Women philosophers in social and political philosophy

Our old colleague John Alexander would like some suggestions for readings by women philosophers for a course in social and political philosophy (beyond Warren, Thomson, Nussbaum, Foot, and Gilligan). John is particularly interested in women who write from a rights-oriented approach. Iris Marion Young, Frances Kamm, Onora O'Neill, Susan Okin, and Amy Gutmann come to mind. Any other ideas for John?

Reverse engineering gender equal participation

Sometimes you notice a teaching outcome that you didn't intend but is welcome nevertheless. Then the challenge is to figure out what you (the teacher) might have done to make the outcome happen.

Here's such an outcome: In my two intro to ethics classes, 44% of the students are women. I sat down and wrote down the names of the students who, in the two sections, participate most frequently in class. I wrote down names until I reached 25% of the total enrollment. Then I looked at the gender division: Of the top quartile of students in terms of frequency of participation, 53% were women.

Achieving the gender equitable syllabus

I'm not sure what to do about the inadequate representation of women in academic philosophy. There are certainly many explanations for it, one of which is that the relative lack of women on philosophy syllabi signals to women that they are not welcome in the profession and should not aspire to membership in it.

I simply don't know enough to say what role this phenomenon has in explaining the inadequate representation of women in our field, but it strikes me as plausible enough that we philosophy instructors should make efforts to include the work of women philosophers in our courses. Even if this turns out to have only a very small role in explaining the inadequate representation, it does no harm to include the work of women philosophers in our courses when appropriate.

This post at Feminist Philosophers motivated me to look at my own syllabi for gender equity and representation. The results:

Feminist philosophers agree: Down with grading!

Over at the Feminist Philosophers blog, someone asked: "If there were one or two things you could change about academia, what would it be?" A heartening answer (from my point of view at least) given by several commenters: grading!

Some choice comments and observations below the fold:

San Diego's H.E. Baber:

Grading. From the perspective of an American academic, grading creates a serious conflict of interests. On the one hand, we’re teachers: we want students to understand the stuff, get excited about the stuff, and do well. On the other hand we’re agents of the university which functions as an employment pre-screening and credentialing agency, ranking students who are after scarce resources: jobs and places in graduate and professional programs. So, we have to produce a spread of grades and make sure that a sufficient percentage of students get bad ones. At my place in particular we’re under constant pressure to keep a lid on grade-inflation.

Brandon:

I teach at a community college, and the conflict between the aims of education and of certification represented by grades is very acute here. What is more, grading often obscures rather than conveys information about student learning; from learning that Student A got an A in an Intro course at one college and that Student B got an A in an Intro course at another (or very often even at the same college, from different instructors), and nothing more, one has learned nothing about their education. You don’t know what they’ve learned, you don’t know how they have been challenged, you don’t know the skills they’ve picked up. The two grades are not commensurable, but we treat them as if they were, and when we do, it’s just pseudo-information, pseudo-knowledge.

Baber's remarks in particular struck a chord. It's frustrating to be playing roles with antithetical aims: the students' educational partner and the students' performance evaluator.

An exericse in gender and family justice

Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber outlines a most ingenious exercise designed to help students appreciate the relevance of family life and the division of labor for questions about justice between the genders. I'd be curious to know if anyone out there has done something similar and what your experiences were.

Teaching Feminist and Race Theory: problematic assumptions and positive transformations

I teach feminist and race theory to five students, four of whom are white, none of whom are female. Yet, for all their lack of diversity, they understand the philosophical relevance of gender and race. Critical theory for them, however, was remarkably new when they began. While they began their studies with me in order to broaden their perspective in social and political philosophy, none of them had ever reflected on some of the contemporary social structures and implicit patterns of thought that are implicitly sexist and/or racist. None of the students were sexist or racist when they entered the course, and they would have been quite defensive about being labeled as such. Yet, on campus, and in other classes, this was the challenge they faced.

Two of my students were called out by a group of women in a class as being sexist for trying to discuss gender! My question then became, how does a group of well-meaning white guys sincerely trying to understand gender and race theory get called sexist (or racist)? Which then led me to the question, how does a group of well-meaning white, male students of critical theory not see the structural patterns of oppression that are implicitly sexist and/or racist? That is when I finally realized the difficulty of teaching feminist or race theory. There is a quasi-principle of inverse proportions at work affecting our students’ investigation of the structural patterns of oppression (and this seems true regardless of their race, or gender): the more perceptive the student is to the marginalization and exploitation of one group, the more likely he or she neglects to see the structural patterns of exploitation and marginalization at work in their own thinking.

Let me proffer an example. In the context of explaining Iris Marion Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression”, one of my students attempted to draw out the implications of Young’s work by exploring the exploitation of migrant workers by large corporations. During his explanation, someone made a quip regarding a previous night’s episode of a new television show called “My Big Redneck Wedding”, where couples from the rural United States get married in non-traditional ways on television, such as in the woods wearing hunting camouflage. The students burst into laughter at the ridiculousness of the couples on the show. I was shocked. Could these students not see that the couples on the show were themselves being exploited for the wealth of the television network and the entertainment of a few? In fact, no! The obvious had not occurred to the students, that their own thinking had been unintentionally inculcated by patterns of thought that, in fact, had given rise to both the marginalization and exploitation of some unfamiliar social group.

Our students come to us with a wide array of hidden assumptions. They also find philosophy liberating as they begin to see patterns and structures of thought in a new way. Watching their fledgling philosophical experience grow into a real passion for philosophy is probably the best part of teaching, but it also has its down-side. Like any passion, the more intense it grows, the more myopic it makes us; and, hence, the less likely it is that our most passionate students will reflect upon their own hidden assumptions. When teaching critical theory, it seems important to draw the students’ attention back to their own patterns of social thinking, and not let them just critique the obvious patterns of social injustice. We should not only reveal the implicit patterns of thought and social structures on a macro level, but also guide each student individually to help her see her own hidden layers of oppression that might (and probably do) exist. (For an interesting and fun look at our students’ hidden assumptions, take a look at Beloit College’s 2012 Mind Set list. How many implicit patterns of social structure can you find hidden within?)

Exposing the hidden patterns of oppression and marginalization within ourselves and our students is uncomfortable, and I have not yet discovered an easy, simple way of doing this. Any suggestions here would be greatly welcomed! One method I have used, however, is to find a “safe” social group that I can generally assume all (or most) students will find humorous and “different”, such as “Renaissance Fair Devotees”, “GenCon Goers” or (like myself) “Buffy the vampire Slayer fans”. Then I try to explore the ways in which the students’ humor is systematically structured. So far, I have found that the students begin to see that their humor depends upon certain hidden structures of thought underlying the concepts they have about that particular social group. They, then, begin to recognize how patterns of oppression might be hidden and unintentional, yet structural and systematic, just like the patterns necessary for their humor. From here, I have been able to introduce them to the main topics of critical theory regarding structurally derived social injustices. I have found through this process that while my well-meaning, white, male students are not sexist, they have begun to understand the complaint of those feminists who complained that they are.