Reviews for Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory

The average rating for Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-20 00:00:00 Robert Schaefer For many women [...] a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond ~ Throwing Like a GirlI particularly liked the last essay here, on breasts (to my own surprise), and the wonderful piece Impartiality and the Civic Public, which deals a heavy blow to deontology and its place in political philosophy and organisation:Impartiality names a point of view of reason that stands apart from any interests and desires [...] the ideal of impartiality requires constructing the ideal of a self abstracted from the context of any real persons: the deontological self is not committed to any particular ends, has no particular history, is a member of no communities, has no body.This leads to the expulsion of desire, affectivity and the body from reason. Since feelings and desires are excluded from moral reason, they are all apprehended as equally bad (compare this with virtue ethics, where moral reasoning's work is to evaluate desires and cultivate the good ones). Moral decisions based on considerations of sympathy, caring and assessment of differentiated needs are deemed irrational, not objective, sentimental. Ultimately, Young argues, deontology opposes happiness and morality, trying to master inner nature instead of directing it to grow in the best directions. She proposes instead a dialogic ethics where all perspectives must be heard, not eliminated or abstracted into unity. Some of the insights here on the history of feminist thought and on "group difference" in politics might seem a bit obvious now or are simply much more clearly articulated by Black feminist theorists like bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins. Young marks her subject position as a White woman and makes some efforts to note other standpoints such as Black feminist critiques of trends in "second wave" feminism, but more importantly she rejects universalising accounts of female experience with strong theory, so that while some of the discussions of female experience reflect white cis middle class USian experience, they do not close down the space to exclude other accounts. Still, I got pretty bored from time to time with the psychoanalysis and biological essentialist "gynocentric" perspectives that were sometimes invoked, usually as part of a historical narrative, but sometimes uncritically. In identifying the poles of humanism and gynocentrism in feminist thought, Young's critique of the former is more robust than of the latter, and in the book's introduction she says that she has "climbed off the fence to gynocentrism", but I feel that many of the gynocentric ideas she discusses are problematic. If humanist feminism wants us all to be judged by the same standards, it fails to note that those standards are thoroughly masculinist, and most women are bound by various circumstances to fall short against them. Gynocentrism rightly points this out, but by unwittingly centering white, middle class, Anglophone, "western", cisgender and (not always) heterosexual women, it's playing spot the difference between the lives of white men and women in the same social positions and coming up with dubious psychoanalysis and implications that the world would be just great if only women ran it, or were taking an equal part in running it, a proposition that leaves the white-supremacist capitalist imperialist world order largely untouched. Young asserts that gynocentrism creates a perspective from which to mount a critique of any social/political institution, and I agree that this could be possible, but I think the dangers of essentialising and universalising she doesn't fail to point out are very much evident in some of the material quoted or summarised as gynocentric. While creativity is in evidence, and it's obviously not a bad thing to analyse one's own experiences or those of people sharing some identity, many White writers seem to get bogged down psychoanalysing women's oppression or "women's culture" in a manner that borders on actually excluding those women who don't have children, for example. The potential for trans-exclusionary theory and practice is heavy. Another issue in the title essay is that the female body as disabled has a long racialised history (not discussed) and is an exclusively White body. That Young marks the particularity and limitations of her discussion doesn't entirely prevent its being unsatisfying, because this history has been repeatedly brought to light by Black intellectuals from Sojourner Truth onwards. I wish Young had drawn on some Black feminist/womanist texts, but that might actually have collapsed the whole binary of humanism vs. gynocentrism in revealing the narrowness of "mainstream" i.e. White USian feminist theory. Overall, the discussion developed here of ethics and politics provides great critical and creative tools and leads easily to useful conclusions:In a heterogeneous public, differences are publicly recognised an acknowledged as irreducible, by which I mean that people from one perspective or history can never completely understand or adopt the point of view of those with other group-based perspectives and histories, yet commitment to the need and desire to decide together the society's policies fosters communication across those differences.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-04 00:00:00 Luc Alexandre One of the best feminists' works today! and will truly be a classic soon. I totally love her existencial phenomenological approach. Maybe that's just me. I'm a pluralist as well as a pheonomenologist. Too bad that Iris Young died so early. Otherwise, I could completely imagine myself studying with her, directly benifit from her wonderful insight and knowledge. Young eloquently covered a wide range of topics which are essential for women's whole life cycle. From body to home, from young to old age, from identity to subjectivity. I value her critiques of Beauvoir and Butler, they are both right to the point and constructive. If there's someone truly "beyond gender dichotomy", I'd say Young is one of them. Butler is still fighting and deconstructing gender/sex, her action itself is creating another dichotomy by denying gender/sex all together. Beauvoir is not our contemporary. Even though her ground-breaking work is still insightful and inspiring today, she herself is by no means limited and constrained by her time and situation, denial is still very prominent in her work. I agree that under those conditions, denial might be necessary (so that your voice get heard). Because of her work and all the work by previous feminists, today, we could have the luxury to say, maybe we don't really have to reject everything :)