Atoms Arranged Meaningwise

So, here's an awesome thing: this blog is the first hit when you do a Google search for Rachel the philosopher.

Does this mean I get to be governor of California now?

I'm looking for a good introduction to/anthology of American pragmatism -- both classic (Dewey, Peirce, James) and more contemporary folks (Rorty, Putnam, etc). Any suggestions?

Particle physicist Sherry Towers has a paper out detailing an example of institutional gender discrimination at FermiLab. Abstract:

This case study of a typical U.S. particle physics experiment explores the issues of gender bias and how it affects the academic career advancement prospects of women in the field of physics beyond the postdoctoral level; we use public databases to study the career paths of the full cohort of 57 former postdoctoral researchers on the Run II Dzero experiment to examine if males and females were treated in a gender-blind fashion on the experiment.
The study finds that the female researchers were on average significantly more productive compared to their male peers, yet were allocated only 1/3 the amount of conference presentations based on their productivity. The study also finds that the dramatic gender bias in allocation of conference presentations appeared to have significant negative impact on the academic career advancement of the females.
The author has a PhD in particle physics and worked for six years as a postdoctoral research scientist, five of which were spent collaborating at Fermilab. She is currently completing a graduate degree in statistics.

Just in case you were feeling too optimistic today about the possibility for self-reflection among male academics, take a peek at some of the frustrating posts from Dr. Towers' blog about the response she has received, as well as the depressing (if unsurprising) first web comment on the paper's write-up in Nature:

"...[W]omen in physics are generally harder working than male colleagues and are great co-workers in terms of encouragement, diligence, and backup support. They do not, however, contribute a great deal of original ideas and rigorous logical analysis to the research."

(hat-tip to Feminist Law Professors.)


Edit: Update. Please read this too. I think it's too easy for us to forget how quickly backlash against women in intellectual communities can turn into intimidation and threats of violence.

A joke from my friend Gina:

An analytic philosopher and a continental philosopher walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “wadda ya havin?” The continental philosopher replies, “I will require an authentic, discursively enjoined, post-structuralist, disimmediated thing-in-itself.”

The bartender shakes his head and says, “I don’t get what you want.” The continental philosopher turns his nose up in the air and storms out of the bar. The bartender looks apologetically to the analytic philosopher and says, “I really couldn’t understand him.”

“Oh, I know!” replies the analytic philosopher. “As for me, I’ll have the same, without the adjectives.”

Fascinating article in the April issue of The Advocate about a pregnant transman and his partner. What I think is so interesting about this situation is that it contradicts some prima facie beliefs that many people seem to possess about male/female sex distinctions having their basis in differences of reproductive capacity.

There are of course major problems with all attempts to locate sex/gender differences biologically according to genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, etc. For any criterion proposed there exists a wealth of human variation such that bodies don't align into "male" and "female" categories easily or infallibly (people much smarter than me have made this argument. See Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body, for example). Further, there's evidence for thinking that our conceptual schemes for adjudicating "problem cases" (transgender and intersexed bodies) are skewed in such a way that we may be apt to distinguish bodies "one-sidedly" by tracking male-coded features at the expense of recognizing female-coded features (see Kessler and McKenna's article "Toward a Theory of Gender" in The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker).

But reproductive capacities perhaps seem to be a little more stable for tracking sex than did chromosomal or hormonal profiles or genitalia. While it's of course not true that all females are capable of giving birth or that the ability to give birth is a necessary condition of female-ness, it certainly did seem to be a pretty good candidate for a prima facie sufficient condition (that is, the proposition, "if S can become pregnant/give birth/etc, then S is female," seems to be true). Alternately, we could say that the reproductive capacity to give birth was a good candidate for a prima facie sufficient condition for establishing non-male-ness as well (that is, the proposition "if S can become pregnant/give birth/etc, then S is not male," seems to be true).

I like the situation discussed in the Advocate article because it can be interpreted as evidence that reproductive capacity as a sufficient condition for sex distinction is not uncontroversially true. To use a much-maligned word from the feminist theory canon, it problematizes our concepts of "male" and "female," which in turn problematize our concepts of "man" and "woman." Which, I think, is a good thing.

Edit: I’ve been worrying a lot lately about the (largely insensitive) press that this has been receiving and the potential for backlash here.

Stories about Beatie have been accompanied by everything from photos and personal information about him prior to transition to stills of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the film Junior. There’s a lot of concern within the FtM community about the potential for increased violence against transmen as a result of the increased visibility of the identity that accompanies a story like this, as well as the potential for institutional repercussions such as the requirement that FtMs receive “bottom” surgery in order to qualify for legal changes in sex-status.

There’s this tendency, I think, for philosophers to read people in interesting real-life situations as if they were characters in a thought experiment. This danger is particularly vivid for cases involving transgender individuals. I worry that my initial response to this case was quite problematic in these respects.

Michelle Goldberg has a good piece up over at her Guardian blog about the (bizarre, racist) rhetoric used against Barack Obama and the (equally bizarre) attacks of anti-feminism leveled against young female Obama supporters by second-wave feminist icons like Gloria Steinem and Geraldine Ferraro:

The irony is that, for the overwhelming majority of women, voting against Clinton was never about repudiating second-wave feminism. But the more leaders of the movement insist on conflating their noble struggle for social justice with the fate of an uninspiring and nepotistic candidate, the less relevant it will be. Many progressives, male and female alike, see Clinton as cynical and narcissistic, pandering to interest-group sectarianism even as she compromises on important principals. It would be a hideous shame if they came to see feminism the same way.

While I don't like everything that Goldberg says, I think there's a fair amount in her analysis that's spot-on.

Rebecca Walker also has a great piece on her Huffington Post blog where she argues that the aforementioned [bizarre, racist] rhetoric of Steinem, Ferraro, et. al. is evidence that capital-f "Feminism" (which I'm taking to refer to either mainstream organizational feminism or second-wave feminism, or something similar) never really learned the lessons it should have from critiques by women of color, lesbians and working women:

What we see in this election is the zenith of the decades-old struggle between women of different sensibilities seeking empowerment, enfranchisement, and their rightful share of the resources available. The issue at hand has to do with Feminism's (not feminism's) inability to respond adequately to the claims brought against it.

Finally, Feministing's Jessica Valenti makes some important points in her recent Nation article, including a point about the tricky position that feminists find themselves in when asked who they support:

Herein lies the reason so many of us are loath to discuss intrafeminist problems publicly. We know that Clinton supporters are taking heat from sexists--whether at home, at work or from pundits who relish talking about Clinton's "shrill" voice or whatever thinly veiled misogyny of the day is on cable news. We don't want to provide the backlash more fodder. We also know how hard our feminist foremothers fought to be here and how important the moment is--and we want to be a part of it. I certainly do. But not at the expense of what I believe is best for women, and not just because a movement that assumes it knows what's best for me tells me to.

"Because despite what whoever you got yer learnin' from told ya, there is such a thing as a bad question."