Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences
Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences

Author: Susanne Lettow

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1438449496

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Investigates the impact of theories of reproduction and heredity on the emerging concepts of race and gender at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this volume highlights the scientific and philosophical inquiry into heredity and reproduction and the consequences of these developing ideas on understandings of race and gender. Neither the life sciences nor philosophy had fixed disciplinary boundaries at this point in history. Kant, Hegel, and Schelling weighed in on these questions alongside scientists such as Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Karl Ernst von Baer. The essays in this volume chart the development of modern gender polarizations and a naturalized, scientific understanding of gender and race that absorbed and legitimized cultural assumptions about difference and hierarchy.

Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences
Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences

Author: Susanne Lettow

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 143844950X

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Focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this volume highlights the scientific and philosophical inquiry into heredity and reproduction and the consequences of these developing ideas on understandings of race and gender. Neither the life sciences nor philosophy had fixed disciplinary boundaries at this point in history. Kant, Hegel, and Schelling weighed in on these questions alongside scientists such as Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Karl Ernst von Baer. The essays in this volume chart the development of modern gender polarizations and a naturalized, scientific understanding of gender and race that absorbed and legitimized cultural assumptions about difference and hierarchy.

Copula
Copula

Author: Robyn Ferrell

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0791481778

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How will the ability to manipulate human reproduction change our social world and the relationship between the sexes? Taking an explicitly interdisciplinary approach to gender and reproductive technology, Robyn Ferrell examines this question in the light of feminist theories of sexual equality and sexual difference, arguing that technology itself can be seen as a kind of reproduction. Invoking a concept of reproduction that understands it as generic, Ferrell asserts that in any reproduction, something is produced of a kind that was there before and yet that is also new. Technology is therefore generically reproductive, since it produces new matter of the same kind. In addition to key figures in French feminism, Ferrell draws from psychoanalysis and contemporary continental thinkers ranging from Heidegger to Haraway.

The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy
The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy

Author: Susanne Lettow

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-04

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 3031131231

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This book gives a comprehensive overview of the ways in which the relation between German Idealism and feminist philosophy has been explored. It demonstrates the significance of German Idealism for feminist philosophy, and simultaneously brings out the relevance of feminist readings and interpretations for a critical understanding of German Idealism. Key Features: • Presents original work on the German Idealists and considers their legacy within feminist thought from different philosophical perspectives. • Incorporates perspectives from queer theory, new materialism and critical philosophy of race, and so explores German Idealism through the subversion and transformation of meanings and conceptual arrangements. • Challenges the epistemic boundaries of philosophy by engaging the thought of women contemporary with the German Idealists such as Bettina von Arnim and Karoline von Günderrode. • Places the work of the German Idealists on gender, sexuality, marriage and family within the wider contexts of colonialism and European nation building. • Considers how several key concepts of German Idealism (such as subject, reason, enlightenment, autonomy and the sublime) have been central targets of feminist theory. • Includes a Black feminist critique of Kantian universalism. Fully reflecting the diversity that characterizes feminist thinking today, The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy is essential reading for scholars and graduate students of German idealism, feminist philosophy and feminist theory. Chapter(s) “The Taxonomy of ‘Race’ and the Anthropology of Sex: Conceptual Determination and Social Presumption in Kant” is/are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The Assisted Reproduction of Race
The Assisted Reproduction of Race

Author: Camisha A. Russell

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-12-06

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0253035929

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A philosopher examines the social implications of assisted reproductive technologies at the intersection of race, medicine, and bioethics. The use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART)—in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and gestational surrogacy—challenges contemporary notions of what it means to be parents or families. Camisha A. Russell argues that these technologies also bring new insight to ideas and questions surrounding race. She does this in part by reframing ART, as medical technologies that also act as technologies of kinship. Thinking about race in terms of technology brings together the common academic insight that race is a social construction with the equally important insight that race is a political tool used in different contexts for a variety of ends. As Russell explores ideas about race through their role in ART, she brings together social and political views to shift debates from what race is to what race does, how it is used, and what effects it has had in the world.

The German Invention of Race
The German Invention of Race

Author: Sara Eigen

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0791482073

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In The German Invention of Race, historians, philosophers, and scholars in literary, cultural, and religious studies trace the origins of the concept of "race" to Enlightenment Germany and seek to understand the issues at work in creating a definition of race. The work introduces a significant connection to the history of race theory as contributors show that the language of race was deployed in contexts as apparently unrelated as hygiene; aesthetics; comparative linguistics; anthropology; debates over the status of science, theology, and philosophy; and Jewish emancipation. The concept of race has no single point of origin, and has never operated within the constraints of a single definition. As the essays in this book trace the powerful resonances of the term in diverse contexts, both before and long after the invention of the scientific term around 1775, they help explain how this pseudoconcept could, in a few short decades, have become so powerful in so many fields of thought and practice. In addition, the essays show that the fateful rise of racial thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was made possible not only by the establishment of physical anthropology as a field, but also by other disciplines and agendas linked by the enduring associations of the word "race."

Of Human Born
Of Human Born

Author: Caroline Arni

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1942130902

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A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciences At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman’s body has, once again, become a fraught issue—from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk—Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of “life before birth.” Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of “fetal life” by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother’s living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the coming-into-being of a human person. Of Human Born thus draws attention to the fundamental way in which modern approaches to the unborn have been intertwined with the configuration of “the human” in the age of scientific empiricism. Arni revises the narrative that the “modern embryo” is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman’s body. On the contrary, she argues that the concept of fetal life cannot be separated from its dependency on the maternal organism, countering the rhetorical discourses that have fueled the recent rollback of abortion rights in the United States.

Family Bonds
Family Bonds

Author: Ellen K. Feder

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-08-06

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 0198042973

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Feminist and critical race theorists alike have long acknowledged the "intersection" of gender and race difference; it is by now a truism that the ways we become boys and girls, men and women, cannot be disentangled from the ways we become white or Black men and women, Asian or Latino boys and girls. And yet, even as many have sought to attend to this intersection of difference, most critical treatments focus finally either on the production of gender or the production of race. Family Bonds proposes a new way to think about the categories of gender and race together. It first explicates and then puts to work Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods to advance the main argument of the book: Gender is best understood primarily as a function of "disciplinary" power operating within the family, while race is primarily a function of a "regulatory" power acting upon the family. Each of the book's central chapters is an individual story, or history - the founding of Levittown, the definitive suburb after the Second World War (1950s and 60s); the development of the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (1970s and 1980s); and the federal coordination of scientific research on violence (1980s and 1990s). Together they make up a larger story about the construction of race and gender in the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century and demonstrate the centrality of the family in these constructions. Rather than a formal study of Foucault's own work, Family Bonds is an effort to produce genealogies of the sort that Foucault himself hoped his work would prompt.

The Secrets of Generation
The Secrets of Generation

Author: Raymond Stephanson

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 579

ISBN-13: 1442646969

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The secrets of Generation' is an interdisciplinary examination of the many aspects of reproduction in the eighteenth century. Exploring the theme of generation from the perspective of histories of medicine, literature, biology, technology, and culture, this collection offers a range of cutting-edge approaches. Its twenty-four contributors, scholars from across Europe and North America, bring an international perspective to discuss reproduction in British, French, American, German, and Italian contexts. The book is a collection on eighteenth-century generation and its many milieus

Politics of the Womb
Politics of the Womb

Author: Lynn Thomas

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-08-20

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0520936647

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In more than a metaphorical sense, the womb has proven to be an important site of political struggle in and about Africa. By examining the political significance—and complex ramifications—of reproductive controversies in twentieth-century Kenya, this book explores why and how control of female initiation, abortion, childbirth, and premarital pregnancy have been crucial to the exercise of colonial and postcolonial power. This innovative book enriches the study of gender, reproduction, sexuality, and African history by revealing how reproductive controversies challenged long-standing social hierarchies and contributed to the construction of new ones that continue to influence the fraught politics of abortion, birth control, female genital cutting, and HIV/AIDS in Africa.