Posts Tagged ‘ Hypatia ’

Self-righteous display

Jul 24th, 2017 9:35 am | By

The latest in the Hypatia saga: the Associate Editors have circulated a new letter among the philosophers. Daily Nous shares it:

We, the members of the Board of Associate Editors of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, are deeply disappointed that the Editors and members of the journal’s nonprofit board have been unwilling to collaborate with us toward a constructive solution to the current crisis, utilizing the processes for reviewing and changing policies outlined within the journal’s approved governance documents. As scholars who highly value Hypatia and who have dedicated a great deal of time and energy to its success, we are troubled by the recent statements by the Editors and the nonprofit board (posted on Hypatia’s website

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The broad, well-established, interdisciplinary scholarly fields

May 11th, 2017 4:58 pm | By

But wait, there’s more. One of the people who signed the letter attacking Rebecca Tuvel – one of the “colleagues” who signed it – wrote a piece for the CHE saying why the signers were right to sign it.

As one of the many scholars involved in writing the open letter calling on Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy to retract the essay “In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rebecca Tuvel, I am compelled to come forward and attempt to reclaim a narrative spinning increasingly out of control.

Five words in the bullying starts – she has to make clear that it was many scholars. (I’m not sure they are all genuine scholars; I think some are adherents rather than … Read the rest



can we get this person fired

May 11th, 2017 9:35 am | By
can we get this person fired

Commenter helterskelter alerted us to a Facebook post by Zoé Samudzi on April 28 vehemently dispraising Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article and suggesting a letter.

It turns out it’s a public post, so we can all read it.

who’s on the editorial board over at hypatia? i honestly want to talk about this absolutely disgusting and harmful legitimization of “transracial” identity beyond adoption. what kind of garbage de-raced and probably trans-exclusionary gender studies professor wants to pretend that socially constructed identities use the same logics and are interchangeable? is gender suddenly inheritable the same way race is?

who wanna put together some kind of letter because i refuse to allow this garbage to gain traction. if anyone has institutional access

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Count the scare-quotes

May 9th, 2017 11:08 am | By

Another entry, this one by Ani Dutta. What’s interesting about this one is the nested hedging and qualifying, which is so recursive that you end up unable to figure out what the claim is.

I have a feeling that I’m not going to be riding any popularity waves with this one, but I wanted to register my discomfort with the way in which ‘trans / gender non-conforming’ and ‘people of color’ voices have often been essentialized and homogenized in the wake of the controversy on Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article that defends ‘transracialism’ and makes analogies between ‘transgenderism’ and ‘transracialism’. I do not say this ‘as’ a trans/gender non-conforming person of color (categories I use with discomfort given their US-centric

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Outrage has become the new truth

May 8th, 2017 10:58 am | By

Kelly Oliver, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt, tells us about the backstage maneuvers in the Ostracism of Rebecca Tuvel.

The dust-up on social media over Rebecca Tuvel’s article, “In Defense of Transracialism” published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, has given a new meaning to the public/private split central to the history of feminism. For decades, feminists have argued the personal is political, and explored the politics of our private lives. The split between what people wrote to both Rebecca Tuvel and to me in private, and what they felt compelled to say in public is one indication that the explosion of personal insults and vicious attacks on social media is symptomatic of something much bigger than

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Editors must stand behind the authors of accepted papers

May 7th, 2017 9:56 am | By

The editor of Hypatia repudiates the apology by the Associate Editors.

Critics blasted the article as a product of white and cisgender privilege, said it discounted important scholarly work by transgender and black academics, and accused its author of using harmful language.

Hundreds of scholars signed their names to an open letter calling on the journal to retract the article.

The journal didn’t go that far, but the apology, which came with a pledge to reconsider Hypatia’s review process, still seemed like an extraordinary step. Some academics applauded the swift response to widespread criticism; others criticized the unorthodox action of a journal in condemning its own publication of an article.

And, especially, the venomous lie-filled attack on an untenured … Read the rest



The Code of Publishing Ethics

May 6th, 2017 6:09 pm | By

A series of useful comments at Daily Nous:

David Wallace:

Most of the discussion above seems to concern the academic and moral rights and wrongs of Professor Tuvel’s article. But the “open letter” is not simply a criticism of that article: it is a demand that Hypatia retract the article (and take various other actions going forward).

Hypatia is published by Wiley and so falls under Wiley’s policy on retraction, which reads, in relevant part: “On occasion, it is necessary to retract articles. This may be due to major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article, or in cases of ethical issues, such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, inappropriate authorship, etc.” Wiley also subscribes to the Code

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A grave misuse of the term “harm”

May 6th, 2017 5:36 pm | By

The CHE has a piece by Suzanna Danuta Walters, the editor of Signson the Hypatia mess.

A young philosopher, Rebecca Tuvel, writes an article in which she considers claims to transracial and transgender identities. The result is a firestorm of condemnation — nasty emails, a petition to retract the article, and, worse, a journal that will not stand up for its own peer-reviewed articles. (That last point is complicated by an internal rift within the journal, Hypatia. The editor, Sally J. Scholz, does stand by the article. It was, she writes in a statement, the associate editorial board that disavowed Tuvel’s paper.)

“Disavowed” meaning they shat all over it.

There are scholars whose work needs to be

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Motivated reasoning?

May 6th, 2017 4:51 pm | By

There’s one thing about the Hypatia Associate Editors’ attack on Rebecca Tuvel’s paper and self…

From Justin Weinberg’s post:

Between the complaints on social media and the open letter, sufficient pressure has been put on Hypatia that members of its board of associate editors have already issued an apology for publishing Tuvel’s essay in which they state that “Clearly, the article should not have been published.” The speed with which this has all happened is extraordinary.

The apology is in the form of a public Facebook post from Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta.

A friend pointed out to me that Tuvel discusses an argument of Heyes’s in … Read the rest



A privileged group relative to much of the population

May 6th, 2017 11:53 am | By

There’s a guest post at Crooked Timber on the Hypatia wharblegarble by Holly Lawford-Smith, a political philosopher at the University of Melbourne. She starts with a comparative versions exercise.

Something bad happened recently. Here’s what I thought it was: a member of a marginalized group within our profession (a pre-tenure woman) published a paper; a group of philosophers were angry about the paper; those same philosophers signed an open letter to Hypatia calling for retraction of the paper; Hypatia issued an apology for publishing the paper; another group of philosophers rallied in defence of paper’s author, against both the journal and the group of philosophers who were angry about the paper in the first place. This would be bad, because

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Will it be outsourcing peer review to social media?

May 5th, 2017 5:29 pm | By

The Hypatia thread is still going. There are interesting comments from colleagues of the Hypatia editors (in other words, philosophers).

Like this one:

Shaun ODwyer I’m writing this as someone who has published with Hypatia in the past, and who has appreciated the peer review feedback and editorial support provided for my submissions. Now I and I’m sure other authors would like to know the following: 1. Will you be retracting Tuvel’s article? 2. Will Hypatia continue to be a blind peer reviewed journal, or will it be outsourcing peer review to social media as well? 3. Will it now be your policy, from time to time, to denounce your authors’ scholarship in public, pour encourager les autres?

And … Read the rest



Move over

May 5th, 2017 10:25 am | By

Here it is again, that idea that feminism is required to defer to everything else while the reciprocal obligation does not exist. Feminism, and feminism only, has to defer to all other social justice movements. What does that remind me of? Oh yes, sexism. It reminds me what has been required of women since forever.

It’s a new comment on the Hypatia grovel.

Ruth Pearce 1) I agree that this statement should have explicitly addressed the specific issue of anti-blackness.

2) A lot of people here talking about freedom of speech etc. I wonder how many of them a) are aware of how the peer review process works, b) have relevant academic knowledge and/or personal experience of racism

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The sheer nastiness

May 4th, 2017 5:58 pm | By

Brian Leiter collected some responses to the monstering [he calls it the defamation] of Rebecca Tuvel. They are consoling after reading the dreck from the Hypatia Associate Editors and that open letter. A few snips:

Philosopher José Luis Bermudez (Texas A&M):

I am deeply concerned about what appears, on the evidence available, to be an egregious episode of collective persecution that breaches longstanding norms, not just of academic life but of civilized behavior. I have no comments on Dr. Tuvel’s article, but the correct response to an article with which one disagrees is surely to write a response pointing out perceived flaws in argumentation and evidence.

You would think. You would especially think that in the case of academics. … Read the rest



Those theorists whose lives are most directly affected

May 4th, 2017 12:45 pm | By

There are different, clashing rules in play in this “how dare Rebecca Tuvel” issue. Let’s revisit the open letter to look at them:

Many published articles include some minor defects of scholarship; however, together the problems with this article are glaring. More importantly, these failures of scholarship do harm to the communities who might expect better from Hypatia. It is difficult to imagine that this article could have been endorsed by referees working in critical race theory and trans theory, which are the two areas of specialization that should have been most relevant to the review process.

Wait. Are they? Who says so? Why? Hypatia is a journal of feminist philosophy. Why is it expected to consult people in critical … Read the rest



One of the signers

May 4th, 2017 10:10 am | By

Lisa Guenther, one of the academic philosophers who signed the letter demanding that Hypatia retract Rebecca Tuvel’s piece, explained her signing a couple of days ago.

[Jesse Singal’s] article, like the post at the Daily Nous, goes through the arguments of Rebecca Tuvel’s article, “In Defense of Transracialism,” to argue that they’re not so bad after all: no outrageous claims, no offensive slurs, nothing but reasonable arguments. But this is precisely the problem: it’s what Charles Mills critiques as “ideal theory,” which attempts (in the words of author Jesse Singal) to “pull up one level from the real world and force people to grapple with principles and claims on their own merits, rather than — in the case of

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The personal identity they wish to assume

May 3rd, 2017 4:36 pm | By

That bit of Tuvel’s paper I reserved to take issue with later:

Generally, we treat people wrongly when we block them from assuming the personal identity they wish to assume. For instance, if some one identifies so strongly with the Jewish community that she wishes to become a Jew, it is wrong to block her from taking conversion classes to do so. This example reveals there are at least two components to a successful identity transformation: (1) how a person self-identifies, and (2) whether a given society is willing to recognize an individual’s felt sense of identity by granting her membership in the desired group. For instance, if the rabbi thinks you are not seriously committed to Judaism, she can

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The monstering

May 3rd, 2017 3:44 pm | By

Justin Weinberg wrote a piece at Daily Nous about the monstering of Rebecca Tuvel.

In the paper, Professor Tuvel takes up the question of whether the considerations that support accepting transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, which she endorses, provide support for accepting transracial individuals’ decisions to change races. She defends an affirmative answer to that question.

The result has been an eruption of complaints from a number of philosophers and other academics, expressed mainly on Facebook and Twitter. Among the complaints is the charge that the paper is anti-transgender.

That charge may come as a surprise to some readers, as it comes through quite clearly in her paper that Professor Tuvel supports accepting transgender individuals’ decisions to change

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These awful, clueless, evil avatars of supreme privilege

May 3rd, 2017 11:48 am | By

Jesse Singal this morning:

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Behold a mean person

May 3rd, 2017 4:37 am | By

I’m told that Zoé Samudzi perpetrated a Twitter storm on Friday, and I gather that may be what set off the flamers who quickly got Hypatia to agree to throw Rebecca Tuvel under the bus. Samudzi tweets a lot, so I haven’t found the storm yet, but I found a more recent squall, and it’s nasty enough for any taste. She’s responding to Jesse Singal’s article yesterday.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/859122708633665536

The piece is about Tuvel, specifically the attack on Tuvel and the retraction of her article along with a public attack by the editors. It doesn’t “give her a platform”; it reports on her abrupt deprivation of a platform. It’s not obliged to give other academics a “platform”; it’s an article, … Read the rest



Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation

May 2nd, 2017 5:28 pm | By

Jesse Singal has written a blast against the public trashing of Rebecca Tuvel’s article.

In late March, Hypatia, a feminist-philosophy journal, published an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, as part of its spring 2017 issue. The point of the article, as the title suggests, is to toy around with the question of what it would mean if some people really were — as Rachel Dolezal claimed — “transracial,” meaning they identified as a race that didn’t line up with how society viewed them in light of their ancestry.

Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept the following premises

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