Beyond Speech
Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy
Edited by Mari Mikkola
Author Information
Edited by Mari Mikkola, Tutorial Fellow, Somerville College & Associate Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, England Berlin
Mari Mikkola is Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. She works mainly on feminist philosophy, and specifically on feminist metaphysics, gender, and pornography. In addition, she has research interests in social ontology, broadly conceived.
Contributors:
Louise Antony (BA Syracuse University, Ph.D. Harvard University) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published many articles in the areas of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, feminist theory, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. She has edited or co-edited three volumes, most recently Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life. She has served as president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.
Talia Mae Bettcher is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles and she serves as the department head. Some of her articles include "Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion" (Hypatia, 2007), "Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Re-thinking Trans Oppression and Resistance (Signs, 2014), and "When Selves Have Sex: What the Phenomenology of Trans Sexuality Can Teach about Sexual Orientation" (Journal of Homosexuality, 2014). With Ann Garry, she co-edited the Hypatia special issue "Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gender Realities" (2009). With Susan Stryker, she co-edited the Transgender Studies Quarterly special issue "Trans/Feminisms" (2016). She is currently at work on a monograph entitled Personhood as Intimacy: A Trans Feminist Philosophy. Talia has also been involved in Los Angeles trans community organizing for over fifteen years and now serves on the newly established Transgender Advisory Council for the City of Los Angeles.
A.W. Eaton is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in both philosophy and art history and works on topics in feminism, aesthetics and philosophy of art, value theory, ethics, and Italian Renaissance painting. Eaton was a Laurence Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton's Center for Human Values in 2005-6, and is currently a Trustee of the American Society of Aesthetics and the editor of the Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art section of Philosophy Compass.
Hilkje Charlotte Hänel is finishing her PhD at the Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany. She held a fellowship at the Carl and Max Schneider Stiftung and was a scholar at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung for two years. Her research is in feminist analytical philosophy and social philosophy. Her thesis is on the concept of rape and how we should methodologically understand it. Further research concerns Wittgenstein's theories of language and family resemblance, the relation between friendship and romantic relationships, methodological problems and Haslanger's ameliorative analyses, Critical Theory and questions of ideology, and the situation of women in philosophy. She is an executive board member of SWIP Germany.
Katharine Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. She received her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2016, before which she studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her research spans the fields of social ontology, feminist philosophy, and the critical philosophy of race. She is particularly interested in using analytic social ontology to illuminate the nature of race and gender categories and the dynamics of racial and gender-based oppression. Her publications include 'Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman' (Ethics) and 'Rape Myths and Domestic Abuse Myths as Hermeneutical Injustices' (Journal of Applied Philosophy).
Rae Langton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College. She is the author of Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, and Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013, and the British Academy in 2014. Some themes of her contribution to this volume are further developed in her John Locke Lectures (Oxford 2015), forthcoming as Accommodating Injustice (Oxford University Press 2017).
Hans Maes is Senior Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Art and Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has authored papers on a variety of topics in ethics and aesthetics, including the relation between modesty and hypocrisy, the role of intention in the interpretation of art, the notion of free beauty, the art of portraiture, and the difference between erotic art and pornography. He is editor of the essay collections Art and Pornography (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Pornographic Art and The Aesthetics of Pornography (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
Mary Kate McGowan is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works at the intersection of the philosophy of language, philosophy of law and feminism and she has written several other articles on silencing.
Mari Mikkola is Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. Prior to moving to Germany in 2010, she worked at philosophy departments at the Universities of Stirling, Lancaster, and Sheffield (UK). In 2005, Mikkola completed her PhD thesis on feminist philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her work is mainly on feminist philosophy and, in particular, on feminist metaphysics and feminist engagements with pornography. Additionally, she has research interests in social ontology, broadly conceived. Mikkola has published papers on these topics in various journals and edited collection (for instance, in Analysis, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, and Hypatia). Her latest work includes a monograph on feminist philosophy and social injustice titled The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and its Role in Feminist Philosophy (NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), and various papers on feminist and 'mainstream' metaphysics. She is also one of editors of the open-access philosophy journal, Journal of Social Ontology.
Lina Papadaki is an assistant professor in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Social Studies, University of Crete (Greece) since 2009. She completed her PhD thesis at Sheffield in 2006, and worked as a lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London between 2007- 2009. Papadaki's research interests are in moral philosophy, bioethics, and feminist philosophy. Her research currently focuses on the phenomenon of women's sexual objectification and on the application of Kant's moral philosophy to bioethical issues like abortion, euthanasia, and organ donation. Some of her recent and forthcoming publications include: 'Abortion and Kant's Formula of Humanity', Humana Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies (2012), 'Treating Others Merely as Means: A Reply to Kerstein', Utilitas (2015), 'What is Wrong About Objectification?', Current Controversies in Political Philosophy, ed. Thom Brooks, London: Routledge (2015), 'Sexual Objectification', The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings.
Dr. Petra Van Brabandt teaches aesthetics, semiotics, art theory, and cultural criticism at St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp, Belgium. She is member of the research group Art&Narrativity. Her research focuses on socio-political dimensions of art. She writes and lectures about art&feminism, queer art, art&pornography, art&postcolonialism, and art&labour. Her current research concerns wet aesthetics in art and pornography.
Robin Zheng is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Michigan and was a Visiting Junior Research Fellow in 2015-16 at Newnham College, Cambridge. She specializes in ethics, moral psychology, feminist and social philosophy.
