Tag: women
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Superfluous Men and Women
In patriarchal cultures, women and men are required by the political economy to form family units for institutional purposes. This is very difficult on individuals when the sex ratio deviates from parity. Sometimes small communities experience this sex ratio deviance due to economic migrations, where men or women move abroad to find work, but are…
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Civic Death and the Afterlife of Imprisonment
The fantasies of social death are pernicious precisely because they imagine no return. The reality is that most of these men must someday rejoin the communities from which they have been exiled. People come back. What’s more, they’re never really that far away.
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The Two Endings of Brison’s Aftermath
Susan Brison’s Aftermath ends twice: the final chapter discusses her various efforts to retell the story of her brutal rape and attempted murder (she calls it “attempted sexual murder.”) And ends with her final, planned retelling to her son when he is older: “Tragedy,” Wittgenstein wrote, “is when the tree, instead of bending, breaks.” What I wish…
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Elections, Partisanship, and the Call for Moderation in Civic Life
No matter how much we might disagree about one law or policy, that disagreement should not be allowed to destroy the possibility of a future alliance on a different problem. Citizens tempted by partisanship have to find a way to hold their ideas and convictions loosely. They have to preserve civic friendship and reject permanent…
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On Minority Genius in Philosophy
Is the problem that philosophers and folks in the humanities think that genius exists, and it doesn’t? Or is the problem that philosophers and folks in the humanities think that they can detect genius, and–because of their racism and sexism–they can’t?
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Prison Abolition, Reform, and End-State Anxieties
Recently I’ve been thinking about a book by Erin McKenna which I read as an undergraduate: The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective. I read it then because it promised to bridge the divide between my favorite genre, science-fiction, and my interest in philosophy. But the book profoundly changed me, and I’m always surprised…
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Giving Well: Oxfam versus BRAC
Daniel Levine has an interesting discussion of giving and giving well up today on whyiamwrongabouteverything: When I got a “real” job at USIP, back in 2007, I resolved that I was going to donate 10 percent of the portion of my take-home pay that I kept for personal use (as opposed to what I contribute…
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Can there be an excess of empathy? How would we know?
BPS has a gloss on this paper by Bremser and Gallup, which suggests that eating disorders and social anxiety may be an example of Extreme Female Brain: too much concern about what other people think and feel is associated with fear of negative evaluations, which may be expressed through apprehension and distress over negative evaluations by…
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Unions versus Women
Literacy is one of the major factors in female empowerment: As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves. Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are associated with increases in women’s participation in the labor force and their contributions to household and national income. Women’s increased earning…
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A Duty to Forgive?
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Arendt’s response raises interesting questions: “Of course I am prejudiced, namely against charity,” she wrote. In her letter…