Feminist Philosophy Commons^™

From Feminist Activist To Abortion Barbie: A Rhetorical History Of Abortion Discourse From 2013-2016, Skye De Saint Felix

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a rhetorical history of abortion discourse with an emphasis on the rhetorical moment from 2013-2016. To uncover the rhetorical strategies used to shape consensus on abortion, I highlight three major events—Senator Wendy Davis’s (D-Fort Worth) notorious 13-hour filibuster against Texas’s HB2, the conservative capture of Davis as Abortion Barbie, and the Supreme Court case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). Because of these key rhetorical moments, pro-choice and anti-choice publics cultivated a period of heightened tension that reinvigorated abortion debates. While pro-choice groups employed narrative to centralize women as rhetorical agents and open spaces to discuss abortion, …

Openness And Protection: A Philosophical Analysis Of The Placenta's Mediatory Role In Co-­‐Constituting Emergent Intertwined Identities, Marjolein Oele

Philosophy

This paper analyzes the placenta's biological and ontological underpinnings in human affectivity as it is generated. The placenta as medial boundary constitutes a place for the encounter and becoming of mother and child, not only as sapient beings, but also in their very nature. Before and beyond the difference between self and other, the placenta offers a model of affective symbiogenesis where selves come into existence in and through the very materiality of one another, contradicting the presumed "immunitary logic of selfpreservation."

The section on placental (re)presentation crafts a placentology that accounts for the possibility of ontogenetic becoming in the …

Imagining Disability Futurities, Carla Rice, Eliza Chandler, Jen Rinaldi, Nadine Changfoot, Kirsty Liddiard, Roxanne Mykitiuk, Ingrid Mundel

Articles & Book Chapters

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in the service of able‐bodiedness and able‐mindedness (Kafer 2013), a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites …

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Ecofeminism: The Path Towards Healing The Earth, Jamie Thompson

Dialogue & Nexus

The concept of the patriarchy, or any concept in which one group dominates another, is inseparable from the formation of human kind’s domination of nature. This domination of nature has led to the current the ecological crisis humanity faces. Those who deny climate change can admit to the massive amounts of pollution, trash, and deforestation. Despite this worsening economic crisis, those in power have been slow to react. Women can ultimately provide and lead the movement to solve this ecological crisis through the growing movement of Ecofeminism. In the philosophy of Ecofeminism, individuals recognize and reject western dualistic thinking that …

Single, Unwed, And Pregnant In Victorian London: Narratives Of Working Class Agency And Negotiation, Virginia L. Grimaldi

Madison Historical Review

Unmarried working women who got pregnant in Victorian London and were abandoned by the fathers were in a sticky situation. If a woman kept the baby, she would unlikely be able to provide for it, especially under the ‘Bastardly Act’ of the 1834 Poor Law, which deemed all illegitimate children under the sole responsibility of the mother. If she concealed her pregnancy and abandoned the child, or risked her life by having an illegal abortion, she would at best be held liable for infanticide, at worst, dead. One institutional option available to these vulnerable mothers was the London Foundling Hospital …

Spectral Bodies: Women's Resistance Across Time In North America, Whitney C. Evanson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contrasts the lived experiences of feminists within the EZLN in Mexico with the historical persecution of community outsiders during the Salem witch trials. I want to explore the differences between a radical political and social movement (the EZLN), and the radical shift in history in which women were accused of witchcraft based on hysteria and rumors. There are parallels between the witch trials and the causes of the Zapatista movement in the ways that women's bodies were treated--their political usefulness to create fear and obedience from citizens by murdering them for their defiance, burying them in shallow graves. …

The Willfulness Of A Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki And The Politics Of Visual Resistance, Miriam M. Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ahmed Zaki (1949-2005) is one of Egyptian cinema’s most prominent leading actors, with work spanning three decades of critical films that informed a generation’s visual register of masculinity. However, the beginnings of his career were marked by public skepticism around his place as a leading actor due to him being “too dark” and “too poor”; as his career continued to flourish, those very markings of racing and classing Zaki because a foundation for increasingly stamping his public image with the “authenticity” of an Egyptian citizen. At a particularly neoliberal moment in the Egyptian economy, that of the early 80s, new …

Toward A Social Ontology Of The Family, Laura W. Kane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation proposes a definition of the family that captures the qualitative aspects of familial relationships – a collection of features that set apart ideal families from deficient families – that best serve family members and the state. Most importantly, the qualitative features that define ideal families are the features that actually define the family qua family: groups that do not have these features do not count as families. Why draw such a categorical distinction between families and non-families? I argue that the benefits conferred upon families by the state demand that families be the kinds of groups that …

[Not] Buying It: Prostitution As Unwanted Sex, Rebecca Whisnant

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Noting the relative invisibility of prostitution buyers, or Johns, in discussions of the morality of prostitution, this article criticizes Johns’ behavior on the grounds that they are culpably involved in causing the typical harms of prostitution in the lives of the women whom they pay for sex. Those harms are, at bottom, the result of being habitually subjected to unwanted sex, and they are exacerbated rather than mitigated by such sex being bought and paid for. Efforts to normalize and legalize sex-buying should therefore be resisted.

Celebrating The Feminine: Daoist Connections To Contemporary Feminism In China, Dessie Miller

Master's Projects and Capstones

Contemporary feminism and its emergence in the early 20th century may seem like a recent phenomenon; however, the idea of feminism has been evolving over the centuries and what may be called a “proto-feminism” could be found in one of China’s classical literary masterpieces, known as the Daodejing. Classical Chinese philosophy has influenced and helped shape what feminism is today in China. For this project, I analyzed the use of language in the Daodejing to demonstrate the feminine imagery throughout the text. Secondly, the characters having significance for feminist interpretations for the Dao and Yin-Yang were deconstructed and analyzed in …

Cat Metamorfosis: Becoming Animal And The Freedom Of Non-Identity, Hannah Becker

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A large number of modern and contemporary female artists have employed the state of becoming to either free themselves of or challenge the social norms that come with being a woman. Kara Walker frees the Mammy of her expectation by combining her with a sphinx in her monumental sugar sculpture, A Subtlety. The Guerilla Girls have an impenetrable and unidentifiable voice when they speak from behind gorilla masks. Lucy Gunning’s The Horse Impressionists depicts women mimicking the behavior of horses to lose their human consciousness, and more specifically, female identity. Looking beyond the art world and into recent consumerist …

Creatures Of Play, Melissa Shelton

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis explores my practice as an artist and my work’s cultural, theoretical and social contexts, such carnival theory, feminist studies and film studies, as well as references to mythology and my own biography. I discuss forms of representation of gendered identities through my work in drawing, performance, animation, video and installation.

The masks we wear become as real as our bare face. Through the act of doubling the representation, my thesis work BECOMING/a fine line situates the mask as the mediator between reflections, mirroring the identity and the notion of performativity. Embracing a certain incompleteness and embodying the theoretical …

Feminism In Biology And Belief, Rachel Hurst

Dialogue & Nexus

As feminism has become more hotly-contested in today’s society, the need to analyze the movement’s claims from a scientific and theological perspective has developed. Labor statistics and sociological research reveal that income inequality persists between the sexes. Neuroscience and evolutionary psychology show that subtle differences exist between male and female brains, and these slight variations can potentially be traced to the differing selective pressures between the genders. Ultimately, the biological differences that favor power differentials must be overcome to remedy inequality and injustice. Although Christians have historically upheld these differences and viewed women as inferior, a more modern theological understanding …

Volume 3 Editorial, Daniel Brannan

Dialogue & Nexus

No abstract provided.

The Feminization Of Violence, Caitlin Logan

Theses and Dissertations

Grounded in the necessity of upending the economic base as it is defined by Louis Althusser, this paper seeks to express a possibility for the creation of a feminine voice, that when expressed as itself, independent of the pervasive nature of patriarchal power and significance, could be the very event that engenders the first real “violent” attack on the base. Using Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as an example of a uniquely feminine voice, this paper also seeks to empower the experience of the Black female aesthetic as a perspective capable of tapping the multiplicity of human …

Girls Are Us: A Collection Of Oral Histories From The Jmu Community, Anne M. Sherman

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

On a campus where women make up a majority of the student population, it is especially important that female voices are heard and given a platform on which they can control their own narrative. I wanted to give those female-identifying voices that platform. I conducted a series of interviews to examine how college-aged female-identifying students feel about their identity and how they construct that identity within the climate of the JMU community. I was particularly interested in the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual preference, and ability. I asked each person to share their stories of times when they …

Preserving Dignity In The Long Term Care Of Actively Dying Residents, Libby-Rose Cronican

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

As one goes through the process of aging and approaches death, they experience a series of losses: from the loss of physical or mental ability to the ultimate loss of life. These losses make the individual vulnerable to harms that can come from a variety of sources. One source is found within the everyday interactions of long-term care nurses and aides with their elderly, dying residents. Creating this harm stems from a poor nursing practice where the nurse or aide fails to recognize and promote the resident’s dignity and autonomy. The normal notion of dignity and autonomy does not encompass …

Three Women, Two Spheres, And A Contract: A Comparative Study Of Mary Astell And Mary Wollstonecraft Through The Lens Of Carole Pateman's "The Sexual Contract", Robyn Burke Dabora

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This project examines the writings of Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) regarding women in light of ideas articulated by Carole Pateman (1940- ) in her book, The Sexual Contract (1988). In her work, Pateman critiques the prescriptions for the management of society suggested by classic contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) and cites that their solutions focus solely on men in the public sphere of society. Pateman illuminates the condition of women in the private sphere of the home, and asserts that this realm operates by mechanisms radically different from those of the …

Making Sex Work For The State : The Policing Of Sex Work In The United States., Madeline A Clabough

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the ways that sex work is regulated within the United States, and analyze the ways that regulation is shaped by contemporary feminist discourse. To do so, it analyzes the ways in which sex workers have been and pathologized since the 19th century, and address the ways that these conceptualizations have been incorporated into the legal regulation of sex workers. Finally, this thesis will look to contemporary practices in the state regulation of sex workers, and argue that the relationship between neoliberalism, the carceral state, and what has come to be termed “carceral feminism” operate in conjunction to …