Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Bodily Experience And Suppressed Female Values: A Pathway Through Works Of Literature, Art And The Labyrinth, Bettina Schmitz

XIV IAPh Symposium 2010

This presentation is part of the Value and the Body track.

In my paper I will question the relation between bodily experience and female values. The debate on gender and gender equality has made it quite difficult to use the word ‘female’ or to refer to the female body. Is it possible to presuppose an analogy of body and values similar to the one Immanuel Kant probably had in mind, when in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) he admired “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”? Even if my paper will not primarily be about …

Martha Nussbaum: Feminism Between Universalism And Pluralism, Louise Derksen

XIV IAPh Symposium 2010

This presentation is part of the Communities and Institutions: Negotiating Differences track.

Martha Nussbaum describes the project of her book Women and Human Development as the ‘practical pursuit of gender justice’. Despite the emphasis on the practical, she believes that the feminist theory which underlies emancipation in the practical sense must have a firm philosophical basis. Philosophy, according to Nussbaum, is the best possible area in which to develop theories to think through issues having to do with gender justice. In sciences such as political science, legal theory or economics, theories are developed which have an impact on the lives …

Women’S Reproductive Autonomy: Cesareans, Technological Interventions, And Loss Of Choice, Sylvia Burrow

XIV IAPh Symposium 2010

This presentation is part of the Technology and Intervention in Pregnancy and Childbirth track.

Situating Knowledge Through The Mothers Committee Of Bayview Hunters Point, Nancy Mchugh

XIV IAPh Symposium 2010

This presentation is part of the Social Values in Medical Research track.

Due to higher than national average breast cancer rates and deaths on Long Island the U.S. Congress in 1993 ordered a study of breast cancer on the island. The Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project (LIBCSP), federally funded under Public Law 103-43, conducted by the National Cancer Institute in collaboration with the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, is aimed at investigating environmental causes of breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute states “[t]he LIBCSP consists of more than 10 studies that include human population (epidemiologic) studies, the establishment …

Accountability Or Attestation? An Assessment Of Butler’S Ethical Subject With The Help Of Ricoeur, Annemie Halsema

XIV IAPh Symposium 2010

This presentation is part of the Ethical and Epistemic Choices: New Approaches track.

In Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) Judith Butler investigates the possibility of ethics starting from a poststructuralist subject position. Whereas in earlier works, with concepts such as “performativity,” Butler put the ethical and critical capacities of the subject into perspective, works such as Giving an Account of Oneself, Precarious Life (2004) and to some extent Antigone’s Claim (2000), give the impression of a “turn” to ethics.

In the paper I will evaluate the notion of the ethical subject that Butler uses in these works by confronting …

Gender Ideology In The Physical Sciences: Philosophical Arguments, ÁGnes KováCs, LáSzló Ropolyi

XIV IAPh Symposium 2010

This presentation is part of the Feminist Perspectives in the Sciences: Physics, Chemistry and Climate Science track.

Feminist science criticism has overwhelmingly concerned itself with biological theories on sex and gender difference. Feminist critics (Bleier, Hubbard, Fausto-Sterling, Haraway) have discredited these theories by arguing that gender bias resulted in cognitive distortions and misrepresentation of the subject of inquiry. Feminist philosophers of science (Harding, Longino, and Nelson, among others), elaborated epistemological frameworks to account for these gender biases in science. There is nothing specific in their theories which would limit their validity to the social and life sciences, and yet no …

Gender, Germs, And Dirt: A Case Study Of Properly Politicised Science, Sharyn Clough

XIV IAPh Symposium 2010

This presentation is part of the Feminist Perspectives in the Sciences: Epidemiology track.

The relatively recent increase in cases of allergies and asthma, especially in industrialised nations of the north and west, has been explained by the “hygiene hypothesis”—viz., that increased cleanliness and sanitation have unintended negative consequences for immune health—an hypothesis that has received robust epidemiological support (e.g., Platts-Mills 2002). Over the last few years, support for the hypothesis has increased with the discovery that populations regularly exposed to certain parasitic worms (helminths) have very low incidence of chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s (Elliot, Summers, and Weinstock 2007). …