Feminine Ethics Research Articles

‘It’s a Good Thing to Take an Interest’: Care and University Women in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night and Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love

This essay explores discourses of emotional labour in the university novel. It focuses on Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) and Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love (1961), two novels written at transformational moments when women’s participation in higher education was increasing and the emergence of the welfare state was transforming ideas about the social function of the university. The essay pays particular attention to the various, shifting uses of the word ‘interest’, a phatic expression that connotes both affect and intellect, in depictions of emotional labour. While care has long been understood as a vital part of learning, thinking, and education, Sayers and Pym depict women academics who are ambivalent about performing emotional labour. These novels prefigure ongoing debates about whether universities, and the public sphere more broadly, can be transformed by a feminine ethics which values emotion and relationship building or whether such an ethics of care may enable the exploitation of caregivers and perpetuate a history of female exploitation. As this essay considers how academic work has transformed in the wake of what Arlie Russell Hochschild terms the growth of the ‘care sector’, it explores the forms and affordances of academic emotional labour as well as the spaces, both institutional and symbolic, in which such labour is undertaken.

Ethnography Research: Dayak Kaharingan Ethics Kalimantan

This research is an ethnographic on the Kaharingan Dayak in Central Kalimantan, East Barito, and South Kalimantan in Tabalong District, and Gunung Meratus Dayak. The studies were conducted in 2012, 2016, 2018 and 2023. The research units were the male and female Wadian Kaharingan, and the Mantir Adat Dayak. The results of this ethnographic research produced 3 main findings, namely the Dara Mula Lapeh Ethics of Concern, Datu Mula Munta's Environmental Ethics, and the third is the Ethics of Living Together on the Land. The Caring Ethics develops the notion of caring as a feminine ethic, and applies it to the practice of moral education. Women "enter the practical realm of moral action in a different way". The Caring Ethic as a preference for moral deliberation takes place in practice, and an appreciation for the uniqueness of each caring relationship. The ethics of caring as the basis of human existence and awareness. Environmental Ethics is given a holistic intrinsic value, namely including non-human entities, more precisely animals, plants, water, mountains, seas and other organisms in a group of entities that have intrinsic value that must be protected and respected. All biotic and abiotic beings deserve moral judgment for themselves. In other words, along with the human species, all other living things have intrinsic value. Meanwhile, the Ethics of the Dayak Kaharingan are the Ethics of Living Together on the Ground. The results of ethnographic research state that the mental doctrine of the Dayak Kaharingan is mechanical solidarity occurring when society consists of individuals who are different from each other, and social cohesion is obtained to shared values, beliefs, and rituals as a form of collective awareness as well as reducing individuals

Anthropocentrism and ethics of care in environmental ethics based on gender variable

PurposeThis article aims to analyze the anthropocentrism vs ethics of care positions of a group of undergraduate students at a private university in Mexico to test gender variable differences in their perspectives. There are two hypotheses: (1) there is a statistically significant difference between male and female genders related to anthropocentrism vs ethics of care positions, and if so, (2) the differences are attributable to women having a more ethics of care position than men. Participants were 561 undergraduate students from a private university in Mexico (257 female, 304 male). The findings demonstrated that both hypotheses were supported by the ethics of care, where the individual rights perspective is set aside to seek collective and holistic well-being.Design/methodology/approachT-tests were performed to test gender differences in anthropocentrism and ethics of care.FindingsThe results showed statistical differences based on gender (sig.000) and that women are less anthropocentric (or more oriented toward an ethics of care than men (female:1.64 and male:1.94). Ethics of care of female position is more defined than that of men. As a conclusion, men are more oriented to anthropocentrism, which reflects a lack of environmental connection by not assuming themselves as part of it and by defending the right of resources exploitation. On the contrary, women tend to respond from an ethic of care that means a more harmonious relationship with nature. In addition, women tend to assume a relationship with the environment, without hierarchy or supremacy towards it, and tend to reject the demand for the exploitation of the planet's resources as part of a right that human beings have historically assumed.Research limitations/implicationsOne of the limitations of this study is that it has been carried out in a university educational context with exclusively undergraduate students. It would be interesting to validate these anthropocentric vs ethics of care positions in different university groups, including professors and academic managers. Studying this concept in diverse contexts such as business, government and civil society would also be engaging. In addition, the authors recognize that the study is limited by its small population, which means that a balance between men and women or disciplines could not be guaranteed. However, the authors believe that although the results may not be considered exhaustive or conclusive, the results shed light for possible new studies in which the population is expanded. This is an exploratory study.Practical implicationsThese results have practical implications for universities. In the classroom and in the university environment, students can learn to question the way they relate to the environment. Anthropocentrism (more accentuated in men) is assumed to be separate from the environment and with the right to its exploitation. Contrary to anthropocentrism, it is necessary to explore other positions such as the ethics of care or feminine ethics, more pronounced in women. Universities can develop environmental sustainability projects under the leadership of women, without claiming to be exclusive to them. In this way, the ethic of care approach can be put into practice and thus begin the necessary change for a new environmental relationship perspective.Originality/valueUniversities are required to provide an educational orientation towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) particularly those that respond to the climate crisis. To this end, it is necessary to promote a new environmental awareness that critically question anthropocentric models based on the supremacy over the environment. The ethics of care or feminine ethics, contrary to the previous position, assumes that the person is part of the environment and is oriented to its care and healing of the damage caused to restore this network of the human being with nature. The originality of this study lies in demonstrating how women exhibit a different relationship with the environment, oriented to the ethics of care, and how their posture shows a difference with anthropocentrism, which is stronger in men.

Carrie Menkel-Meadow: Dispute Resolution in a Feminist Voice


 The presence of women in the law has changed the law’s substance, practice, and process. Carrie Menkel-Meadow, whose scholarship centers on this theme, is one such revolutionary woman.
 
 Professor Menkel-Meadow, who I am proud to call my colleague, co-author, and friend (hereinafter referred to as Carrie), began her career in 1977 with a series of simple questions that sparked a breathtaking body of work. Carrie probed the depth of male domination in the realm of law and wondered what changes female representation might engender. In particular, she focused her inquiry on the value orientation each respective gender might bring to the law: "To what extent are the legal institutions we deal with male-dominated, both in the values they reflect and the manner or means used to express those values? To what extent might the expression of feminine or female values, principles and qualities both in the ends desired and the means used to express those ends alter our legal institutions? How does the increased participation of women in these legal institutions move us toward or away from the realization of feminine values in the law?"
 
 
 
 Over 40 years, Carrie elaborated on these questions to develop a thorough and wide-ranging feminist jurisprudence. This Essay attempts to do justice to her work. Part II recapitulates her account of the feminization of the law: the way that feminine values affect the substance of the law; the way that we practice and learn law; and the process of law, especially in the area of Carrie’s other love—dispute resolution. In particular, Carrie used a key narrative to illustrate competing approaches to problem-solving. Spurred by Carol Gilligan’s reanalysis of psychology studies, Carrie dove into the moral dilemmas used in psychology and recast the story of Amy and Jake (where they wrestle over the dilemma of whether to steal drugs to save a life) as a lesson in problem-solving. Throughout her writings, Carrie advocated for a feminine ethic of care to have equal footing with the more traditional (masculine) ethic of justice that has been hallowed in law.
 
 
 
 Part III of this Essay uses a different narrative from Carrie’s scholarship to illustrate the application of the feminization of the law. In the case of Ziba—a hypothetical mediation between an underage bride and her controlling husband, Ahmed—we see how Carrie’s own passions for feminism and dispute resolution collide in the mediation process she typically champions. Ultimately, Carrie’s treatment of the case puts into practice the ethic of care developed within her feminist jurisprudence.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Fat fuckers and fat fucking: a feminine ethic of care in sex therapy

ABSTRACT Through the regulation of both femininity and fatness, dominant norms in queer communities construct fatness and femininity as excessive, desexualised/hypersexualised, and undeserving of sexual desire, pleasure, and care. Care, as a feminine ethical stance emphasising relationality and interdependency, is not typically associated with fucking, yet is critical in sex therapeutic work and interventions. In this article, we contend that fat scholarship, femme theory, and care ethics offer productive intersections in terms of crafting an ethic of care in sex therapy practice and activism for fat bodies of all genders. Using the example of the Fat Fuckers workshop developed in Ontario, Canada, offered internationally and online, this article describes how sex therapeutic work that combines fat activism, care, community building and relationality works at the intersections of femme theory, fat studies, and care ethics. This article combines theory with praxis by describing the Fat Fuckers workshop as a form of fat activism that simultaneously promotes fat identification and care for fat bodies in sex therapy while illustrating a nuanced form of feminine relationality for fat subjects and sexualities. Through this, practical tips are described for practitioners (e.g. sex therapists, activists and sex workers) with theoretical implications for sexuality scholars.

Wittgenstein and Care Ethics as a Plea for Realism

This paper aims to bring together the appeal to the ordinary in the ethics of care and the ‘destruction’ or philosophical subversion which Wittgenstein references in his Philosophical Investigations: Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems to destroy everything interesting, all that is great and important? What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards. The paper pursues a connection between the ethics of care and ordinary language philosophy as represented by Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell, in particular in a feminist perspective. The central point of Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice may not be the idea of a ‘feminine morality’ but a claim for an alternative form of morality. Gilligan’s essay seeks to capture a different, hitherto neglected yet universally present alternative ethical perspective, one easy to ignore because it relates to women and women’s activities. The ethics of care recalls a plea for ‘realism’; in the sense given to it in Cora Diamond’s The Realistic Spirit to mean the necessity of seeing (or attending to) what lies close at hand. Reflection on care brings ethics back to everyday practice much as Wittgenstein sought to bring language back from the metaphysical level to its everyday use.

동·서양 일월 신화에 나타나는 성차 담론의 반복과 차이 ― 원형론·구조론·위상론과 전복적 여성성 -

The signifier of sexual difference is always adopted in the Eastern and Western mythologies on the sun and the moon. This essay amid to discuss what femininity would be like as a subversive force to oppressing and discriminating society by reading four representative sun and moon myths of the East and the West: the Greek and Roman mythology of Apollo and Diana, the Norse mythology of Sol and Mani, the Chinese mythology of Nuwa and Fuki, and the Korean mythology of “The Sun and the Moon.” This essay analyzes the characteristics of the gender and power relationship of the sun and the moon in the four myths and interprets them through the theories of Jung’s archetype, Levi-Strauss’ structure and Lacan’s topology. Dialogically discussing the possibilities and limitations of each theory for the recovery of liberating femininity, this essay highlights the fluidity of sexual difference in the Korean mythology of “The Sun and the Moon” as a possible model for the new feminine ethics of inclusion and infinity.

The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

Staging the Feminine Ethic of Care

The neoliberal university can be a restrictive, repressive, and/or oppressive space. However, the contributions in this edited publication “Reimagining the Academy: ShiFting towards Kindness, Connection, and an Ethics of Care” by Alison L Black and Rachael Dwyer and published by Palgrave Macmillan represent hope, kindness, love, and compassion. The words and works contained in this book gift to any reader many enriching, impactful storied accounts of academic works from differentiated perspectives. These important works support the re-imagining of academic spaces, scholarship, research, teaching and learning and care for self, others, and the work that matters. My reading of these works engaged my individuated ethic of care and inspired a creative response – artistic and poetic storying as an act of performative synthesis of the experience that awaits the reader.

토니 모리슨의 『빌러비드』: 캐롤 길리건의 보살핌 윤리의 가치 연구

This study examines the positive values of social change that care ethics will bring based on Carol Gilligan''s feminist theory. She says that the feminine ethics of caring for others does not avoid accurate judgment, but ‘recognition’ that considers and encompasses differences in people with differences. Toni Morrison focuses on a mother''s experience of killing her daughter to avoid slavery, and the restoration of her self and identity. This black woman named Sethe blames herself for all the sins of killing her daughter, unable to overcome the trauma of the past and is trapped in the shackles of morality. The core of this case is not the moral judgment of right or wrong about the sincerity of black motherhood. It is important for the community to help Sethe and this should be an unconditional form of help. The female relationship shown by Ella and the village women is a mutually considerate care that goes beyond the dichotomy of selfishness and altruism, which were the main concerns of morality.

Contra uma moralidade das mulheres: a crítica de Joan Tronto a Carol Gilligan

Esse artigo pretende reconstruir a crítica de Joan Tronto ao modelo da ética do cuidado de Carol Gilligan. A análise de Tronto compreende, por um lado, que o cuidado não se restringe a uma moral feminina, mas é possível verificar sua prática em grupos em condição de subordinação, e, por outro (em consequência disso), que não se pode teorizar o cuidado sem o aporte do social. Sob esse aspecto, Tronto observa na análise de Gilligan um discurso essencialista e elitista que pretende universalizar a experiência do cuidado a partir de grupos hegemônicos.

Qualitative analysis of feminine morality and visible personality characteristics among young adults

This article documents the perceptions and judgments of youth about character of female as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, based on her visible personality characteristics. A qualitative study is carried out among the undergraduate students in two public sector universities. This study highlights contextual factors linked with the choice of clothing and quality of physical appearance among young girls. The judgments about a girl’s character are based on immediate, apparent personality characteristics. This study found that there are two contrasting categories of clothing and visible personality associated with positive and negative feminine morality. Certain expectations are also found to be associated with the attire of young women in Pakistani society which restricts their individual choices. Pakistani and Britain national boys judged girl’s character as immoral or bad based on cosmetics usage, fashion-ability, body exposedness, physical attractiveness, friendliness, bold temperament, and easiness while interaction with boys.

The Paci-Feminist Ethic of Virginia Woolf and Malala Yousafzai: Rhetorics of Care and Justice in the Face of Tyranny

The Paci-Feminist Ethic of Virginia Woolf and Malala Yousafzai: Rhetorics of Care and Justice in the Face of Tyranny Hillary Coenen (bio) In August of 1940, the United States had yet to enter the Second World War, and Virginia Woolf wrote the widely circulated “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” in part to advise Americans on their approach to the war. Many of Woolf’s works address issues of peace and women’s rights, as does this one. The brief entreaty was written for a symposium addressing “current matters concerning women” (Woolf, “Thoughts” 243). Less than one month after writing the piece, Woolf’s London home was destroyed by a bomb during the London Blitz, and the address was never delivered to the American symposium. Just days before the address was published in The New Republic, Woolf witnessed the bombing and destruction of Tavistock Square, a significant local landmark. “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” is an essay inseparable from its time. Over seventy years later, in a notable 2013 interview with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, Malala1 Yousafzai made her first appearance on a major late-night news program. There she described her experience of being threatened and attacked by the Taliban, and she shared why she took on what she knew to be the dangerous task of advocating for girls’ education. The interview occurred three months after she delivered a highly publicized speech at the United Nations General Assembly on what was her 16th birthday, and a year after she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for her advocacy of the rights of women and girls. Both Woolf’s undelivered (but later published) address and Malala’s interview represent public assertions that highlight how investing in education for women and girls can promote peace and justice while resisting violence. Rejection of violence has a long history in feminist scholarship and literature, and this theme has often been linked to care as a value that informs feminine ethics. In philosophy, care as an ethical and moral value has often been contrasted with the more traditional (and supposedly masculine) value of justice.2 While feminist scholars have acknowledged that both care and justice are essential values for ethical thinking and decision-making, in recent years feminist scholarship has fully embraced an ethic of care as a guiding principle. With the landmark publication of Jaqueline Royster and Gesa Kirsch’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and [End Page 139] Literacy Studies (2012), feminist rhetorical studies developed a renewed interest in the connection between feminism and care. Scholars in feminist rhetoric have taken up an “ethos of humility, respect, and care” that Royster and Kirsch claim is essential for excellent feminist inquiry (21). This research stance is consistent with the portrayal of feminist thought that Virginia Held upholds in The Ethics of Care. Held claims that “the ethics of care now has a central, though not exclusive, place in feminist moral theorizing” (28). Held responds to Carol Gilligan’s earlier work that distinguishes a “care perspective” from a “justice perspective.” In that response, Held explains that, although feminists who work within an ethic of care “share the goals of justice and equality,” this approach challenges traditional moral theories, in part because it is feminist (26). Feminists have long been faced with the violence of oppression and tyranny supported by willful ignorance and overt hatred. Appropriate and effective responses to these forces need to balance the need for justice and equity with a need to educate and build empathetic communities. Acknowledging these tensions, a pacifist and feminist response would necessarily incorporate care and justice perspectives, as well as notions of humility and respect. Feminist Rhetorical Practices provides “critical terms of engagement” that guide the rhetorical study of texts and contexts that have traditionally been excluded from the rhetorical canon or that apply non-traditional strategies (21). One of these terms is critical imagination, an approach that prompts us to rethink “what is there and not there” (20). Drawing from Jaqueline Royster’s Traces of a Stream, Royster and Kirsch explain that critical imagination involves “account[ing] for what we ‘know’ by...

Objects or Subjects? Pictoriality and Domesticity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

In his entry for 1 July 1892, Hardy notes: “The art of observation […] consists in this: the seeing of great things in little things, the whole in the part – even the infinitesimal part.” His novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles stages the heroine’s struggle to comply with the Victorian ideal of feminine morality, as she strives for redemption after her initial “downfall”. One of the key features of that ideal was domesticity, embodied in the figure of the Angel in the House – a figure which Tess is desperately trying to impersonate throughout the novel. In that sense, the presence of household objects in Tess could be read as the presence of “little things”, insignificant details, hinting at “greater things” – that is, the struggle for domesticity. Yet the proliferation of objects leads the reader to see them also as a part of the aesthetic aspirations of the novel, which is fraught with pictorial reminiscences, such as genre paintings or still-lifes, in which objects play a key role, to the extent of sometimes becoming the sole subject of the picture. This study aims at exploring the way Hardy questions the frontier between subject and object by blurring the characteristics of animate and inanimate, the two being united in the motionless world of painting. Hardy’s novel leads one to wonder whether the way he lends a voice to what is ordinary, sometimes barely noticeable and perhaps almost insignificant, necessarily implies a reification of the human figures. In a word, can the object be a subject?

Mujer Maravilla y Capitana Marvel. Aproximaciones divergentes a las éticas feministas

En este ensayo se abordan dos películas con superheroínas como protagonistas, un género relativamente reciente en el cine que ha demostrado tener una gran acogida entre los aficionados, que además tiene una novedosa y emocionante forma de contar historias de acción. La primera película es producida por DC Comics y Warner studios, Mujer Maravilla (Jenkins, 2017). La legendaria amazona, heredera de los dioses olímpicos y una de los líderes de la liga de la justicia, una heroína prototipo de las éticas femeninas del cuidado. La otra película es de Marvel comics, Capitana Marvel (Bodoen y Fleck, 2019), una increíble piloto que por un acto de azar obtiene superpoderes de orígenes alienígenas y termina convirtiéndose en la más fuerte de Los Vengadores, y un elemento clave de la nueva superproducción de esta editorial, una representante de las éticas feministas liberales. Las dos superheroinas tiene distintos orígenes y además características que pueden asociarse a distintas corrientes de éticas feministas. La Mujer Maravilla basa su desarrollo moral en la equidad, defiende ciertas características de la mujer y su devoción al cuidado, y por otro lado, la Capitana Marvel es una líder competitiva quien tiene un desarrollo en búsqueda de la igualdad de género ante la adversidad y los conflictos de poder. Este ensayo pretende evidenciar las diferencias de estos personajes y sus asociaciones morales divergentes, y cómo esto determina una particular representación de mujer ideal que parece tener cada editorial de comic.

Sorge, Heideggerian Ethic of Care: Creating More Caring Organizations

Recently ethical implications of human resource management have intensified the focus on care perspectives in management and organization studies. Appeals have also been made for the concept of organizational care to be grounded in philosophies of care rather than business theories. Care perspectives see individuals, especially women, as primarily relational and view work as a means by which people can increase in self-esteem, self-develop and be fulfilled. The ethic of care has received attention in feminist ethics and is often socially construed as a feminine ethic. Although well developed in the caring professions there remains no model or definition of the care ethic in management literature with little care research undertaken. This paper develops the concept of the care ethic using Heidegger’s philosophy, namely, care is fundamental to human being. To show Heideggerian care, an individual notices, pays attention to another and responds in ways to empower and enable. In a study which aimed to analyze women’s lived experience of career, we applied the philosophically grounded methodology hermeneutic phenomenology. Findings revealed the power of Heideggerian care, Sorge, as a key factor in creating meaning. From this, we propose that care has potential as a theoretical and philosophically based construct with strong practical implications. It provides a way of understanding the care ethic, lies at the heart of our being, and is essential to meaning in our grelationships and undertakings. Crucially, it can provide reprieve from the existential angst that trademarks our being.

Philosophical Implications of Taxpayer Funding for Prison Education

This paper attempts to address the question of whether it is fair to use US taxpayer dollars on prison education programs. Through a philosophical inquiry from a pragmatist lens and a feminine ethic of care, issues of fairness are clarified. Following the philosophical inquiry, a historical analysis provides some background on the issue of prison history and reform movements in America. Finally, I conclude by briefly highlighting the main arguments in favor of funding prison education programs with US tax payer dollars.

”Murderess of Two Husbands”: Female Agency as Female Loyalty in the History of the Nun

Abstract This work studies the behaviour of the protagonist of The History of the Nun: or, The Fair Vow- Breaker (1689) to investigate both what motivates her decisions (from pious woman to murderer) and what the objectives of her author may be. The conclusion reached is that female agency and the transgressive desire developed by Aphra Behn presented a new conception of femininity. Behn challenges the social contract and subverts seventeenth century conceptions of gender. Through Isabella’s behaviour Behn challenges established feminine morality, postulating a new role for women within society. The implication is that the act of breaking a holy vow, and the courage shown by a woman determined to take responsibility for her own life and make her own decisions in society, inevitably ends in tragedy and disaster.

From Masculine Ontology to Feminine Ethics: Joseph Soloveitchik and the Drive Toward the Ethical

From Masculine Ontology to Feminine Ethics: Joseph Soloveitchik and the Drive Toward the Ethical

Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Women in the Perspective of Philosophy

The article entitled “Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Women in the Perspective of Philosophy” derived from the results of philosophical research. The research objective is specifically exploring the philosophical concept of Hannah Arendt’s politics of women and revealthe forms of implementation in the context of open access, participation, and political control those are involving the women. Hannah Arendt political concept subsequently is applied to be adopted as a political strategy to fight for political equality of women in Indonesia. Concept, form of implementation, and women’s political strategy is analyzed through library research by using the typical elements of philosophical research; interpretation, deduction and induction, historical continuity, idealization, heuristics, and inclusive language. By using the typical elements of philosophical research, it is found that the source of women political thought isoriginating from Hannah Arendt’s idea of labor. The idea lies in a private area which is regarded as the political basis of reproductive and the strength of birthrate. In addition, Hannah Arendt introduced the politics of women as a feminine ethics which is conceptuallydefined as the ability to forgive and to love. The politics of women at the praxis level, according to Hannah Arendt should emphasize the principle of equality in the public sphere and apply the typical feminine power.