Diversity Reading List

Publisher's note: Rae Langton here draws together her ground-breaking and contentious work on pornography and objectification. She shows how women come to be objectified -- made subordinate and treated as things -- and she argues for the controversial feminist conclusions that pornography subordinates and silences women, and women have rights against pornography.

Abstract: This paper strengthens the theoretical ground of feminist analyses of anger by explaining how the angers of the oppressed are ways of knowing. Relying on insights created through the juxtaposition of Latina feminism and Zen Buddhism, I argue that these angers are special kinds of embodied perceptions that surface when there is a profound lack of fit between a particular bodily orientation and its framing world of sense. As openings to alternative sensibilities, these angers are transformative, liberatory, and deeply epistemological.

Abstract:

This paper uses logic - a formal language with models and a consequence relation - to think about the social and political topics of subordination and subordinative speech. I take subordination to be a matter of three things: i) ranking one person or a group of people below others, ii) depriving the lower-ranked of rights, and iii) permitting others to discriminate against them. Subordinative speech is speech - utterances in contexts - which subordinates. Section 1 introduces the topic of subordination using examples from the 1979 novel Kindred by Octavia Butler. Section 2 uses these examples to clarify and illustrate the definitions of subordination and subordinative speech. Sections 3 and 4 then develop a way of modeling subordination using a system of social spheres, an adaptation of (Lewis, 1973)'s approach to modeling the relation of comparative similarity on worlds for counterfactuals. Section 4 looks at three possible applications for this work: giving truth-conditions for social quantifiers, identifying fallacies involving such expressions, and explaining the pragmatics of subordinative speech. The last section anticipates objections and raises further questions.