•  129
    Apology is arguably the central act of the reparative work required after wrongdoing. Claudia Card’s (1940-2015) analysis of complicity in collectively perpetrated evils moves one to ask whether apology ought to be requested of persons culpably complicit in institutional evils. To better appreciate the benefits of and barriers to apologies offered by culpably complicit wrongdoers, this article examines doctors’ complicity in a practice that meets Card’s definition of an evil, namely, the non-med…Read more
  •  2
    Genealogies of Race and Gender
    In Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary & Jana Sawicki (eds.), A Companion to Foucault, Wiley. 2013.
    The question of a genealogy of race and gender is first and foremost a question of methodology. By bringing to bear the critical tools provided by Foucauldian methodology on the construction of race and gender in the specific historical case of Levittown, this chapter explores the manner in which the stories that inform our sense of “the way things are,” are shaped historically. Moreover, the chapter argues that the significance of the institutions and discourses becomes apparent only once they …Read more
  •  155
    Apology is arguably the central act of the reparative work required after wrongdoing. The analysis by Claudia Card of complicity in collectively perpetrated evils moves one to ask whether apology ought to be requested of persons culpably complicit in institutional evils. To better appreciate the benefits of and barriers to apologies offered by culpably complicit wrongdoers, this article examines doctors’ complicity in a practice that meets Card's definition of an evil, namely, the non-medically …Read more
  •  9
    More Rhetoric Than Argument?
    with Alice Dreger and Anne Tamar-Mattis
    Hastings Center Report 43 (2): 4-6. 2013.
    One of two commentaries on “Normalizing Atypical Genitalia: How a Heated Debate Went Astray,” by Josephine Johnston, from the November‐December 2012 issue.
  •  27
    Prenatal Dexamethasone for Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: An Ethics Canary in the Modern Medical Mine
    with Alice Dreger and Anne Tamar-Mattis
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9 (3): 277-294. 2012.
    Following extensive examination of published and unpublished materials, we provide a history of the use of dexamethasone in pregnant women at risk of carrying a female fetus affected by congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). This intervention has been aimed at preventing development of ambiguous genitalia, the urogenital sinus, tomboyism, and lesbianism. We map out ethical problems in this history, including: misleading promotion to physicians and CAH-affected families; de facto experimentation w…Read more
  • Atypical bodies in medical care
    In Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, Routledge. 2016.
  •  73
    The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency (edited book)
    Rowman & Littlefield. 2002.
    The essays of this volume consider how acknowledgement of the fact of dependency changes our conceptions of law, political theory, and morality, as well as our very conceptions of self.
  •  11
    Intersex—the fact of bodies neither typically male nor female, together with the grim history of its medical management—was a topic for feminist theory before there was such a thing as intersex activism. Indeed, critical academic scholarship about intersex supported the consciousness raising that made an intersex activist movement possible. Activist engagement, in turn, has expanded the understanding of the theorists whose work is responsive to that activism. Central to the thinking about inters…Read more
  •  10
    Intersex—the fact of bodies neither typically male nor female, together with the grim history of its medical management—was a topic for feminist theory before there was such a thing as intersex activism. Indeed, critical academic scholarship about intersex supported the consciousness raising that made an intersex activist movement possible. Activist engagement, in turn, has expanded the understanding of the theorists whose work is responsive to that activism. Central to the thinking about inters…Read more
  •  8
    When Racism Comes in Gray
    Philosophy Today 64 (4): 985-990. 2020.
  • Disciplining the Family: Feminism, Foucault, and the Institution of Difference
    Dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook. 1996.
    This dissertation is a Foucauldian investigation of the way in which disciplinary power works in and through the family. I argue that the contemporary practices consolidating 'family' as a disciplinary institution result from the deployment of an authoritative gaze, itself the principle of panopticism. I contend that where family is concerned, the effectiveness of panopticism cannot be measured simply in terms of discrete family units and the individuals who comprise them; rather, 'family' must …Read more
  •  17
    Beyond Good Intentions
    Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics 5 (2): 133-138. 2015.
    Ethical questions in medicine tend to emphasize the intentions of researchers and physicians. Questions concerning harm have more often been addressed in terms of legal culpability. This commentary proposes that normalizing interventions for atypical sex anatomies, both historical and ongoing, be recognized as a kind of medical error, and that attention be focused not simply on prevention, but on repair.
  •  53
    What's in a Name?: The Controversy over "Disorders of Sex Development"
    with Karkazis Katrina
    Hastings Center Report 38 (5): 33-36. 2008.
  •  35
    Intersex in the Age of Ethics (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 23 (4): 392-395. 2000.
  •  43
    Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures provides an unusual and important reading of Michel Foucault's later work. This response is an effort to introduce McWhorter's project and to describe the challenge it presents to engage in askesis, the transformative exercise of thinking, which McWhorter's work itself exemplifies
  •  17
    Sex, Ethics, and Method
    Philosophy Today 60 (3): 809-821. 2016.
  •  12
    Lucinda Joy Peach, 1956-2008
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 82 (2): 163. 2008.
  •  18
  •  67
    : Even as feminist analyses have contributed in important ways to discussions of how gender is raced and race is gendered, there has been little in the way of comparative analysis of the specific mechanisms that are at work in the production of each. Feder argues that in Michel Foucault's analytics of power we find tools to understand the reproduction of whiteness as a complex interaction of distinctive expressions of power associated with these categories of difference
  •  10
    Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender
    Oxford University Press. 2007.
    Ellen Feder's monograph is an attempt to think about the categories of race and gender together. She explains and then employs some critical tools derived from Foucault, in order to advance her main argument: that the institution of the family is the locus of the production of gender and race, and that gender is best understood as a function of a "disciplinary" power that operates within the family, while race is the function of a "regulatory" power acting upon the family from outside. Her inter…Read more
  •  43
    Putting the ethical tools of philosophy to work, Ellen K. Feder seeks to clarify how we should understand "the problem" of intersex. Adults often report that medical interventions they underwent as children to "correct" atypical sex anatomies caused them physical and psychological harm. Proposing a philosophical framework for the treatment of children with intersex conditions—one that acknowledges the intertwined identities of parents, children, and their doctors—Feder presents a persuasive mora…Read more
  •  39
    Bioethics and the disciplines: Recent work on the medical management of Intersex, by Katrina Karkazis and Elizabeth Reis
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4 (1): 241-249. 2011.
    Katrina Karkazis, Fixing sex: Intersex, medical authority, and lived experience, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008, reviewed by Ellen K. Feder Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in doubt: An American history of intersex, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, reviewed by Ellen K. Feder
  •  112
    Cheryl Chase has argued that “the problem” of intersex is one of “stigma and trauma, not gender,” as those focused on medical management would have it. Despite frequent references to shame in the critical literature, there has been surprisingly little analysis of shame, or of the disgust that provokes it. This paper investigates the function of disgust in the medical management of intersex and seeks to understand the consequences—material and moral—with respect to the shame it provokes.Conventio…Read more
  •  17
    In this paper, I apply Michel Foucault’s analysis of normalization to the 2006 announcement by the US and European Endocrinological Societies that variations on the term “hermaphrodite” and “intersex” would be replaced by the term, “Disorders of Sex Development” or DSD. I argue that the change should be understood as normalizing in a positive sense; rather than fighting for the demedicalization of conditions that have significant consequences for individuals’ health, this change can promote the …Read more