All posts tagged: women in philosophy

Can the Historical Materialist Be a Woman? On the Woman Question in Walter Benjamin

Can the Historical Materialist Be a Woman? On the Woman Question in Walter Benjamin

Published by Jenni Sidey

Image provided by smith. This year I agreed to be a part of a translation project: alongside two fellow academics, the aim was to translate the fifty-something page Walter Benjamin essay, “Eduard Fuchs, collector and historian.” An issue soon arose concerning whether or not we should change the pronouns—which in the essay is usually “he”—to the gender-neutral “they.” I had initially suggested this change without giving it much thought. Another translator did not agree with my view that this was a relatively harmless change, rather insisting that we ought to maintain the translation of the pronoun as “he,” citing the necessity of “fidelity to the text.” To his mind, if this word was what was on the page, then we had to translate it as literally as possible: a one-to-one match. Translation must be free of interpretation, since interpretation is subjective, and subjectivity is, my colleague seemed to express, a bad word in the world of translation. I thought at the time, and still do, that this seemed a little odd considering how much of …

Race, Risk, and the VBAC Calculator: The Politics of Race Correction in Childbirth

Race, Risk, and the VBAC Calculator: The Politics of Race Correction in Childbirth

Published by Jenni Sidey

Image provided by Mncube. I started noticing a pattern. Every Black woman I know who has given birth in the past decade delivered by cesarean. Some of those surgeries were scheduled in advance. Some followed hours of labor. Some were described as unavoidable emergencies. But the outcome was the same. At first, I treated it as coincidence. Childbirth is unpredictable. Cesarean delivery can be lifesaving. Obstetric care is complex. No two births unfold the same way. But the pattern unsettled me, and I began to ask a different kind of question. Not just what was happening to these women, but what was shaping the information they were given when decisions were being made. What did these women actually know about how their risk was being calculated? And who, or what, had shaped that calculation before they ever walked into a consultation room? These questions led me to vaginal birth after cesarean—commonly called VBAC. VBAC refers to attempting a vaginal delivery in a pregnancy after a prior cesarean section. National clinical guidelines state that many patients …

What Do We Really Know About “Obesity”?

What Do We Really Know About “Obesity”?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash. In 1864, the scientist Benjamin Apthorp Gould was appointed to conduct a survey of the physical characteristics of thousands of Civil War soldiers, sailors, and students. Five years later, what emerged from the published report was a narrative of racial difference. An entire chapter was devoted to lung function: making use of the recently developed spirometer (a measuring device), Gould declared a “very striking” difference between the capacity of Black and white lungs. Gould’s findings were consistent with previous conjectures, where the apparent lower lung function of Black people was part of a justification for enslavement. The report also had a significant legacy, contributing to the establishment of racial difference in lung function as a scientific fact. The assumption that Black people have lower “normal” lung capacity became built into medical practice: a “race correction” in the equation that translates spirometer readings into a measurement of lung function automatically lowered the threshold of “normal” lung function for Black patients. This meant that the same spirometer reading could be categorized …