Naomi Scheman

I argue that naturalizing normativity—articulating norms that are appropriate given what we know about ourselves and the world—can be framed in terms of sustainability, calling for norms that underwrite practices of inquiry that make it more rather than less likely that others, especially those who are variously marginalized and subordinated, will be able to acquire knowledge in the future. The case for a sustainable epistemology, with a commitment to attending especially to those in positions of vulnerability, can be made, I argue, as much on epistemic grounds as on grounds of social justice.

Nicholson's political philosophy is distinctively grounded in history. The Play of Reason: From the Modern to the Postmodern argues that such "grounding" plays as much of the foundational role demanded of philosophy as can coherently be played by anything-and that such a foundation is, pragmatically, enough. I focus on two moves: (1) thinking historically as a model for thinking cross-culturally, and (2) historicizing "all the way down," as a way of exorcising the demand for the ahistorical grounding of epistemology

What are we to make of the Walrus’ sobs and tears and his claim to “deeply sympathize”? Alice, at least, makes something of them: when Tweedledee is done, she says, “I like the Walrus best, … because he was a little sorry for the poor Oysters.” She’s indignant, however, when Tweedledee tells her, “He ate more than the Carpenter, though…. You see he held his handkerchief, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took; contrariwise.” The Oysters, understandably, take a thoroughly sceptical view of the sobs and tears: “O woeful, weeping Walrus, your tears are all a sham! You’re greedier for Oysters than children are for jam.”

Connecting the issues of the female gaze and of the female narrative is the issue of desire. As [Stanley] Cavell repeatedly stresses, a central theme of these films is the heroine’s acknowledgment of her desire of its true object—frequently the man from whom she mistakenly thought she needed to be divorced. The heroine’s acknowledgment of her desire, and of herself as a subject of desire, is for Cavell what principally makes a marriage of equality achievable. It is in this achievement that Cavell wants to locate the feminism of the genre: it is the “comedy of equality” . There is, therefore, an obvious explanation in Cavell’s terms for the anomalous nature of these films: if their vision is explicitly feminist in embracing an ideal of equality, in approvingly foregrounding female desire, and in characterizing that desire as active and as actively gazing, then they would not be expected to fit an analysis based on films whose view of female desire and the female gaze is passive, absent, or treacherous. If we accept Cavell’s readings, these films provide genuine counterexamples to feminist claims of the normative masculinity of film .My affection for these films, and the ways in which Cavell accounts for that affection, leads me to want to believe that his account, or something like it, is true: that there did briefly emerge a distinctively feminist sensibility in some popular Hollywood movies, one which unsurprisingly succumbed to the repressive redomestication of women in the postwar years. But, for a number of reasons, I can’t quite believe it. Some version of the feminist critical theory of popular cinema does, in an odd way, apply to these movies: they are, to use a frequent phrase of Cavell’s, the exceptions that prove the rule. Though they do have some claim to being considered feminist, their feminism is seriously qualified by the terms in which it is presented, by the ways in which female desire and the female gaze are framed.Naomi Scheman is associate professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Minnesota. She is currently working on the roles played by bodies and by differences in modern and feminist postmodern accounts of knowledge