Posts Tagged ‘ Rebecca Tuvel ’

A report that found the apology inappropriate

Jul 22nd, 2017 12:57 pm | By

The CHE has useful background information on the Hypatia matter.

Miriam Solomon, a professor and chair of the philosophy department at Temple University and president of the Board of Directors, said the journal’s publisher, John Wiley & Sons, had brought in the Committee on Publication Ethics, an outside group that consults with editors and publishers of academic journals, to review the situation. The main question: Was the apology issued by the associate editors appropriate?

Last week the committee, known as COPE, produced a report that found the apology inappropriate, Ms. Solomon said. Even after the report’s findings were presented to the journal’s editors, the associate editors did not acknowledge any mistake in issuing the apology, and the board had

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The Associate Editors did not in any way speak for the journal

Jul 22nd, 2017 12:20 pm | By

The Board of Directors of Hypatia posted a statement on the Hypatia site:

It is with disappointment and regret that the Board of Directors of Hypatia has received the news that Sally Scholz and Shelley Wilcox [the on-line reviews editor] are resigning from their roles as editors of Hypatia. Throughout their tenure with the journal, they have stood by fundamental principles of publication ethics, which call upon all who are involved in the governance of a journal to respect the integrity of the peer-review process and to support authors published by the journal (with rare exceptions such as plagiarism and fraud). The Board is also committed to these principles and fully supports Scholz and Wilcox in their commitment to

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Hypatia’s statement

May 18th, 2017 11:30 am | By

The Board of Directors of Hypatia has issued a statement which is published at Daily Nous.

The Board of Directors of Hypatia would like to clarify the nature of the controversy, since there are misrepresentations in the press and on social media. Further, we would like to articulate the principles we are committed to as we move forward beyond this controversy.

1. The Board acknowledges the intensity of experience and convictions around matters of intersectionality, especially in the world of academic philosophy, which has an egregious history of treatment of women of color feminists and feminists from other marginalized social positions. To those unfamiliar with the issues, outrage about a particular academic publication is often dismissed as nothing more

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What is this “harm” of which you speak?

May 13th, 2017 5:00 pm | By

A piece by José Luis Bermúdez in Inside Higher Ed a week ago asked a necessary question about the open letter attacking Rebecca Tuvel and the apology by the Associate Editors: what are they talking about when they talk about “harm”?

This is not the place to discuss the merits or otherwise of Tuvel’s article, which I would encourage you to read (it is clearly written, and pleasantly free of jargon) before reading the open letter and the statement. There is a persuasive analysis of the weakness of the complaints made in the open letter in this article by Jesse Singal in New York magazine. At a minimum, Tuvel appears to have been significantly misrepresented.

I want to explore a

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Rectifications

May 12th, 2017 11:33 am | By

I was hoping the dogpile had ended, but it hasn’t.

Brian Leiter has a brief post about the role of Lisa Guenther.

Lisa Guenther is the Vanderbilt philosophy professor and former member of Rebecca Tuvel’s dissertation [committee?] who not only was an early signatory of the defamatory “Open Letter” but also offered several public facebook explanations for her conduct.

So I decided to look up her several Facebook explanations.

Depressing shit.

April 30:

Robin James on the deep reckoning and accountability demanded of those of us who do work in philosophy — especially white feminist philosophers like myself, because we should know better than to keep using the master’s tools over and over and over again —

“Rephrasing

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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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Ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise

May 10th, 2017 11:53 am | By

At Quillette, Oliver Traldi on the Rebecca Tuvel uproar.

The letter he refers to is the open letter explaining how Tuvel was wrong wrong wrong.

The letter’s most important point is hidden in the first complaint: that Tuvel “uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” In the Daily Nous comments, academics in these subfields struggled to identify precisely which arguments Tuvel failed to cite or address, or where her thinking might have gone wrong on a more than superficial level. Indeed, many philosophers of both gender and race have come out against retraction. But “the relevant subfields” are not really the academic studies of gender and race. They are the

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Many harmful aspects

May 8th, 2017 11:41 am | By

Kelly Oliver posted the link to her piece on Facebook. There are some extraordinary comments on the post.

Hanna Vered Lipkind I am sorry Kelly was insulted. But she reduces all of the outrage to petty insult and mischaracterizes the nature of the critiques and harms expressed by her trans and black colleagues, delegitimizing them, and doubling the harmful silencing effected by Tuvel’s article in the first place. How difficult would it be to acknowledge that, yes, there were many harmful aspects to Tuvel’s article, and there are very real contentions at play here? Real people with real pain this past week, folks. Reducing cries of epistemic injustice to “thought policing” is nowhere near a fair characterization. Generally, a

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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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The importance of lived experience

May 7th, 2017 4:48 pm | By

A friend of Rebecca Tuvel’s, Alison Suen, writes at Daily Nous about what all this has been like from that “standpoint.”

Recently, amid the controversy over Hypatia’s publication of Rebecca Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism,” there has been a lot of talk in the philosophical community about the importance of lived experience. I have been reflecting on my lived experience over the past week, as one of Rebecca’s friends. Speaking from the perspective of someone who has been on the sidelines watching this whole affair unfold, I am not sure if I am ready to, as Sally Haslanger says, “go forward,” and “not focus on Rebecca Tuvel, the individual and the philosopher, and to shift

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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



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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