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255Personal Autonomy and the Paradox of Feminine SocializationJournal of Philosophy 84 (11): 619-628. 1987.
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13Kindred Matters: Rethinking the Philosophy of the FamilyPhilosophical Quarterly 45 (180): 405. 1995.
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14No safe passage: ‘the mapping journey project’Journal of Global Ethics 12 (3): 252-259. 2016.This essay examines ‘The Mapping Journey Project’, an installation artwork by Bouchra Khalili. It consists of eight large video screens and headsets. In each video, a migrant draws a map of her/his journey to and in Europe and narrates her/his route. In collaboration with Khalili, I argue, these storyteller/draftspersons create a dissident cartography that superimposes their lived geography on the background of legal geography. Thus, ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ is a work of art that is also a …Read more
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79Part IV. Section 1. The Personal and the Political Value of Autonomy: Disparities in autonomy competency number among the many ways in which women and men in western societies are unequal. Meyers holds that although personal autonomy is not the sole or paramount value, medial autonomy is not only a personal good, but is also a political good.
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51Part II. Section 5. Interests, Self-Interest and Autonomy: Two questions drive this chapter: 1) What kinds of things can be objects of autonomous choices? and 2) How are these related to an individual's authentic self? If self-interest is construed as securing a set of basic goods for oneself, personal autonomy and self-interest can collide. Still, Meyers holds that autonomy based on exercising autonomy competency is compatible with the dominance principle, which counsels opting for a course of …Read more
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368Who's there? Selfhood, self-regard, and social relationsHypatia 20 (4): 200-215. 2000.: J. David Velleman develops a canny, albeit mentalistic, theory of selfhood that furnishes some insights feminist philosophers should heed but that does not adequately heed some of the insights feminist philosophers have developed about the embodiment and relationality of the self. In my view, reflexivity cannot do the whole job of accounting for selfhood, for it rests on an unduly sharp distinction between reflexive loci of understanding and value, on the one hand, and embodiment and relationa…Read more
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70Authenticity for Real PeopleThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 9 195-202. 2000.In this paper I shall offer an account of the authentic self that is compatible with human intrapsychic, interpersonal, and social experience. I begin by examiningHarry Frankfurt’s influential treatment of authenticity as a form of personal integration, and argue that his conception of the integrated self is too restrictive. I then offer an alternative processual account that views integration as the intelligibility of the self that emerges when a person exercises autonomy skills.
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8The Family Romance: A Fin-de-siecle TragedyIn Hilde Lindemann (ed.), Feminism and Families, Routledge. 1997.
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62Part III. Section 3. Autonomy and Feminine Socialization: Having agreed with Beauvoir that narcissism and altruism contribute to women's lack of autonomy, Meyers examines Beauvoir's account of autonomy in light of her own conception of autonomy competency and argues that Beauvoir's conception of autonomy is too stringent. Autonomy competency, in contrast, allows for degrees of autonomy and variations in degree as viewed over a life-time, as well as for a distinction between programmatic and epis…Read more
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40Rights-based rightsLaw and Philosophy 3 (3). 1984.Ronald Dworkin maintains that particular rights, like the right to free speech and the right to own personal property, can be derived from a foundational right, the right to equal concern and respect. This paper questions the tenability of this program for rights-based rights. A right is an individuated moral or political guarantee which confers a specified benefit on each right-holder and which resists conduct that would derogate it. For there to be rights-based rights, both the foundational ri…Read more
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49Moral Reflection: Beyond Impartial ReasonHypatia 8 (3). 1993.This paper considers two accounts of the self that have gained prominence in contemporary feminist psychoanalytic theory and draws out the implications of these views with respect to the problem of moral reflection. I argue that our account of moral reflection will be impoverished unless it mobilizes the capacity to empathize with others and the rhetoric of figurative language. To make my case for this claim, I argue that John Rawls's account of reflective equilibrium suffers from his exclusive …Read more
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107Part IV. Section 2. Self-Respect and Autonomy: Meyers's discussion of self-respect takes into account work by Stephen Darwall, Thomas Hill, Jr., and Stephen Massey and proposes a unified triadic account that undermines the distinction between self-respect and self-esteem. After distinguishing compromised respect from unqualified respect, she shows why self-respect is both required for and a product of exercising autonomy competency.
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122Women and Moral Theory (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1987.To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
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1239Corporeal selfhood, self-interpretation, and narrative selfhoodPhilosophical Explorations 17 (2): 141-153. 2014.Ever since Freud pioneered the “talking cure,” psychologists of various stripes have explored how autobiographical narrative bears on self-understanding and psychic wellbeing. Recently, there has been a wave of philosophical speculation as to whether autobiographical narrative plays an essential or important role in the constitution of agentic selves. However, embodiment has received little attention from philosophers who defend some version of the narrative self. Catriona Mackenzie is an imp…Read more
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100Part I. The book begins with literary, cinematic, and historical scenarios that exemplify personal autonomy. Meyers uses these vignettes to distinguish personal autonomy from other, variously related types of autonomy and to show that other kinds of autonomy cannot adequately address the concern people have with their own personal decisions. Noting how profoundly social experience impinges on self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction, Meyers characterizes autonomous individuals as pers…Read more
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26The Rationale for Inalienable Rights in Moral SystemsSocial Theory and Practice 7 (2): 127-143. 1981.
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The justice position and the care perspectiveIn Eva Feder Kittay & Diana T. Meyers (eds.), Women and Moral Theory, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 4--10. 1987.
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58Diemut Bubeck, Care, Gender and Justice, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 281Utilitas 10 (2): 246. 1998.
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738Recovering the Human in Human RightsLaw, Culture, and Humanities 1-30. 2014.It is often said that human rights are the rights that people possess simply in virtue of being human – that is, in virtue of their intrinsic, dignity-defining common humanity. Yet, on closer inspection the human rights landscape doesn’t look so even. Once we bring perpetrators of human rights abuse and their victims into the picture, attributions of humanity to persons become unstable. In this essay, I trace the ways in which rights discourse ascribes variable humanity to certain categories of …Read more
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836Jenny Saville Remakes the Female Nude – Feminist Reflections on the State of the ArtIn Peg Brand (ed.), Beauty Unlimited, Indiana University Press. pp. 137-162. 2012.Jenny Saville is a leading contemporary painter of female nudes. This paper explores her work in light of theories of gender and embodied agency. Recent work on the phenomenology of embodiment draws a distinction between the body image and the body schema. The body image is your representation of your own body, including your visual image of it and your emotional attitudes towards it. The body schema is comprised of your proprioceptive knowledge, your corporeally encoded memories, and your c…Read more
Storrs, Connecticut, United States
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |