AbsractIn this paper, we contribute to a growing literature in the philosophy of social science cautioning social scientists against context-independent claims to objectivity, by analyzing the recent proposal of a new Basic Index of Gender Inequality by Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary. Despite the many internal problems with BIGI, Stoet and Geary have had some success in positioning the index as an important corrective to the way in which gender inequality is measured in mainstream metrics like the (...) Global Gender Gap Index. We argue that this success is facilitated at least in part by the failure of GGGI’s proponents to adequately justify the methodological choices underpinning the index in relation to the context in which the index’s findings are intended to be used. In so doing, the authors of GGGI oversell the objectivity of the metric’s assessment of the state of global gender inequality—and it is this overselling that allows Stoet and Geary to present BIGI as a metric that corrects what they claim are systematic biases within GGGI. The case of BIGI and GGGI, we argue, suggests that the kind of epistemic modesty exhibited by recent operational approaches to objectivity is particularly important for social research on highly politically contested topics. (shrink)

A detailed examination of the philosophy of science of Evelyn Fox Keller, with special emphasis on her account of "objectivity" and her understanding of the methodology of Barbara McClintock.

Do we make gendered associations with objects whose linguistic labels have masculine/feminine grammatical gender? This question derives from the neo-Whorfian view that language shapes our conceptualizations of the world. Previous research has provided mixed answers. Here, we present three experiments where we tested for the gender effect on object conceptualization using a word association approach: a first group of participants generated adjectives for nouns referring to objects, and a second group subsequently rated those adjectives for masculinity/femininity. In Experiment (...) 1, with native French speakers, we tested semantically related object nouns that have opposite grammatical gender (masculine vs. feminine) in French; in Experiment 2, with native French and German speakers, we tested translation equivalents having opposite grammatical gender in the two languages. Results from both experiments showed the absence of a gender effect in French, while a small gender effect was found in German. In both experiments, nouns had been presented with a gender-marked determiner. In Experiment 3, we tested a new group of German participants on the same items, which were now presented without a determiner; we again observed a small gender effect. Consistent with previous findings, we also found that people ascribe more feminine qualities to natural entities and masculine qualities to artificial entities. Taken together, we conclude that the influence of grammatical gender on object conceptualization is weak and dependent on language. (shrink)

Medical conscientious objection refers to a healthcare provider’s right to refuse medical services within their scope of practice due to moral, religious, or ethical conflict (Curlin et al. 2007)....

This study constitutes a contribution to the discussion about moral reasoning in business. Kohlberg’s (1971, in Cognitive Development and Epistemology (Academic Press, New York), 1976, in Moral Development and Behavior: Theory and Research and Social Issues (Holt, Rienhart and Winston, New York)) cognitive moral development (CMD) theory is one explanation of moral reasoning. One unresolved debate on the topic of CMD is the charge that Kohlbergian-type CMD theory is gender biased. This research puts forth the proposal that the issue (...) may be elucidated by exposing an ambiguity in “gender” (Borna and White: 2003, Journal of Business Ethics 47, 89–99; Gentile: 1993, Psychological Science 4(2), 120–122; Unger: 1979, American Psychologist 34(11), 1085–1094). We use the Sociomoral Reflective Objective Measure (SROM) to measure CMD and the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) to measure gender as a psychosocial concept, rather than as a biological classification. The results of our study indicate that high femininity, measured as a psychosocial attribute, is associated with significantly lower Kohlbergian-type CMD scores among business practitioners. Sex moderates the effect of gender on CMD, but only indirectly. Our research also reveals that education plays a significant moderating role in the relationship between gender and moral reasoning. In addition, age has a significant direct effect on CMD scores of business practitioners. (shrink)

This document is a lengthy handout providing brief summaries of a number of objections I have made to Simon Baron-Cohen, and some related points. The objections are scattered across multiple databases and are in numerous contributions.

This article examines the career of Alice Mossie Brues (1913–2007), a prominent yet ambivalent figure in twentieth-century physical anthropology, to explore how gender and race shaped scientific authority and knowledge production during a period of profound disciplinary transformation. Trained under Earnest A. Hooton at Harvard, Brues combined classical racial anthropology with emerging approaches from population genetics, evolutionary theory, and, from the 1960s onward, computer simulation. She became an early innovator in the statistical and computational analysis of human variation and (...) played a key role in integrating physical anthropology into the framework of modern evolutionary synthesis. At the same time, Brues consistently defended the biological validity of race, understood as geographically patterned population differences in gene frequencies, even as contemporaries moved toward clinal models of human diversity or rejected the race concept altogether. Through a close analysis of her publications, professional activities, and rhetorical strategies, this article situates Brues within debates over race, scientific neutrality, and political engagement. It argues that her insistence on an objective, socially neutral science – coupled with an explicit rejection of racism – formed a central but tension-laden aspect of her scientific persona. The article further shows how Brues’s success as one of the few women to attain leadership roles in physical anthropology was facilitated by her familial background and her willingness and ability to align herself with a masculinized culture of quantification, rigor, and disciplinary authority, while downplaying gender discrimination. Brues’s career thus illuminates the entangled histories of race, gender, and objectivity in the sciences of human diversity. (shrink)

The emphasis on the limitations of objectivity, in specific guises and networks, has been a continuing theme of contemporary analytic philosophy for the past few decades. The popular sport of baiting feminist philosophers — into pointing to what's left out of objective knowledge, or into describing what methods, exactly, they would offer to replace the powerful objective methods grounding scientific knowledge — embodies a blatant double standard which has the effect of constantly putting feminist epistemologists on the defensive, on (...) the fringes, on the run.This strategy can only work if objectivity is transparent, simple, stable, and clear in its meaning. It most certainly is not. In fact, taking objectivity as a sort of beautiful primitive, self-evident in its value, and all-powerful in its revelatory power, requires careless philosophy, and the best workers in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science have made reworked definitions of objectivity absolutely central to their own projects. In fact, classic feminist concerns with exploring the impact of sex and gender on knowledge, understanding, and other relations between human beings and the rest of the world fall squarely within the sort of human and social settings thatare already considered central in most current analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. I argue that the burden of proof is clearly on those who wish toreject the centrality and relevance of sex and gender to our most fundamental philosophical work on knowledge and reality. (shrink)

This essay situates Object Lessons in the contemporary academic spaces of women’s studies in India. A decade ago, Object Lessons offered an extensive critique of identity knowledges in the US academy with a special focus on women’s studies. What might its relevance be in the contemporary Indian context? The institutionalisation of women’s studies in India has been shaped by the resources of the social sciences, with their empirical bent and especially their connection to state and development policy. This makes for (...) specific differences with the US context while many concerns are shared. The essay also looks at how gender as a category has been deployed in specific contexts in contrast to that of “women”, in the light of Wiegman’s cautions over seeking resolutions to particular problems through a preferential treatment of categories. By way of concluding thoughts on the Indian situation, women’s studies in India is hypervisible compared to other identity knowledges. In spite of its marginal and precarious location in the academy, it carries a disproportionate political burden, one that a heterogeneous student body is shouldering in their struggles for a sustainable future. (shrink)

This article queries the very question of and that is ‘gender’, from the vantage of transgender studies. In other words, it moves through Wiegman's question of the desires that propel us and asks what desires propel a feeling of gender's necessity, positing the possibility of relinquishing gender as a vector with the same kind of footing it currently has. In short, the question that is asked is gender itself, and the question is asked from a trans (...) studies that excavates the possibilities of radicality. (shrink)

Haptic object recognition is usually an efficient process although slower and less accurate than its visual counterpart. The early loss of vision imposes a greater reliance on haptic perception for recognition compared to the sighted. Therefore, we may expect that congenitally blind persons could recognize objects through touch more quickly and accurately than late blind or sighted people. However, the literature provided mixed results. Furthermore, most of the studies on haptic object recognition focused on performance, devoting little attention to the (...) exploration procedures that conducted to that performance. In this study, we used iCube, an instrumented cube recording its orientation in space as well as the location of the points of contact on its faces. Three groups of congenitally blind, late blind and age and gender-matched blindfolded sighted participants were asked to explore the cube faces where little pins were positioned in varying number. Participants were required to explore the cube twice, reporting whether the cube was the same or it differed in pins disposition. Results showed that recognition accuracy was not modulated by the level of visual ability. However, congenitally blind touched more cells simultaneously while exploring the faces and changed more the pattern of touched cells from one recording sample to the next than late blind and sighted. Furthermore, the number of simultaneously touched cells negatively correlated with exploration duration. These findings indicate that early blindness shapes haptic exploration of objects that can be held in hands. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us (...) in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

I read Robert Card's recent paper entitled ‘Is there no alternative? Conscientious objection by medical students’ with great interest.1 That Muslim students in America are able to conscientiously object to the cross-gender consultation is somewhat startling. I have just left the Middle East, where I worked as a medical educator for five-and-a-half years , and, to the best of my knowledge, even in the conservative, gender-segregated traditional Muslim culture of the United Arab Emirates, not once did a male (...) or female student refuse to examine a patient of the opposite sex.Several issues, many of which have been described by Padela and del Pozo,2 should be taken into consideration in relation to Muslim students’ conscientious objection to the cross-gender consultation on religious grounds. Although Islam prohibits touching or physical contact by the opposite gender, unless appropriate , in some circumstances, the ‘prohibited becomes permissible’.3 Medicine is one such circumstance. Islam does not …. (shrink)

Though feminists are correct to note that conventional standards of sexiness are oppressive, we argue that feminism should reclaim sexiness rather than reject it. We argue for an aesthetic and ethical practice of working to shift from conventional attributions of sexiness to respectful attributions, in which embodied sexual subjects are appreciated in their full individual magnificence. We argue that undertaking this practice is an ethical obligation, since it contributes to the full recognition of others’ humanity. We discuss the relationship of (...) ethical to aesthetic considerations and argue that the respectful notion of sexiness is a genuinely aesthetic one, even though it does not involve assessment in relation to standards. (shrink)

In this article I defend the capability approach by focusing on its built-in gender-sensitivity and on its concern with comprehensive outcomes and informationally-rich evaluation of well-being, two elements of Sen's work that are too rarely put together. I then try to show what the capability approach would have to gain by focusing on trans-positional objectivity (as Elizabeth Anderson does) and by leaving behind the narrow confines of states in favor of a more cosmopolitan stance. These preliminary discussions are (...) followed by two more precise applications. At first, I show how a gender-sensitive capability approach that respects the criteria of trans-positional objectivity and cosmopolitanism can enhance the agency of women inhabiting third-world societies. I turn next to show how mainstream feminism can insulate itself against criticisms such as bell hooks' by switching to trans-positional objectivity in public reasoning. (shrink)

This paper is interested in commodity fetishism as a signal of collapsing marital mandates in the genre of lad lit. Instead of focusing solely on its late twentieth-century moment of emergence as a response to chick lit, the paper proposes a longer historical view in order to understand the crisis of masculinity that lad lit lays bare in its protagonists’ inherently queer status as collectors. The analysis puts critical pressure on the collectible object by re-reading the “lad” through the literary (...) figure of the fop, who represents a recurring response to similar crises in gender from the seventeenth-century’s comedy of manners to the novels of Jane Austen. The fop’s overinvestment in style and consequent marginalization is considered in Nick Hornby’s novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, in which the protagonists’ obsessive collecting of objects can be understood as both a dominant feature of their masculinity and the roadblock to their participation in heteronormative rituals of romance. Instead of reading Hornby’s characters as straightforwardly queer, this paper focuses on the commodity as a signal of queerness, and in turn its central role in the creation of, and the challenge to, the lad’s masculinity. (shrink)

The ongoing duel between realist and anti-realist tendencies in film theory usually positions the ideas of André Bazin unambiguously on the realist side. Whatever else we expect to find in his writing – and the current resurgence is finding more and more – we should find this: realism, cinematic realism. But what type of realism? Is it ontological, and, if so, is it based on a claim for the primacy of photography's “analogical” relation to the world, even to the point (...) of a “direct contact” with the physical existence of nature? Is it aesthetic, celebrating depth of field? Unaffected mise-en-scène? The documentary impulse in preference to fantasy or artifice? In this article, however, I want to argue that we must expand the definition of Bazinian realism through its sensitivity to the non-human. The terrain of the cinematic “Real” is inhabited by a singular complex, one that includes physical space, animality, and material objects, as well as persons and events. To shift our attention to these elements and their effects – intimate as well as alienating, familiar as well as jarring and unexpected – offers another way to glimpse the Real. Which is not to say that the socially constituted world drops out. Of course, language, gender and culture are inescapable mediations. Yet they are, in a certain sense, all wrought by a transcendent human hand. Bazin's conception of realism provides access to a space that is less anthropocentric and testifies to an immanence of the Real, such that non-human, objective realism is not about capturing reality in toto but registering the fact that the human is only a part of reality. There are realities beyond human subjectivity – in space, in objects, in animality – realities that we are put in contact with by cinema. Ideally, what cinema makes possible is an equality, a democratic freedom, not merely for the human spectator – to view and explore film worlds – but for the viewed “object” too: a democracy of the viewer-viewed that installs intersubjectivity in the Real. (shrink)

On the 1st of July 2014 the European Court of Human Rights upheld the French legislation banning the wearing in public of the full-face veil. The article describes the intriguing justification given by the Court, notably the argument that the ban was justified as necessary to protect the principle of “living together”, and analyses it as an attempt to avoid rhetorically costlier justifications, such as those mobilising the principles of gender equality and human dignity. The analysis is undertaken in (...) the light of the general hypothesis that one of the factors presiding over interpretative choices, in complex legal cases, is a strategic reasoning taking into account, on the one hand, the benefits and costs of each argumentative possibility for the persuasiveness and objectivity of the justification to be given in the case pending before the Court, and, on the other hand, the corresponding losses and gains of future interpretative power. (shrink)

In “Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies”, we show how oppression can be inscribed in medical devices. We consider oximeters and spirometers, drawing heavily on the work of anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas and historian Lundy Braun. Both devices encode racial biases: oximeters because they do not correct for race, and spirometers because they do. We zoom out from these particular devices to examine a wide range of tools and technologies, and we build a theoretical framework that covers not only race (...) but other axes of oppression: gender, ability, class, etc. -/- We are inspired by the peer commentaries and the guest editorial, and we are grateful to the contributors for engaging with our work and sharing their expertise. Their responses to our target article advance our understanding in three directions. First, a set of responses contextualize our framework within the histories of medicine, bioethics, and science and technology studies. Second, a set of responses provide additional examples of oppressive medical tools and technologies: not only material artifacts like oximeters and spirometers, but also spatial environments like inpatient psychiatric units, and cognitive niches comprised of digital technologies like electronic medical records and medical data classifications. Third, a set of responses propose countermeasures: operationalizing anti-oppressive practices for device design and testing; mapping the complex causal relationships involved in real-world problems; and repairing the harms done by materialized oppression through racism-conscious praxis. We reply to these three sets of responses—respectively, the “past, present, and future” of oppressive medical objects and spaces—in what follows. (shrink)

Reflective equilibrium has been criticized for various reasons ever since the publication of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Recent empirical research into moral decision-making poses new challenges to RE because it questions the reliability of moral intuitions. This research might discredit moral intuitionism in general and RE in particular insofar as it ascribes epistemic value to moral intuitions. These findings suggest, for instance, that moral intuitions vary with cultural background, gender or framing. If it could be shown that all (...) or certain kinds of moral intuitions are unreliable, this would diminish the plausibility of the claim that they provide good reasons to believe in the truth of their content, especially given the growing evidence that professional philosophers are just as biased and susceptible to distorting factors as lay people. In this paper I critically discuss three recent defenses of RE against this unreliable intuitions objection. Two of these defenses argue that the UIO misses its target, because RE does not depend on intuitions, or because the relevant considered judgments in RE are not intuitions. The third defense grants that RE depends on intuitions and that some Rawlsian considered judgments are intuitions. But it argues that the notion of considered judgments can be revised, and that wide reflective equilibrium has the means to adopt the criticism because it can use information about unreliable intuitions and exclude those from further consideration. I argue that the first two defenses do not succeed. The third defense is the most promising one. However, I argue that this defense also fails. In this defense, RE is not a distinctive moral epistemic theory: different versions of RE would be conceivable, all of which are deeply problematic. I conclude with a discussion of the broader philosophical implications of the UIO, specifically whether or not accepting the UIO would warrant skepticism regarding moral knowledge. (shrink)

This article focuses on a resonant debate initiated by the publication of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s groundbreaking article “On Defense of Abortion” in 1971. It is my contention that philosophers who argued against Thomson based on what has come to be called the “Responsibility Objection” did not fully examine the gender assumptions embedded in their logic. Rather than attempt to prove the flaw in the Responsibility Objection directly, I demonstrate it by applying the same logic used to discuss women’s responsibilities (...) to men to prove that it also supports forcing men to get a vasectomy. What I show is that the Responsibility Objection, when no longer clothed in a set of gendered assumptions, is not logically convincing. Further, given that the Responsibility Objection supports the logic the U.S. Supreme Court recently relied on in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health in overruling Roe vs. Wade, the examination of the flaws in this logic is timely and important. (shrink)

Florence Ashley has responded to our response to ‘Gatekeeping hormone replacement therapy for transgender patients is dehumanising.’ Ashley criticises some of our objections to their view that patients seeking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for gender dysphoria should not have to undergo a prior psychological assessment. Here we clarify our objections, most importantly that concerning the parity between cosmetic surgery and the sort of intervention Ashley has in mind. Firstly, we show Ashley’s criticism of our comparison is insubstantial. We then (...) examine their comments regarding the analogy between abortion and HRT, and the language of informed consent. We also scrutinize the data upon which Ashley relies to defend the claim that informed consent without assessment always yields positive outcomes, finding this conclusion to be overstated. Finally, even if Ashley’s arguments were vindicated, the claim that the gatekeeping of HRT is motivated by hostility towards transgender people remains unsupported. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a Lacanian perspective on football, while notably fathoming its normative dimension. Starting with a defining imperative, the prohibition against ‘handling’ or touching the ball with your hands, diverging football historically from rugby, we will subsequently focus our attention on the role of the foot, the eye (notably the eyes of the audience) and the ‘object a’ (in the context of gender). Against this backdrop, we will address pressing issues such as the troubled position of (...) the referee (as an ‘impossible profession’), the commercialisation of football, and the rising tides of violence, match—fixing and other instances of systemic deviance. As we will argue, football exemplifies modern sport as an arena defined by prohibitions and desire, by inclusion and exclusion, by purity and abuse, culminating in recent challenges involved in gender trouble. Symbolical practices, like modern football, are based on in- and exclusion. Instead of more regulations and dichotomies, we advocate careful attention to the delicate art of handling desire in practice. (shrink)

From Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects traces some of the ruptures and continuities between the eighteenth-century masculinist formulations of subjectivity elaborated by Rousseau, Diderot and Kant and the contemporary postmodern and feminist critiques of the universal subject--meaning the self viewed as an abstract individual who exercises an impartial and rational (political) judgment that is idential to other similarly defined individuals--developed by Luce Irigaray, Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. In her work, Moscovici brings (...) together the wide-ranging discussion of subjectivity with debates about public discourse. In so doing she attempts a synthesis between the two discussions that have recently engaged feminist theorists and others. (shrink)

For the past century French intellectuals have increasingly censured Athénaïs Michelet as an "abusive widow" who mutilated the work of her husband. This article explores the role such censure, often vituperative and emotionally charged, has played in the development of French historiography and argues that it has been crucial in constructing the revered figure of Michelet. Further, the figure of Michelet is itself central to the more important trajectory of historiography that depends on the establishment of "authors" as focal points (...) of disciplinary power. Because the authorship of Michelet is so reliant on the scientific scholarship deployed to prove that Athénaïs Michelet was no author herself, the historiographic enterprise of establishing authorship is more than a little tainted with gender--not immune to it, as the profession claims to be. To the contrary, Michelet scholarship, like other historiographical debates, has taken great pains to establish the priority of the male over the female in writing history. If, as Howard Bloch as noted, this pointing to a male "original" and a female "copy" is the archetype of misogyny, then, the paper asks, is not scientific history so grounded? (shrink)

The notion of objectivity in science has come under critique of feminist writers. The scientific ideal of a detached, neutral observer, who has no race, no gender, no cultural identity, no class, and views the world “from nowhere,” has been challenged, and patterns of domination explored. Feminists argue that objectivity is a tacit generalization from the subjectivity of a small, privileged social group “of educated, usually prosperous, white men.” Hence, it is a result of the denial of (...) the subjectivity of women and other marginalized people. The task which I set before myself is to inquire into the problem of objectivity in science and to explore the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. I argue that, although the feminists’ critique of objectivity contributes to a greater awareness of the problem of objectivity in science and indeed subjectivity matters, their critique is ill founded. It is an example of one of many stereotypes and simplifications that we can find in today’s feminist thought. The affective engagement with the world, the approach that I propose, leads us to knowledge beyond objectivity. It is a prerequisite of knowing persons as persons and things as they are. (shrink)

Our contribution takes shape as reflections on Object Lessons (Wiegman, 2012) from the perspective of three scholars of race, gender and sexuality who were also graduate students of Robyn Wiegman in the mid-2000s at Duke University. All three of us took Introduction to Feminist Theory with her and all three of us received graduate certificates in Feminist Studies. Our educational and career trajectories also share this similarity: we received PhDs in the disciplines (English, Comparative Literature and French), but went (...) on to jobs that are either completely or partially housed in departments invested in studying what Wiegman calls ‘identity knowledges' (namely, African American Studies and Gender Studies). In these essays, we reflect on how Wiegman's course helped shaped our approaches to academic knowledge production and how her reflexive pedagogy animates not only Object Lessons but also our own critiques of identity’s institutionalized forms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Object Life in Monique David-MénardJudith ButlerThe three papers published here were originally given as part of a colloquium, “Objects, Phantasms, Life, and Death” on the work of Monique David-Ménard at Columbia University in April 2014. Monique David-Ménard is a psychoanalyst and philosopher who has been teaching at the Université de Paris VII-Diderot and has been engaged in private psychoanalytic practice for many years. Her work is distinguished (...) in part because of the way she brings clinical experience to philosophical inquiry, and how she understands the unconscious to support and disrupt various philosophical systems. Trained in the Lacanian school, but returning time and again to Freud with her own questions, she has written extensively on the problem of drives, the role of biology in psychoanalysis, all along staging a way of thinking about philosophy and psychoanalysis as mutually illuminating. Engaged by feminist philosophy, she has offered a way of thinking about sexual alterity, social embodiment, [End Page 80] and gender, to offer a different “French feminist” trajectory than those usually canonized in English.David-Ménard completed a master’s degree in philosophy with Paul Ricoeur (Université de Nanterre, 1968), a doctorate in psychopathology and psychoanalysis with Pierre Fédida (Université Paris-VII, 1978), and a doctorate in philosophy with Jean-Marie Beysade (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-III, 1990). She was a professor of philosophy in Reims, Sceaux, and Paris-VII, and received her psychoanalytic training at the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) then led by Jacques Lacan; she was a member of that school in 1979–80. Between 1982 and 1994 she was a member of the Centre de formation et de recherches psychanalytiques (CFRP) and then became a member of the Société de psychanalyse Freudienne in 1994. She was Directrice of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris from 1992 to 1995, and served as its vice president from 1995 to 1998. In 1999 she was appointed professor of psychopathology and psychoanalysis at the Université de Paris-VII, Denis Diderot, where she has served as Directrice of the Centre des études du vivant. In addition she is a co-founder of the Société Internationale de Philosophie et Psychoanalyse.Her publications include works on the relation of psychoanalysis to biological and philosophical discourses, hysterical conversion in Freud and Lacan, the Freudian account of drives as a “threshold” phenomenon; bodies and language, constructions of the universal, exemplified most dramatically by a consideration of “madness” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and gender and melancholia.1 The range of her work is relentless and impressive: it includes an early work on Kant’s reading of Swedenborg that initiates a critique of universality through the study of how sexuality and madness inform the text; a study of hysteria “between” Freud and Lacan that establishes her own way of negotiating between the two; several essays on drives and their various vicissitudes; theories of embodiment; feminism and philosophy; the difference between the sexes, the process of sexuation, desire, narcissism, what to do with an organless body following from an impressive, if disconcerting, study on the convergence of Deleuze with psychoanalysis. She has also written on the status of contingency in chaos theory. Although historically trained in Kant, Spinoza, and Husserlian phenomenology, she has also engaged Lacanian thought in a selective and critical way, working with its productive potentials and refusing some of its more rigid formulations. She draws from science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology to weave together a set of theoretical reflections prompted by an event, an occasion, or a challenge. Penelope Deutscher’s contribution to this volume shows how this cross-theoretical inquiry works. David-Ménard, for instance, makes use of a Foucaultian form of inquiry to establish a certain problematic within psychoanalysis and philosophy, posing questions about how the initial impetus for [End Page 81] a theoretical system both conditions, orients, and disrupts any effort at full systematicity. As Deutscher explains, the task is neither to psychoanalyze Foucault nor to apply Foucault to psychoanalysis, but to formulate and pursue an inquiry in which the driving impetus informs and precludes the systematic closure of the theory itself.And... (shrink)

Conventional gender analysis of development policy does not adequately explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Our research analyses the gender discourses embedded in agricultural and rural development policies in Myanmar and Nepal. We find that both countries focus on increasing women’s participation in development activities as a core gender equality policy objective. This creates a binary categorisation of participating versus non-participating women and identifies women as responsible for improving their position. At the same time, (...) class='Hi'>gender (in)equality is defined exclusively as a women’s concern. Such discourses, as constitutive practices, produce specific knowledge about rural women and new subjectivities that prescribe and govern them solely as subjects of development. Our research suggests that such a limited discursive practice invisiblises gendered power relations and structural and institutional issues, ultimately slowing progress towards gender equality. We demonstrate the importance of studying policy as discourse, beyond the effectiveness of policies or mainstreaming tools, and call for empirical evidence on the impact of these discourses on women’s subjectivities and lived experiences. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Inversion Argument The Costs‐of‐Dominance Argument The Distraction Argument Defining Discrimination.

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal (...) and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance. (shrink)

Gender-neutral bathrooms are usually framed as an accommodation for trans and other gender-nonconforming individuals. In this paper, we show that the benefits of gender-neutral bathrooms are much broader. First, our simulations show that gender-neutral bathrooms reduce average waiting times: while waiting times for women go down invariably, waiting times for men either go down or slightly increase depending on usage intensity, occupancy-time differentials and the presence of urinals. Second, our result can be turned on its head: (...) firms have an opportunity to reduce the number of facilities and cut costs by making them all gender-neutral without increasing waiting times. These observations can be used to reframe the gender-neutral bathrooms debate so that they appeal to a larger constituency, cutting across the usual dividing lines in the ‘bathroom wars’. Finally, there are improved designs and behavioural strategies that can help overcome resistance. We explore what strategies can be invoked to mitigate the objections that gender-neutral bathrooms (1) are unsafe, (2) elicit discomfort and (3) are unhygienic. (shrink)

This article considers the importance of Nietzsche’s GM I 13 to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), arguing that Butler misreads Nietzsche’s passage and exploring the implications of their misreading. I begin by placing Butler’s reading in the context of French poststructuralist readings of Nietzsche that appear to have influenced Butler. I then turn to Butler’s crucial invocation of GM I 13, showing how Nietzsche is claiming that consideration of the human being as a hierarchy of drives reveals our limitations (...) when it comes to self-transformation – whereas Butler takes the lack of a “doer” behind the “deed” to be a thought that amplifies our capacity for self-transformation. Turning to Saba Mahmood’s criticisms of Butler’s account of the subversion of gender norms, I show how, without speaking of Nietzsche, Mahmood’s critique highlights what Butler failed to register in Nietzsche: namely, that thinking of the gendered human being as embodied means acknowledging that the subversion of cultural norms must involve more than the disruption of repeated culturally significant acts. Rather, it must involve the potentially long, slow work of reengineering the body as a hierarchy of drives. (shrink)

There is growing support for the view that social categories like men and women refer to “objective types” (Haslanger 2000, 2006, 2012; Alcoff 2005). An objective type is a similarity class for which the axis of similarity is an objective rather than nominal or fictional property. Such types are independently real and causally relevant, yet their unity does not derive from an essential property. Given this tandem of features, it is not surprising why empirically-minded researchers interested in fighting oppression and (...) marginalization have found this ontological category so attractive: objective types have the ontological credentials to secure the reality (and thus political representation) of social categories, and yet they do not impose exclusionary essences that also naturalize and legitimize social inequalities. This essay argues that, from the perspective of these political goals of fighting oppression and marginalization, the category of objective types is in fact a Trojan horse; it looks like a gift, but it ends up creating trouble. I argue that objective type classifications often lack empirical adequacy, and as a result they lack political adequacy. I also provide, and in reference to the normative goals described above, several arguments for preferring a social ontology of natural kinds with historical essences. (shrink)

Statutory requirements for compulsory Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) in the UK is generating concern among many religious communities and reigniting debates about the purpose of School Based Sexuality Education (SBSE). Among the communities voicing their dissent are members of the British Islamic community. Quranic scripture deems obligatory the teaching and learning about all aspects relevant to human sexuality, however, religion, and in particular Islam, is widely viewed as hostile to sexuality education. Whilst Muslim objection to ‘progressive’ agendas in SBSE (...) (i.e., same-sex relations, gender fluidity, pleasure and desire) is generating much attention, equal attention to understanding the Islamic theological, philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of these views, is less frequently sought. The purpose of this paper is to foreground Islamic responses to some of the ‘progressive’ topics featuring in RSE and SBSE more broadly. Using British printed media sources and Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper aims to make sense of British Muslim parents’ objections to ‘progressive’ sexuality education. A more concerted focus on Islamic underpinnings of these views is imperative to alleviate negative responses to Muslim positions on this subject as well as inform the ongoing dilemma of finding ways in which religious diversity be addressed in SBSE. (shrink)