The first conference on Confucianism that I have attended in which men were in the minority: last weekend’s “Women as Exemplary Persons in The Ru (Confucian) Tradition”; program here.
Category Archives: Feminism
Article of Interest: “Instructions to Women” by Olivia Milburn
Milburn, Olivia. “Instructions to Women: Admonitions Texts for a Female Readership in Early China”, NAN NÜ 20, 2: 169-197, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685268-00202P01
The Issue is Not the Issue: A Podcast with Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas
Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas discuss contemporary debates on “political correctness” and related moral and social issues. They point to concepts such as virtue speech (“virtue signalling”), civil religion, and the role of critique to better understand their nature.
Episode 1–Virtue Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pg8H-b87Cs;
The phenomenon of virtue speech (“virtue signalling”) has become a central feature in recent outrage movements pervasive throughout the West. Virtue speech, which is implicitly tied to accusations of hate speech, is a form of moralistic discourse setting speech examples that make it difficult to openly discuss elements of our culture without falling into the trap of moralizing.
Episode 2–Civil Religion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EDEuXCPHOQ
Civil religion plays a central role in the virtue speech, or political correctness, discourse. The history of the concept is discussed as well as the structure of the American form of civil religion and how tenets of civil religion are constantly being performed and re-enacted, particularly in current social media outrage movements.
CFP: Women as Exemplary Persons 女君子 in the Ru (Confucian) Tradition
Call For Papers: “Women as Exemplary Persons 女君子 in the Ru (Confucian) Tradition”
Washington, D.C. March 8-10th, 2019
Keynotes:
- Ann A. Pang-White (University of Scranton)
- Anna Sun (Kenyon College)
- Robert C. Neville (Boston University)
Confucianism is often criticized for being misogynistic and patriarchal in ways that go beyond similar critiques of other intellectual traditions by implying that Confucianism is inconceivable apart from these elements. Two more recent works begin to challenge this way of thinking by drawing on nuances and elaborating the contexts of traditional Confucian teachings on women: Ann A. Pang-White’s translation of The Confucian Four Books for Women (2018) and Robert C. Neville’s “Confucianism and the Feminist Revolution: Ritual Definition and the Social Construction of Gender Roles” in The Good is One, Its Manifestations Many (2016). Also, Anna Sun’s sociological work in progress on women in the global revival of Confucianism is quite promising in indicating a very positive trajectory for women in the tradition.
New Book: Bodies in China: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Gender, and Politics
SUNY has published Eva Kit Wah Man, Bodies in China: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Gender, and Politics. More information is here or below.
Review of Pang-White’s handbook of Chinese philosophy & gender
Here is Sarah Mattice’s review of Ann Pang-White’s Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender, published in Hypatia Reviews Online.
New Book: Feminist Encounters with Confucius
Mathew A. Foust and Sor-hoon Tan, eds., Feminist Encounters with Confucius (Brill, 2016) has been published. Congratulations! The table of contents follows, and see also here.
New Handbook on Chinese Philosophy Methodologies
The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies, edited by Sor-hoon Tan, is due to be published later this week. Details are here, and I’ll paste the very rich Table of Contents below. This is another in the Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy series, on which more is available here. So far, the only other title concerned with Chinese philosophy is The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender, edited by Ann-Pang White, which appeared earlier this year; see further below for its Table of Contents, and more details here. The series also contains several books focusing on the philosophies of India.
New article on Confucian Role Ethics
I’d like to recommend Ian Sullivan’s recently published article, “Simone de Beauvoir and Confucian Role Ethics: Role-Relational Ambiguity and Confucian Mystification,” which has just been published in Hypatia 31:3. Abstract follows….
