Sex & Gender

Philosophy is suffering gender-wise (and here I bracket for the moment class, race, and sexuality) — see Sally Haslanger’s “Women in Philosophy? Do the Math” in The Stone. But the gender trouble is not simply a matter of representation in the field. The problem also entails a regretfully enduring elision in the transmission of Western thought, a continued forgetfulness of invaluable labor …

Who is Joan Didion anyway? In The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, Tracy Daugherty decided to find the writer in her most public work. “Does the life reveal the art, the art the life?” he asks in the prologue (xxiii). If you find fault with The Last Love Song it will be in this decision — not in Daugherty’s entertaining style, which often reads like the New Journalism that Didion helped to establish; nor in his …

One of my fondest memories from the New School for Social Research Liberal Studies MA program comes from a course titled “Representations of Race and Gender in American Culture.” It was the day, about halfway through the semester, when co-teachers Elizabeth Kendall (author of feminist studies of early modern dance and 1930s screwball …

Do you have a disability? Do you want to work? This seemingly innocent pairing of questions should immediately raise a red flag, for it is technically oxymoronic: in the United States, the disabled, by definition, are those who cannot work, at least in any significant sense. Granted, disability falls on a continuum, and answering to this continuum is a parallel benefits scheme for some workers — specifically, those whose disabilities have resulted from …

I spent most of my summer on the Italian coast, in the little town where I was born, as I do almost every year. The difference, this time, was that I had not been back to my home country for a whole year. This gave me some sort of a distance from the customs and habits I have grown up with and perhaps also enabled me to see things I had never noticed before. In particular, as an insider-outsider, I was struck by the number of African immigrants …

It was in late July of 2014, during the final two days of the 23rd annual Democracy & Diversity Institute, that a sizable group of the Institute’s alumni — representatives of a much larger NSSR/TCDS community now living and working in Europe — joined us in Wroclaw. They were an impressive and accomplished assemblage: people who teach at excellent universities …

Long a fixture of progressive culture in New York City, The New School opened its doors on September 20, 2015 to host a memorial celebration of the life, achievements, and activist causes of the remarkable Naomi Weisstein. Weisstein, who died last March at age 75, was a pathbreaking neuroscientist, woman in science, radical feminist, humorist, and co-founder of an all-women’s rock band (the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band), before …