Liberal Views Research Articles

Marie Spartali-Stillman’s feminism against Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood gender stereotypes art

In the middle of the 19th century Great Britain, Queen Victoria had been imposing her new ethical code system on social and cultural conditions, sharpening evidently the already abyssal differences of the gendered stereotypes. The Pre-Raphaelite painters reacted to the sterile way of painting dictated by the art academies, both in terms of thematology and technique, by suggesting a new, revolutionary way of painting, but were unable to escape their monolithic gender stereotypes culture. Using female models for their heroines who were often identified with the degraded position of the Victorian woman, they could not overcome their socially systemic views, despite their innovative art ideas and achievements. However, art, in several forms, executed mainly by women, played a particularly important role in projecting several types of feminism, in a desperate attempt to help the Victorian woman claim her rights both in domestic and public sphere. This article aims at exploring and commenting on the role of Marie Spartali-Stillman, one of the most charismatic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood models and later famous painter herself, in the painting scene of the time. Through the research of her personal and professional relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites, and mainly through an in depth analysis of selected paintings, the authors try to shed light on the way in which M. Spartali-Stillman managed to introduce her subversive feminist views through her work, following in a way the feministic path of other female artists of her time. The ways and the conditions, under which the painter managed to project women as dominant, self-sufficient and empowered, opposing their predetermined social roles, have also been revised.

Ecofeminist Energy Illiteracy: Greta in Alberta Oil Country

This paper rebuts Keller (2021) and the feminist view that Greta Thunberg’s 2019 visit to ‘tar sands’ Alberta sparked ugly push-back by pro-oil activists due to ‘patriarchal petroculture’ rather than this resistance being a response to an on-going geopolitical ‘green’ transnational trade war against Alberta. This paper will examine how Greta is the exploited ‘walking native advertisement’ for a transnational social media/social engineering project established by several carbon offset promoters. Greta is not a true example of ‘spectacular’ mediated transnational girlhood (Projansky 2014), but rather she is a figure contrived. Greta Thunberg’s earnest and naive climate concerns have been exploited by the rich and powerful; a child with a black and white world view due to her Asperger’s’ ‘super power’. This paper deconstructs the fallacious logic and confirmation bias of an ecofeminist perspective that is clouded with energy illiteracy.

The Partisan Consequences of Secularisation

Abstract While we would expect secularisation to have important consequences for voting behaviour, data limitations in previous studies leave the specific implications of secularisation for Canadian electoral politics unclear. Using a data set covering the period between 1975 and 2005, this study examines which aspects of secularisation have affected the partisan balance of the electorate by estimating the effects of religious belonging, behaving, and believing on party preferences. The results show that while the effects of religion (and other social identities) have not changed over time, changes in the composition of the electorate resulting from the growing share of non-religious Canadians holding liberal views on questions of personal morality has benefited the NDP and undercut support for the Conservatives.

Barriers to Advancing Evidence-Based Practice in Domestic Violence Perpetrator Treatment in the United States: Ideology, Public Funding, or Both?

Though usually framed in the context of ideological and political processes, the failure of domestic violence perpetrator programs to embrace research-supported practice may also be influenced by a widespread unwillingness to use public funds for that purpose. This policy analysis examines the links among federal policy, state implementation, organizational structure, and funding sources of perpetrator service-providing organizations. Those links reveal reciprocal relationships among conservative and ostensibly feminist views of domestic violence within an implied policy framework justifying public underfunding of perpetrator treatment programs. Placed within the current hyper-politicized context of US Federal governance and policy, this analysis identifies advancements in perpetrator treatment in several state governments as harbingers of potential movement toward research-supported practice.

Analytical Philosophy of Education: A Critique from Marxist Lens

While the school of analytical philosophy of education is often credited for providing Philosophy of Education with a sense of identity, purpose and academic respect and for marking out a legitimate field in which philosophy of education could lay claim to funds and positions in competition with sociologists and psychologists, it has not escaped falling prey to criticism from different schools of thoughts. Whereas analytical traditions propound the idea of liberal education as value free, neutral and irrespective of the context in which the concepts are embedded, Marxist school of thought criticizes the tradition for serving the propaganda of liberal education. Analytical philosophy of education, according to Marxists, is the educational representative of a liberal rationalist world view which has political, economic, historical and cultural manifestations. The paper presents a Marxist critique of the School of Analytical Philosophy of Education as discussed by Michael R. Mathews in his book The Marxist theory of Schooling: A Study of Epistemology and Education (1980).

Creation and anthropology: N.F.S. Grundtvig as humanist and feminist

AbstractThis article focuses on Scandinavian creation theology by way of the anthropology of the Happy Dane, the theologian, author, hymn writer, poet, and pastor Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872). After having given two examples of Grundtvig's and Grundtvigians’ encounter with USA in the past, it is demonstrated how the Lutheran Grundtvig, based on his positive and organic creation theology, fought ideas of creational hierarchies, whether slavery or subjection of women. Grundtvig logically and naturally connected his creation theology to a humanist anthropology of which not the devil but God was Creator and sole subject. As in Galatians 3:28, this encompassed a feminist view as he acknowledged two equal sexes and genders: all humans are equal regardless of color of the skin, sex, or belief and hence should have human rights equally.

Categorical difference as affective assemblage: experiences of Vietnamese women in the neoliberal university

ABSTRACT In this article, we draw on interview data with three Vietnamese women to explore how categorical difference works through the ways that these women constitute themselves and are constituted as academics and doctoral students in Australian universities. Our analysis focuses on the arrangement of things that make neoliberalism an inexhaustive force, working via affective connections with other social, historical and material conditions in producing differences. Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of assemblage and contemporary feminist views of affect, we map moments when things come together via their affective capacities to produce identity categories, structures, binaries and power relations in Australian neoliberal universities. Our theorisation of categorical difference as affective assemblage is helpful in understanding the production of differences as affective arrangements of matter and meaning that are linked not only to contemporary neoliberal practices and regimes but also to historical pasts that are often Eurocentric, racialised and conventionally gendered. Given that the categorical difference is affective and contingent, we suggest that it can be surmounted when any of us, at any moment, can affect others via our capacities to think outside ordered systems no matter how powerful they might be in the thoughts of those engaged.

Do adult men and women in same-sex relationships have weaker ties to their parents?

Using a national sample of people in same-sex relationships (N = 843) and different-sex relationships (N = 510) in the Netherlands, we examine the frequently discussed but infrequently tested hypothesis of weaker intergenerational ties between parents and their adult daughters and sons in same-sex relationships. We also test hypotheses linking the strength of these ties to gender differences and the liberal or traditional views held by the parents when the child was growing up (reported retrospectively). Overall, we find few differences in the strength of the current parent-child relationship but clear differences in the process of leaving home. Our findings show that people who are in same-sex relationships in adulthood left home earlier and moved further away from their parents than those in different-sex relationships. In addition, they left more often due to conflicts at home and due to an unpleasant atmosphere in the community of origin, and less often to move in directly with a partner. In adulthood, people in same-sex relationships show many commonalities with people in different-sex relationships and only a few differences. Men in same-sex relationships have more ambivalent relationships with their mothers and weaker relationships with their fathers than men partnered with women. When the parental home was more traditional in terms of gendered role division in parenting, the current relationship of women in same-sex relationships with their father is on average weaker in adulthood. Women in same-sex relationships also have less frequent contact with both parents compared to women in different-sex relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A Feminist View of James Joyce's The Boarding House

The theories of feminism have global implications for the due rights of the female gender. Women are exterminated from political, economic, and social circles of life based on gender and they lack opportunities as well. This study aims to analyze James Joyce's The Boarding House against the backdrop of feminism. Joyce points out the sufferings and oppression of women in the male dominant society. Mrs Mooney is the protagonist of the story. Initially, she suffers because of her gender but later on, she achieves independence and emancipation from male dominancy. Thus the character of Mrs Mooney truly depicts the essence of feminism in the story. Similarly, the character Polly faces gender-based discrimination. This study analyzes the sufferings, subjugation, and oppression of women and recommends ways to abolish gender inequality. This study also calls for the emancipation of women and suggests ways to liberate them from patriarchy.

State Ibuism and Women’s Empowerment in Indonesia: Governmentality and Political Subjectification of Chinese Benteng Women

This paper examines how the patriarchal understanding of “women’s empowerment” in Indonesia instrumentalizes the notion of Ibu, a social construction of womanhood based on a societally determined idea of domestication and productivity. Through the establishment of a saving and lending cooperative, a group of Chinese Benteng women was subjected to a neoliberal development project that operated on the basis of a market-driven society and promoted a “gender mainstreaming” discourse to enhance this participatory project. They were introduced by a women’s NGO as their broker. The notion of “women’s empowerment” inspired a governmental operation aimed at these women, promoting the particular qualities of the dutiful housewife, devoted mother, and socially active member of Indonesian society. These characters were distinguished by their high level of devotion to community volunteering and to the state’s apolitical project, thus depoliticizing and deradicalizing the feminist view of women’s empowerment; this was simultaneously balanced with the promotion of the traditional gender roles of wife and mother. Such a discourse also molds women’s desires to voluntarily subscribe to such a social construction of womanhood and, at the same time, circumvents objections to any form of women’s subordination reproduced by the same rhetoric of “women’s empowerment”. By employing an ethnographic methodology, this article argues that the patriarchal view of “women’s empowerment” emerged as a deceitful doctrine to prompt Chinese Benteng women into internalizing certain qualities according to the gendered conception of womanhood in Indonesia. This article concludes that the patronizing and dominating aspects of State Ibuism have normalized Indonesian society’s expectations and desires with regard to women’s empowerment.

Идеологические основы уголовного законодательства советского периода о преступлении и наказании

In article the influence of the Marxist legal doctrine on approach in the criminal legislation of the Soviet period to such key categories in criminal law as crime and punishment is analyzed. The conclusion that such approach synthesized the liberal and conservative views on these categories is drawn. It is noted that originally approach of the Soviet legislation to crime and punishment was mainly liberal since during the formation the Soviet state proceeded from the concept of cardinal withdrawal pains of old law and order. Special attention is paid on regulations on crime and punishment in the draft of the Soviet criminal code of 1918, the most fully reflected Marxist legal ideology. Pronounced class approach to the specified criminal categories at the Leading beginnings on criminal law of RSFSR of December 12, 1919, in Criminal codes of RSFSR 1922 and 1926 is stated. The attention that with acceptance of Principles of the criminal legislation of USSR and federal republics on December 25, 1958 and the Criminal code of RSFSR class and liberal approach to crime and punishment was significantly softened on October 27, 1960 is paid, conservative approach to them on the contrary is significantly strengthened. Mitigation of class approach was that the types of punishment specified in the law had no class character, their appointment as court wasn't put into dependence on class association of the defendant. Strengthening of conservative approach consisted in return of the legislator to the paid concept of criminal penalty, to fixing in the criminal law of material definition of crime through public danger and to establishment in the criminal law of priorities of criminal protection in the form of the interests of the state and society.

Neoliberalizm Düşüncesinin Evriminde Ekonomik Kalkınmanın Yeri/The Place Of Economıc Development In The Evolutıon Of Neolıberalısm Thought

By removing the obstacles to the international trade of goods and services on the one hand and capital movements on the other, the neoliberal economic policies, which gradually accelerated in the 70s, took the first steps of the deregulation process that will be experienced in almost all areas of the economy in the following years. England, which completed its development process with the protectionism policies applied in the pre-Industrial Revolution period, started to support the liberal views, which are the basis of the free market economy understanding, as a result of the market requirement of the increasing production volume after the Industrial Revolution. As a result of low profit rates and low interest rates in growing economies, capital inflows to underdeveloped or developing countries significantly increased, and the yields obtained by developed economies also increased. In this study, the relationship between neoliberalism and economic development is discussed, criticism of neoliberal thought and the importance of the concept of development for economies are emphasized.

MatthewYglesiasOne Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Portfolio, 2020. 288 p. $28.00

MatthewYglesiasOne Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Portfolio, 2020. 288 p. $28.00

American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition

American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition

There Will Be Blood: Oil Curse, Fossil Dependency and Petro-Addiction

There is an active academic and policy debate over whether and how oil producers – as exemplars of a larger set of Global South development problems associated with 'resource dependency' – can be associated with a number of 'pathologies' or deficits (corruption, poor economic growth, conflict) that are seen as expressions of a much-wider global addiction to petroleum and natural gas. Equally, there is a vibrant set of regulatory and policy interventions designed to render the oil and gas sector more transparent and accountable through modalities like the extractive industries transparency initiative (EITI). In both cases, the language of dependency and addiction is endemic. The socalled 'resource curse' and oil's commodity status as 'the devil's excrement' are exemplary expressions of oil's apparently seductive yet catastrophic properties. Oil dependency and oil addiction have become central to the discourse – a planetary discourse in effect, of the Anthropocene and forms of life within it. This article explores how discourses of dependency and addiction have been put to work, and with what effect, in the debate around the oil and gas global assemblage. It shows how in the case of dependency (and here it is largely the dependency associated with oil-producing or petro-states such as Saudi Arabia or Nigeria) there are often unacknowledged and deep registrations of the word's meanings which are embedded in liberal governance. Much of this dependency talk, I will argue, locates the problem in a series of failings (which oil both overdetermines and facilitates) associated with liberal views of the self, of political economy and the state. In the case of oil dependency as an addiction, I attempt to draw out how an understanding of addiction as a social (and systemic) issue, rather than a property of individual consumers or the pathological-addictive character of particular commodities, sheds light on how oil is built into hydrocarbon capitalism, and what it will take to, as it were, break the habit of large-scale oil consumption.

Linguistic Understanding and Testimonial Warrant

How much linguistic understanding is required for testimonial knowledge acquisition? One answer is that, so long as we grasp the content expressed by the speaker, it does not matter if our understanding of it is poor. Call this the ‘Liberal View’ of testimony. This approach looks especially promising when combined with the thesis that we share a public language that makes it easy to grasp the right content. In this paper, I argue that this picture is epistemically problematic. Poor linguistic understanding undermines our ability to recognise evidence and counterevidence for the testimonial content. Because of this, in many cases in which a hearer’s understanding is poor, her resultant testimonial belief will lack sufficient warrant to qualify as knowledge. Given that we often do not possess a sufficiently good understanding of the testimony we consume, I argue that we acquire far less knowledge through testimony than the Liberal View suggests.

Five years later: How the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the #MeToo movement impacted feminist social studies teachers

ABSTRACT In a previous study conducted before the emergence of the #MeToo Movement and the results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, the authors examined feminist teachers and found differences based on their liberal feminist or critical feminist perspectives. In this study, the authors examine the same participants five years later to determine if and how their beliefs, teaching practices, and curricula may have changed. Using a multiple case study design, the authors found that all but one feminist teacher had become more critical in their stance. Five out of six teachers reported feeling a need to respond to the current climate for women and create more opportunities for their students to learn about gender equity. Yet, one of the six teachers, who previously had the strongest critical feminist views, described feeling defeated and frustrated with the outward sexism that has become more prevalent since the 2016 election.

The possibility of democratic socialism in Habermas

In keeping with the radical openness of his theory of democracy, Habermas avoided pre-determining the ideal mode of economic organization for his favoured model of deliberative democracy. Instead of attempting a full-blown derivation, in this article, I propose adapting the Rawlsian method of comparing different political–economic regimes as candidate applications of his theory of justice to Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. Although both theorists are seen as endorsing liberal democratic world views, from the perspective of political economy, the corollary of their conceptions of democracy would arguably veer elsewhere: in Rawls’s case, into the territory of property-owning democracy or democratic socialism, and in Habermas’s, into any political–economic regime which guarantees the real exercise of full political and discursive liberties against the background of legitimate lawmaking. The ultimate aim of this article is to discuss whether a concrete conception of democratic socialism, if any, is compatible with Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy.

Hanne Marlene Dahl: Struggles in (elderly) care. A feminist view

Hanne Marlene Dahl: Struggles in (elderly) care. A feminist view

Does school learning shape gender ideology? Academic performance and adolescents’ attitudes toward gender practices

Despite research linking education to values, our understanding of the effects of academic learning on gender attitudes is still limited. Using sibling data collected over time, we investigate how learning in school, measured by achievement test scores, affects adolescents' views on gender issues both with and without direct implications for women's economic mobility. With fixed-effects models accounting for unobserved heterogeneity between high and low achievers, we show that the relationship between academic achievement and gender ideology is not spurious, but learning does not enlighten adolescents on all gender-related beliefs, either. Rather, school learning socializes both boys and girls into more liberal views on issues clearly related to women's economic opportunities. For views concerning dating practices or boy-girl interactions, which are irrelevant to the meritocracy-based mainstream values, academic performance has less consistent effects, with higher achievement scores sometimes associated with more conservative views among boys. Our results generally support the socialization and reproduction model of the role of school learning, although self-interest also explains high and low achievers' different attitudes on dating and other personal-realm gender practices.