Feminist Ethics Midterm

Naive Conception of Misogyny

Misogyny is primarily a property of individual agents (typically men) who are prone to feel hatred, hostility, and other similar emotions toward any and every woman, simply because they are women.

Manne on Naive Conception of Misogyny

• It can also be easy to excuse oneself of being a misogynist based on the definition because because the actor can claim have good relationships with some women.

• It can have silencing effects on women because if misogyny is defined as a property of an individuals psychological states, then we cannot prove its presence or absence.  

• Ex.) If a woman says they are experiencing misogyny, the perpetrator can argue a different motivation for their actions, and it can be dismissed under the definition. 

Manne’s Account of Misogyny

• It is a property of social systems or environments as a whole in which women will tend to face hostility of various kinds because they are women in a man’s world (patriarchy), who are held to be failing to live up to patriarchal standards. 

• The system that polices and enforces a patriarchal order.

Manne’s Definition of Misogyny

• The system that polices and enforces patriarchy’s governing norms and expectations. It is a political phenomenon, and it is an outgrowth of patriarchal ideology. 

• Focuses on the the hostility women experience in a man’s world. Its essence lies in its function and not in the psychology of the actor.  

• Defined from the perspective of its targets and its effects on them.

Manne’s Definition Sexism

• Sexism is the branch of the patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal order. 

• Sexist ideology consists in assumptions, beliefs, theories, stereotypes, and broader cultural narratives that represent men and women as importantly different in ways that, if true and known to be true… would make rational people more inclined to support and participate in a patriarchal social arrangement

Manne on Patriarchy

• A social system where men hold power over women, leading to women's subordination in all areas of social life, not just the home.

• Giving and taking attention, care, sexual labor is all a part of the gendered economy. Sexism justifies that order and misogyny sanctions that order.

Bartky’s Main Claim

• Women’s emotional caregiving confers status on men, enforcing social hierarchy.

• “The consistent giving of what we don’t get in return is a performative acknowledgement of male supremacy and thus a contribution to our own social demotion”. (disempowering for women, regardless of whether men benefit from it). 

• Conversational cheerleading is similar to deference displays in hierarchical societies. 

Emotional Caregiving Consists of… 

• Feeding Egos: conversational cheerleading. 

• Tending Wounds: emotional healing- Awareness and responsiveness to the fact that the person is hurting.

Definition “A” of a Feminist which Bartky Rejects

• Someone who supported a program for the liberation of women and who held beliefs about the nature of contemporary society appropriate to such a political program.

Safety Valve Theory

Contemporary patriarchal society does violence to men, and women’s care is a safety valve for the release of emotional tensions. 

Bartky’s Definition of Feminist

• To be a feminist, one has to first become one. To become one is to develop a radically altered consciousness of oneself, of others, and the “social reality”. 

Social Reality

• The ensemble of formal and informal relationships with other people in which we are now enmeshed and are likely to become enmeshed, together with attitudes, values, types of communication, and conventions which accompany such relationships. 

Feminist Consciousness

• The experience in a certain way of certain specific contradictions in the social order. The feminist apprehends certain features of the social reality as intolerable and want to/strive to do something about it.

• The consciousness develops once there becomes hope that there is a possibility in transforming the social order. 

Feminists and Social Reality

• Feminists are not aware of different things than other people, they are aware of the same things differently.

Double Ontological Shock

• Frist, the realization that what is really happening is quite different from what appears to be happening, and second, the frequent inability to tell what is really happening at all. 

The Arrow of Care Map

• Its abstract conceptual nature is designed for flexible analyses of caregiving without asserting claims about the nature of the family.

• Providing care is a contribution to society, and having our care needs met is the most fundamental need in society.

• Combats the ideological invisibility of care by making care visible with a focus on material caregiving.

Categories of Care

• Dependency Care- hands-on labor, in its absence, the dependent person will not survive long (i.e., feeding a baby)

  • Unpaid dependency care

  • Poorly paid dependency care. 

• Personal Services- Care/activity that a person does for another person when that person is capable of meeting the basic need themselves or the need is not pressing or legitimate.

• There are also unmet care needs, which also need to be identified.

Brison’s Main Claim

• Rape should be classified as gender-based violence rather than as sex without consent to take it out of the interpersonal realm and classify it as an injustice. 

• It should also focus on the perspective of the victim, not the perpetrator. 

  • Rape is not sex from the victim’s POV. Just like if someone was robbed they would not say it was gift-giving without consent.
    

Kate Mann & Brison

Acts of gender-based violence are misogyny (enforcement of gender-roles) that uphold the patriarchy of control for men. 

The Benefits of Calling Rape “Gender-Based Violence”

• Gender-Based- Makes salient… that it is also a form of sex discrimination and human rights violation; it situates rape in a civil rights and human rights context and highlights the social and political conditions in which men rape women. 

• Violence- Captures the severity of the act and situates it in a criminal justice context (where norms of responsibility focus on individuals and their actions). 

• Helps us to identify the connection between singular events. 

Why is it hard to see sex crimes against women as political violence constituing a group-based injustice? 

• Diffuseness- happens in a variety of different environments. 

• Ubiquity- So common that people fail to see the problem. 

• Physical isolation of the crimes- people don’t see the acts of violence happening. 

• We live in a culture which violence is sexualized (porn, prostitution, and other forms of commodification of women’s bodies).

Arrogant Perception

• To view others from a position of self-importance, failing to identify with them and thus seeing them as inferior or as mere products of that arrogant viewpoint.

  • Involves the failure to identify.

  • Men and women are taught to perceive many other women arrogantly.

Two kinds of love

• First- Love as involving arrogant perception and unconditional servitude.

  • Servitude and love are equated due in part to assuming that they are selfless.

• Second- Love by learning to travel to each other’s worlds.

Grafting

• May be done with or without identification.

• In cases of racism, it is done without identification where we graft on to someone who can do something for us, but we don’t identify with them.

Lugones on Grafted Subjects

• There is no loss when there is grafting without identification. When Lugones grafted to her servants, once they were gone, she didn’t lose a sense of identity. However, with her mom, once she was gone, she lost a sense of identity. 

Loving Requires World-Traveling

• In order to love someone we must see with their eyes and witness their own sense of self from their world. Only through traveling can we begin to identify with someone. 

A “World”

• Must include some real people, but it can also include some imaginary people. 

• It can be a dominant or non-dominant construction of society, can be traditional construction of life. 

• Some of the inhabitants may not understand or hold the particular construction of them that constructs them in that “world”. 

Travel

• The shift from being one person to being a different person.

• We are different selves in different worlds. 

Four Ways of Being at Ease in a “World”

• 1: “Having a history”, where a shared history supplies shared references and points of contact for discourse. 

• 2: “Being a fluent speaker”, which includes knowing the words, the norms, the moves, and being confident.

• 3: Being normatively happy that you agree with all the norms and could not love the norms any better. You are asked to do what you want to do and are at ease. 

• 4: “Being Humanly Bonded” as being with those you love and those that love you too. It is possible to be humanly bonded while existing in a world that is hostile to you. 

Playfulness

• An attitude of joyful openness, creativity, and self-reinvention that is vital for empathetic "world"-traveling and building cross-cultural connections.