Diversity Reading List

Abstract: The story of a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program.

Publisher’s Note:

For Nivedita Menon, feminism is not about a moment of final triumph over patriarchy but about the gradual transformation of the social field so decisively that old markers shift forever. From sexual harassment charges against international figures to the challenge that caste politics poses to feminism, from the ban on the veil in France to the attempt to impose skirts on international women badminton players, from queer politics to domestic servants’ unions to the Pink Chaddi campaign, Menon deftly illustrates how feminism complicates the field irrevocably. Incisive, eclectic and politically engaged, Seeing like a Feminist is a bold and wide-ranging book that reorders contemporary societ

Abstract: I further the argument for a socially extended mind by examining gender and the role it plays in cognition. My first claim is that gender is a social institution that often if not always subtends our cognitive processes, especially those that are maximally embodied. The social institution of gender often serves to inhibit female embodied cognitive processing, as a quick glance at the myriad of oppressive forces at play in gender dynamics illustrates. To combat the potential objection that gender is not a vehicle for extending cognitive processes, but rather plays a shaping role in embodied practice, I propose looking at the history of Female Sexual Dysfunction and its construction by the social institutions of the pharmaceutical companies and media. By doing so, I claim a case can be made that these institutions have actually invaded the minds of many women to the point that cognition pertaining to sex, sexual functioning, and health are wholly dependent upon and constituted by the interplay of these social systems.

Publisher’s Note: This book develops an intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. It accomplisheses four main goals. First, it outlines a concise list of the main principles of intersectional feminism. Second, it uses these principles to critique prevailing philosophical theories of moral responsibility. Third, it offers an account of moral responsibility that is compatible with the ethos of intersectional feminism. And fourth, it uses intersectional feminist principles to critique culturally normative responsibility practices. This is the first book to provide an explicitly intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. After identifying the five principles central to intersectional feminism, the author demonstrates how influential theories of responsibility are incompatible with these principles. She argues that a normatively adequate theory of blame should not be preoccupied with the agency or traits of wrongdoers; it should instead underscore, and seek to ameliorate, oppression and adversity as experienced by the marginalized. Apt blame and praise, according to her intersectional feminist account, is both communicative and functionalist. The book concludes with an extensive discussion of culturally embedded responsibility practices, including asymmetrically structured conversations and gender- and racially biased social spaces. An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Moral Responsibility presents a sophisticated and original philosophical account of moral responsibility. It will be of interest to philosophers working at the crossroads of moral responsibility, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, queer theory, critical disability studies, and intersectionality theory.

Abstract: Despite increasing rates of women researching in math-intensive fields, publications by female authors remain underrepresented. By analyzing millions of records from the dedicated bibliographic databases zbMATH, arXiv, and ADS, we unveil the chronological evolution of authorships by women in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. We observe a pronounced shortage of female authors in top-ranked journals, with quasistagnant figures in various distinguished periodicals in the first two disciplines and a significantly more equitable situation in the latter. Additionally, we provide an interactive open-access web interface to further examine the data. To address whether female scholars submit fewer articles for publication to relevant journals or whether they are consciously or unconsciously disadvantaged by the peer review system, we also study authors’ perceptions of their submission practices and analyze around 10,000 responses, collected as part of a recent global survey of scientists. Our analysis indicates that men and women perceive their submission practices to be similar, with no evidence that a significantly lower number of submissions by women is responsible for their underrepresentation in top-ranked journals. According to the self-reported responses, a larger number of articles submitted to prestigious venues correlates rather with aspects associated with pronounced research activity, a well-established network, and academic seniority.

Introduction: Feminism is the movement to end women's oppression. One possible way to understand 'woman' in this claim is to take it as a sex term: 'woman' picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood 'woman' differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry (around 12 000 words in length) outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender.

Abstract: The gender concept woman is central to feminism but has proven to be notoriously difficult to define. Some feminist philosophers, most notably Sally Haslanger, have recently argued for revisionary analyses of the concept where it is defined pragmatically for feminist political purposes. I argue against such analyses: pragmatically revising woman may not best serve feminist goals and doing so is unnecessary. Instead, focusing on certain intuitive uses of the term 'woman' enables feminist philosophers to make sense of it.

Abstract: The relationship between feminism and metaphysics has historically been strained. Metaphysics has until recently remained dismissive of feminist insights, and many feminist philosophers have been deeply skeptical about any value that metaphysics might have when thinking about advancing gender justice. Nevertheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. Such feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics in holding that metaphysical tools can help advance debates on topics outside of traditional metaphysical inquiry (e.g. the nature of gender, sex, or sexuality). Moreover, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. Feminist metaphysicians have also recently begun interrogating the methods of metaphysics and they have raised questions about what metaphysics as a discipline is in the business of doing. In discussing such methodological issues, Elizabeth Barnes has recently argued that some prevalent conceptions of metaphysics rule out feminist metaphysics from the start and render it impossible. This is bad news for self-proclaimed feminist metaphysicians in suggesting that they are mistaken about the metaphysical status of their work. With this worry in mind, the paper asks: how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to 'mainstream' metaphysics? More specifically, it explores how feminist and 'mainstream' debates intersect, on what grounds do they come apart (if at all), and whether feminist metaphysics qualifies as metaphysics 'proper'.

Abstract: Philosophers involved in the ‘porn-or-art’ debates standardly assume that pornography is centrally about sexual arousal, while art is about something else. I argue against this assumption and for the view that there is no single thing that pornography (or art) ‘is about’. This suggests that there is no prima facie reason for claiming that some x cannot be both pornography and art. I further go on to develop an understanding of (what I call) ‘porno-art’ - a wholly new kind of thing developing from the extant categories of pornography and art, but still distinct and separate from them.

Abstract: Rather than focusing on the legal and political questions that surround genocidal rape, in this paper I treat a vital area of inquiry that has received much less attention: the moral significance of genocidal rape. My aim is to augment existing moral accounts of rape in order to address the specific contexts of genocidal rape. I move beyond understanding rape primarily as a violation of an individual's interests or agential abilities. The account I offer builds on these approaches (as well as on a pluralist approach), by arguing that rape, as a moral injury, negatively affects the very human dignity of victims. My account also emphasizes the relational harm that marks genocidal rape.

Introduction: White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, andlibertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along.

Summary (Diversifying Syllabi): There are a variety of possible views about the metaphysical status of racial assignments, which roughly parallel the variety of meta-ethical views in the literature. Most people are realists about race. Those who see that the realist position is wrongheaded often conclude that race is unreal, subjective, or relative. Both of these views are mistaken. There are seven candidate conditions for racial identification: appearance, ancestry, public awareness of ancestry, self-awareness of ancestry, culture, experience, and self-identification. Consideration of ten cases of “racial transgressives”—in which a person has some of these conditions but not others — push on our intuitions and ultimately show that we ought to conclude that race is a social construction. This view is to be distinguished from relativism, insofar as you can be wrong about what race you are: Thinking does not make it so.

Abstract: Recent surveys of the development of feminist ethics over the last three decades have emphasized that the exclusive and unitary focus on 'care' with which it is still sometimes identified has long been misleading. While paying tribute to the historic significance and continuing influence of Carol Gilligan's and Nel Noddings's pathbreaking work (1982; 1984), commentators such as Samantha Brennan, Marilyn Friedman, and Alison Jaggar point to 'the increasing connections between feminist ethics and mainstream moral theory' (Brennan 1999, 859), the 'number of diverse methodological strategies' adopted (Friedman 2000, 211), and the 'controversy and diversity' rather than 'unity' within feminism, marking 'the shift from asserting the radical otherness of feminist ethics to seeing feminist philosophers as making a diverse range of contributions to an ongoing [larger] tradition of ethical discussion' (Jaggar 2000, 452-53). Indeed, Samantha Brennan's 1999 Ethics survey article suggests that there is no 'one' feminist ethic, and that the distinctive features of a feminist approach are simply the perception of the wrongness of women's oppression, and the resulting construction and orientation of theory - based on women's moral experiences - to the goal of understanding and ending that oppression (1999, 860). Obviously, then, this minimalist definition will permit a very broad spectrum of perspectives. In this respect, feminist ethics has interestingly come to converge with feminist political philosophy, which, at least from the 'second wave' onward, also encompassed a wide variety of approaches whose common denominator was simply the goal of ending female subordination (Jaggar 1983; Tong 1998). In this paper, I want to focus on an ethical strategy best and most selfconsciously developed in feminist theory in the writings of Onora O'Neill (1987; 1993), but that can arguably be traced back, at least in implicit and schematic form, to Marxism and classical left theory, and that would certainly be congenial to many people working on race. (I have found it very useful in my own work: Mills 1997; Mills 1998.) I refer to the distinction between idealizing and non?idealizing approaches to ethical theory, and the endorsement of the latter. I will argue that this normative strategy has the virtue of being potentially universalist in its application - able to address many, if not all, of the concerns not only of women, but also of those, men as well as women, subordinated by class, race, and the underdevelopment of the 'South' - and reflecting the distinctive experience of the oppressed while avoiding particularism and relativism. Moreover, in certain respects it engages with mainstream ethics on what are nominally its own terms, thereby (at least in theory) making it somewhat harder to ignore and marginalize. Correspondingly, I will argue that the so?called ideal theory more dominant in mainstream ethics is in crucial respects obfuscatory, and can indeed be thought of as in part ideological, in the pejorative sense of a set of group ideas that reflect, and contribute to perpetuating, illicit group privilege. As O'Neill argues, and as I agree, the best way of realizing the ideal is through the recognition of the importance of theorizing the nonideal.

<strong>Abstract:</strong> The development of social epistemology in recent decades is a welcome turn away from Cartesian individualism. But the centrality of oppression to societies in general is still insufficiently recognized in this literature. This chapter looks at “white ignorance” as an example of a particular kind of systemic group-based miscognition that has been hugely influential over the past few hundred years. After a ten-point clarification of the concept, it turns to an examination of white ignorance as it plays itself out in the complex interaction of Eurocentric perception and categorization, white normativity, social memory and social amnesia, the derogation of non-white testimony, racial group interests, and motivated irrationality.

Abstract: Drawing on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, this contribution will examine commemorative practices alongside critical modes of historical engagement. In Untimely Meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche documents three historical methodologies—the monumental, antiquarian and critical—which purposely use history in non-objective ways. In particular, critical history desires to judge and reject historical figures rather than repeat the past or venerate the dead. For instance, in recent protests against racism there have also been calls to decolonize public space through the defacement, destruction, and removal of monuments. There is thus much potential in critical history being used to address ongoing harms.