Cheshire Calhoun

Can one theorize the lesbian within a feminist frame? I argue that a difference sensitive feminist frame closets lesbians because (1) heterosexist oppression has been under-theorized and thus gender analyses fail to intersect with sexual orientation analyses, (2) feminist values and goals have worked against representing lesbian difference from heterosexual women, and (3) difference sensitive feminism requires that lesbians be representable as women with a different sexuality and not as a “third sex”, not-women, not-men, i.e., not through the very image through which lesbians historically were made conceivable.

This essay contributes to the explanatory hypotheses for why women persistently make up a third or fewer of all undergraduate philosophy majors in the United States. Following a suggestion of Tom Dougherty, Samuel Baron, and Kristie Miller, the essay first examines what women undergraduates do major in, why they might prefer these subjects to philosophy, and how departments might make philosophy more attractive. Second, the essay explores the relevance to philosophy of Sapna Cheryan’s work on the connection between women’s disinterest in majoring in computer science and their feelings of dissimilarity to the stereotype of the computer science major.

This essay engages with Sarah Buss's 2019 annual lecture for the Society for Applied Philosophy: "Some Musings About the Limits of an Ethics That Can Be Applied – A Response to a Question About Courage and Convictions That Confronted the Author When She Woke Up on November 9, 2016." She reflects on whether one is obligated to take great risks in the face of grave injustice. I suggest shifting the normative question from “Am I obligated?” to “Is there something of moral importance that someone needs to do, and shall it be me who does it?”

Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet is about placing sexual orientation politics within feminist theorizing. It is also about defining the central political issues confronting lesbians and gay men. The book brings the study of lesbians from the margins of feminist theory to the center by critiquing the analytic frameworks employed within feminist theory that renders invisible lesbians' difference from heterosexual women. This book also outlines the basic features of lesbian and gay subordination by exploring the differences between heterosexual dominance and gender and race relations. Throughout, Calhoun aims to re-center lesbian and gay politics away from concerns with sexual regulations and toward concern with the displacement of gays and lesbians from the public sphere of visible citizenship and from the private sphere of romance, marriage, and family.

What is it that enables agents to find the business of reflective endorsement, deliberation, and willing meaningful? I argue that our having motivating reasons to act-and thus reason to lead a life-depends on a set of background "frames" of agency being in place. These "frames" are attitudes toward and beliefs about our own agency that, under normal conditions, are simply taken for granted as we lead our lives as agents and that thus do not enter into our normative reflection, deliberation, planning, and intending. Those frames include a perception of our lives as meaningful, lack of alienation from one's own normative outlook, a belief in the effectiveness of instrumental reasoning, and confidence in our relative security from disastrous misfortune. When those background frames are disrupted, we may find our agency not defeated, but emptied of significance.

Feminist philosophy has often succeeded in breaking new philosophical ground because it takes its paradigm examples from the lives of marginalized people. It then seeks to construct philosophical views that are adequate to those lives. Artless Integrity is, in this sense, a work in feminist philosophy. Susan Babbitt focuses on the lives of those at "moral risk." A person is at moral risk if social expectations undermine her options for self-realization, and if her choice to redirect her life toward more humanly worthy possibilities is not socially intelligible as meaningful or rational. For those at moral risk, practical deliberation about options does not conform to familiar philosophical pictures of practical deliberation and rational justification. Babbitt's book is an attempt to explain why deliberation and justification cannot take the expected form. She also constructs a model of the form that deliberation and justification must take. One of the most intriguing and fruitful features of this book is that it allows us to think quite differently about practical rationality.

Lynching, arbitrary imprisonment, and police brutality are uncivilized forms of oppression that cause obvious, measurable harms. Exercised through physical violence or unjust legal action, uncivilized oppression expresses ill will toward vulnerable individuals and blatantly misuses power. Civilized oppression, by contrast, takes place in routine, socially accepted institutional and intimate relationships between people. Civilized oppression may cause no obvious harms, may be motivated by good intentions, may be non-culpable, and may be invisible to both the agents of oppression and to witnesses. It is, nevertheless, a morally serious phenomenon. In Civilized Oppression, Jean Harvey aims to make civilized forms of oppression more visible by carefully describing the multiple factors that make wrongful exercises of power hard to detect. She also aims to shift the moral analysis of oppression from a preoccupation with tangible harms to the distorted nature of the moral relationship.