Feminist Philosophy Commons^™

Imagining Action In/Against The Anthropocene: Narrative Impasse And The Necessity Of Alternatives To Effect Resistance, Ariel Kroon

The Goose

The Anthropocene has emerged as the dominant conception of the contemporary moment, centering the human individual as both responsible for and bearing the responsibility to counteract its numerous interrelated socioeconomic, political, and environmental issues including the staggering loss of biodiversity across the globe and the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This constitutes a significant psychological impasse that disempowers and disenfranchises humans living in this epoch, discouraging any substantive individual effort. Drawing on the posthuman feminist philosophy of theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and Stacy Alaimo together with a reflection of the power of science fiction as a literature of cognitive …

Structural Justice: A Critical Feminist Framework Exploring The Intersection Between Justice, Equity And Structural Reconciliation., Camille Burnett, Michael Swanberg, Ashley Hudson, Donna Schminkey

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Violence against women is a human rights violation (UN, 2006). It affects the health of women globally (UN, 2009) and its elimination is at the heart of many international and national goals. Intimate partner violence (IPV), one of the most common forms of gender-based violence, affects one in three women worldwide (WHO, 2013). The consequences of IPV create negative health outcomes for women that diminish their quality of life and their overall well-being. Abused women access community supports such as shelters to seek safe refuge from the abuse and restore their lives. While shelters play an extensive role in helping …

Sex Work And Empowerment: Migrant Women Looking For Love, Breanna A. Harkins

The Corinthian

This paper will address the issues regarding consensual female sex work and whether this is a legitimate form of work or an appropriate lifestyle for women to hold. Research collected from various countries and cultures conclude that sexual labor is a common, but often underappreciated, means of income for women. In China, India, Ethiopia, and Hungary we see an intersection between the women interviewed and how their stories, while different, all lead towards a very similar conclusion and realization: female sex work is empowering.

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Sex(Edness) In The City: Reimagining Our Urban Spaces With Abraham Akkerman, Duane Allyson U. Gravador-Pancho

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

In this essay, Duane Allyson U. Gravador-Pancho foregrounds the gendered origins of the cities that we build. Taking her cue from Akkerman, Gravador-Pancho outlines the predominantly masculine characteristics of most cities, which coincides with the privileging of Western rationality that emphasizes rigidity and predictability in urban design. Such a predominantly masculine conception and design of the city comes at the cost of setting aside characteristics that are feminine, such as the elements of surprise and eroticism. But how would a city look like if we allowed the feminine to also come into play? “In the context of urban planning and …

Can Nonhumans Be Victims Of Genocide?, Kirstin Waldkoenig

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

“Genocide” appears commonly in critical animal studies literature and sparsely in philosophy to describe human-caused violence against nonhuman beings. However, such uses of the term have rarely been informed by relevant work in genocide studies, nor otherwise formally substantiated. This thesis explores what is at stake when employing the term and proposes a model for appropriate application to nonhuman contexts. Claudia Card’s notion of genocide as social death allows for the consideration of nonhuman animals as victims of genocide. Social vitality is important to the lives of some nonhuman animals and its forcible diminishment results in social death for those …

Gender, Politics, Market Segmentation, And Taste: Adult Contemporary Radio At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Saesha Senger

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the …

Inviting Others In: How Oppression Affects The Self, Mylo Apollo Parker-Emerson

Senior Independent Study Theses

Broadly, the focus of this thesis is to consider how oppression affects the self. More specifically, this project supports the claim that there is a conflicting imposition (by being oppression) placed on queer folk in black (American) Christian spaces that affects the self. The position is elucidated through a four-chapter structure. In the first chapter, I provide a charitable reading to Mead’s theory of the self. I end the chapter by considering how a dissonance may occur. In chapter two, I define identity through a hermeneutical lens and supplement this theory by considering the ways identity can be imposed and …

A Feminist Epistemological Framework: Preventing Knowledge Distortions In Scientific Inquiry, Karina Bucciarelli

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how scientific knowledge claims can become distorted due to socially constructed conceptions of gender. Further, it delves into the key components of an epistemological framework that will minimize these distortions.

To set up the analysis, I first explore how ‘traditional’ scientific explanations of human fertilization map stereotypes of the passive female and the active male onto the scientific participation of the egg and the sperm in human reproduction, thus rendering this knowledge claim problematic. We then turn to arguments presented by prominent feminist epistemologists. I argue that in order to produce knowledge claims free of distortions due …

Humans Aren't Boxes, Art Isn't Finite, Brianne Alta Humphreys

Theses and Dissertations

I am bored. All around me are systems that perpetuate repetitive, reductive, and mundane modes of living. In an attempt to counter a culture obsessed with singular ways of existence and bite-sized perfection, I utilize moving mediums of video and performance to dive head first into a vast array of sloppy sincerity. The crisp, white-washed, analytical, and restrictive is loudly replaced with the empirical, haphazard, and instinctual. My intention is to create and encourage raw, performative-based work that is as multifaceted as unbridled life itself. This alive and physical practice hosts a conglomeration of sweat, memories, heartbreaks, hymn singing, line …

Scavengers Of The In-Between: Feminist Ruminations On Dogs, Love, And Pragmatism, Cathryn Bailey

Between the Species

Abstract:

Western philosophy’s frequent conflation and denigration of animals, human others, embodiment and emotions has been powerfully documented over the past many decades. I explore the impact of this fear and loathing of the body, a somatophobia that infects much of the Western philosophical canon and its orientation toward people of color, white women, and animals. As I share reflections that are meant to enact and reveal an embodied pragmatism, I consider the potential of our love for dogs to ground a more embodied philosophical approach to love. Rooted in my own journey (as philosopher and dog lover), I pose …

Experimental Philosophy And Feminist Epistemology: Conflicts And Complements, Amanda Huminski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The recent turn toward experimental philosophy, particularly in ethics and epistemology, might appear to be supported by feminist epistemology, insofar as experimental philosophy signifies a break from the tradition of primarily white, middle-class men attempting to draw universal claims from within the limits of their own experience and research. However, the relationship between the two is not so straightforward, and an analysis of their connection bears on broader questions concerning intuitions, philosophical methodology, and epistemic standards more generally. This dissertation project aims to 1) examine the conception of intuitions that appears to underpin many projects in experimental philosophy, 2) levy …

Feeling As Knowing: Trans Phenomenology And Epistemic Justice, B. Lee Aultman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a critical intervention into the literatures on epistemic and phenomenological claims about trans experiences, and embodied knowledge more generally. It also addresses the conception of ordinary affects, or feelings of self-adjustment in everyday life, and their political implications for trans people. Traditional literatures on the political tend to avoid questions of embodiment and the experiences of everyday life in favor of institutional interpretations of courts, elections, and protest movements. This has become particularly true of scholarship on trans politics and theories of ordinary life. These literatures often reduce political movements to their presumed universal intentions for constitutional …

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Four Sights Of The Patient (Ophelia), Cecily Ann Fergeson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I make work in a variety of media, largely dealing with the imagery and material of the human body. My current work attempts to reckon with the following subjects: a reclamation of the notion of the so-called medical gaze and its historical record in photography; the idea that receiving the medical gaze transforms patients’ bodies; the idea of illness as an uncanny and intimate experience; and, finally, the act of metaphorically retracing the body’s material journey through the medical institution as it exists today. In this text, I discuss my practice in the context of critical theory, a recent observation …

The Logic Of Sexuation In Deleuze And Lacan, Matthew Lovett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In The Logic of Sexuation in Deleuze and Lacan, I argue for an account of sexual difference that responds to a tension in feminist philosophy, namely, the problem of the ontological status of the sexed body. In so doing, I turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. I argue that, rather than being antithetical, the two can be productively read together, in particular with regard to this very question. Ultimately basing my reading in the Deleuzian passive syntheses and dynamic geneses of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as well as in Lacan’s twentieth …

Gender Differences Associated With The Evolution Of Attributes Sought In Sports Apparel, Jami Adler

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Since the turn of the century, many things have changed around the world, with a focus on the athletic apparel and fashion industries. Using Fowler’s (1999) research regarding the attributes sought in sports apparel, this study serves as a replication to determine how attributes sought in sports apparel have evolved. Online surveying through Qualtrics was utilized for data collection. The research explored the trend of Athleisure and the rising demand for versatile clothing. The role of gender and its associated differences significantly influenced the attributes sought in sports apparel. In addition, this study explored three additional attributes that consumers evaluate …

Sensibility And Self-Denial: A Christian Evaluation Of Journalistic Care Ethics And Traditional Ethics, Valerie Pors

Senior Honors Theses

Traditional ethical models within journalism have upheld truth and objectivity as the highest standard, based on a conglomeration of Western ethical traditions. However, as the age of subjective moral reasoning ushered in skepticism and independently subjective philosophies, ethicists have examined the application of care ethics to the field of journalism. Scholars have viewed care ethics and traditional ethics as conflicting theories, but both contain elements of God’s nature as revealed in the Bible. Both models also harbor secularized elements. In a biblical analysis of the two systems and their underlying assumptions, this thesis identifies crucial biblical differences in their views …

Naming The Nameless: An Exploration Of Queer Poetry And Empowerment, Jesse Yelvington

2018 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Wise Women: The Female Junzi In Confucian Ethics, Berit Turnquist

Library Research Prize Student Works

In the context of Confucian ethics, there are few concepts as indefinable yet centrally important to the system of thought as a whole as the ideal of the sage. The sage is a key topic of discussion in The Analects of Confucius, and has been the subject of much reflection, revision, and discussion by neo-Confucian scholars throughout history. For centuries, however, one segment of the population was largely absent from the annals of Confucian scholarship, namely, women. The goal of this essay is to argue that, although women are rarely addressed in the canon of Confucian writings, women are not …