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Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy
This book offers a major collection of new essays at the forefront of contemporary feminist theory in the United States and presents the work of leading feminist philosophers, including Sandra Harding, Hilde Hein, Alison M. Jaggar, Janice Moulton, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Caroline Whitbeck, and Carol C. Gould. The seventeen contributors explore such current philosophical, social, and political issues as sex differences, gynecological theory, and sexual equality; gender and rationality; concepts of womanhood and domination in psychoanalytical theory; sexism, religion, and spiritual liberation; women's work and sex roles; and the relations between the personal and the political, the private and the public.
The book, for its breadth of approach and the vigor and variety of its essays, will be a major focus of discussion among feminists and philosophers.
The book, for its breadth of approach and the vigor and variety of its essays, will be a major focus of discussion among feminists and philosophers.
321 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
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December 8, 2014
Carol C. Gould, “Private Rights and Public Virtues: Women, the Family and Democracy” pp.3-18
p.3 – The most obvious and distressing fact about the feminist movement today id that it is under severe and sustained attack, both with respect to the gains women have made in the last decade and with respect to the feminist vision itself. A reactionary backlash has arisen against the movement for equal rights for women, including affirmative action and the ERA, and against abortion rights and other reproductive rights.
Eva Feder Kittay, “Pornography and the Erotics of Domination” pp.145-174
p.168 – Most pertinent is the extent to which we have eroticized the relations of power. We have done so in a manner consonant with the dominant power relations between men and women, so that women generally seek male sexual partners who are their superiors, while men regard as erotic women who are their inferiors. […] Women eroticize being possessed, conquered, overwhelmed, etc. Men have eroticized the conquering, possessing, subduing.
To be in a position of dependency is to be in a position in which another can exert power over you. That power may involve the potential exercise of physical force or psychological coercion.
p.170 – Women notoriously fantasize scenes of rape, humiliation, and submission to pain and brutality. That women have such fantasies is a sign of how deeply the “internal colonization” of women has taken hold. Women have, to some measure, adopted the negative self-conceptions that serve the advantage of their oppressors.
p.172 – Pornography, rather than purging sexual desires as a dangerous sort, exhibits horrid violence, sexually – that is pleasurably – charged, as permissible, as well as possible.
The problem, in the end, is more than pornography. It is the eroticizing of the relation of power. Without this, pornography would simply revolt us all; it would not be stimulating to many.
The eroticism of domination, rather than being demanded by the nature of eros, is an instrument for the maintenance of male prerogatives.
p.3 – The most obvious and distressing fact about the feminist movement today id that it is under severe and sustained attack, both with respect to the gains women have made in the last decade and with respect to the feminist vision itself. A reactionary backlash has arisen against the movement for equal rights for women, including affirmative action and the ERA, and against abortion rights and other reproductive rights.
Eva Feder Kittay, “Pornography and the Erotics of Domination” pp.145-174
p.168 – Most pertinent is the extent to which we have eroticized the relations of power. We have done so in a manner consonant with the dominant power relations between men and women, so that women generally seek male sexual partners who are their superiors, while men regard as erotic women who are their inferiors. […] Women eroticize being possessed, conquered, overwhelmed, etc. Men have eroticized the conquering, possessing, subduing.
To be in a position of dependency is to be in a position in which another can exert power over you. That power may involve the potential exercise of physical force or psychological coercion.
p.170 – Women notoriously fantasize scenes of rape, humiliation, and submission to pain and brutality. That women have such fantasies is a sign of how deeply the “internal colonization” of women has taken hold. Women have, to some measure, adopted the negative self-conceptions that serve the advantage of their oppressors.
p.172 – Pornography, rather than purging sexual desires as a dangerous sort, exhibits horrid violence, sexually – that is pleasurably – charged, as permissible, as well as possible.
The problem, in the end, is more than pornography. It is the eroticizing of the relation of power. Without this, pornography would simply revolt us all; it would not be stimulating to many.
The eroticism of domination, rather than being demanded by the nature of eros, is an instrument for the maintenance of male prerogatives.
Displaying 1 of 1 review