The Feminist Philosophy Reader
Alison Bailey
Language: English
Pages: 902
ISBN: 0073407399
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The most comprehensive anthology of feminist philosophy available, this first edition reader brings together over 55 of the most influential and time-tested works to have been published in the field of feminist philosophy. Featuring perspectives from across the philosophical spectrum, and from an array of different cultural vantage points, it displays the incredible range, diversity, and depth of feminist writing on fundamental issues, from the early second wave to the present.
transsexual men look like. They look, in fact, like other men, and Bloom quickly admits that she finds herself in flirtatious heterosexual dynamics with her charming companions, dynamics that quickly shore up the essential differences between men and women. Bloom, for example, reports that she was sitting in her rental car with James Green and could not find the dimmer switch for the headlights; when James finds it for her, she comments: “He looks at me exactly as my husband has on hundreds of
transgenders are like political lesbians. Again, such an argument collapses the historical differences between the lesbian sex debates and contemporary identity skirmishes, and it also renders transgenders as well-meaning, but transsexuals as the real thing. The contradictions of cross-identification and its mobilities are further exemplified in a highly renowned autobiographical transsexual text, Jan Morris’s Conundrum. Jan Morris was at one time known as James Morris, a travel writer and, in
precisely from this incompleteness of form which allows her organ to touch itself over and over again, indefinitely, by itself, that pleasure is denied by a civilization that privileges phallomorphism. The value granted to the only definable form excludes the one that is in play in female autoeroticism. The one of form, of the individual, of the (male) sexual organ, of the proper name, of the proper meaning . . . supplants, while separating and dividing, that contact of at least two (lips) which
property rights, but rather different sorts of rights that various people have in other people. Marriage transactions—the gifts and material which circulate in the ceremonies marking a marriage—are a rich source of data for determining exactly who has which rights in whom. It is not difficult to deduce from such transactions that in most cases women’s rights are considerably more residual than those of men. Kinship systems do not merely exchange women. They exchange sexual access, genealogical
cages, and analysis of this aspect also helps account for the invisibility of the oppression of women. It is as a woman (or as a Chicana/o or as a Black or Asian or lesbian) that one is entrapped. “Why can’t I go to the park; you let Jimmy go!” “Because it’s not safe for girls.” “I want to be a secretary, not a seamstress; I don’t want to learn to make dresses.” “There’s no work for negroes in that line; learn a skill where you can earn your living.”1 When you question why you are being blocked,