Damaged Identities Narrative Repair

Hilde Lindemann Nelson focuses on the stories of groups of people--including Gypsies, mothers, nurses, and transsexuals--whose identities have been defined by those with the power to speak for them and to constrain the scope of their actions. By placing their stories side by side with narratives about the groups in question, Nelson arrives at some important insights regarding the nature of identity. She regards personal identity as consisting not only of how people view themselves but also of how others view them. These perceptions combine to shape the person's field of action. If a dominant group constructs the identities of certain people through socially shared narratives that mark them as morally subnormal, those who bear the damaged identity cannot exercise their moral agency freely.Nelson identifies two kinds of damage inflicted on identities by abusive group relations: one kind deprives individuals of important social goods, and the other deprives them of self-respect. To intervene in the production of either kind of damage, Nelson develops the counterstory, a strategy of resistance that allows the identity to be narratively repaired and so restores the person to full membership in the social and moral community. By attending to the power dynamics that constrict agency, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair augments the narrative approaches of ethicists such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor.

The social practice of forming, shaping, expressing, contesting, and maintaining personal identities makes human interaction, and therefore society, possible. Our identities give us our sense of how we are supposed to act and how we may or must treat others, so how we hold each other in our identities is of crucial moral importance. To hold someone in her identity is to treat her according to the stories one uses to make sense of who she is. Done well, holding allows individuals to flourish personally and in their interactions with others; done poorly, it diminishes their self-respect and restricts their participation in social life. If the identity is to represent accurately the person who bears it, the tissue of stories that constitute it must continue to change as the person grows and changes. Here, good holding is a matter of retaining the stories that still depict the person but letting go of the ones that no longer do. The book begins with a puzzling instance of personhood, where the work of holding someone in her identity is tragically one-sided. It then traces this work of holding and letting go over the human life span, paying special attention to its implications for bioethics. A pregnant woman starts to call her fetus into personhood. Children develop their moral agency as they learn to hold themselves and others in their identities. Ordinary adults hold and let go, sometimes well and sometimes badly. People bearing damaged or liminal identities leave others uncertain how to hold and what to let go. Identities are called into question at the end of life, and persist after the person has died. In all, the book offers a glimpse into a fascinating moral terrain that is ripe for philosophical exploration.

Telling Stories to Change the World is a powerful collection of essays about community-based and interest-based projects where storytelling is used as a strategy for speaking out for justice. Contributors from locations across the globe—including Uganda, Darfur, China, Afghanistan, South Africa, New Orleans, and Chicago—describe grassroots projects in which communities use narrative as a way of exploring what a more just society might look like and what civic engagement means. These compelling accounts of resistance, hope, and vision showcase the power of the storytelling form to generate critique and collective action. Together, these projects demonstrate the contemporary power of stories to stimulate engagement, active citizenship, the pride of identity, and the humility of human connectedness.

Meyers (philosophy, U. of Connecticut, Storrs) presents a collection of essays exploring how to live a life that expresses one's own unique personality and distinctive values; nine of the 13 essays were previously published between 1987 and 2003. Coverage includes autonomous action and its bearing on gender, women's subordination, and women's resis

The statistics are alarming. Some say that once every nine minutes a woman in the United States is beaten by her spouse or partner. Others claim that once every four minutes a woman in the world is beaten by her spouse or partner. More women go to emergency rooms in the United States for injuries sustained at the hands of their spouses and partners than for all other injuries combined. Shelters for battered women are filled beyond capacity every single day of the year. Despite the overwhelming evidence that violence in our homes is a daily reality, most of us are not willing to acknowledge this private violence or talk about it openly. Women Escaping Violence brings women's stories to the attention of the academy as well as the reading public. While we may be unwilling or unable to talk about the issue of battered women, many of us are ready to read what women have to say about their endangered lives. Considerable scholarship is emerging in the area of domestic violence, including many self-help books about how to identify and escape abuse. Women Escaping Violence offers the unique view of battered women's stories told in their own words, as well as a feminist analysis of how these women use the power of narrative to transform their sense of self and regain a place within the larger society. Lawless shares with the reader the heart-wrenching experiences of battered women who have escaped violence by fleeing to shelters with little more than a few items hastily shoved into a plastic bag, and often with small children in tow. The book includes women's stories as they are told and retold within the shelter, in the presence of other battered women and of caregivers. It analyzes the uses made of these narratives by those seeking to counsel battered women as well as by the women themselves.

The early Enoch literature does not refer to the Mosaic Torah or emphasize the distinctively Mosaic laws designed for Israel. But the book of Jubilees gives room to both Mosaic and Enochic traditions within the Sinaitic revelatory framework. What, then, should we make of such differences? / This question and related speculations were on the minds of scholars gathered from around the world at the fourth Enoch Seminar at Camaldoli, Italy, in July 2007. Four tendencies emerged from the discussion at the seminar. Some scholars claimed that Jubilees was a direct product of Enochic Judaism with subordinated Mosaic features. Some suggested that Jubilees was a conscious synthesis of Enochic and Mosaic tradition, yet remaining autonomous from both. Some asserted that Jubilees was essentially a Mosaic text with some Enochic influence. And others questioned the very existence of a gulf between Enochic and Mosaic traditions as competing forms of Judaism at the time of Jubilees. / Gabriele Boccaccini and Giovanni Ibba have carefully collected the countervailing views into this volume. What readers will find here is a lively debate among the most distinguished international specialists, together striving for a better understanding of a puzzling ancient document.

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in womens health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over womens health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into womens hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates. Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in womens health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.

Feminist ethics addresses how power, through gender, affects moral practice and theory. This enterprise is more important than ever before in an age of sharpened attention and concern for feminist issues and injustices. Yet the number of terms which have entered mainstream discussion can quickly overwhelm the novice: intersectionality, gender neutrality, androcentrism. An Invitation to Feminist Ethics offers an easy-to-understand, hospitable approach to the study of feminist moral theory and practice from a renowned ethicist, underscoring its need and the clarifying light it casts on some of the most pressing topics in contemporary society. The work surveys feminist ethical theory, beginning with an explanation of ethics, feminism, and gender before discussing the concepts of discrimination, oppression, gender neutrality, and androcentrism. The work further discusses in-depth intersectionality and microagressions before examining personal identities and how identities are vulnerable to oppression, and what can be done about it. The book also includes a helpful overview of three standard moral theories--social contract theory, utilitarianism, and Kantian ethics--and a discussion of their failings from a feminist point of view, followed by introductions to feminist care theory and feminist responsibility ethics. A "close-ups" section explores three social practices--bioethics, violence, and the globalized economy--within which these concepts are applied, and the need for feminist ethics is most urgent.