Herjeet Marway

Scandalous subwomen and sublime superwomen: exploring portrayals of female suicide bombers’ agency

When the terms ‘women’ and ‘violence’ are used, it is usually in the context of women as victims and rarely as perpetrators of violence, and yet women do behave aggressively – for instance, as female suicide bombers. An ethical analysis of this role, however, has tended to be somewhat overlooked, partly because of the gender stereotypes at play, with little (or spurious) focus on the agency and autonomy of the women. This has resulted in an incomplete understanding of the unique ways in which societies treat female political aggressions, and the consequences of this for their agency. This paper seeks to redress these issues by evaluating two different societal portrayals of female suicide bombers; that of the ‘scandalous subwoman’ and the ‘sublime superwoman’. It argues that violent womens agency is often distorted to extremes beyond that of their male counterparts, and that it is imperative to avoid misrepresenting them either as agentless victims (‘subwomen’) or wholly agentic (‘superwomen’) since, even in times of political instability, they can rarely be dichotomised in this binary way.

A Global Public Goods Approach to the Health of Migrants

This paper explores a global public goods approach to the health of migrants. It suggests that this approach establishes that there are a number of health goods which must be provided to migrants not because these are theirs by right (although this may independently be the case), but because these goods are primary goods which fit the threefold criteria of global public goods. There are two key advantages to this approach: first, it is non-confrontational and non-oppositional, and second, it provides self-interested arguments to provide at least some health goods to migrants and thus appeals to those little moved by rights-based arguments.

Should We Genetically Select for the Beauty Norm of Fair Skin

Fair skin is often regarded as a beauty ideal in many parts of the world. Genetic selection for non-disease traits may allow reproducers to select fair skin for the purposes of beauty, and may be justified under various procreative principles. In this paper I assess the ethics of genetic selection for fair skin as a beauty feature. In particular, I explore the discriminatory aspects and demands of such selection. Using race and colour hierarchies that many would find objectionable, I argue that selection for beauty that is underpinned by such hierarchies is not a trivial selection. Given this, I claim that we should not make such selections.

Philosophical Feminist Bioethics

The end of the last century was a particularly vibrant period for feminist bioethics. Almost two decades on, we reflect on the legacy of the feminist critique of bioethics and investigate the extent to which it has been successful and what requires more attention yet. We do this by examining the past, present, and future: we draw out three feminist concerns that emerged in this period-abstraction, individualism, and power-and consider three feminist responses-relationality, particularity, and justice-and we finish with some thoughts about the future.

Witness Seminar: The Voluntary Sector in 1980s Britain

Nicholas Deakin: I would like to underline the pervasive effect of the reliance of the Thatcher government on the market as the agent of change and not only, though perhaps primarily, in addressing Britain’s economic problems. Market mechanisms for that government were to be the guarantor of change and the means by which those notorious three ‘e’s—efficiency, economy, effectiveness—were to be achieved. Within this context the government’s repeated stress was on individual empowerment ending the so-called dependency culture. It seems to me the Conservative Government’s general dislike of the organised professional voluntary sector (which was seen as an expression of producer interests) links to its general antipathy towards the local statutory sector. And also, finally, the government’s particular distaste for lobbies, which was expressed by Douglas Hurd as Home Secretary, and Chris Patten in his Goodman lecture. ‘Crickets in a field’ one minister said about the poverty lobby. I can identify four different challenges that the sector had to meet over this decade and it is perhaps not too melodramatic to call them crises. They certainly seemed like that to us at the time. First, there was a crisis of resources. There was an increased level of funding from the central government over this period, but it came with the distorting effects of the policy objectives and the stresses associated with meeting the additional demands being made of the sector in the required form. The terms of trade with government were extremely one sided and there were chronic insecurities generated by frequent switches of programmes and policy emphasis. This often seemed to those at the receiving end like an attempt to constrain the organised sector to a programme delivery role, excluding policy dialogue and campaigning. All this took practical shape in the shift over the decade from grants to contracts. Second is the crisis of public management. I refer to the impact on the voluntary sector of the introduction of different management styles into the public sector at the national level: the Next Steps and so forth. This involved crucially the importation of business values and criteria for funding. We are now into the so-called ‘contract

Female Suicide Bombers and Autonomy

My aim in this chapter is to consider which theoretical understandings of autonomy are useful and appropriate for interpreting real-life violent women and for attributing them with autonomy where this might be fitting. I focus on the example of female suicide bombers because such women are often denied agency, as I will show. And — insofar as our goal in this collection is to recognize agency — if they and their actions can be better illuminated on certain philosophical frameworks, then such approaches, I argue, are to be preferred. To explore this, I first briefly illustrate the tendency to distort the agency of the bombers. I second examine which theoretical models of relational autonomy, procedural or substantive, might more fully represent their autonomy. I argue that common understandings of female bombers are problematic because they are based on societal (patriarchal, oppressive) norms about what women should be or can do, and that procedural theories of autonomy less satisfactorily capture the social self and degrees of autonomy than substantive notions. Thus, if better representations of the autonomy of violent women are being sought, substantive relational theories of autonomy should be preferred over procedural ones.