MISOGINIA E SESSISMO: SONO LA STESSA COSA? - VERA TRIPODI (UNIVERSITÀ DI TORINO, LABONT) EMAIL: UNISR

Vera Tripodi                                  13 marzo 2018
(Università di Torino, LabOnt)         Gender lunch seminar
Email: vera.tripodi@unito.it           Università Vita-Salute,
                                        San Raffaele, Milano

    Misoginia e sessismo: sono la stessa cosa?

Outline:

1.Misogyny versus Sexism

2. The gendered economy of giving and taking

3.Haslanger’s ameliorative project

4.Misogyny, Humanism and Dehumanization

1. MISOGYNY VERSUS SEXISM

MISOGYNY                                     SEXISM
               (police force)                              (theory)

A property of social system             Patriarchal ideology, a set of beliefs, that
                                        justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal
The hostile reactions women face in     social order
navigating the social world.
                                        Think men are less suited for feminine
It helps us uphold sexist beliefs and   roles.
enforces patriarchy
                                        Belief women are inherently inferior
It functions like a “police force”,
punishing women who deviate from
feminine roles, policing women’s        It is scientific
subordination, enforcing male
dominance

It is moralistic

Sexism and misogyny share a common purpose:

To maintain or restore a patriarchal social order

target concept versus naïve conception

The naïve conception: misogyny is primarily a property of individual agents
(typically, although not necessary, men) who are prone to feel hatred, hostility, or
other similar emotions toward any and every woman, or at least women generally,
simply because they are women.

                This conception is too narrow in some respects and is not focused
                enough in others. It makes misogyny a psychologically puzzling and
                predictably rare phenomenon

Target concept: misogyny understood as a political phenomenon

Two examples

The ISLA VISTA KILLINGS                        Donald Trump

On May 23, 2014, in Isla
Vista, California, 22-year-
old Elliot Rodger killed six
people and injured
fourteen others near the
campus of University of
California, Santa Barbara,
before killing himself inside
his vehicle.

Rodger uploaded to YouTube a
video: he explained that he
wanted to punish women for
rejecting him.

Misogyny’s primary target: a certain kinds of women, those who challenge or
disrupt existing gender hierarchies.

A woman is often expected to           So women’s indifference become
play the role of a man’s               aversion; testimony becomes
attentive, loving subordinate          tattling, asking becomes
                                       extortion.

2. THE GENDERED ECONOMY OF GIVING AND TAKING

The gendered economy of giving and taking

             Asymmetrical moral support roles between women and men

         Women:                                              Men:

may not be simply human                          as human takers may also be
                                                 prone to regard a woman’s
beings but positioned as
                                                 asking for the sorts of goods
human givers when it                             she’s supposed to provide
comes to the dominant men                        with as an outrage
who look to them for
various kinds of moral
support, admiration,
attention, care, respect,
love, sex, pleasure, nurture
and so on.

She is not allowed to be in the same ways as he is. She will tend to be
in trouble when she does not give enough, or to the right people, in
the right way, or in the right spirit

     She is a source of support, then, not a rival.

3. HASLANGER’S AMELIORATIVE PROJECT

Sally Haslanger’s project

“there are at least three common ways to answer “what is X?”
questions: conceptual, descriptive, and ameliorative”

If we consider for example the question “what is Misogyny?”:

i) a conceptual approach is concerned with “what is our concept of
Misogyny?”;

ii) a descriptive approach with “what objective type (if any) our
epistemic vocabulary tracks”

iii) an ameliorative approach with “what is the point of having the
concept in question; [...] what concept (if any) would do the work
best?”.

Consequently, we should distinguish between:

the manifest concept: “the concept I take myself to be applying or
attempting to apply in the cases in question”;

the operative concept: “the concept that best captures the distinction
I draw it in practice”;

the target concept: “the concept I should, ideally, be employing”.

Manne’s concept of Misogyny is a theoretical notion and her project
needs not be taken to be analyses of the concept that we actually
use when we talk or think about Misogyny.

Rather, her analysis is about the concepts of Misogyny we should use
– those that best serve our legitimate purpose.

In Manne’s project, the purpose is to fight against women subordination
and to end women oppression.

Therefore – following Haslanger’s distinction between manifest, operative
and target concepts – her analysis should be taken as an ameliorative
inquiry that attempts to discover what concept we should be using,
namely an inquiry on the target concept of Misogyny.

According to her, some of feminist purposes are best served by her
target concept of Misogyny and this target concept has nothing to do
with people have in mind when they talk or think about women.

Consequently, the counterintuitiveness of her Misogyny definition is
not relevant to her analysis because her ameliorative project raises
normative questions about how we should understand Misogyny, not
only how we currently do.

4. MISOGYNY, HUMANISM AND DEHUMANIZATION

Misogyny, Humanism and Dehumanization

Dehumanization: people’s failure               Women are viewed and treated as
to recognize some of their fellows             mere things or objects
as fellow human beings

  Humanism: man’s
  inhumanity to man;                           misogyny would have its source in a
                                               failure to recognize women’s full
  explanation for interpersonal
                                               humanity
  conduct of the kind that is
  naturally described as
  inhumane, in being not only
  morally objectionable, but
  also somehow cruel, brutal,
  humiliating, or degrading

Humanism as understood as the conjunction of five claims:

1. Conceptual-cum-perceptual claim: Human beings are capable of seeing or
recognizing other human beings as such, in a way that goes beyond
identifying them as other members of the species.

2. Moral psychological claim: When we recognize another human being as
such, in the sense given by claim (1), then this is not only a necessary
condition for treating her humanely, in interpersonal contexts, but also
strongly motivates and disposes us to do so

3. Quasi-contrapositive moral psychological claim: In order for people to mistreat
others in the most morally egregious ways (e.g., to murder, rape, or torture them
with relative impunity), a failure to see them as fellow human beings is a powerful,
and perhaps even necessary, psychological lubricant

4. Historical claim: When a class of historically oppressed people comes to be seen as
fellow human beings by most members of dominant social groups, and
in society as a whole, moral and social progress becomes much more
likely, perhaps even virtually inevitable

5. Moral-cum-political claim: when the members of certain social groups are
mistreated in the above ways, then one of the most crucial immediate political
goals should be to make their humanity visible to other people (whatever that
involves, exactly).

misogyny takes women to be human, all-too-human

misogyny involves recognizing her successful participation in
characteristically human activities

Her personal services, moreover, have a humanizing psychological
effect on those in her care orbit, to whom her attention is held to be
owed. So, when she fails to give him what he’s held to be entitled to, by
way of various forms of nurturing, admiration, sympathy, and attention,
he may be left feeling less than human—like “an insignificant little
mouse,

As with the analysis of misogyny Manne developed:

- we won’t then need the supplementation of the
dehumanization paradigm. Rather, the psychological story can be seen
as the upshot of the internalization of ideology and features of the
(unjust but all too real) moral-cum-social landscape.

- It can rather be explained in terms of
current and historical social structures, hierarchical relations, and
norms and expectations, together with the fact that they are widely
internalized and difficult to eradicate

Vera Tripodi                                            13 marzo 2018
(Università di Torino, LabOnt)                   Gender lunch seminar
Email: vera.tripodi@unito.it                     Università Vita-Salute,
                                                  San Raffaele, Milano

                                 Grazie mille!