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IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics, Jun 24, 2022

Hypatia, 2022

Readers may notice that this issue (volume 37, no. 1) features an interview with Sally Haslanger ... more Readers may notice that this issue (volume 37, no. 1) features an interview with Sally Haslanger by Jeremiah Joven Joaquin. Longtime readers may recognize that this is the first interview published in Hypatia since 2008, when an interview with Iris Marion Young by Neus Torbisco Casals and Idil Boran appeared in volume 23, no. 3, a special issue celebrating Young's life and work. We the co-editors are pleased to announce that the journal will return to publishing interviews with feminist scholars. Though establishing a fair and adequate review process for interviews can be challenging, we feel that not publishing interviews in one of the small number of journals dedicated to feminist philosophy may serve as a barrier to continuing and nuanced engagement with the work of significant feminist thinkers. In the broader field, published interviews with canonical, nonfeminist philosophers often become important and highly cited parts of secondary work on these thinkers. As a major source of feminist philosophical scholarship, Hypatia can contribute to deeper scholarly engagement with influential feminist philosophers through this form. We hope that, in the spirit of our new Feminism in Translation initiative, the interview feature will be used to highlight or introduce the work of feminist scholars working primarily in languages other than English or coming from traditions of feminist thought outside the mainstream of Hypatia articles. We seek not just to increase the bandwidth of established feminist voices, but to introduce and amplify less familiar voices at the margins of our current disciplinary boundaries. For this, especially, we ask your help. We invite interview submissions at this time, through our regular submissions portal. In recognition of the anonymity challenges that interviews pose, submitted manuscripts will be subject only to editorial review, but will be evaluated by several editors. This process will be highly selective; successful interviews will significantly clarify or advance readers' understanding of an author's thought or of a movement or organization's principles and methods. To reduce bias, if an interview is beyond the scope of the co-editors' expertise, we will reach out to Hypatia Associate Editors for further review. Like other manuscripts, interviews cannot exceed 10,000 words, but there is no minimum word count to be met. Interviews should be submitted to ScholarOne by the interviewer (not the interviewee) and should list only the interviewer as author. We appreciate your help in making the most of this renewed feature.

Hypatia

For academics, it is often easier to detail the many forms that racism and anti-Blackness take in... more For academics, it is often easier to detail the many forms that racism and anti-Blackness take in our societies than it is to imagine effective resistance to them. Indeed, our understanding of the magnitude of the problem risks making us cynical about the possibility of meaningful resistance. Yet the authors of the following four pieces-which make up a found cluster of articles on "Race and Resistance"-take up the question of resistance in intriguing and insightful ways. None of them are naïve, nor do they view any of the resistances they identify as perfect or incorruptible. Nevertheless, each author reminds us in their own fashion of María Lugones's urgent call (quoted in Mason 2021) to "think of people who are oppressed as not consumed or exhausted by oppression, but also as resisting or sabotaging a system aimed at molding, reducing, violating, or erasing them" (Lugones 2003, 24). Although the four pieces are quite diverse in style, influences, and specific sites of inquiry, several common threads run through the cluster. Qrescent Mali Mason draws on the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Simone de Beauvoir, María Lugones, and José Medina to argue that the social media hashtag #BlackGirlMagic, with which Black women began tagging images and posts of themselves and other Black women in 2013, emerges from and constitutes a guerrilla epistemology. Taylor Rogers also engages the epistemological insights of José Medina and uses the social media hashtag #MeToo in one of her striking examples, but uses Kristie Dotson's work to focus on the resilience of dominant epistemologies and addresses her work to the perpetrators of epistemic injustice rather than to its victims. Jan-Therese Mendes's work stands out in several ways as it engages Black Canadian performance and visual artists Camille Turner and Riya Jama and has a particular interest in the Othering and alien status of Black Muslim women in Canada; yet her emphasis on art echoes Mason's interest in resistant imagination and, like Mason, she is most interested in the ways Black women's resistances speak to other Black women, rather than to the dominant culture. Finally, K. Melchor Quick Hall's piece is striking for its intimacy and use of personal narrative, but is no less engaged with the pervasive nature of the dominant culture and power systems, using Saidiya Hartman and Dorothy Roberts to chart a path of Black women's resistance though revolutionary mothering (practices that are also evident in Mason's discussion of #BlackGirlMagic). Taken together, the pieces describe distinct but interrelated ways in which dominant structures and social imaginaries exhibit tremendous resilience in the face of resistances, but also illustrate modes of resistance that can interrupt that resilience, even if only for a limited period of time.

The American Journal of Bioethics

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry

In this essay, I argue that bioethicists have a thus-far unfulfilled role to play in helping life... more In this essay, I argue that bioethicists have a thus-far unfulfilled role to play in helping life scientists, including medical doctors and researchers, think about race. I begin with descriptions of how life scientists tend to think about race and descriptions of typical approaches to bioethics. I then describe three different approaches to race: biological race, race as social construction, and race as cultural driver of history. Taking into account the historical and contemporary interplay of these three approaches, I suggest an alternative framework for thinking about race focused on how the idea of race functions socially. Finally, using assisted reproductive technologies as an example, I discuss how bioethicists and scientists might work together using this framework to improve not only their own but broader perspectives on race.

The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2014

Introduction As fundamental as progress is for Firmin, it remains more an assumption of his text ... more Introduction As fundamental as progress is for Firmin, it remains more an assumption of his text than a proven result, more a motivating ideal than a scientific fact, putting Firmin's faith in progress into tension with his own exhortation that science must free itself from all prejudices. Because Firmin's science was shaped by what can only be described as a positivist philosophy or a philosophy of progress, Firmin's book belongs not only to the history of the study of race but to the history of the philosophy of race as well. With The Equality of Human Races, Haitian intellectual Antenor Firmin offered the world its first sustained, philosophical, book-length response to scientific European racism. Unfortunately, the volume, first published in Paris in 1885, quickly disappeared and was out of print even in Haiti until 1968. With the publication of the English translation in 2000 (following an additional reprint of the original French in Haiti in 1985), we in the Anglop...

Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online

Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online

Hypatia

This essay is a response to the events surrounding Hypatia's publication of “In Defense of Tr... more This essay is a response to the events surrounding Hypatia's publication of “In Defense of Transracialism.” It does not take up the question of “transracialism” itself, but rather attempts to shed light both on what some black women may have experienced following from the publication of the article and on how we might understand this experience as harm. It also suggests one way for feminist journals to reduce the likelihood of similar harms occurring in the future. I begin by describing a discussion that occurred in my classroom that bears some resemblance to the much larger debate that emerged around Hypatia. Next, I elaborate a concept of imperial harm. I then address how this concept comes to be relevant to the experience of black women within the discipline of philosophy in general, before briefly describing how academic feminism (including feminist philosophy) has served as a particular site of imperial harm for black women. Finally, touching on the idea of expressive harm,...

IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics, Jun 24, 2022

Hypatia, 2022

Readers may notice that this issue (volume 37, no. 1) features an interview with Sally Haslanger ... more Readers may notice that this issue (volume 37, no. 1) features an interview with Sally Haslanger by Jeremiah Joven Joaquin. Longtime readers may recognize that this is the first interview published in Hypatia since 2008, when an interview with Iris Marion Young by Neus Torbisco Casals and Idil Boran appeared in volume 23, no. 3, a special issue celebrating Young's life and work. We the co-editors are pleased to announce that the journal will return to publishing interviews with feminist scholars. Though establishing a fair and adequate review process for interviews can be challenging, we feel that not publishing interviews in one of the small number of journals dedicated to feminist philosophy may serve as a barrier to continuing and nuanced engagement with the work of significant feminist thinkers. In the broader field, published interviews with canonical, nonfeminist philosophers often become important and highly cited parts of secondary work on these thinkers. As a major source of feminist philosophical scholarship, Hypatia can contribute to deeper scholarly engagement with influential feminist philosophers through this form. We hope that, in the spirit of our new Feminism in Translation initiative, the interview feature will be used to highlight or introduce the work of feminist scholars working primarily in languages other than English or coming from traditions of feminist thought outside the mainstream of Hypatia articles. We seek not just to increase the bandwidth of established feminist voices, but to introduce and amplify less familiar voices at the margins of our current disciplinary boundaries. For this, especially, we ask your help. We invite interview submissions at this time, through our regular submissions portal. In recognition of the anonymity challenges that interviews pose, submitted manuscripts will be subject only to editorial review, but will be evaluated by several editors. This process will be highly selective; successful interviews will significantly clarify or advance readers' understanding of an author's thought or of a movement or organization's principles and methods. To reduce bias, if an interview is beyond the scope of the co-editors' expertise, we will reach out to Hypatia Associate Editors for further review. Like other manuscripts, interviews cannot exceed 10,000 words, but there is no minimum word count to be met. Interviews should be submitted to ScholarOne by the interviewer (not the interviewee) and should list only the interviewer as author. We appreciate your help in making the most of this renewed feature.

Hypatia

For academics, it is often easier to detail the many forms that racism and anti-Blackness take in... more For academics, it is often easier to detail the many forms that racism and anti-Blackness take in our societies than it is to imagine effective resistance to them. Indeed, our understanding of the magnitude of the problem risks making us cynical about the possibility of meaningful resistance. Yet the authors of the following four pieces-which make up a found cluster of articles on "Race and Resistance"-take up the question of resistance in intriguing and insightful ways. None of them are naïve, nor do they view any of the resistances they identify as perfect or incorruptible. Nevertheless, each author reminds us in their own fashion of María Lugones's urgent call (quoted in Mason 2021) to "think of people who are oppressed as not consumed or exhausted by oppression, but also as resisting or sabotaging a system aimed at molding, reducing, violating, or erasing them" (Lugones 2003, 24). Although the four pieces are quite diverse in style, influences, and specific sites of inquiry, several common threads run through the cluster. Qrescent Mali Mason draws on the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Simone de Beauvoir, María Lugones, and José Medina to argue that the social media hashtag #BlackGirlMagic, with which Black women began tagging images and posts of themselves and other Black women in 2013, emerges from and constitutes a guerrilla epistemology. Taylor Rogers also engages the epistemological insights of José Medina and uses the social media hashtag #MeToo in one of her striking examples, but uses Kristie Dotson's work to focus on the resilience of dominant epistemologies and addresses her work to the perpetrators of epistemic injustice rather than to its victims. Jan-Therese Mendes's work stands out in several ways as it engages Black Canadian performance and visual artists Camille Turner and Riya Jama and has a particular interest in the Othering and alien status of Black Muslim women in Canada; yet her emphasis on art echoes Mason's interest in resistant imagination and, like Mason, she is most interested in the ways Black women's resistances speak to other Black women, rather than to the dominant culture. Finally, K. Melchor Quick Hall's piece is striking for its intimacy and use of personal narrative, but is no less engaged with the pervasive nature of the dominant culture and power systems, using Saidiya Hartman and Dorothy Roberts to chart a path of Black women's resistance though revolutionary mothering (practices that are also evident in Mason's discussion of #BlackGirlMagic). Taken together, the pieces describe distinct but interrelated ways in which dominant structures and social imaginaries exhibit tremendous resilience in the face of resistances, but also illustrate modes of resistance that can interrupt that resilience, even if only for a limited period of time.

The American Journal of Bioethics

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry

In this essay, I argue that bioethicists have a thus-far unfulfilled role to play in helping life... more In this essay, I argue that bioethicists have a thus-far unfulfilled role to play in helping life scientists, including medical doctors and researchers, think about race. I begin with descriptions of how life scientists tend to think about race and descriptions of typical approaches to bioethics. I then describe three different approaches to race: biological race, race as social construction, and race as cultural driver of history. Taking into account the historical and contemporary interplay of these three approaches, I suggest an alternative framework for thinking about race focused on how the idea of race functions socially. Finally, using assisted reproductive technologies as an example, I discuss how bioethicists and scientists might work together using this framework to improve not only their own but broader perspectives on race.

The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2014

Introduction As fundamental as progress is for Firmin, it remains more an assumption of his text ... more Introduction As fundamental as progress is for Firmin, it remains more an assumption of his text than a proven result, more a motivating ideal than a scientific fact, putting Firmin's faith in progress into tension with his own exhortation that science must free itself from all prejudices. Because Firmin's science was shaped by what can only be described as a positivist philosophy or a philosophy of progress, Firmin's book belongs not only to the history of the study of race but to the history of the philosophy of race as well. With The Equality of Human Races, Haitian intellectual Antenor Firmin offered the world its first sustained, philosophical, book-length response to scientific European racism. Unfortunately, the volume, first published in Paris in 1885, quickly disappeared and was out of print even in Haiti until 1968. With the publication of the English translation in 2000 (following an additional reprint of the original French in Haiti in 1985), we in the Anglop...

Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online

Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online

Hypatia

This essay is a response to the events surrounding Hypatia's publication of “In Defense of Tr... more This essay is a response to the events surrounding Hypatia's publication of “In Defense of Transracialism.” It does not take up the question of “transracialism” itself, but rather attempts to shed light both on what some black women may have experienced following from the publication of the article and on how we might understand this experience as harm. It also suggests one way for feminist journals to reduce the likelihood of similar harms occurring in the future. I begin by describing a discussion that occurred in my classroom that bears some resemblance to the much larger debate that emerged around Hypatia. Next, I elaborate a concept of imperial harm. I then address how this concept comes to be relevant to the experience of black women within the discipline of philosophy in general, before briefly describing how academic feminism (including feminist philosophy) has served as a particular site of imperial harm for black women. Finally, touching on the idea of expressive harm,...