Just Life: Bioethics and the Future of Sexual Difference

by Mary C. Rawlinson

Overview

Just Life reorients ethics and politics around the generativity of mothers and daughters rather than the right to property and the sexual proprieties of the oedipal drama. Invoking two concrete universals—everyone is born of a woman and everyone needs to eat—Rawlinson rethinks labor and food as relationships that make ethical claims and sustain agency. Just Life counters the capitalization of bodies under biopower with the solidarity of sovereign bodies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231171755
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mary C. Rawlinson is professor and chair of philosophy at Stony Brook University.

Table of Contents

Preface: On the Necessity of Universals in Philosophy and Bioethics
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Our Time—Man, Money, Media
I. Critique of Rights
1. State of Nature! Property, Propriety, and the Rights of Man
2. Capitalized Bodies: Bioethics, Biopower, and the Practice of Freedom
II. Refiguring Ethics
3. Antigone and Ismene: Hard Heads, Hard Hearts, and the Claim of the Right
4. Demeter and Persephone, "Unies Sous le Même Manteau"
III. Livable Futures
5. Eating at the Heart of Ethics
6. A Working Life
IV. Sovereign Bodies: Politics of Wonder or the Right to Be Joyful
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This reorientation of ethics from rights to generativity provides a valuable resource in working toward eliminating those institutions, laws, and practices that threaten the generativity of women and nature.

Hypatia

Rawlinson has made here a very significant contribution that will hopefully lead to a reappraisal of where feminist—and by derivation all—bioethics should be going.

Margrit Shildrick

In this original approach to bioethics, philosophy, and feminism, Rawlinson ranges over the history of philosophy and provides fresh interpretations of Antigone and Ismene, Demeter and Persephone. She imaginatively combines theoretical discussions with concrete phenomenological discussions of eating as an ethical issue and the working lives of women. Throughout her discussions are thought-provoking, imaginative, and illuminating.

Richard J. Bernstein

This is a powerful and erudite reading of some of the key figures in the history of political thought, whose relevance and limits remain strong even today. Mary C. Rawlinson provides a feminist critique of and alternative to prevailing models of politics and ethics by insisting on the centrality and irreducibility of differences of all kinds, but most especially sexual difference in understanding life and its social and natural connections and possibilities.

Elizabeth Grosz

Just Life expands the surprisingly narrow scope of the dominant frameworks in bioethics, and, more importantly, identifies new questions for the field. Rawlinson's insistence on seeing the commitments entailed by an ethics of life—especially attention to women, and to the earth—leads her to delve much deeper into the history of Western philosophy than most theorists in bioethics dare.

Ellen K. Feder