Romantic Love, Gender Imbalance and Feminist Readings in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea

Even though Iris Murdoch’s novels depict a profoundly patriarchal society, most scholars have generally failed to identify any feminist aspirations in her work. This article aims to reassess her legacy as a writer by analysing from a feminist perspective one of her most acclaimed novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978). The tension between the androcentric approach of a self-deluded male narrator and a female author whose worldview is strongly influenced by her gender results in a feminist critique which is not based on the recovery of a female voice, but on the exploration of patriarchy within the novel and the production of a feminist epistemology derived from a dialogue between Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy.

The Multiply Produced Film: Collaboration, Ethnography, and Feminist Epistemology

This article introduces the “multiply produced film” as a methodology and analytic that highlights the asymmetrical dynamics inherent to collaboration. I draw on (auto)ethnographic material from the making of Get By (2014), a film on worker-community solidarity, to explore collaboration across race, class, and gender in subject matter and method. I situate the multiply produced film within a genealogy that grafts ontological insights from the anthropology of exchange onto the epistemological contributions of feminist, decolonial, and visual anthropologists committed to collaboration. I argue that as a method, collaborative filmmaking has the potential to challenge narrow Western conceptions of autonomy and authorship through shared authority and fluid roles that engender a cascading multivocality that shapes the resulting filmic form. As an analytic, the multiply produced film reveals how collaboration entails a fundamental tension between the gift-like exchanges of solidarity and the outwardly commoditized form (e.g., films, books) produced by such exchanges, raising questions about asymmetries of power, prestige, and accountability.

Feminist Epistemology and Business Ethics

Neoclassical economics has become the predominant school of economic thought, influencing scholarship on management, organizations, and business ethics. However, many feminist economists challenge the individualist and positivist foundations of neoclassical economic epistemology, arguing instead that purportedly gender-neutral and value-free methods routinely and systematically leave out and undervalue women. Extending this proposition, this article introduces the epistemic foundations of feminist economics and illustrates how they can produce novel insights relevant for business ethics. In particular, by examining economic phenomena from the point of view of the people they affect, feminist economic epistemology is able to elucidate the ways in which power asymmetries and gender norms that constitute the social world can be reflected in business practices. I apply this methodological insight to three case studies of global supply chains to challenge the neoclassical assertion that including women in labor markets necessarily catalyzes gender equality.

Nowhere Men and Divine I’s: Feminist Epistemology, Perfect Being Theism, and the God’s-Eye View

This paper employs tools and critiques from analytic feminist scholarship in order to show how particular values commonly on display in analytic theology have served both to marginalize certain voices from the realm of analytic theological debate and to reinforce a particular conception of the divine—one which, despite its historical roots, is not inevitable. I claim that a particular conception of what constitutes a “rational, objective, analytic thinker” often displays certain affinities with those infinite or maximal properties that analytic theologians have taken to be most relevant or essential to their theological conceptions of the divine, and I explore what thinking differently about the former might mean for how we think about the latter and vice versa.

The Future of Middle Level Education–Chicana Maestras and Vignettes

This interdisciplinary case study research centers anticolonial theories and Chicana feminist epistemology (Bernal, 1998) to interrogate the experiences of Chicana maestras during their clinical teaching semester. The experiences of Chicana maestras is often silenced in educational research, especially in the research of prospective middle grades educators. This work seeks to challenge the often-colonizing practices of teaching and research and seeks to serve as a model of the possibilities for research in middle level teacher education. The findings of this research center on the collective power of Chicanas experiencing teaching and learning as a collective through the creation of vignettes. These vignettes highlight the themes of maestras and comunidad, exploring and solidifying identity, thriving colonialism, clinical chingonas, and sharing of knowledge. Each of these themes, and the collective work that went into this research, demonstrate the importance of Chicanas in middle level education.

Integrating Feminist Theory, Pedagogy, and Praxis into Teacher Education

This article discusses suggestions for integrating feminist epistemology, theory, pedagogy, and praxis even more intentionally into existing U.S. teacher education curricula. The premise is that in light of recent 21st century women’s empowerment movements, such ideas should be examined and integrated fully in justice-oriented teacher education programs. Supporting them with a review of the relevant literature, the author offers additions to existing frames within teacher education in U.S. programs. The author suggests emphasis on establishing authentic teacher voice through intentional pedagogy that incorporates feminism, through establishment of community, and through praxis and reflection. With these aspects firmly established in teacher education as essential to justice-oriented teacher education, the author advocates for counter-hegemonic conversations and storylines that encourage feminist voice and feminist praxis in teacher education.

Feminist Epistemology

This chapter offers an account of the central issues of feminist epistemology, its historical trajectory, its recent trends, and its relationship to mainstream and social epistemology. Having started out providing critiques of existing epistemological frameworks that seemed ill-equipped to account for the effects of power relations on knowing, feminist epistemologists then began to develop new tools better suited to their goals of understanding how we can know under conditions of oppression and develop the kinds of knowledge required to overcome oppression. The chapter characterizes feminist epistemology as having evolved well beyond concerns of gender alone, such that it is now more accurately conceptualized as broadly investigating how various axes of oppression intersect with each other and affect people’s possibilities for knowing. The chapter identifies three key features of feminist epistemology—situated knowing, interactive knowing, and practical/contextual approaches to epistemology—and argues that these features combine to push feminist epistemology in distinct directions even as the field draws on some recent developments from within nonfeminist epistemology.

Animal Studies

Animal studies is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field. It has roots in both animal ethics and feminist philosophy. While mainstream animal ethics has not yet incorporated the insights from feminist philosophy, work in animal studies has increasingly drawn on and built upon feminist thinking. Feminist animal studies can, in turn, contribute to discussions in feminist ethics and feminist epistemology. In this chapter, three key connected issues that are central to feminist philosophy and important within animal studies are discussed: the centrality of relationships, navigating difference, and speaking for others.