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- all posts on feminism, all posts on liberalism, all posts on marriage, Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality
Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality
This Handbook covers the most urgent, controversial, and important topics in the philosophy of sex. It is both philosophically rigorous and yet accessible to specialists and non-specialists, covering ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language, and featuring interactions with neighboring disciplines such as psychology, bioethics, sociology, and anthropology. The volume’s 40 chapters, written by an international team of both respected senior researchers and essential emerging scholars, are divided into eight parts: I. What is Sex? Is Sex Good?II. Sexual OrientationsIII. Sexual Autonomy and ConsentIV. Regulating Sexual RelationshipsV. Pathologizing Sex and SexualityVI. Contested DesiresVII. Objectification and Commercialized SexVIII. Technology and the Future of Sex…
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Nuffield Council on Bioethics project on gender identity
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is launching a new project that will explore the ethical, social, and legal issues associated with the care and treatment of children and adolescents in relation to their gender identity. Increasing numbers of young people and their families in the UK have been seeking advice and support in relation to gender identity issues in recent years. In autumn 2019, we spoke to a wide range of individuals about the challenges involved in providing care and treatment for young people in relation to their gender identity. From those meetings, it is clear that there are many areas of consensus, but there are also a number of unresolved ethical…
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Talking Politics History of Ideas
David Runciman and I discussed Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in an LRB subscribers’ webinar in March 2021. The webinar was part of Talking Politics History of Ideas Season 2. You can listen to that series here.
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Women & Equalities Select Committee
On 23rd September 2020 I gave evidence to the Women & Equalities Select Committee Inquiry “Changing the Perfect Picture: an Inquiry into Body Image” on behalf of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. You can view a recording of the evidence session here, and read a transcript here. My evidence to the Committee was quoted on the Talk Radio news bulletin that night and in a written article in Yahoo News.
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Sex, Money, and Luck in Sport
Clare Chambers, “Sex, Money, and Luck in Sport” published in Journal of Medical Ethics Vol. 46 No. 9 (2020). You can read the paper here.
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Respect, Religion, and Feminism
Respect, Religion, and Feminism: Comments on Lori Watson and Christie Hartley, Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism is published in Journal of Applied Philosophy September 2020. You can read the paper here. Abstract: There is significant disagreement among feminists and liberals about the compatibility between the two doctrines. Political liberalism has come under particular criticism from feminists, who argue that its restricted form of equality is insufficient. In contrast, Lori Watson and Christie Hartley argue that political liberalism can and must be feminist. This article raises three areas of disagreement with Watson and Hartley’s incisive account of feminist political liberalism. First, it argues that an appeal to a…
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Rethinking The Body discussed in BBC article
My essay on Rethinking The Body featured as a discussion article based on the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour discussion. You can read the article here.
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Rethinking The Body on Woman’s Hour
My radio essay “Rethinking The Body” was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on Wednesday 24th June. From the Woman’s Hour website:Rethink is a series of essays and discussions across BBC Radio 4, 5 Live and the World Service that looks at how the world might change after the coronavirus pandemic. Today’s essay features the political philosopher Clare Chambers who considers how our relationship with our bodies, and our appearance has been affected by the lockdown. To discuss Jenni is joined by Laura Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism project, Kate Lister, Lecturer in the School of Arts and Communication at Leeds Trinity University, and Shahidha Bari, Professor…
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Rethinking The Body
I have recorded an essay on how we think about our bodies for Rethink – a BBC radio series that considers how the world should change after the coronavirus pandemic. You can listen to the programme and see the others in the series here.
- Against Marriage, all posts on feminism, all posts on liberalism, all posts on marriage, feminism, liberalism, multiculturalism and religion, publications on marriage
Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State
(Oxford University Press, 2017) Against Marriage is an exciting, provocative work making the egalitarian case against the state recognition of marriage. In it, Clare Chambers shows how feminist and liberal principles require the abolition of state-recognised marriage and the creation of a marriage-free state: one in which private marriages, whether religious or secular, would have no legal status. Against Marriage is in two parts. Part One makes the case against marriage. Chambers investigates the critique of marriage that has developed within feminist and liberal theory and argues that marriage is a violation of both equality and liberty. Feminists have long argued that state-recognised marriage is a violation of equality. Chambers…
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Blending in and standing out: comfort and visibility in beauty practices
“My thought is this: a significant aspect of beauty practices is comfort and visibility. Comfort relates to discipline: discipline makes some actions and inactions seem comfortable and others effortful. Visibility relates to surveillance: some beauty practices make us seem visible or hyper-visible, others make us feel invisible. Sometimes beauty practices aim at making the practitioner visible: she wants her appearance to be noticeable. But beauty practices can also aim at invisibility: at making a person blend in rather than stand out. Both make up and its absence can have this effect, depending on the person and context involved.” This short piece is published on the Beauty Demands blog. You can…
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How to Disagree on BBC Radio 4
Timandra Harkness interviewed me for the BBC Radio 4 series “How to Disagree: A Beginner’s Guide to Having Better Arguments”, episode 4. The topic of the discussion is moral disagreement, with particular reference to the topic of abortion. The episode was broadcast on 16 August 2018 and you can listen to it here.
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OUP Women in Philosophy reading list
Against Marriage features in the Oxford University Press Women in Philosophy reading list. “This March, in recognition of Women’s History Month, the OUP Philosophy team will be celebrating Women in Philosophy. The philosophy discipline has long been perceived as male-dominated, so we want to recognize some of the incredible female philosophers from the past including Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Hannah Arendt, plus female philosophers doing great things in 2018 like Martha Nussbaum, Clare Chambers, and Kate Manne.” You can see the whole reading list here.
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Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy reviewed in Hypatia Reviews Online
I have a chapter on feminism and liberalism in The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone (Routledge, 2017). The volume has been reviewed by Amy Marvin in Hypatia Reviews Online. You can read the full review here. “The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy presents an exciting, comprehensive, and original pluralist presentation of feminist philosophy that is a much-needed update to existing feminist philosophy companions. Students, scholars, independent researchers, and departments interested in feminism and philosophy would do well to make sure they have access to this volume, and it should be a relevant resource for years to come.”
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Quoted on marriage in The Guardian
Rose Hackman quotes me in a long-form piece on marriage in The Guardian. You can read the whole article here. ” “Married men gained rights over women’s bodies, property and children,” confirms Clare Chambers, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge who wrote a book arguing for an end to state-recognized marriage. “Traditionally [marriage] has maintained legal gender inequality, and it has done so to the benefit of men.” “Chambers concedes that many formal inequalities tied to marriage have been denounced and revoked. Marital rape was outlawed in the UK in 1991 and in the US in 1993 – hard to believe there was ever an exemption –…
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Fabian Society on Against Marriage
Andrew Harrop, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, reviewed Against Marriage in Fabian Review, May 2018. You can read the full review here. “Marriage makes me uncomfortable, whether the reason is political, historical, cultural or aesthetic. No matter how many married couples I see living modern equal relationships, for me, the whole concept is tainted by its patriarchal past. But I say ‘for me’ with good reason, as I have dozens of friends and comrades who disagree. This is a fault-line issue that divides socialists and feminists amongst themselves. In Against Marriage, Clare Chambers makes the case for why egalitarians and liberals should reject marriage. It is political philosophy at its…
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Gli Stati Generali on the “Me Too” movement
I was interviewed by Valentina Saini for her piece “È L’ALBA DI UN’INTERNAZIONALE FEMMINISTA?” on the Italian news site Gli Stati Generali. You can read the piece, in Italian, here. For those who don’t speak Italian I don’t have a translation of the full article, but here are the answers I gave to Valentina Saini’s questions. VS: In many countries and regions of the world, sexual harassment in the form of a “pat” on a woman’s “butt”, for example, is seen as something innocent and harmless, nothing one should be especially offended by – many women think so too. Why is that? Is women’s body still something that does not belong…
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Dress codes at work for the BBC
Can your employer demand that you go to work naked? In this short video and article for the BBC I tell David Edmonds why not.
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Joint Session 2017
I’m a Symposiast at the 2017 Joint Sessions of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association in Edinburgh. My paper is called “Ideology and Normativity” and it responds to Sally Haslanger. You can find details here and read my paper here.
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Ideology and Normativity
In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Edition ( 2017)
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Ideology and Normativity
In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Edition (forthcoming, 2017)
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Judging Women: 25 Years Further Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
In Feminist Political Quarterly (Vol. 3 No. 2, 2017).
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Feminism and Liberalism
In Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Serene Khader, Ann Gary, and Alison Stone (Routledge, 2017). For some feminists liberalism is little more than patriarchy in disguise; for others, it is the framework for securing justice. Feminism, like all other positions in political philosophy, is a range of views rather than a single determinate viewpoint. One aspect of this range is that feminism includes both academics and activists, for whom the term ‘liberalism’ can signify rather different things; after all, liberalism is not one single thing either. In this chapter I start by considering feminist criticisms of liberalism. I discuss two aspects of feminist critique: first, academic feminist critiques…
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Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
In The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory, edited by Jacob T. Levy (OUP, forthcoming). This chapter provides a critical introduction to Judith Butler’s classic work Gender Trouble, including an analysis of the impact it has made on political theory. The chapter is online first and you can read it here.
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Not the Fun Kind – Conference on Andrea Dworkin
I enjoyed speaking and listening at this event – a one-day conference on Andrea Dworkin, for activists and academics, at Anglia Ruskin University in July 2015. Find details here. You can watch a video of the session I spoke in here.
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Becoming Oneself – The Problem of Gendered Complicity
I responded to a paper by Nancy Bauer at this conference in Birkbeck in June 2015, organised by Prof Susan James. Details here.
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Gender in the History of Early Modern Political Thought
I was delighted to be a representative of contemporary political philosophy, talking about Feminism in Philosophy, in this year’s Balzan-Skinner conference in the History of Political Thought. Find details here. The conference is on 22 May 2015.
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WOW festival
I spoke at the WOW – Women of the World – Festival in Cambridge in March 2015, on a panel on Women’s Bodies, Private Places. Women’s bodies, who do they belong to? A wide- ranging, multi-generational and diverse panel will explore issues around life as a woman. From boobs and body hair to body image and periods, how have attitudes changed and who decides what’s ‘right’? In conversation will be Dr Clare Chambers, author of ‘Fat is a Feminist Issue’ Susie Orbach, Roz Hardie, CEO of campaign group Object, Debra Bourne from All Walks Beyond the Catwalk, poet, singer, writer and actor Keisha Thompson, Alice Wroe from the Herstory project,…
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3am magazine
An interview with me, focusing on my work in Sex, Culture, and Justice. Read the interview here. Clare Chambers chews over the core philosophical issues of sex, culture and justice for liberal feminists, brooding on practices of physical modification, social construction’s role in negotiating claims of universalism and tolerance, Foucault and the panopticon, Bourdieu and habitus, Mackinnon’s critique of liberal feminism, taking violence against women seriously, Benhabib’s discourse ethics, how not to be a relativist, of what kind of universality is worth defending and of the state of academic philosophy and feminism. This is a voice from a war zone. Listen up!
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The Marriage-Free State
in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2013).