepts of villain and victim and questions the presumption that women always suffer when exercising their reproductive choice. Oliver-Powell situates Varda alongside the 343 eminent French female cultural leaders who composed a famous 1971 Manifesto publicly declaring themselves criminals for having had illegal abortions and presents simultaneous histories of French feminism and French cinema. Varda’s film constructs a feminist representation of abortion that avoids foregrounding women ’s suffering and instead emphasizes empowerment and solidarity. Its narrative features two women friends, both treated unjustly by France’s abortion laws, who participate in the movement for reform over a fourteen -year span. Varda represents the interplay of motherhood with women ’s lives as a continuum, not a disruptive episode, and she blends documentary -style devices with imaginative musical interludes: she shows actual women seeking abortions in Holland and includes songs about abortion, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oliver-Powell claims that Varda dramatizes unprecedented representations “of female friendship without pathology, of abortion without guilt, death or persecution, of motherhood without objectification....” A second essay, Rachel Hurst’s “Abortion as a Feminist Pedagogy of Grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water,” proposes that the championing of women’s reproductive rights could better account for the context of difficult emotions and an imperfect world. Hurst uses reproductive justice approaches to critique simplistic rights-based arguments for abortion, premised on liberal concepts of choice and autonomy, which fail to understand the material conditions of poor women and especially women of color. Such analyses emphasize the necessity of rights discourses that include the right to bear and parent one’s own children free from violence and economic hardship, and they advocate the transformative possibilities of acknowledging rather than suppressing women’s ambivalence about their own abortions as well as others’ choices. Hurst describes a collaboration between two contemporary Canadian feminists, writer Marianne Apostolides and visual artist  9 Catherine Mellinger, in their mixed-media text, Deep Salt Water, which is organized according to the weeks of a pregnancy and the aftermath of its termination. Rather than falling back into familiar polarizations for and against “choice,” they use the story of Apostolides’s abortion seventeen years earlier... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface Within the current context in the United States, we tend to think of “choice” as the leading slogan of the liberal movement to expand women’s reproductive rights, particularly the right to elective abortion. But choice depends on context: on what is available, what is mandated, what is prohibited or discouraged, and what has not yet been imagined. This issue of Feminist Studies expands our thinking about available and (...) potential choices, both individual and social. The issue opens with Stephanie Yingyi Wang’s ethnographic study of companionate marriage in China, in which she describes cooperative marriage partnerships that look heterosexual and appear to fulfill traditional familial expectations, but that facilitate same-sex liaisons and so create new family structures. Other essays in this issue describe the kinds of choices available to those who seek nontraditional or less conventional family and erotic bonds. Leila J. Rupp discusses the “queer dilemmas of desire” that perplex undergraduate queer women in US colleges, and Sonny Nordmarken opens possibilities for new trans epistemologies that disrupt and produce new gender practices, claiming that queer instability provides “infinite possibilities” for individual and social change. More traditional choices and families take differing shapes in other historical and cultural contexts. Carla Pascoe Leahy compares the levels of maternal satisfaction felt by three historical cohorts of Australian women: those of the immediate post-World War II generation, the later generation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the current generation. Miriam Kienle examines how two designers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, decided to explore alternatives to big data by sending each other weekly postcards that quantified their lives according to “small/slow data” points. Other essays and poems emphasize constraint rather than choice about the kinds of identities that take shape within current social structures. Bettina Judd ponders the effects on herself and others of her own rage at racial injustice and of the stereotype of raging black women perpetuated by a society that has chosen not to 8Preface deal with its endemic racism. Similarly, Vivyan Adair’s memoir on the stigmata of growing up in poverty exposes the limitations of individual choice in the context of violence, a theme echoed in the poems by Elisabeth Blair, which dramatize her experiences in an abusive institution for troubled teens. Trysh Travis reviews four books published in 2017 that together, but differently, tackle the difficult situations of the “drug-using woman” and her recovery. Marilyn Strathern and Jade S. Sasser review Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway’s edited volume Making Kin, Not Population : Reconceiving Generations, with responses from multiple authors featured in the book. Finally, a short story by Mary Anna Evans and poetry by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Abigail G. H. Manzella voice other individual dilemmas related to choice. We end the issue with a News and Views piece by Sonja Thomas that offers more context on the recent Women’s Wall protest in Kerala, India. In “When Tongzhi Marry: Experiments of Cooperative Marriage between Lalas and Gay Men in Urban China,” Stephanie Yingyi Wang frames cooperative marriage in mainland China between gay men and lalas (same-sex loving women), or tonghzi marriage, as an experiment in queer kinship. Such marriages appear to fulfill traditional roles on the surface, providing women and men who desire same-sex relationships a sanctioned institution—marriage—within which to fulfill these desires. According to Wang, these relational strategies are shaped simultaneously by China’s heteronormative policies and by the global circulation of gay rights narratives, “transforming the heteronormative family institution from within.” In this ethnography, Wang describes relationships as varied as those in which married partners are mutually supportive close friends who confide in one another about their same-sex relationships, to others in which subjects suffered from differing expectations between the partners, sometimes with gay husbands expecting deferential behavior from their lala wives, or between the couples and their parents and in-laws. Wang suggests applying a “decolonizing feminist methodology” to go beyond dichotomies of public/private, local/global, and success/failure and thus to better understand tongzhi marriage and critical queer subjectivities at this global juncture. Wang’s article is a co-winner of the 2018 Feminist Studies Award for the... (shrink)

I first discuss reasons for feminists to attend to the role of women in the military, despite past emphasis on antimilitarism. I then focus on the exclusion of women from combat duty, reviewing its sanction by the U.S. Supreme Court and the history of its adoption. I present arguments favoring the exclusion, defending strong replies to each, and demonstrate that reasoning from related cases and feminist analyses of equality explain why exclusion remains entrenched.

To help professionals in all health care disciplines grapple with ethical issues, Ahronheim (medicine, New York Medical College), Moreno (biomedical ethics, U. of Virginia) and Zuckerman (Center for Ethics in Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center) review the history and theory of clinical ethics and present 31 case studies analyzed from medical, ethical and legal perspectives. This second edition expands the original discussions of ethical dilemmas caused by advances in medical genetics, organ transplants, HIV medicine and other developments. The appendix includes (...) Internet references, suggested readings and other resources. (shrink)

Within the psychoanalytic framework, there is a growing body of research and thinking about female development. In addition, there is ongoing research within other areas of psychology, such as developmental psychology and social psychology, which has important implications for an understanding of women's adult development. Often these research findings are not readily available to the analytic community, nor has much of the research been incorporated into a psychoanalytic framework. _Psychoanalysis and Women_ broadens analytic thinking by integrating contemporary literature from psychoanalysis (...) with that of other areas, both within and outside psychology, which has implications for the undertanding of women's development. This literature is conceptualized within a psychoanalytic framework. A basic premise underlying this book is that psychoanalysis needs continuing review and revision in terms of what women and men are about and a continuing focus on whether and how unfounded biases prevent analysts from understanding patients. The present volume considers how sexism and feminism are affecting psychoanalysis and exemplifies how the emerging field of psychoanalysis of women and the issues its existence raises should be conceptualized. It also exemplifies some of the positive contributions that a feminist outlook gives to the study of human behavior and should esxpand the range of hypotheses that we have about people. (shrink)

This qualitative study examines the moral courage of leaders working for democracy and human rights in Burma. As Burma transitions to democracy moralcourage will be essential for leaders of civil society organizations as they face corruption, cronyism, and resistance to change. From interview data with nineteen leaders in Burma and Thailand, and a review of the literature we developed a conceptual model of moral courage that suggests that the relationship between moral motivation and the demonstration of moral courage was mediated (...) by political, social, and individual level factors including the activists’ knowledge and experiences. In addition to applications for leadership in civil society organizations in emerging democracies, results suggest individuals in private, public, or non-governmental organizations, when confronted with coercion, corruption, exploitation, or denial of due process can act with moral courage by engaging their moral principles, commitment, compassion, and sense of urgency while recognizing risks and potential hardship. (shrink)