Re: Feminist Ethics: I’m just curious – what do you think a feminist ethics would need to address? I mean, what is lacking in other ethical theories you’re interested in that would need to be addressed by a specifically ‘feminist’ ethics? I don’t mean to sound contentious here: I’m honestly just curious about your opinion on this as I don’t have an answer for it myself, and it seems like an essential question if you’re wondering why a specifically ‘feminist’ ethics doesn’t (seem to) exist.

Just to give one (of several possible) examples, I am thinking specifically of how academia has appropriated something that came to be in activist groups, namely that “the personal is political” and yet, much of academic theory refuses to properly credit the activists that embody these practices. Think of how blogs are scouted for the latest “trends” which later on are theorized about as “novel” by feminist academics who, at the same time, refuse to acknowledge these same bloggers as authorities and peers. This IS an ethical matter. And sure, there are pronouncements here and there about what constitutes an ethical practice in academia, but hardly ever do these pronouncements treat the people involved as “partners of equal standing”. It’s always a very one way street. Feminist academia has, for a good part, failed to bridge the gap between the activist and the centers of knowledge production, while constantly scouting this activism to produce theory. I find it especially telling that this happens within a movement/ and or philosophy that predicates equality and liberation. Yet, many of the producers of this knowledge are, for a good part the antithesis of this supposedly liberating practice.

And again, I am not talking about individuals addressing these issues (of which, quite tellingly, a majority are either WoC or people in/ from what is commonly referred to as The Global South) but in a more generalized form of political and philosophical practice, rooted in a common and shared ethics, where these issues would not need to be spelled out but would be taken as, and sorry if this sounds old fashioned, a self evident truth.

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