Society for the Study of Women Philosophers
The Society for the Study of Women Philosophers was founded in December 1987 at the annual conference of the American Philosophical Association. The Society is open to men and women from all disciplines and is constituted around the following purposes:
1 The first purpose of the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers is to create and sustain a “Republic of Letters,” in which women are both citizens and sovereigns. To that end, we shall commemorate women philosophers of the past as well as of the present by engaging their texts, whether critically or appreciatively, in a dialogical interchange. In this way, both we and our sisters from the past can also become interlocutors for our sisters in the future.
2 The second purpose of the Society is to examine the nature of philosophy, specifically in the light of women's contributions to the discipline. Thus, papers are welcome that reflect on the methodology and style of women philosophers themselves, or that compare the texts of women with those of men.
3 Furthermore, since philosophical method may be distinguished from philosophical understanding, it is possible that philosophical understanding could be reached in a variety of ways. The Society, therefore, will also explore the nature of philosophy by comparing works of women philosophers with those of women thinkers of other types, such as poets, mystics, novelists, or biographers. We thus hope to enlarge and enrich the resources of everyone concerned with the central and most basic questions of human life.
The Society meets annually in conjunction with the Eastern session of the American Philosophical Association. Calls for papers can be found in the Society's newsletter and on its Web site at http://ksumail.kennesaw.edu/~ldamico/sswp. Membership in the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers (SSWP) is based on the calendar year. To become a member, send a check for $10.00 made out to SSWP to Cecile Tougas, SSWP Convener, 126 North Avenue, Syracuse, NY 13206. Please include the following information: date, name, institution, address, telephone (office and home), e-mail address, and major areas of interest.
Society for Women in Philosophy
For information on SWIP membership, which includes receiving program announcements, the national SWIP newsletter, and a discount subscription to Hypatia, contact the SWIP chapter in your area:
Eastern SWIP: Executive Secretary: Christa Davis Acampora, Department of Philosophy, Hunter College/CUNY, West 1413, 695 Park Avenue, New York,
NY 10021. (christa_acampora@umit.maine.edu) Treasurer: Jessica Prata Miller, Department of Philosophy, University of Maine, 5776 The Maples, Orono, ME 04469–5776. Phone: (207) 581–3865. (Jessica_Miller@umit.maine.edu)
Midwest SWIP: Executive Secretary: Crista Lebens, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater WI, 53190. Phone: (262) 472–5269. (lebensc@mail.uww.edu) Treasurer: Amber L. Katherine, Santa Monica College, 1900 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90405. Phone: (310) 434–3539. (katherine_amber@smc.edu)
Pacific SWIP: Executive Secretary: Sarah Goering, Philosophy, California State University, Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90840. (sgoering@csulb.edu) Treasurer: Mary Ann Warren, 415 Drake View Drive, Inverness, CA 94937; Philosophy Department, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, CA 94132. Home Phone: (415) 663–1511. Work Phone: (415) 338–3137. Fax: (415) 663–1913. (103103.552@compuserve.com)
SWIP-L, an electronic mail list for feminist philosophers, is the e-mail information and discussion list for members of the Society for Women in Philosophy and others interested in feminist philosophy. To subscribe to this list send the following one-line message: SUBSCRIBE SWIP-L <YOUR NAME> to: listserv@listserv.uh.edu. When you want to post messages on the list send them to: swip-l@listserv.uh.edu. The purpose of the list is to provide a place to share information about SWIP and other feminist philosophy meetings, calls for papers, jobs for feminist philosophers, etc., as well as to engage in more substantive discussions related to feminist philosophy. While the list is open to both SWIP members and non-members, it is meant for feminist philosophers and theorists. It is free of charge. The SWIP-L's “owner” is Linda Lopez McAlister. If you have questions, please email her at mcalister@chumal.cas.usf.edu The Society for Women in Philosophy's Web site is: http://www.uh.edu/-cfreelan/SWIP/. Please send any comments or suggestions concerning the Web site to Cynthia Freeland at Cfreeland@uh.edu.
Call For Papers: Maternal Bodies
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy is seeking papers for a special issue on Maternal Bodies, to be guest edited by Rebecca Kukla. Over the course of the last several decades, feminist philosophers have exposed motherhood and maternality as rich and fertile terrains for ethics, social and political philosophy, and even epistemology and aesthetics. At the same time, a growing number of philosophers—particularly feminist philosophers—have thrust the lived, enculturated, material body into the limelight as an object of philosophical attention. We are coming to see how central questions in ethics, epistemology, and social philosophy gain depth and clarity when asked explicitly as questions about embodied and materially situated agents. This volume will bring these two central themes in feminist philosophy together, in a set of conceptual explorations of maternal bodies as they are positioned in culture, imaginatively represented, marked by significant differences along lines of race, class, shape, and capacity, valued as appropriate or inappropriate, constituted in relation to the bodies of fetuses, children, fathers, lovers, and women who are not mothers, renegotiated in relationship to new technologies, sites of distinctive skills and epistemic practices, and sites of agency, responsibility, integrity, and vulnerability.
Possible topics include, but are by no means restricted to:
• Relationships between fetal bodies and maternal bodies
• Motherhood and queer sexuality
• Disabled mothers
• The sociocultural privileges of biological motherhood
• Adoptive maternal bodies
• The medical management of fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood
• The ethics and politics of breastfeeding
• The ontology of maternal bodies
• Aging mothers and their adult children
• Mothering across racial differences
• “Bad” and “untrustworthy” maternal bodies
• Absent mothers
• The invisibility or distortion of nonmaternal caregiving bodies
• Visual and narrative representations of maternal bodies
• Maternal bodies as objects of science
• Mothering in domestic and in public spaces
• The moral contours of embodied mothering
• Surrogate motherhood
Papers should be less than 10,000 words long, and should be submitted in quintuplet (5 copies) and identified as submissions for the special issue on Maternal Bodies. The paper submission deadline is November 1, 2004. Contributors are to follow the Hypatia style guidelines as found at the Hypatia website: http://www.msu.edu/~hypatia. Please e-mail all correspondence and manuscripts, saved as attachments in Word or WordPerfect, to: Hypatia@msu.edu. Please provide a cover letter identifying your manuscript as a submission for the special issue.
