Danielle Wenner, a philosopher and bioethicist, noted on Twitter that throughout her undergraduate philosophy training there had been no inclusion of feminist or racial philosophy.
My own undergraduate philosophy training was similar. When I later returned to academia to study bioethics after some time out in the workforce, my formal bioethics training was not much better. My training included very little written by women, people of colour or disabled philosophers, never mind explicitly feminist work or critical theory for example. We had the somewhat typical inclusion of Thomson on abortion and Foote on the double-effect, but little else. My feminist learning started informally outside of the academy in books. Books recommended to me and books I found. These books put language to my naïve and unarticulated feelings. As I undertook my PhD, I sought out these type of texts explicitly because they spoke to me in ways that my formal learning did not. I’m proud that my PhD includes both feminist theory and methodology, something that wasn’t supported strongly where I studied. Through my PhD, I became aware of and connected to the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics group and the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics both of which showed me that there were ways of doing bioethics that more deeply connected to my own values and commitments as a scholar and human. I consider myself a developing feminist scholar, in part because of the nature of my self-taught learning in this space, but also because my confidence to engage with feminist theory in practice is something I have to nurture and grow over time, having never seen this modelled in my training. I am lucky to now see it through the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics network.
The reason I explain this is because IJFAB has been a key source of finding writing and books that support this development in my work-life and personal life. I’ve written here previously about my love of books but I can only emphasize again their magic in connecting readers to new thoughts, ideas, lives and worlds. Books are one way that we can learn of and from others, while also learning about ourselves. Of course, we also need to get out and interact; to engage and challenge the thoughts we develop from reading, but reading is a good place to begin exploring new things, especially for those who may, in some way, be isolated (intellectually, if not physically). If you are just beginning to explore this type of bioethics, “Feminist Bioethics: At the centre, on the margins” edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick, and also reviewed in IJFAB is a great place to start.
As the book review editor, I truly believe that IJFAB book reviews, as I previously wrote, are a feminist practice. It is critical solidarity. Through book reviews, we promote feminist writings to others and challenge our work in positive ways. We are always looking for new books to review and new reviewers to review books either already on our radar or books that should be (yes, you can make suggestions, too!). I’ve provided a snapshot below of our current reviews and things currently requiring reviewers so please do get in touch if you’d like to write for us.
The latest book reviews in Vol 13 Issue 2 of IJFAB can be found here:
2) Scott Robinson’s review of “Full Surrogacy Now” by Sophie Lewis
A selection of the books we are currently seeking reviewers for are:
- Rachelle Chadwick’s “Bodies that Birth: Vitalizing Birth Politics”, which uses birth stories to explore power and agency in birth with a particular focus on flesh and embodiment something she believes has largely been ignored.
- Annemarie Goldstein Jutel’s book on diagnosis “Diagnosis: Truth and Tales” also discusses stories; stories of diagnosis, building from her previous work in this field which examined the socio-political aspects of diagnosis and the phenomena of diagnosis in contemporary society.
- From one of our own FAB members, Carolyn McLeod’s “Conscience in Reproductive Healthcare: Prioritizing Patient Interests” is hot off the press and promises a new approach to understanding and considering the ethical way to deal with objection.
- Another book, only recently released is Michele Goodwin’s “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood” which analyses the way pregnant people become the object of state surveillance and are criminalized and violated.
- A book covering the many other aspects of reproductive justice beyond abortion. On a slightly different tack, “Exploiting Hope: how the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us – and Makes Us Vulnerable” by Jeremy Synder promises to elucidate ethical analysis of hope, and exploitation in healthcare; something likely to be of great interest to an IJFAB audience, and reminiscent of Ann Snitow’s work on why women trying to conceive are drawn to expensive and risky fertility treatments.
- Another book, that looks fascinating and likely of interest to our audience “Diagnosing Desire” by Alyson K. Spurgas (about whose work IJFAB Blog has written, before), looks at the relationship between technoscientific medicine and how it constructs or constrains female desire and sexuality.
- Also using biopolitical theory, “Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood” by Alison Rowland sets out to understood how beings are granted the status of humanhood and given its attendant value.
- A new edited collection by Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson, “The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism” offers a great selection of essays exploring this topic with a specific view to the relationship between economic landscapes and political or ideological influences on these social phenomena.
Aside from these, we have noted some excellent texts that we would be willing to seek review copies for if there were interest. One that strikes me as particularly interesting is “Decolonization and Afrofeminism” by Sylvia Tamale and for its implication for technology in health, Ruha Benjamin’s book from last year “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.” Similarly “Data Feminism” by Catherine D’Ignazio and Laura F. Klein appears to offer something new in this space.
There are many more and there are likely books that you the reader are aware of that we should be reviewing – reach out! If the book is relevant to a bioethics audience with commitments to feminist theory, methodology and analysis, then we want to hear about it. If you’ve written a book that fits this bill and need a review, get in touch!
Authors, reviewers, and people with suggestions can contact me at: emma.tumilty@deakin.edu.au
