Ìwà l’ẹwà: Towards a Yorùbá Feminist Ethics

This paper explores a narrative path towards foregrounding what it calls a gender-relative morality as a core dimension of female subordination. It takes a feminist approach to ethics, which stresses specifically the political enterprise of eradicating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains. The theoretical implications of Feminist narrative ethics is then applied to the philosophical imports of Yorùbá proverbs about women as a way to tease out how female subordination is grounded in Yorùbá ontology and ethics. Spe[1]cifically, the essay interrogates the ethical and aesthetical trajectory that leads from ìwà l’ẹwà (character is beauty), a Yoruba moral dictum, to ìwà l’ẹwà obìnrin ([good moral] character is a woman’s beauty). Within this transition, there is the possibility that the woman is excluded from the category of those properly referred to as ọmọlúwàbí.

Narrative Ethics

This chapter offers an orientation to Woolf’s narrative ethics, as well as readings informed by those perspectives and attending to questions of intimacy, alterity, and failed sociality. These resistant readings of Woolf’s ethics, taking into account the novelist’s rejection of normativity, her feminism, and her ambivalence around queer sexuality, find that Woolf is concerned with attempting to define ‘the good life’ while also feeling that flourishing is elusive, even impossible, for those on the margins. Mrs Dalloway and The Years are taken as focus texts, demonstrating how we might read Woolf’s narratives—and her feminism—via postmodern ethics and affect theory. Significantly, a focus on narrative ethics illuminates reading Woolf’s queer sexualities. Across her career, Woolf’s innovations in the representation of character, everyday experience, and the failure of community have implications for ethical thinking and reading.

Book Book review of Beth A. Dixon.2018. Food justice and narrative ethics: reading stories for ethical awareness and activism.

 

SOCIAL STORY TELLING AND CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON DIFFERENCE

This exposition investigates novel practices for showing social morals through narrating. Drawing from my encounters showing a high level undergrad Narrative Ethics workshop, I clarify how my understudies reacted to a narrating unit through which they inspected their qualities and narrating morals. I entwine perceptions from my educating with experiences assembled from my understudies' in-class conversations and composed reflections to show the instructive points, results, and difficulties experienced while drawing in this material. I center especially around submitting thoughts for urging understudies to (a) embrace cutoff points to their comprehending of others and (b) perceive how tuning in for, and communicating, contrast assumes a basic part in their own, social, and moral development.