Stella Villarmea

The emerging area of philosophy of birth is invaluable, first, to diagnose fallacious assumptions about the relation between the womb and reason, and, ultimately, to challenge potentially damaging narratives with major impact on birth care. With its analysis of eighteenth-century epistemic and medical discussions about the role of the uterus in women's reasoning, this article supports two arguments: first, that women's “flawed thinking” was a premise drawn by many modern intellectual men, one that was presented as based upon empirical evidence; and second, that the pervasive construction of the uterus as an element that renders women wild, uncontrollable, and irrational continues to influence contemporary obstetrics, even as today's medicine and science consider themselves to be free of any such prejudices.This article shows the role that Giacomo Casanova played in debunking these prejudices and presents his short manuscript on the issue as an important contribution to the literature of the Enlightenment, with its argument against women's supposed “natural” inferiority and for the idea that differences in education were to blame for women's subordinate position in society.Detailed analysis of the “thinking uterus” debate illuminates the different ways in which various arguments from/by the “anti-uterine” lobby were used to justify the subordination of women: sometimes emphasizing the connection between the uterus and thought and sometimes negating it, but always concluding that women's inferiority is to be found in some known or yet-to-be-discovered anatomical, and mainly sexual, deficiency or problem.

Conceptual innovation can change our perspectives and be thus emancipatory. It is my thesis that emancipatory movements do not construct a language ex novo but rather proceed by understanding how a certain segment of language works, removing problems and confusions regarding some terms, and proposing a creative use of that language, which throws light onto its meaning, to use a Wittgensteinian formulation. That happened when feminist theory started to use and reuse notions like “patriarchy”, “sexism”, “gender”, “feminization of poverty”, “sex worker”, “domestic terrorism”, “sexual class”, or “emotional work”. And that is exactly what happens around the new terminology on gynecology and pregnancy. To see a caesarean not as a necessary surgical intervention but as an unneeded and violent intervention, childbirth activism coins an expression that concisely shows the difference: “unne-caesarean”. From a philosophical perspective, the new conceptualization on childbirth is fascinating. To understand the kind of debate produced by childbirth activism, I appeal to Marcelo Dascal’s famous classification of debates as discussions, disputes, or controversies. My hypothesis is that linguistic innovation is one of the factors that turn a discussion or a dispute into a controversy. Thus, when childbirth activism talks of an “unne-caesarea” it shifts the field of debate into a controversy. The shift has advantages: it enforces dialogue between positions and promotes socio-political changes in our common practices. To conclude, I draw some theoretical and practical consequences of this approach for the sphere of rationality and normativity.

This essay analyzes some of the connections between hermeneutics, epistemology, and feminism. Feminist theory offers a useful field for reflection on the links between the enlightened and the hermeneutic traditions. The appeal to the Enlightenment introduces the notions of truth and freedom 1 Este artículo ha podido realizarse gracias a la generosa ayuda de la Fundación Caja de Madrid en forma de beca postdoctoral, bajo la dirección de Celia Amorós. Es también fruto de la colaboración en el proyecto de investigación Hermenéutica y Epistemología PB 98-0828. Asimismo, agradezco sinceramente a los participantes en el seminario Conocimiento e Interpretación (coord. Á. J. Perona, P. López y V. Sanfélix, Dpto. Filosofía IV, UCM, curso 2000-2001) sus comentarios a una primera versión de este escrito. 213 Stella Villarmea Algunas bases hermenéuticas y epistémicas... which gives meaning to the concept of emancipation; the appeal to hermeneutics raises our awareness of the existence of different interpretations resulting from different perspectives. This essay focuses on emancipatory consciousness, treated as an example of the construction of personal identity