Philosophy Commons^™

Witnessing Conspiracy Theories: Developing An Intersectional Approach To Conspiracy Theory Research, David Guignion

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation proposes an intersectional approach to conspiracy theory research that engages conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists by considering their proximity and affiliations with hegemonic power structures. Against challenges to conspiracy theories based on their lack of empirical legitimacy (Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019) and building on arguments that propound their status as “subjugated knowledges” (Bratich 2008), this dissertation argues that conspiracy theories can be vectors of anti-oppressive resistance against systemic forces that disenfranchise racial, gender, and class minorities. Conspiracy theories are not a homogenous phenomenon; they are particular instances of potentially generative suspicion against powerful forces. The dissertation deploys Kelly …

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in …

Toward A Fluid Cinematic Spectatorship And Desire: Revisiting Laura Mulvey’S Psychoanalytic Film Theories, Taylor Ashton Mcgoey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis project re-evaluates Laura Mulvey’s film theories regarding psychoanalysis and the “male gaze,” first found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). By re-evaluating the limitations of Mulvey’s use of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic model this project seeks to understand the desires and processes of identification of cinematic spectators who reject the ideological imperative of the “male gaze”. As many critics have noted, Mulvey’s initial examination of cinema does not account for LGBTQ+ spectators and/or black spectators who occupy looking relations that reject cis-normative and heteronormative white Hollywood cinematic conventions. From this standpoint, we begin the …

Dancing Across Difference: Transforming Habitual Modes Of Being In The World Through Movement, Kimberly Dority

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although some important scholarly work has been done on race, and whiteness, in relation to habit, my account addresses the role of movement in habit through dance. Dance is well-suited for exploring habit since dancers cultivate an intimate knowledge of their bodies as habitual dancing bodies. I argue that dancing can offer critical insight into how habitual modes of being in the world may be shifted and changed. Dancers’ mastery of movement not only consists in sedimenting habits within the body, but also involves actively exploring how one’s own bodily movement can be altered (Ravn 2017; Damkjaer, 2015; Ingerslev, 2013; …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

Death Of The Clinic: Trans-Informing The Clinical Gaze To Counter Epistemic Violence, Diana E. Kuhl

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This case study research (Patton, 2002, 2014; Flyvberg, 2006) has grown out of an awareness of deep resistance from the psy disciplines to trans-informed epistemologies as a source of legitimate knowledge (Tosh, 2015, 2016; Winters, 2008). It focuses on examining how the closure of The Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) for Children and Youth at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, signaled a paradigm shift from the ‘treatment model’ to the ‘affirmative model’ with respect to clinical approaches for supporting trans and gender diverse children and youth. As such the case study involved tracing the …

A Queer Politics Of Imperceptibility: A Philosophy Of Resistance To Contemporary Sexual Surveillance, Andie Shabbar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis journeys through a series of events to develop a concept of “imperceptibility” as a mode of resistance to contemporary sexual surveillance. The events I examine include biometric recognition of gender and race at airport security checkpoints, the heteropatriarchal colonial surveillance of Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, various protest actions, and the political potentials of glitch art. Exploring their unexpected points of connection, my goal is to bring into view acts of resistance against sexual surveillance that already operate below and above the threshold of everyday perception.

The project advocates for a philosophy of resistance that underscores the political …

Unread: The (Un)Published Texts Of Romanticism, Marc D. Mazur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads the unpublished texts of Romanticism not as fragments on the road to publication but as psychoanalytic “partial objects” that re-figure our understanding of the relationship between Romantic authors and publication. Against positivist interpretations of literary production that limit writing to the professionalization of the author and to a sociology of texts, Unread develops the concept of the (un)published whose parenthetical bracketing signals an unstable suspension of textual instability that is at once prior to and yet persistently remains a part of the writing of the published text. I argue that non-publication also arises from the author’s relation …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

Contesting Gender Concepts, Language And Norms: Three Critical Articles On Ethical And Political Aspects Of Gender Non-Conformity, Stephanie Julia Kapusta

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In chapter one I firstly critique some contemporary family-resemblance approaches to the category woman, and claim that they do not take sufficient account of dis-semblance, that is, resemblances that people have in common with members of the contrast category man. Second, I analyze how the concept of woman is semantically contestable: resemblance/dissemblance structures give rise to vagueness and to borderline cases. Borderline cases can either be included in the category or excluded from it. The factors which incline parties in a dispute about membership to include or exclude depend on metaphysical, ethical, or political background assumptions.

In chapter two, I …

Crossing The Law: Trans Activism, Aleatory Materialism, And The Analyst's Discourse, Christopher M. Bomba

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines contingency to elucidate transgender activism’s leadership in radical politics. I take up Louis Althusser’s theory of aleatory materialism to politicize everyday encounters. Trans activists gain a parallax view through gendered (mis)recognition that reveals the structure of ideology’s vanishing points. By contrast, I criticize a cisgendered viewpoint and demonstrate the logical errors that result in transphobic behavior through Jacques Lacan’s version of the prisoner’s dilemma. I conclude to theorize trans activism’s engagement with the state through Lacanian analytic technique. This technique does not result in traditional “treatment,” but instead fuels activism with knowledge of the structures that must …

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). …

Harm Or Mere Inconvenience? Denying Women Emergency Contraception, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

This paper addresses the likely impact on women of being denied emergency contraception (EC) by pharmacists who conscientiously refuse to provide it. A common view—defended by Elizabeth Fenton and Loren Lomasky, among others—is that these refusals inconvenience rather than harm women so long as the women can easily get EC somewhere else nearby. I argue from a feminist perspective that the refusals harm women even when they can easily get EC somewhere else nearby.

Referral In The Wake Of Conscientious Objection To Abortion, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

Currently, the preferred accommodation for conscientious objection to abortion in medicine is to allow the objector to refuse to accede to the patient's request so long as the objector refers the patient to a physician who performs abortions. The referral part of this arrangement is controversial, however. Pro-life advocates claim that referrals make objectors complicit in the performance of acts that they, the objectors, find morally offensive. McLeod argues that the referral requirement is justifiable, although not in the way that people usually assume.

Infertility And Moral Luck: The Politics Of Women Blaming Themselves For Infertility, Carolyn Mcleod, Julie Ponesse

Philosophy Publications

Infertility can be an agonizing experience, especially for women. And, much of the agony has to do with luck: with how unlucky one is in being infertile, and in how much luck is involved in determining whether one can weather the storm of infertility and perhaps have a child in the end. We argue that bad luck associated with being infertile is often bad moral luck for women. The infertile woman often blames herself or is blamed by others for what is happening to her, even when she cannot control or prevent what is happening to her. She has simply …

The Stem Cell Debate Continues: The Buying And Selling Of Eggs For Research, Françoise Baylis, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

Now that stem cell scientists are clamouring for human eggs for cloning-based stem cell research, there is vigorous debate about the ethics of paying women for their eggs. Generally speaking, some claim that women should be paid a fair wage for their reproductive labour or tissues, while others argue against the further commodification of reproductive labour or tissues and worry about voluntariness among potential egg providers. Siding mainly with those who believe that women should be financially compensated for providing eggs for research, the new stem cell guidelines of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) legitimise both reimbursement …

For Dignity Or Money: Feminists On The Commodification Of Women’S Reproductive Labour, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Mere And Partial Means: The Full Range Of The Objectification Of Women, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Relational Autonomy, Self-Trust, And Health Care For Patients Who Are Oppressed, Carolyn Mcleod, Susan Sherwin

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Self-Trust And Reproductive Autonomy, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

In this thesis. I give a theory of the nature of self-trust and an explanation of its role in autonomous decision-making. We tend to think of trust as essentially interpersonal which casts doubt on the coherence of the concept of self-trust. Drawing on patients' experiences in reproductive medicine. I argue that self-trust is a meaningful as well as a useful concept. I provide autobiographical sketches of a number of women's experiences. supplemented by my own observations made while doing a clinical practicum in reproductive medicine, to illustrate that what many women feel toward themselves in a variety of reproductive health …

Trudy Govier’S Dilemmas Of Trust, Carolyn Mcleod, S. Burns

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.